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Kruse has also posted his paper that expands on this topic.

I’m sharing this particular post with some of our Sales team as a baby step toward understanding some of the fundamental underlying challenges of teaching with technology.

Title: Why Can’t My Instructional Designer Skate?
Description: Education is schooled by skateboarding’s self-organizing, DIY culture of individuality, adaptability, and informal learning.

Here’s a sneak peak of the deck:

Really, this is just an excuse to indulge my passion and share photos of skating from around the world. So come to The State Room in Salt Lake City on Aug 31st at 7pm. And if mine bores you, the other speakers are sure to entertain.

Here’s the first draft of the criterion map, which would be used as a guide for assessing student-created maps:

As a criterion map, this provides assessors with the information they need to score a learner’s original concept map (I can provide learner and instructor materials on request).

Concept map experts & web developers: please offer feedback.

• Direction. Clear, explicit, concise instructions and schedules can eliminate frustration and keep students in the course.
• Community. Spending time on community building interaction can provide social and intellectual reinforcement for participants to continue to engage.
• Pacing. Regular pacing can create learning habits that encourage persistence. Releasing material on a schedule can entice learners with “new”-ness.

I believe these are critical in online courses, where perceptual and transactional distance may encourage disconnection, and result in attrition.

At UVU we’re facing physical space issues–we don’t have nearly enough classrooms for our schedules or the enrolled students, and, being a commuter campus, parking and transportation is increasingly squeezed. The good news is that this problem is catalyzing interest in hybrid courses that replace 50% of face-to-face classroom experiences with online activities. And while hybrids are an important solution for physical space, it’s important to realize that partially full courses also waste classroom space, and students who drop a course at a late date–officially or unofficially–waste a seat that could have been used by another student. The fact that the student who dropped out of the course will likely have to take the course again, of course, exacerbates the pressure on classroom space in the future. Because of this, I see retention as an important space-related issue: high retention maximizes classroom space and reduces re-takes.

I subscribe to TechTrends as part of my AECT membership. It has a great subtitle (Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning) and it is peer reviewed, though I don’t know if it’s considered a journal or a magazine (I lean towards “magazine”). Sometimes there are some good articles, sometimes there are bad ones. One particular article in the September/October 2010 issue caught my attention: “Using Blogs to Identify Misconceptions in a Large Undergraduate Nutrition Course”. Not exactly a home run of a title, but I’m interested in examples of student blogging in action, so I read on. I soon discovered that the authors, Trena Paulus and Marsha Spence, are exhibiting a inversion of Jim Groom’s (now surely ubiquitous) post, “Blog…You keep saying that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means”. Whereas Groom explained the expansiveness of the word “blog”, Paulus and Spence reduce the meaning to nothing more than a discussion forum. Indeed, replacing the word “blog” with “discussion forum” throughout the article does little to reduce it’s meaning, nor an expectation that the year is, in fact, 1996.

Now, I could attribute this misuse of “blogging” to mere lack of creativity or fear of change, i.e., “How can we use this new tool in a way that’s not too different from the old tool?” Or I could blame the authors for simply not exploring and discerning the key differences of blogs and discussions before designing their activities. Or I could discredit TechTrends for peer-reviewing the article without recognizing that blog !== discussion forum. But none of that would be entirely fair, for, you see, Paulus and Spence are using Blackboard. And though the version is not specified, both the description of the tool and screen shots confirm that Paulus and Spence’s “blogs” are really just discussion forums with a fancy label. In short, these are course restricted, instructor-controlled, feed-less lockboxes where students can compose and reply to course topics.

A friendly pair of lockboxes. CC By-NC-SA by spike55151

Knowing this we might be inclined to rationalize the article by suggesting that the authors are themselves simply confused by Blackboard’s dubious marketing of the word “blog”, and TechTrends had to concede that if Blackboard calls it a blog, the authors are entitled to refer to it as such. And yet the authors write:

We chose blogs instead of asynchronous discussion forums for several reasons. We felt that undergraduates would be likely to perceive blogging as more engaging and motivating than the now-standard asynchronous discussion forums. Students can more easily incorporate digital images, video, and links to other Web pages into blog posts and comments. Group blogs in particular provide a venue for both individual reflection and peer interaction through discussion…

Are Paulus and Spence acknowledging the shell game when they claim that students are “likely to perceive blogging as more engaging and motivating” than discussuion forums? (My emphasis.) Are they admitting that this is all just a trick in order to stimulate attention? Examining their subsequent claims about blogs vs. discussions does nothing to dissuade this point of view, for none are exclusive to blogs, but rather common features shared with discussion forums. For instance, their claim about incorporating digital images, video and links being easier in blogs versus discussions is simply not true, though I do believe that the discussion forum convention undervalues these practices. And, though group blogs are the norm, they can, of course, provide a venue for the same reflection and peer interactions that the discussion forum supports.

