Jon Dron

Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy.

This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design. The three generations of cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy are examined, using the familiar community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) with its focus on social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Although this typology of pedagogies could also be usefully applied to campus-based education, the need for and practice of openness and explicitness in distance education content and process makes the work especially relevant to distance education designers, teachers, and developers. The article concludes that high-quality distance education exploits all three generations as determined by the learning content, context, and learning expectations.

Control and Constraint in E-learning: Choosing When to Choose

Structure influences behavior. Through their structure, e-learning environments (including the people within them) to a greater or lesser degree control how we learn, within a framework bounded by intrinsic and external constraints such as physical and temporal limits, prior knowledge, ability, needs of narrative, conversational conventions, and so on. Control and Constraint in E-Learning: Choosing When to Choose discusses how many conventional technologies can constrain the behavior of the people who use them, and how they can be used to provide the learner with the ability to choose to choose. An invaluable addition to every library collection, this book provides a foundation for developers of software and users of Web 2.0 environments for education and learning, unifying many distance learning theories and match them to the affordances of e-learning in general, but social software in particular.

CoFIND An experiment in N-dimensional collaborative filtering

This paper reports on the development of CoFIND, a Web-based n-dimensional collaborative filtering system that seeks to guide learners to relevant resources based upon not only the content of the resources but the qualities exhibited by those resources that make them useful learning material. Qualities provide the n-dimensions of this collaborative filter. Qualities and resources are generated collaboratively by the users of the system. CoFIND is designed to allow evolution to occur, which is discussed in the context of Darwinian theory and includes reference to current theories relating to the development of complex systems. The paper goes on to describe the implementation of the system and the results of an early pilot experiment involving a group of 42 students. It is concluded that, despite encouraging early results, some further work is needed to develop an effective interface and to embody the kind of complex interactions needed to generate spontaneous evolution. This work is already underway and discussed in the context of the lessons learnt.

Social Software and the Emergence of Control

Social software, such as blogs, wikis, tagging systems and collaborative filters, treats the group as a first-class object within the system. Drawing from theories of transactional distance and control, this paper proposes a model of e-learning that extends traditional concepts of learner-teacher-content interactions to include these emergent properties of the group. It suggests that this feature of social software can facilitate an approach to e-learning that is qualitatively different from and capable of significantly augmenting traditional methods. It goes on to explore some of the dangers and issues that need to be addressed in order for this new model to fulfill its promise.

An Infrastructure for Developing Pervasive Learning Environments

This paper presents an infrastructure for developing problem-based pervasive learning environments. Building such environments necessitates having many autonomous components dealing with various tasks and heterogeneous distributed resources. Our proposed infrastructure is based on a multi-agent system architecture to integrate various components of the environments. The infrastructure includes a location- and context-awareness service, a question and answer service, an adaptive mechanism; problem based ubiquitous learning models, social networking issues, and the evaluation of multimedia inputs. Furthermore, student modeling issues among components are considered. The design of the infrastructure as well as its components is discussed. This paves the way towards the development of pervasive learning applications.

On the Design of Collective Applications

In this paper we define collective applications as those that employ the aggregated behaviours of individuals in a crowd to shape their environment and to provide structure and influence in that environment. Collectives occur in most systems that aggregate user-generated content, whether or not that is the intention of the designers or contributors. We identify the necessary features of such applications and observe that they pose a particularly wicked set of design problems, because important characteristics of the system, including processing and presentation, reside outside the program in the behaviour of the crowd itself. We suggest some tentative approaches to dealing with these problems.

The teacher, the learner and the collective mind

This paper deals with techniques for tapping processes of self-organisation in adult learning. It looks at systems that make use of evolution and stigmergy (communication through signs left in the environment) to generate a kind of group mind, which both influences and is influenced by the actions of its constituents. Such systems exhibit both high structure and high dialogue, constraining choice and providing freedom at the same time. This makes them very interesting educationally as theory suggests that such opposites cannot co-exist. The paper describes two such systems, exploring their strengths and weaknesses and identifying potential future avenues of research.

Lost in the Web 2.0 jungle

If we wish to cater for diverse needs then we need a diverse environment. Mainstream learning management systems impose structural, technical and organisational constraints that limit the ability of teachers to control them and, typically, constrain learners even more. Personal learning environments (PLEs), offer an alternative flexible and adaptable path. However, PLEs draw on resources and delivery platforms outside those controlled by the course team and LMS. It may become difficult to manage the learning process for both learner and teacher. This paper is a companion to cultivating the web 2.0 jungle, by Bhattacharya and Dron, which proposes solutions to the problems raised here.

Challenges and opportunities for learning analytics when formal teaching meets social spaces

Social networking is revolutionizing the world in ways few imagined just a few years ago. The power of social networking technology can also be leveraged to improve education and enhance the instructor and learner experience. Unlike conventional learning management systems, social software environments such as Athabasca Landing provide a persistent space and are flexible enough to support social and learner-led methods of informal, non-formal, and formal learning. Analytics can be used to effectively track and measure personal progress and help uncover extra-curricular factor affecting learner success such as network formation and growth. The paper reports on an attempt to explore this problem through analysis of student behaviour on the Athabasca Landing site within the context of a course. Its findings, explanation, and potential implications are listed. Effects of social learning on learners, based on the learners behaviour before, during, and after the course are described and discussed. Finally, features of an open source tool created for this analysis, LASSIE is presented.

Epimethean information systems: harnessing the power of the collective in e-learning

This paper discusses the educational uses of self-organised web-based environments that are defined as Epimethean Information Systems. Epimethean Information Systems are not designed in the conventional sense, but take their shape in response to the actions of the people that use them. They share a range of characteristics, including implicit communication between users, emergent structure, and self-organisation. The fact that structure in such systems arises out of a dialogic process means that they are potentially ideal vehicles for e-learning, combining high and low transactional distance (a measurement of the relative degree of structure and dialogue in an educational transaction) in a single environment as well as shaping themselves to the needs of a specific community.