New learning environments: The challenge and the promise #EDENchat

In recent years, education has evolved to the point where learning can take place anywhere and at any time, usually beyond the walls of the traditional learning space. There are all sorts of possibilities thanks to new technologies. Although distance education has been in existence for more than a century, the various technological means by which it can now be conducted have advanced quickly. The last two decades alone have seen a rapid rise in popularity of the World Wide Web, smartphones, social media, social networks, augmented reality, wearable technologies and user generated content sites. New trends have emerged including blended learning, personalised learning environments (PLEs) Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), mobile learning and the flipped classroom. Although it could be argued that some of these are not new concepts, in combination they have become a phenomenon that has occupied and exercised the minds of educators worldwide.

What are the challenges of these new learning environments? What do new learning environments promise in terms of new learning, new pedagogy and new opportunities? What are the issues we need to address to make new learning environments a success? And what new skills and knowledge do educators need? These and other questions will be addressed at the final Twitter #EDENchat session of the year on Wednesday 16th December, when we will discuss issues, challenges and benefits of the new learning environments mentioned above. As ever, the session will be one hour in duration, and will start at 20.00 GMT (21.00 CET). Please join us, and come prepared to share your expertise, ask questions, challenge others and be challenged, and generally learn together as we head towards 2016. I hope to see you there!

NB: All previous #EDENchats can be found here as Storified archives

NB: The next series of #EDENchat will start on 13 January, 2016. Further details will be posted about the schedule on this blog and also on the EDEN NAP website later.

Photo by Sarah Macmillan on Flickr


New learning environments: The challenge and the promise #EDENchat by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Off the rails?

It so happens that my friend, colleague and fellow Edupunk from two oceans away has set me a little challenge. Amy Burvall has sent me three images, and my task is to create a learning related blog post using one of them. She calls it the #blimage challenge. I'm not one to shy away from any challenge, so I hereby present a post that incorporates all three images.

The state education system can easily be compared to a railway network. Trains arrive and depart from designated stations, passengers embark and disembark, and somehow, the train delivers everyone to their destinations. There is no deviation from the track (unless there is a disaster and there is a derailment - trains run on the rails), and generally there is a prescribed timetable that dictates the schedule of arrivals and departures of all trains in the network. This is a great metaphor for school systems, which generally operate on the same principles. There is a timetable that all school lessons and schemes of work run to. A bell divides activities, and everything is scheduled for a specific part of the school calendar. This is the easiest and most cost effective way to manage the delivery of a curriculum, but is it the most helpful for learners? It doesn't suit all students, just as a railway timetable doesn't suit all travellers. But we comply with them, because there is no alternative. Or is there?

Some prefer to travel in a taxi, or even by using their own personal transport. This transport will depart at the time the traveller decides and hopefully get them to their destination. This is a metaphor for personalised learning, with the personal learning environment supporting an individual's learning. There is plenty of opportunity to deviate from prescribed educational processes, which leads to endless possibilities for personal research and digressions into uncharted territory. Furthermore, unlike traditional formalised education, the personal learner determines his or her own destination. To learn at this level of individualisation, the learner requires several things. Firstly, they need a set of tools they can use to access knowledge, and to communicate with others. In other words, they need technologies that are networked. They need to be able to connect with experts, peers and content.

One of my tasks as an academic working in the field of teacher education over the last few years, has been to develop and promote this kind of alternative, off the rails education. Now and then I deviate into some alternative practices, which have been documented on this blog and elsewhere. Things can happen that are not planned, or may not appear to have a clear purpose. You might say these are 'strainge sessions' (I love the alternative spelling) in the sense that they don't comply with conventional educational practice. In one of my recent sessions I asked my students to use their cameras to create a 'story without words'. They not only had to create the videos or image sets, but determine what exactly the learning outcomes were. It goes without saying that each decided their own learning outcomes, and each got something different from their participation. Each had to solve their own idiosyncratic problems, and each had to think critically and creatively to successfully complete their task (the success criteria were also decided by them). Some teachers might consider this to be completely off the rails. For me it's a necessary, creative approach to support and promote personalised and critical learning.

How's that Amy? Anyone else want to set me an image/blog challenge?

