7. MY OBJECTIVE An all-in-one centralised and easily controllable learning environment that promotes collaborative learning for various skills and its usage is sustainable throughout the year. BENEFITS OF AN ALL-IN-ONE VLE “An all in one system {with} a single interface allows access to a range of learning materials and communication tools. “ “The academic may use the system to provide enhanced resources (bibliographies with live links to electronic journals, simulations expanding practice) or initiate online collaborative projects to stimulate and develop ideas and theories beyond their face to face meetings.” Jennings, D. (2005, p.159)
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9. TWO-TIER LIMITED ACCESS TO KEEP OUTSIDERS OUT DOUBLE-LOCK SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR ACCESS TO CONTENT,DESIGN AND SOURCE-CODES ALL-IN-ONE INTERFACE CREATES BOUNDARIESTO KEEP LEARNERS IN
10. CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT “Parents and communities place faith in school board members and educators to protect students during the school day — and that means securing their safety when they’re online.” National School Boards Association, 2007 “An effective educator should create a safe environment for learners to express themselves freely in appropriate ways, to share their ideas and to ask questions. (Hamilton, 1996; Porter, 1997).” “In this positive, safe and motivating environment, learners might feel free to fail and try again (Chen, 1997; Spitzer, 1998).” cited in Huang (2003, p.33)
12. EMBEDDED INTERFACE INTEGRATED INTO ONE ONE LEARNING CURVE “We see a pattern where the technology is front and center stage, rather than the academic content. In case after case we see that when computer technologies are adopted, the learning about the technology often takes over, and it is only after several rounds of integrating technology with content that content emerges in strong ways. The technology learning curve tends to eclipse content learning temporarily .“ Shelley, Cole and Syer (1999, p.3)
13. LEARNERS DEVELOP LEARNING FLOW (FLOW THEORY) “A flow activity is one in which the mind becomes effortlessly focussed and engaged on an activity, rather than falling prey to distractions. Flow is a continuum from no flow to maximum flow” Stage 1 A perception of challenges that are well matched to the persons skills. Stage 2 A merging of action and awareness A sense of control over the activity; and concentration. Stage 3 Loss of self-consciousness; time distortion; and a feeling that the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake (autotelic). Pearce, Ainley and Howard (2004, p.747)
24. PERSONAL PAGES AND SPACE “Wenger (1999) notes that the issue of education should be addressed first and foremost in terms of the identities of the participants and the ways in which we create a sense of belonging, two elements that are critical factors in the creation of community, whether it is f+f or online. It is the social aspects of education that are the most important.” “Social identity drives learning.” RocciLuppicini (2007, pp.3-4)
25. FACILITATES COLLABORATION Owen (2006, p.11) stated that “if learning to learn, if collaboration, and if the personalisation of educational experiences are at the core of current educational agendas, we need to find ways of enabling young people to come into contact with, collaborate with and learn from each other and other people. Social software is about bringing minds and ideas into contact with each other and is already, in the world outside schools, creating the global village. Our question is whether it is possible to draw on the activities emerging through social software to create learning communities which offer young people personalised, collaborative learning experiences such as those that are already emerging in the world outside the school gates.”
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28. Gradual change from teacher-centred to learner-centred Salmon’s (2002) e-tivities approach
29. SOCIO CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH. A CHECKLIST “Social constructivism emphasize the socially and culturally situated context of cognition, in which knowledge is constructed in shared endeavours.” (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996; cited in Felix, 2006). “Constructivists go further than pure cognitive approaches by recommending that we help [learners] to construct meaningful and conceptually functional representations of the external world.” (Jonassen, 1991, p.29; cited in Felix, 2006, p.87). “By creating social networks around academic topics, or even about specific projects for a course, an instructor can facilitate a strong sense of community among the students, encouraging personal interactions that can lead to the creation of new knowledge and collective intelligence.” (from 7 Things You Should Know About Ning, 2008). THESE POINTS WILL BE ELABORATED IN RELATION TO NING IN THE CLASSROOM IN PART 4.
