During the industrialization the industry needed a vast amount of standardized trained workers for their machine halls. The design of studies changed from personalized to job-centered. Only classes that are needed on the job are being taught. The result is a student that can do exactly what he is trained for, but nothing more.

My complains are that these fact hasn’t changed since then. Soft skill classes had been introduced once “team ability” has been identified as key value for employees. What studies are chosen by students are guided mostly by the fact how much money an according job is generating, not by interests or talents. In my opinion this is the fist step towards “unhappiness” and in extreme cases even burn-out-syndrome.

The motivation for learning should be a passion, a vocation not thrive for money. In other words it should be an intrinsic motivation, not an extrinsic motivation.

Viktor E. Frankl pointed in his talk 1972 out that the percentage of students that name “make a lot of money” as their dedicated goal for life was 16%. 78% specified “finding a purpose and meaning to my life” as their goal.

I’d say this percentage clearly has changed since then. Learning went from beeing a desire and priviledge to a tool in order to “make a lot of money”.

The upcoming of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) could mean an inflection point of this development. PLEs in my eyes is the summary of all your tools, habits and sources you use during your personal learning process. In adapting new tools and habits one is structuring and creating a learning process. In doing so he is getting in touch with new topics and areas. So in using a PLE instead of the traditional frontal lecture type of learning, students could build up or rediscover responsibillity for their learning process. The earlier a student feels responsible for their “path” of learning in their life, the earlier they can take action and steer their path towards their interests and talents. This will also help them finding out what their “Element” is, as Sir Ken Robinson calls the true vocation,

In using and creating PLEs we also express our believe in people that they are willing to develop and learn, or as Goethe did say: “If we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be”.

What do you think PLEs are good or bad for? What is the future of PLEs? Please comment.

So my question is: “Do students always know why they ought to learn a certain topic?”

Asking this question a couple teachers I got different answers. One of the most told answers is: “They will need this in their future life”. In their what? How do they know? We train students for a future that nobody can say nothing about. Most graduates take on jobs that didn’t even exist four years ago. And even if they need a specific knowledge for their future life, how are they suppose to know why they are learning this? Most teachers don’t even know themselves. So how are students supposed to imagine why they ought to learn it?

My personal experience have taught me (painfully) that there are things in life you learn and you WILL need it later. I rejected math classes as far as I could back then, when I started to do some graphical programming it dawned on me that all that math is worth something. Especially matrices haunted me.

I guess if I would have been told an example, for instance something breathtaking within 3D graphics or something like that, I would have brought up more motivation for that topic. Especially if I would have discovered by my own why I need that.

Dan Meyer has reconstructed a math lecture so that his students have to develop the formula for a calculation themselves instead of just giving it away and let them fill in the values. That shows that finding out for yourself forces you to really dig in the topic. So it seems the reason why a student is learning is strongly tied to the creation process of intrinsic motivation. The next question in my eyes would be if an intrinsic motivation could be supported or even created by computer systems?

What do you think? Please comment!

Could it be possible for somebody to improve his motivation by creating intrinsic motivation, just by finding a way of directly relating the learning content to one self? That would imply to be very creative in order to relate any given topic to a current living situation.

But how to achieve that? Creativity is defined as “…thinking items together, that haven’t been thought together before and getting a value out of it…”. I would say that matches the need of connecting externally imposed demands of learning content and personal interests pretty much.

This again would emphasise a certain view on PLEs. Not only would they document ones successful learning history in an e-Portfolio and an overview on current learning activities but they could be used as a support for trying to find a relation between given learning content or topics and current personal situations. Situations of any professional or private nature. The closer to ones interest the better.
I guess with the help of some semantics in the future it will get easier for a PLE to find connections that not even me was thinking of.

My guess is, the more clear I can see what’s in it for me, the more important “it” is for me, the more motivated I am.

What’s your opinion? Any experiences with that? WVDA67ET62Q2

How is it that I’m not motivated at all to learn some cheap formulas for a cryptography exam but I’m highly motivated to learn a foreign language like Chinese, which by the way is slightly harder. My english professor always said: “The fastest way to learn a language is to have a girlfriend who just speaks this language.” I think in this case the motivation is kind of raised.
Why do we have different motivations for different things? How is it that my motivation is higher if I learn self-initiated and when I am passionate about the outcome as it is when somebody tells me to learn?

