Open EdTech 2010 Report, Campus life in the age of the online learner.
By the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the New Media Consortium

During the second day of Open Edtech 2010, the participants worked in several teams, taking as a starting point the ideas gathered in the first day brainstorming.  Four groups were created (A, B, C and D), and all of them presented their ideas about engagement to the general group, that were gathered by Rachel in a big panels. After that, all the participants voted their 16 favorite ideas, and the ‘12 winner ideas’ were discussed more in depth, again in four groups (each group owned 3 ideas). In the final general session, each group presented their conclusions, and basically these conclusions are the ones we are presenting in this post. It is impossible to represent here all the ideas and work that was produced during such a intense second day, but many of these ideas will be accessible through the photos of the panels created by Rachel or in the more developed documentation we will sending by the next days.

To sum up, let’s have a look at these fantastic ideas:

• To allow extreme personalization of learning spaces (yes, radical!). Issues that can be personalizad: the virtual Learning Environment, formats, devices, look and feel, functionalities, learning path and styles, contents, calendar, aggregation, widgets, etc. Radical, but some boundaries are needed.
• To include and go in depth with the emotional dimension of the students
  
• To produce several creative representations that go beyond of plain or 2D. One specific proposal was a Hitmap represented through a sphere with a google maps behaviour, where students would be able to navigate, zoom in or out, et.
• To integrate informal learning
• To increase mobile experiences
• To integrate family and friends in different ways in the virtual life of learners
• An essential one:  place students’ as contributors (co-creators) of learning resources or learning experiences that can be used by others.
• The one about portfolios, that should fully accommodate learners personal, professional, and academic dimension, providing several type of access for different uses. From the creative point of view, we proposed a ‘Dossier’, something highly visual, multilayered. Is about a portfolio understood not only a tool to collect evidences but to organize future learning and accreditation or validation and job applications. Also, to work with the idea of automatically generated aggregated portfolios
• To carry out an overall integration of personal-professional-academic tools.
• To offer personal tools: to understand that students come to ‘personal environments’, they can set up life tools and use diagnosis tools (that will show where they are and where they want to go to). To understand personal tools are also starting points for students. Situate the learning path of the student and where he is: the academic GPS !
• To use more Open source, in general.
  
• To experiment with multidimensional approaches and more interactive interfaces. As an example, David showe the ABCnews application globe… which we liked but should be improved  :)     Is about playing with different visualizations or different representations, also in a more artistic way.
  
• Other aspects like accessibility, ethical issues, etc.
• And last but not least: caring, because engagement is strong emotional connections !

For this new edition of Tech Talk we invited Eduardo Manchon, cofounder of Panoramio, in a session that was moderated by Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Dolors Reig and Llorenç Valverde.

Most of the discussion was about the elements of success in social networks. The debate was especially engaging due to the different views of the participants. According to Eduardo, if you want to build a community that generates content with value, we have to focus in a specific aim, that needs to be addressed to the community properly. A different opinion was showed by Dolors Reig, who pointed out that the success of ideas like Panoramio are based on covering gaps on the needs of users, but also that nowadays the decrease in the participation in social networks needs of another strategies. The question is: Is one clear objective enough to empower communities? Again, according to Eduardo Manchon, there is a need to focus on creators, thogh they may represent just 1 or 2% or the users, and this concrete objective has to be addressed to them, in order to build the critical mass needed by every community.

All of them agreed on the necessity to generate interesting contents, determine social objectives and start “open minded”, meaning in such a flexible way that allows to better fit your community. Also, there was an overall consensus in the idea that in the end is your community who determines the real objectives.

In this line, the conversation moved on few ideas about how to use the capabilities of communities to grow our ideas. El rincón del vago was shown as a good example of it.

We enjoyed a few delicious dishes cooked by all the Edtech participants. See the photos below to have an idea of how best cooks we are !

