eLearning blog

My eLearning blog is now here

Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)

I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not openJ.

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.

But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

New Education

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

In this article Kersti Peenema from Tallinn University focus on the new goals of education. The main goal of article is to find an answer based on literature analysis to the question whether e-learning can meet the competencies of tomorrow. Peenema expresses her belief that using Web 2.0 tools in education will help develop creativity and competencies of tomorrow.

Intorduction

Development of technology is rapid and this has impact to the society and education. With the development of electronic forms of communication and World Wide Web new learning spaces are being created (Jarvis, Holford & Griffin 2003). As society is changing more knowledgebased the question arises: what kind of education we do need to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As society is becoming more knowledgebased more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow?

Use of technological solutions and real life

When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. Similar to web 2.0 there is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today. Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity as basis tomorrow's competencies? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So today many opportunities stay unused. More active creation and use of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life with real situations. It is very important to know how to transfer our knowledge to the real world. In this transfer reflection has important role: does this kind of learning make students reflect more their knowledge? Visualisation of their knowledge helps to bring out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might become a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

Different generations

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. As more learning is becoming knowledgebased there will be a fundamental shift in the relations of teachers and learners (Jarvis et al. 2003). They will be from different generations and the old ways of teaching do not work. So it gets harder to understand and predict the needs of future and the essence of new education. If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it is the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

Conclusion

In this paper I analysed impact of development of technology to education. Society is changing and therefore the goals of education need to change. With wider use of technology we have different technological tools to support new goals of education.

References:

Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.

Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.

Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.

Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

Jarvis, P., Holford, J., Griffin, C. (2003), The theory and practice of learning, London and Sterling: Kogan Page Limited.

Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.

Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].

Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.

de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Open Source Management: The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team

First: I have never played as much computer games as now.

I played twice The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team. Second time I was more successful but even then I used several times the possibility to go back a few turns. After playing it for second time I found surprisingly the first mission the hardest one although the third one was also very difficult.

The drawings in the beginning of the game and between missions are very nice. The landscapes are very different - it seems that Blue Team has used all possibilities in map drawing. This is definitely strong element of the game.

I have to admit that all missions were quite hard. I used in every mission back turns to win.

In the first mission the ground of landscape was mainly sand and mountains and it was very difficult to move. This was a problem for me because I had no flying creatures unlike the Vampire Bats owned by the "Bad" team.

Second mission I liked the best. It might even be that this was the easiest one for me (or the reason might have been that I liked green landscape much more...)

Third mission had very difficult landscape and it was very difficult level because lots of villages were located closer to enemy. So the "Bads" had a chance to collect many buildings and raise lots of money and that was used to recruit more fighters.

The main goal was to resist until the end of turns. At the final mission it would have been more logical if the end would be "killing" the bad guy?

I would have preferred a more interesting story line, but then again - the story of our team was not more elaborate either. For example, it would have made me happier if I would have got to know what "The Thing" was or for what it was good for... At the beginning of the third mission there was a "gem", was this The Thing?

These were all just tiny remarks. Anyway I am impressed that we could do something like this. And I would like to congratulate the Blue Team for their good work done.

FLOSS Business Successes and Failures

While starting to analyze the business successes and failures I came to surprising finding about the size of the companies in question. Whereas the largest OSS company - North Carolina-based Red Hat Inc. employs 2000 employees worldwide[1] compared to its commercial competitor Microsoft that comes above 79000 employee headcount[2].

The second largest OSS company - Uppsala-based MySQL AB employs 360 employees[3] whereas its closest competitors are also significantly larger - 75000 in Oracle[4], more than 4000 in Sybase[5] or more than 1500 in Progress[6]. So in average the companies that have chosen to do business and provide the public with its source code are tens of times smaller than their fully commercial equivalents. Through keeping the number of employees down, making them work from their home-base open source also cuts down on essential research and development costs while at the same time speeding up delivery of new products.

Most of the other OSS companies seem to be small corner offices that usually employ a few fanatics. What is their motivation? In plenty of cases they indeed work with the passion to turn the world into a better place. This kind of approach together with user innovation probably makes them success already on the grassroots. When we look at them - there are a few who are proudly announcing to be geeks[7].

Success Story - How to make good money with OSS?

