Dr. Marco Kalz » Re-searched

Structuration of Personal Learning Environments Lecture @KMI

Marco Kalz — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:40:32 +0000

Last week I gave a lecture about the “Structuration of Personal Learning Environments” in the context of the MUPPLE lecture series at The Open University (UK). The lecture series is a follow-up activity of our three MUPPLE workshops that we have organized at the European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning from 2008 – 2010 (see the proceedings 2008, 2009 and 2010).

In the lecture I am taking a critical stance on the impact of our work about PLE and I am proposing a theoretical framework that can help us to overcome some problems with empirical approaches to Personal Learning Environments. My hypothesis is that we have not yet understood the roles that PLE play for learners and we need to invest in empirical studies to understand the benefit of PLE for learners. The lecture has been recorded, please find the recording here. My slides uses are embedded below.

Structuration of Personal Learning Environments

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If you are interested in other lectures of the MUPPLE lecture series please find below a player that aggregates them.

Feedback loops and the new behaviourism

Marco Kalz — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:00:18 +0000

The recent Wired article about feedback loops by Thomas Goetze has helped me to understand the phenomenon of sensors, feedback, learning and behaviour change better. Or better to say, after the article I was aware how pervasive these loops are already part of our lifes.

New sensors and feedback via personal devices have inspired many developers and companies to use live data measures for intelligent information distribution in many parts of our lives (energy consumption, sports activities, health awareness etc.). What surprised me about the obvious success of these feedback loops is their simplicity. In its core they often realize a behavioristic stimulus-response model and to some extent also conditioning effects. Dan Lockton (via Stephen Downes) has written an interesting article on his blog where he discusses the implications of behaviourism for designers. He discusses the different conditioning types and he presents an example of a simple feedback loop:

"Pryor (2002) gives the example of a car seatbelt warning buzzer as negative reinforcement—a device designed to be irritating or unpleasant enough to cause the user to take action to avoid it. We might consider that a recorded voice saying “Thank you” after the seatbelt is fastened could be a positive reinforcement alternative. Positive and negative punishment are essentially the inverse of each of these—a fine for not wearing a seatbelt while driving is a form of positive punishment, and taking away someone’s driving licence would be a form of negative punishment" (Lockton, 2011).

On the other hand, many feedback loops (and this is what Goetze has neglected to some extent) also seem to work because of social control or social competition effects. Let's take the famous example of running trackers and sensors. People use individual sensor to control their speed and perseverance and after their running session they share their efforts with a specific audience (the family, facebook friends or the world). This again seems to have positive effects on motivation and in the end healthiness. But there can also be a negative effect of the social embeddedness which Lockton calls social fences or social traps. A social trap is a situation where reward and negative consequences are given but they overlap each other. Lockton points to a social trap taxonomy by Cross and Guyer (1980) which discusses 5 classes of traps:

time-delay traps (delay between behaviour and reinforcement is too long to be effective)
ignorance traps (knowledge about negative effects is not used because the rewards establishes a habit)
externality traps (negative effects are not on the individual but on other people)
collective traps (similar to the tragedy of commons)
hybrid traps (a mixture of some of these traps)

For the design of ambient displays and feedback loops it would be very interesting if we could break these traps and connect behaviour and consequences directly, especially with a focus on the grand challenges of our time (e.g. sustainability, security etc.).

Challenges of PLE research and development

Marco Kalz — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:53:15 +0000

photo credit: DieselDemon

On May 5 I have given a lecture in the E-Learning course of the i9-group at the RWTH Aachen. The students consistes of a group of computer science students and teachers for informatics. At the start of the lecture the students have presented some very creative video clips about their concept of personal learning environments. The first part of the presentation consists of some critical issues I could identify through an analysis of the three MUPPLE workshops I have co-organized.

At the end of the lecture we split in groups and collected challenges on different levels. Please find here my embedded presentation.

Challenges for PLE research and development

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Social media as the trojan horse for organizational change?

Marco Kalz — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:33:10 +0000

photo credit: ccarlstea

I have just been appointed as one of the ambassadors of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in October. In this context I haven been asked what my special interest is to attend the conference. This is a very good opportunity to publish a posting that has been waiting until end of May.

In the last months I have been talking to some smaller and larger companies about the use of social media in their organizations. I really enjoyed the many interesting discussion – nonetheless it was surprising to see how far these discussions went. For me the most interesting aspects of the whole social media and enterprise 2.0 discussion is the question if social media can function as agents for organizational change. On a high level I am really curious that many organizations start to implement a social software tool and already during the implementation of a short time after they start to talk about values, rules and strategic dimensions of the recently implemented software. Sebastian Küpers shares this experience and he has the idea that social media can function as trojan horses for redefining core-values of a company and finally organizational change. Mirko Lange has discussed here (in german) in a very good article the strategic dimension of social media and he points out that companies cannot treat with ignore social media which relates again to values.

I am looking forward to discuss this impression at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit soon. Besides this high-level interest I am curious to see some examples of social tagging in enterprises and I would like to see if the topic of Open Educational Resources has already arrived at companies and SMEs. Finally I would like to see if I can raise some interest with our ongoing project called OpenScout that focuses on making very large amounts of open study material in the domain of business and management education available for competence-based education with a special focus on SMEs.