Discussion Forum Vs. Blog

The different features and affordances found in discussion forums and blogs has been articulated elsewhere, and for years. One of the better such articles is Lee LeFever’s 2004 post “What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?”, in which he identified nine notable distinctions. I believe the three most important for education—and most unfortunately overlooked in the Paulus and Spence article are:

• Locus of control. LeFever writes,

  Weblogs are individual or small group resources- the control of content and value is driven by a single person or small group. Message Boards are group resources- the control of content and value is shared equally across all users.

  In a class environment an institutionalized “blog” set up by the faculty and owned by the temporary course web site is really no blog at all. Even if individuals have authoring control in their own instructor-designated lockbox, they have no control over the LMS course site itself, nor with whom the content is shared with. Remember, blogs default to publicly readable and persistent; LMS course sites are limited to extremely private and temporary. Further, blogs are owned and personalized by the individual. LMS course sites are owned by the institution and personalized—to a still startlingly limited degree—by the instructor.

• Intent. LeFever distinguishes between “centralized” and “decentralized” aspects of blogs and discussions, but I don’t think that particular phrasing is helpful here; I prefer independent (blog) versus dependent (LMS discussion). The intent of a blog, even an educational blog, if determined by the blog owner (owner, not just author). The blog owner may post course assignments on his or her blog, but ultimately the full purpose and beautiful potential of the blog is determined by the individual. You won’t find a LMS discussion forum/blog useful as an individual space for anything like that. Most discussion forums or message boards are product or problem-centric: users commune around a single specific topics, and new threads are usually initiated with a question. The intent of a LMS discussion—and the described intent of Paulus and Spence in their “blog” project–is to provide a private classroom space where registered course members can, asynchronously, discuss course-specific topics overtly delegated by the instructor. This example didn’t even provide students’ with their own lockboxes; they apparently had to share lockboxes with other students in an institutionally formulated group under the control of a TA.

• Content buckets. This ties in to ownership suggested by “locus of control”. Blogs are often sourced from an elegant and flexible content management system (not to be confused with a course management system), which provides a fertile space to be segmented and planted with whatever variety of flora preferred by the owner. The Bb “blog” described by Paulus and Spence does not allow the individual to categorize or appropriately tag posts for future reference. One can upload media, sure, but one does not maintain one’s own library of media, nor seamlessly call upon those artifacts when needed.

  I’ve referred to the LMS “blog” space as a lockbox. By comparison, a blog is a kind of shoebox for one’s treasures. Kids tend to love shoeboxes as storage places because they are (1) easy to color, paste paper onto, and otherwise personalize, and (2) they’re wonderful tools for sharing one’s best content, like a captured preying mantis, or a collection of baseball cards, or even a mini-theater for screening one’s creative works:

  
  A shoebox theatre, complete with iPod screen. CC By-NC by Photo Giddy

  One can not lift the lid of a LMS lockbox to show the world one’s treasures; indeed, a key feature of blogs proves this even more ridiculous, because we have come to take for granted the news feed provided not only by a blog, but by its myriad comments streams as well.

Does it Really Matter?