It seems to be an oxymoron - to make money with free / libre / open source software. When most of the customers would be able to use freely available source code to build their own - why would they pay anybody for anything related to the OSS?

However, there are still several possibilities how to make money with open source. Open Source Business Models and Strategies website [8] displays web-roll of numerous success stories.
The open source business model relies on shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the 'Product Halo,' or ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation.)[9] In most cases this is associated with related services. One strong example would be JBoss, which is a division of Red Hat. JBoss has managed to sell conferences, support, certification, even reference manuals.[10]

How to fail with OSS?

But then on the other hand it is difficult to identify any failure stories. This is so probably because the very nature of the open source development principles. When a commercial company faces huge losses or enters bankruptcy then usually we can see big headlines - numbers of people were laid off, the managers were kicked out from their positions, shareholders were left empty-handed, customers did not receive their services. However, as the open source development is frequently based on the operations of volunteers - when they stop their activities usually none of the previous would either be applicable or hit a major news channel - the developers simply leave for other alternatives, no managers would have been employed, any financiers would not have committed their funds, and mostly the customers are psychologically ready to accept that whatever they got free until this moment should account for a new alternative thereafter. Hence looking around in yahoo finance, CNN headlines or even some hard-core IT portals did not provide good links on the events that would demonstrate a major failure in OSS business.

Hence I decided to take an approach of a social Darwinist. The very principles of social evolutionary theory provide that there is constant variation of new ideas where only the fittest are selected and retained in the long run. The variation of the OSS ideas is mostly captured in open source software development web sites. Looking at SourceForge.net website[11] their number of registered projects accounted at the end of 2007 to 165234! Appears to be a rather large number! When I tried to trace their discontinued projects - there are really hundreds of projects that demonstrate active development for a few months and have died out thereafter. Hence it could be concluded rather easily that the social Darwinism with combination of lack of stakeholder interests could be used in order to explain the silent failure stories of the open source software development.

References

[1] http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/facts/
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MSFT, with the history of the headcount during the past years displayed here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/msftemp.jpg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
[4] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ORCL
[5] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=SY
[6] http://www.progress.com/uk/about_us/index.ssp
[7] http://www.landley.net/
[8] http://www.opensourcestrategies.org/
[9] http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/misc/opensourcebiz.html
[10] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/6417/1/
[11] http://sourceforge.net/

Wesnoth

Red team

In the class of open source management was a home assignment to develop the game named Wesnoth. For some obscure reason I ended up as team leader. Teams were composed by Kaido Kikkas. As I have a background in the field of education, then open source and Wesnoth have not been present in my everyday life. So I was a team leader in the field I know nothing about.

Already at the begging our teams suffered losses: our team member from Ethiopia could not be part of our team having some problems with the internet. Hence we were left with three only!

We agreed in the beginning since everybody wants to have fun with map drawing that every member of the team will compose one level of the game. Although this kind of agreement did not match the best way with our profiles, we still decided to try.

First we (team) had to come up with a scenario. I wrote basis of the scenario and sent it to our team for reviewing and commenting. Scenario was received ok from other team members and we agreed on some deadlines when something must be ready.

As all team members were working and having extremely busy times at their daily work, we did not manage to keep any of those deadlines. As a team leader I had some doubts whether to choose some other style and start strongly controlling but I didn’t consider this right. Because in the end - what matters is whether we do development of the game not whether we succeed to hold on strictly our deadlines. Maybe it was wrong decision because it was understandable that one of our team members - Egert - has some problems and probably would not cope with the assignment. In the middle of december it appeared that he was still with us but a couple of days before the final deadline I have to say that unfortunately another team member has left us and at the end - red team today has only two members (and none of us has background in computer science). So as it became clear that our Wesnoth will have only two levels and we had to change our storyline a little.

About the game:
Development of this game was a huge challenge for me for several reasons. First: I don't like computer games that much. I almost don’t play them. Second: not having any previous programming skills it was at the beginning quite difficult to figure out how this stuff works. I had some help from my husband who worked with me and explained the logic behind it. I must admit that the most fun part for me was still drawing the map. The scenario-language become understandable after a while. As well did this how all those pictures, scenarios, map go together.
Although it was a really hard assignment for me I'm still quite happy about it. I don’t see myself as an open source developer in the future but it is good to know how these things work.

My thanks go to my husband for patience and to Geroli.