A personal learning includes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and it includes formal and informal learning. Mostly it starts with informal learning during the days you try to stand up and walk, then it is more formal learning going through school, college or university and after that it becomes informal again. For instance if you learn a foreign language just for the fun of it or to stay active or if you discover a new sport or game.

The reason for the differentiation of informal and formal learning could be the same as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, at least in most cases. So it would be fantastic to be able to transfer formal to informal learning or sometimes vice versa. Is there a chance to convert from one into the other? How could students be engaged to disregard the boundaries of formal learning and go beyond these boundaries? Could social learning be an approach to facilitate learners to simply forget about the boundaries of formal learning and just learn as it would be informal?

picture source: http://mrg.bz/s4aN2K

The friend graph

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been reading a lot of papers and still do, to acquire a broad knowledge about social software and how it can be used within learning management systems.

Reading this ACM article I came across a awesome piece of software. The Nexus friend grapher is able not only to visualize the network of all your friends within facebook.com, it can find out similarities between your friends. Once you marked a friend, you can see who of your friends are friend with him and with who of your friends he has similarities like in music or hobbies.

Interesting to see is also the form. In clouds you can easily determine your “circle of friends”. There is a bunch of people i know from a specific company, which all are in the same cloud. People I know from the university are in a different cloud.

If you want to take a look at it without installing the facebook application or if you don’t have a facebook account, there is an anonymized demo you can play around with.

The Nexus friend grapher is definitly worth a look and a must-have for everyone researching in this field. A fine piece of software to visualize and explore your friends in a different way.

What are you working with? Any other good experiences or hints?

After a walk through several halls, I spotted some more interessting stands offering quite innovative services in the field of social networking and eLearning.

Blogtronix
Social online networks are not just a personal fun pages any more but very interesting for enterprises to use internally to improve collaboration within the enterprise or externally to cooperate with customers and suppliers. Blogtronix, a company located in Bulgaria, Canada and USA, offers social online networks especially tailored to enterprise needs.

Kontextwork
André Ulrich and his company kontextwork offers Wikis, adapted to special needs of enterprises. Needs like online social networks, knowledge management, news, blogging and project-based collaboration can be served with wikis. Applicated Wikis are based on OpenSource projects and can be developed further to any kind of

Commetrix
Commetrix is a project of the Technical University of Berlin. It provides various ways to visualize social networks with a lot of input. Email traffic or online social networks can be analyzed and displayed. The results of the analysis can be tweaked and shaped in different ways like narrow it down by keyword. Taken its almost real-time character it is really useful for monitoring or getting snapshots of any kind of network.

VennMaker
A different approach of capture information about social networks is VennMaker. It doesn’t automatically import data from networks but offers the possibility of enter information manually as you talk to an individual. It focuses the subjective character of information provided by persons. Social networks can be drawn and exported in an easy way.

social virtPresenter
social virtPresenter developed by the University of Osnabrueck is an Facebook application that offers a lot of funktions for eLearning for the existing online social network. Videos of lectures can be watched online together with friends. Questions can be asked, according to specific points in the video. The watch behaviour is recorded and is visualized in the form of how often was a particular point watched.

Komuniki
I had a very nice chat with a feller from Komuniki at our Stand. Komuniki is a young vibrant company based in Cyprus and Germany. They created a eLearning comunity featuring intercultural communication and collaboration. Attend an online class learning also about your virtual neighbor from India, China or wherever in the world.

CampusContent
Prof. Dr.-ing Krämer from Fern-Universität Hagen is creating a repository for eLearning media content called CampusContent. Why produce every little bit of media content yourself when there is already a bunch of content available. The repository will feature crontribution of new content and copy or reference things. It will also feature a licencing model in order to protect content from ilegal copying.

LiveSocial
Kalmann Graffi a PhD candidate from TU Darmstadt is currently developing LiveSocial, a social network offering features similar to StudiVZ but with a peer-to-peer network model.

Liquiverse
A company not directly involved in eLearning but still worth mentioning is an Liquiverse, founded by of a very innovative friend of mine. With Liquifile and Liquibase, Carsten Waldeck, is storming the field of browsing in a innovative manor. Even the official CeBIT website is featuring his liquid browsing to find exhibitors.