zmWmQs

Signals of Success and Self-directed Learning
Penny Bentley, Helen Crump, Paige Cuffe, Iwona Gniadek,
Briar Jamieson, Sheila MacNeill and Yishay Mor
Helen’s Reflection on Connecting for learning success
(Helen Crump (@crumphelen) is a literacies practitioner
working in community education in the North West of
Ireland.)
“I consider my participation in OLDSMOOC to have
been successful, adhering largely to the descriptor of
an active participant of Milligan, Littlejohn & Margaryan
(2013) by maintaining an active blog and Twitter account
for the duration of the course, and afterwards by maintaining
an enduring network of connections.
I embarked upon OLDS MOOC with the clear intention
that participation would help me develop knowledge
and skills pertinent to learning design, and compliment an
existing project that I had already been blogging about.
Having a clear aim for my participation was an important
factor in my success, as was the confidence that I had already
started to gain. This combination of purpose and
confidence gained through prior experience was crucial
in enabling me to participate actively and successfully. It
enabled me to persist and overcome challenges that for
others might have proved to be a barrier. As Cross (2013)
recognises, within OLDS MOOC “the use of unfamiliar
technologies such as Cloudworks presented an additional
challenge to many participants in the first week”. It was
here that I invested considerable time and effort overcoming
not only the challenges posed by the platform but
the project grouping process as well.
“It was just impossible to figure out the platform and
track down all the people that you wanted to talk to, so after
considerable effort and not getting very far, I decided
to park myself under the cloud entitled “Digital Identity
and Social Media” […] and likewise with the Digilit study
circle cloud […] I then pasted the links to these clouds into
my Evernote account and proceeded to access Cloudworks
from there” (Crump, 2013).
This was a telling stage as I not only developed a workaround
solution, but I also formed the tenacious mind-set
that, in the short term, would help me continue with the
course. As I noted at the time, I hung on.
If hanging on was key to success in the short term, making
connections was key to success in the long term. In
making introductions at the start of the course, I deliberately
mentioned that I was originally from Nottingham because
I supposed a number of MOOC participants were
likely to be UK-based. Indeed, this conversation trigger
proved fruitful as it drew the attention of another participant
who was based in Nottingham and from which
point we were able to establish that we had similar learning
goals. Locating this individual and realising that we
had corresponding aims was as an important support for
learning in the complex environment of OLDSMOOC, as
was our ability to learn together. A large part of the success
I experienced in OLDS MOOC can be attributed to
the formation of this partnership and to cooperatively engaging
in a learning design project.”
Sheila’s Reflection on Adaptation and Control
(At the time of writing Sheila MacNeill was Assistant Director
for a nationally funded educational technology Innovation
Support Centre in the UK (www.cetis.ac.uk).
“Unlike many MOOCs, OLDS MOOC didn’t use a centralised
platform or VLE for user engagement. Instead it
utilised and encouraged the use of a number of different
services including a dedicated website, google+, twitter,
YouTube, bibsonomy and Cloudworks. This gave a range
of spaces for learners to interact with, however it also
overwhelmed some users in terms of where and how to
interact online.
The use of Cloudworks was actively encouraged for collaboration,
sharing and reflection. Cloudworks is a social
networking site developed by the Open University specifically
to support “participatory practices (peer critiquing,
sharing, user-generated content, aggregation and personalisation)
within an educational context, and promote
reflective professional practice and development.” (Galley
& Mor, 2013)
However the user interface and navigation of Cloudworks
is not particularly intuitive, and can lead to confusion
for users. This was particularly apparent at the start
of OLDSMOOC when many learners started to use it for
the first time. I was in a fortunate position in that I had
used the system before, however from the first week I did
become increasingly interested in the potential extension
and development of Cloudworks to show more explicitly
network connections for and between learners, content
and their activities. Stuart (2013) describes the various
affordances of network participation in MOOCs. From
previous experiments with the Cloudworks API I knew it
was possible to create a mind map view of a user’s personal
space or Cloudscape. I felt that there was potential for
this to be taken a stage further to create further visualisations
of a users followers and content and their inter-relationships
in a more visually explicit way.
“I’m also now wondering if a network diagram of cloudscape
. . . would be helpful. . . . . . in starting to make more
explicit links between people, activities and networks.
Maybe the mind map view is too linear” (MacNeill, 2013)
From my initial blog post outlining this idea, Hirst
(2013) developed a number of proof of concept visualisations
based on the openly available data from Cloudworks.
These networked views also illustrate some of the
concepts behind notions of rhizomatic learning (Cormier,
2011).
In terms of context of learning, which was the theme of
week two, I felt that these visualisations provided greater
Research Track | 21