Calling a LMS discussion forum a blog creates the potential for a number of problems:

• It confuses people. It confuses students, it confuses teachers, it confuses researchers and evaluators. In this case the authors cite “faculty interest in using ‘cutting-edge’ CMC technologies”–is that what we’re calling the discussion forum these days?
• A “blog” without the affordances of a blog simply won’t reflect the benefits of blogging, which I’ve alluded to above but ultimately tie in to lifelong learning and personal attainment of flow.
• Discussion forums don’t encourage blogger behavior. Sure, discussion forums encourage a number of valuable practices, especially for education, but they are not blogs. They don’t provide the same full, individual ownership of a learning/sharing space; they don’t encourage the same habits of authorship, such as rich hyperlinking, self-reference, and editing; they don’t provide the same accountability, the same awful, glorious pressure to perform in a public space; the community is centered around the product or problem, not the individuals ties; finally, and perhaps because of this latter distinction, discussion forums don’t grant individuals the opportunity to be recognized by professionals in their fields.
• It allows the LMS to define our educational technology practices and manipulate our expectations within the boundaries of their closed system and tertiary business goals–at a time when the most innovative practices are happening all around us, born of self-organizing communities and experimental practitioners in the outworld.

I don’t mean to rail on the Paulus and Spence article–it does sound like they reached some of their goals for increasing interaction and learning intervention with their use of the Blackboard discussion forum, and we need to read about that, too–even in 2010. But the mislabeling of a forum as a blog is just another example of re-branding an old practice to make it seem hip again. Discussion forums can be very effective for learning at multiple cognitive levels. Blogs are powerful in their own right, and much of their potential has not surfaced yet in educational practices. But the two are very different tools, and should be utilized with specific ends in mind that capitalize on their individual potentials, and promote life-long use of these networked technologies that are in accordance with the authentic community beasts that learners will encounter in the wild.

* Alternate title courtesy of Chris Lott

Many people have their own opinion of what an e-learning platform should be (I spelled out some of my own broad criteria here), but that’s a debate in and of itself that we tried to dodge here. In doing so, we may have taken a number of things for granted–feel free to disagree in the comments. In the mode of keeping it simple, we reviewed Nixty by looking at the following areas:

1. Sign-Up and User Accounts
2. Creating a Course
3. Designing a Course
4. Participating in a Course
5. Conclusion

Sign-Up and Accounts

Signing up for Nixty is a straight forward process via new accounts or Facebook. We didn’t see an OpenID option. Users can populate a contacts list via invitations through Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Any user can sign up as a learner in any public course, or create a new course and share it with the world.

Within a user’s Settings users can upload a photo or avatar of themselves. Noticeably absent is any field for users’ personal web sites, social network accounts, or Atom/RSS feeds.

Users each have a theme-able “Eportfolio” (see Seth’s at http://nixty.com/eportfolio/Sgur). As opposed to a portfolio that showcases a person’s work, Nixty’s Eportfolio is limited mainly to presenting text information via a resume/CV builder.

Users also have a basic “Blog” (see Jared’s at http://nixty.com/blog/read/jaredstein/). The Nixty Blog allows for rich text editing, but, once submitted, new posts can not be edited. The blogs are publicly visible with no option to make private, either to a single course or to other Nixty members.

Nixty has an internal “Mail” tool which allows messaging of any Nixty user (plain text only). We would have liked to see some sort of integration with external e-mail or social media accounts.

Creating a Course

We began our examination of the features and limitations of Nixty by creating new online courses. In short, creating a new course and adding content is easy. Nixty provides a Wizard, but the interface is simple enough that most users can build courses without it. In most cases Nixty uses AJAX to facilitate page changes without reloading the page.

Courses can be designated as “traditional” or “wiki” versions–the latter allows any Nixty user to edit, add to, or re-order course content. After some confusion, @nixty (via Twitter) let us know that “Tests” and the “Gradebook” features are currently only available in the traditional version.

Course settings allow users to choose a course image icon which appears next to the course in Nixty directories. It also allows the instructor to set learner pass requirements for the course, and even issue a certificate to users upon completion.

The core unit of a Nixty course is the “Lesson” folder. Lesson folders can have learner instructions, can be nested, and can contain a sequence of any number of “Content” materials, “Discussions”, or “Tests”. Content is typically embedded HTML, but can also be a document (e.g. PDF or DOC), a media file, etc. We saw no way to scrape content from a web page–blog, wiki, or other. Also, though labeled “wiki” the wiki version of a course offers few wiki-like features, such as easy creation of new pages, access to wiki mark-up, version histories, etc.

The usability of the Content embedder/editor varied over the two days we used Nixty. Sometimes a simply WYSIWYG editor popped right up; sometimes the editor window was too small to use; sometimes it failed altogether with no error message.