All images by Amy Burvall


Off the rails? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

New and emerging technologies

I was interviewed recently by the team from Sponge UK in the beautiful gardens of Drake's Place, at Plymouth University. The video below is the result of that interview, in which I answer questions such as: what emerging technology trends have the greatest potential for learning? What tips you you have for people wanting to invest in emerging technology? and should we be waiting until our learners adopt new technology or should we be leading the way as learning providers?

As you might expect, smart mobile technologies, personal learning environments and social learning feature prominently. I also take a gaze into the near future of technology supported learning with some comments on augmented reality, the semantic web and the rise in bring your own device strategies in the workplace.



Video and image courtesy of Sponge UK


New and emerging technologies by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

#EDENchat Up close and personal

I have written a lot about Personal Learning Environments in the past, especially when they were emerging as a concept, and sounded quite new. There were posts about the Anatomy of PLEs, their functionality, their role as a counterpoint to the institutional Learning Management System, and also their relationship to MOOCs and Connectivism. I attended the first ever Personal Learning Environments conference in Barcelona, about 5 years ago, and spent three glorious days in the sun, learning with others about the merits and challenges of the PLE and how it would 'revolutionise' learning. We were all excited about the potential of PLEs, especially their subversive nature and their inherent informality. PLEs could be created by anyone, using just about any tool or technology, and we later expanded the idea to embrace other elements such as real experiences and people (Personal Learning Networks). Several peer reviewed journal articles (and a special issue in Interactive Learning Environments) also appeared, and countless blog posts were published. Fittingly, the history of the PLE was written through personal experience and experimentation.

Looking back on all of this frenetic activity, we can now see that PLEs, whatever they have evolved into, have become so much a part of the fabric of everyday learning, that they have all but disappeared, at least in terms of our perception of them. People tend rarely to refer to them now. Personal devices and the free and widespread access to social media have amplified the concept of PLEs to the point that they have become ubiquitous, and therefore run of the mill. What is your experience of using PLEs in your own learning? How can the concept be applied to wider issues in education?

The #EDENchat on May 20th explored these questions and many others, and there was free ranging discussion which was challenging, thought provoking and enlightening. The archive for this and all other #EDENchats can be found as Storified records on the EDEN NAP website.

Photo by Jourixia on Deviant Art


Up close and personal by Steve Wheeler was written in Preston, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism

'Students should be at the centre of learning', declared Stephen Downes, 'because there is no other place they could possibly be.' Downes was speaking at the ELI 4th International Conference on e-Learning and Distance Education held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was one of several sound bites that exemplified the theme of his speech, Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment.

Although it's a fundamental principle of progressive education, keeping the student at the centre seems to be something that not many schools, colleges and universities are good at. Rows of seats still persist in the classrooms of many schools, and direct instruction still holds sway. Standardised tests are administered by schools who ignore the fact that all students are different, and bells continually punctuate the timetable, dividing the school day up into an unconnected parade of subjects, each delivered in content heavy lessons. One size never did fit everyone.

Stephen Downes was adamant in his view that personal learning is the way forward for all forms of education. He argued that in the new learning ecology, where technology can connect students to any others, and any content, any where in the world, is one in which content must change. Content, he said, should not be delivered by experts to passive recipients, but in a connected world where personal learning environments are controlled by the learners, content is actually a signal between one student and another.

We learn through collaboration, interaction and sharing he said, citing the formula for connectivist learning approaches he said: Aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward. Generally, this aligns to that held by many educators who subscribe to connectivist theory - that students not only consume content, they now have the capability, through their personal learning environments (PLEs), to mash it up with any other content, to create new content, extend it, remix it and share it across their network of friends and other connections. The learning comes not by memorising it, said Downes, but by using it, applying it. And this was exactly the guiding principle of the earliest MOOCs.

Downes bemoaned the fact that the original Massive Open Online Courses, run in free and flexible, student led ways and owned by students, had been sadly misappropriated by the large consortia, and now hardly resembled at all the first MOOCs of the last decade. The cMOOCs, connectivist (or some would argue Canadian) courses had been overtaken by the xMOOCs, and were now unrecognisable from their first form. cMOOCs still exist of course, but the popular format is now that of the mega-courses run by the likes of consortia such as Coursera and EdX. When asked by a member of the audience to comment on the huge non-completion rates of MOOCs, Downes said that most people do MOOCs because they are interested in the content and the interactions rather than gaining a qualification.

Photo from JISC Website


PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.