30. SALMON’S E-TIVITIES APPROACH. LEARNER CENTRED DEVELOPMENT KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION INFORMATION EXCHANGE ONLINE SOCIALISATION ACCESS AND MOTIVATION TEACHER CENTRED
31. A REMINDER Ning was chosen because of the need to have a centralised, controlled and communalistic learning environment that would be sustained throughout the academic year and further. Ning was chosen because of its VLE qualities as well as to come extent its Managed Learning Environment (MLE) qualities. Ning was not chosen to accommodate the teaching of particular skills but because of its potential to accommodate the teaching of most, if not all, of the skills.
32. NING IN COLLABORATIVE WRITING TASKS Warschauer (1996b) states that “Computer Mediated Communication allows users to share not only brief messages, but also lengthy (formatted or unformatted) documents - thus facilitating collaborative writing”. He further elaborates that students “can also use the Web to publish their texts or multimedia materials to share with partner classes”. “Many composition and language teachers believe that word processing encourages new pedagogical relationships in the class, by facilitating student revision and collaborative writing” (Warschauer, 1996a, p.2) Warschauer (1996a) points out L1 composition teachers were the earliest proponents of CMC using computer conferencing among the students in a class to enhance collaborative writing and the social production of knowledge (as exemplified by Batson, 1988; DiMatteo, 1990; Faigley, 1990; Hawisher and LeBland, 1992; and Susser, 1993) followed by L2 composition teachers such as Sullivan (1993).
39. Enter writing processes : Drafting, proofreading, editing in blogs05. Submission through featuring their blogpost. 06. Helping others in completing their work.
40. REFERENCES Chen, L. (1997). Distance delivery systems in terms of pedagogical considerations: a re-evaluation. Educational Technology. pp.34-37. Duffy, T. M. and Cunningham, D. J. (1996). Constructivism: implications for the design and delivery of instruction. In Jonassen, D. H. (ed.). Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology. New York : Macmillan Library Reference.Felix, U. (2006). E-learning pedagogy in the third millennium: the need for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches. ReCALL. 17 (1), pp.85–100. Hamilton, D. (1996). Learning about education: an unfinished curriculum. Bristol : Open University Press. Huang, H. (2002). Toward constructivism for adult learners in online learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology. 33 (1), pp.27-37. Jennings, D. (2005) Virtually effective : The measure of a learning environment. In O’Neill, G., Moore, S., and McMullin, B. (Eds). Emerging Issues in the Practice of University Learning and Teaching. Dublin : AISHE. pp. 159-167. Jonassen, D. H. (1991). Evaluating constructivistic learning. Educational Technology 31 (9), pp.28–33. Luppicini, R. (2007). Online Learning Communities. North Carolina : Information Age Publishing. National School Boards Association (2007). Creating and connecting : Research and guidelines on online social - and educational - networking. Retrieved from http://www.nsba.org/site/view.asp?CID=63&DID=41340 Owen, M., Grant, L., Sayers, S. and Facer, K. (2006). Social software and learning. Futurelab. http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Social_Software_report.pdf Pearce, J. M., Ainley, M. and Howard, S. (2004). The ebb and flow of online learning. Computers in human behavior. 21 pp. 745-771.
41. REFERENCES Porter, L. R. (1997). Creating the virtual classroom distance learning with the Internet. New York : John Wiley & Sons. Salmon, G. (2002). e-tivities: The key to active online learning. London. Kogan Page. Shelley, G., Cole, K. and Syer, C. (1999). The technology/content dilemma. In Proceedings from the Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology, 1999: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Technology. Spitzer, D. R. (1998). Rediscovering the social context of distance learning. Educational Technology. pp.52-56. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (2008). 7 Things You Should Know About Ning. EDUCAUSE. Warschauer, M. (1996a). Motivational Aspects of Using Computers for Writing and Communication. In Warschauer, M. (Ed.), Telecollaboration in Foreign Language Learning: Proceedings of the Hawai‘i Symposium. (Technical Report #12) (pp. 29–46). Honolulu, Hawai‘i: University of Hawai‘i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center. Warschauer, M. (1996b) Computer Assisted Language Learning: an Introduction. In Fotos, S. (Ed.) Multimedia Language Teaching, (pp. 3-20). Tokyo: Logos International.