Nixty allows for media uploads, though they recommend use of YouTube for videos. This is surely done for space/bandwidth reasons, but to us it’s the sort of behavior that should be encouraged throughout the system: designers (and users) should host their own materials in the cloud (Flickr, YouTube, Wikibooks, etc), and simple embed that content into the system’s framework.

Reordering Lesson folders was a bit painful. Initial ordering forces the creator to assign a number to each item. However, new items are not automatically queued to the next number, but have to be manually numbered through Manage Course > Lessons > Order Folders.

In our testing the “Syllabus” builder appeared to simply be broken, but there are obvious work-arounds, e.g. syllabus as an external file, or embed it as Content in a Lesson folder.

“Tests” can be used for exams or quizzes, and allow for basic multiple choice, true/false, multiple answer, fill in the blank, ordering and essay questions. Tests showed no option for question categories, pools, or randomization. Remember: Tests are only available in “traditional” version courses.

The “Gradebook” only allows for a Pass/Fail point-value cutoff. A clear limitation for most conventional instructors. Again, the Gradebook is only available in “traditional” version courses.

“Discussions” use the term “thread” but are not actually reply-threaded as we expected.

Nixty has neither an import nor export option for courses or materials, making migration to or from laborious.

Despite Nixty’s apparent draw for opencourseware and open educational resource projects, Nixty provides no licensing feature for content. We expected to be able to list license properties for individual items similar to Flickr, educommons, or the Moodle OpenShare mod.

We can’t discuss the course creation/development process without mentioning the navigation on the web site. Navigation is inconsistent at best, and often laborious or confusing. The following video illustrates one example that’s sure frustrate instructors in number of clicks alone:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://5tein.com/media/video/nixty-edit-content.swf" scale="exactfit" height="300" width="400" /]

Once finished, a creator can make a course public–this lists the course in the Nixty directory and allows other users to sign up for the course.

Designing a Course

We’ve looked at the nuts and bolts of Nixty in order to experience the possibilities, though actually designing a course is a different matter. Design of a successful informal or open course depends a lot on the limitations and affordances of a given system, the creativity of the designer, and the needs of the learners–an element apparently overlooked by Nixty (and most other LMS). We examined design considerations by looking at adapting my own online course, and examining a few of the spotlighted courses in Nixty.

The course I built in Nixty is based on my existing fully online 3-credit course, which aims to lay the groundwork for new web developers by introducing the basics of XHTML and CSS. The course design is a fairly traditional: primarily linear experience that connects heavily project-based instructional lessons with weekly discussions, journals, and learning quizzes.

(As with any conversion or migration, I had the bitter-sweet realization that my course had flaws scars that I was not quite ready to make public. This does, however, encourage me to make improvements under possible public scrutiny.)

In my course Because there is no built-in assignment tool designers have to rely on Discussions and Tests for activities. I did insert assignments into his Nixty course, and conforming to the nature of the informal, open educational experience I listed them as self-assessment only. And though I did provide a basic scoring criteria list, a better self-assessment feature would allow instructors to create rubrics, and users to score and track their work. Assignment-type activities would also be bolstered by a simple URL submission field, or even linking to artifacts in a learner’s Eportfolio (though the Eportfolio does not support objects/artifacts).

Use of essay-type questions in Tests could accommodate non-standard activities and assessments, but I think for such an option to thrive in an informal experience peer users would need to be able to access other learners’ quiz results for feedback and scoring. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Alternatively, a Discussion could be used for project submission and peer feedback. Because file upload is not an option, learners would have to refer to files hosted elsewhere. This limitation may in fact encourage better practices in learners, as each would have to have their own space(s) on the web for publishing educational and professional artifacts (e.g. a blog, Flickr, Slideshare, etc). Unfortunately, the designer’s Discussion thread creation prompt does not provide anything more than a plain text editor, limiting the richness of instructions for the learners.

In my Nixty course, as in most courses, the structure is fairly limited and contained by the Lesson folders, which contain only linearly-sequenced Content, Discussions, etc. The following short video shows how OCW_Maven structured OCW-based courses by interspersing Content and Q&A Discussions:

(Note: I am aware that this screencast is not scaling properly.)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://5tein.com/media/video/nixty-discussions-lesson.swf" scale="exactfit" height="300" width="400" /]

In our opinion a truly disruptive educational platform should encourage alternative structures, including recursive sequencing, e.g. learning branches or paths. That Nixty provides a “wiki” option for the course suggests a highly organic possibility, yet as mentioned several key wiki features are absent, especially dynamic, on-the-fly creation of new pages from links.