The session was really a cooperative cooking activity where the group assumed different roles and the responsability to create good dishes. This engaging and somehow relaxed activity served as the basis for inspiration on how to integrate this kind of engaging experiences to online learning settings. In order to empower the participants’ imagination, we put different photos showing many kind of experiences and emotions and we discussed about the spaces we like (both outdoors and indoors), how our most enjoyable experiences are and how we feel when our expectations are met (or not). This approach to the definition of ‘engagement’ in a physical context aims to be the facilitator bridge between ‘face to face’ traditional settings to online learning experiences.

Below you can see the conclusions reflected in another poster created by Rachel.

The first activity of this year has been about the understanding of the concept of engagement. Certainly, ‘engagement‘ is one of these words we tend to use in a quite unspecific way, both in educational and non-educational settings. In this sense, is unavoidable that the first step of our work is to go in depth on the conceptualization of the term ‘engagement’.

In order to do this, we have had a special session consisting on a brainstorming, where all the participants have discussed about the meaning of engagement from the point of view of online learners. Following we present a set of some of the most interesting ideas and statements of the session. Rachel Smith, our colleague from the NMC, has collected these ones and others in a poster (see photo section below). Unfortunately is not possible to transcript here all the keywords mentioned but a list of the most common ones.

So, what are the elements that have an important impact on engagement according to what we will infer as students’ perception?

- Less structured settings: in this point there was some controversy due to the fact that some students may prefer more structured environments

- The power of communities to engage individuals, and more specifically the connection with other peers as a must for engament.

- Flexibility, in general.

- From the internal dimension of individuals (emotions, sensations, etc.) engagement can be seen through expressions like “It’s fun !!” or “It feels good”.

- The role of technology: has technology something to do with engagement? what’s the real impact of technology design and campuses on engagement?

- Mobility.

- The personal contribution of each learner: if as students, we can do meaningful contributions that will somehow remain in the environment, we will be more engaged. In general, all the group agree on the need to create and to share as a basic element of motivation.

- The use of multimedia possibilities and the need to convert online learning in a multisensorial experience.

- “Infinite” resources.

Finally, it has also been considered when students see engagement as a barrier or blocking wall: we have to accept that some students don’t want to be engaged, they may just want to finish their activities or courses.

Some aspects we discussed about are not  elements of engagement themselves but techniques and methods to design engaging environments: to focus on the user experience from a User Centered Design perspective, to give students the possibility to participate in courses and environment design, to have passionate designers, to introduce beauty in design,etc.

Facebook has been discussed as an example of online community where many users are very engaged. This fact suggests that we should study as a challenge why so  many people gets engaged voluntarily with environments like Facebook.

Also, as a practical example, the group discussed about Apple and MAC computers: why Apple (and definetely its branding) has become something that many users love so much?

As you will guess, the objective of the session has been t0 identify this group of keywords, without going in depth with their implementation in online settings. This task will be developed during tomorrow team sessions.

Now, what do you think about these points?  could you contribute with other elements or best practices ?

And finally the third edition of Open Edtech started !

We chatted for one hour in the hall of Hotel Catedral in a quite informal setting. After that, we went to one of our favorite  Restaurants: the Euskal Etxea, where everybody was introduced to the typical Basque food called Pinchos (or Pinxos in catalan). A good preparatory session for the cooking course tomorrow !

Below you can find some photos of the Reception.

More soon.

Dear colleagues, to all of you present/invited, welcome to the 3rd edition of Open Edtech.

Barcelona could not be a better option to discuss engagement. The city is very well known for its potential to attract tourists, travellers and professionals due to a pleasant lifestyle. In fact, the city  has had some success in defining itself as the promoter of ‘good moods’. It is not easy to describe all the variables involved in the creation of this engagement, but that’s precisely our reason to be here at Open Edtech: to identify the elements of engagement, in our case, for online learners.

By the way, I guess the weather is one of these elements you may be worried about. Good news, it seems this summer is still going to accompany us. At least the forecast is with us, and the weather won’t be too bad.