Participating in a Course

The idea behind a formally informal course experience is that a critical mass of users congregate around a learning hub in order to provide peer-to-peer or expert-to-peer feedback, direction, or mentoring. This requires a large number of users active on the site. It also requires a method of connecting users with the site’s activities when they are away from the course. Often this is done via e-mail, but the simple–yet surprisingly rare–method is with Atom or RSS feeds, for either content updates or discussion threads. Nixty provides neither feature, which may be the single largest weakness threatening the success of a project that apparently aims to be an open, informal learning hub.

Tests aside, “completion” of a Lesson, Discussion, or piece of content is based primarily on the user clicking “Mark this item complete”. This is fine for monitoring simple progress through a sequence of activities, but provides no real feedback to users on more substantive levels of progress. We suggested previously that a self-assessment rubric and tracking feature would be ideal for projects and assignments. Further, a reflective journaling field could be employed to help users track their thoughts as they progress through the materials.

Discussion responses can be voted “up” or “down”, but we thought that a better user feedback feature would provide additional, aggregable feedback to users in cases where the Discussion is used for sharing of work and solicitation of critiques. Users replying to a thread can use a GUI editor to compose their responses, but can not attach files. Again, this is not necessary with a PLE/PLN-informed perspective on digital identities and self-publishing, but many instructors–and learners–will look for this.

A plus for anyone planning to try Nixty is the fact that their representatives are very active on the support forums as well as on Twitter, and are more than willing to engage the community, answer questions, and offer advice.

Conclusion

As a simple e-learning platform Nixty is fairly satisfying. It’s willingness to provide a home for discussing and organizing content is laudable, and its aim to provide an alternative, open platform for informal learning is something we’ve been talking about for years.

The version of Nixty reviewed here is somewhat promising for informal learning scenarios, and the lightweight nature of the LMS can, at times, feel like a breath of fresh air over heavier LMS. The shifted paradigm of the system and its inherent limitations may encourage designers and educators to think about informal and independent learning in alternate ways.

However, broken or absent features make it difficult to recommend as a serious e-learning platform or an LMS. Indeed, existing Web 2.0 systems–either independently or in tandem–offer better core functionality (e.g. WordPress, MediaWiki), and we can think of other specifically educational platforms that would probably serve as well or better. For instance, the commercial LMS provider Instructure offers free individual course accounts to instructors as well as a public course option for informal open courses. Instructure Canvas is a more mature and feature-rich LMS platform that should not be ignored by open educators and educational theorists. And, of course, open source-minded folks would can just host their own instance Moodle or Sakai. (It’s somewhat surprising that Nixty didn’t build itself on either of these platforms, which are also full-featured and more mature.)

The fact that Nixty is new forces something of a catch-22: many self-directed learners and open educators won’t want to invest the time in using it until a critical mass of users can support those experiences; yet not critical mass is possible without users committing the system.

Despite its weaknesses Nixty is an interesting project, and we’ll be watching as its development progresses in the coming months and years. At this stage at least, Nixty is missing too many features, exhibits too many bugs, and offers little new affordances for us to encourage its adoption at this stage for anything except experimental open educational experiences.

Aleven, V, Koedinger, K. (2002). An effective metacognitive strategy: learning by doing and explaining with a computer-based Cognitive Tutor. Cognitive Science 26, 147-179.

In this report the researchers explain how explanation was shown to increase learner performance and increased time on task. In this particular case the learners input their explanations into a computer interface, but I wonder about self-explanation–that is, explanations crafted only as a part of one’s reflection, only for one’s own consumption. I make this distinction because though learners were “communicating” with a non-human (software) I suspect it was clear to the learners that their explanations would be archived and relayed to the instructor. So to me there may be an issue of learner privacy–a privacy that may shield them and allow them to more fully express themselves, or, conversely, a privacy that masks them and allows them to neglect a fuller explanation as might be made under instructor scrutiny.

There are more questions to raise (some fascinating ones regarding instructional design for solitary learning) and I hope to consider and investigate them in the coming weeks.