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Abstract
This paper suggests
that personal Webpublishing technologies and practices can be
conceptualized as a reflective conversational learning tool for self-organized learning. Beyond
the examination of the theoretical basis for such a claim, initial ideas for specific learning
environment designs on the basis of a "conversational framework" are presented.
Introduction
The rather rapid
dissemination of personal Webpublishing and Weblog tools has also produced
a growing number of projects that want to explore the potential of these technologies for
educational applications. Just like many other technologies that have been brought into the
realm of human teaching and learning, personal Webpublishing can be tweaked and twisted
until it fits a particular educational context and its underlying philosophy. No technological
feature or tool characteristic prevents an instructor from supporting his authoritarian teaching
style and the core assumption that "teachers-know-best" through the application of a personal
Webpublishing system that is merely used to hand out and collect assignments, to organize
compulsory content and learning activities, and to micro-manage the overall pace of his
students. (1.1)
Shifting from a task-focused level to a learning-focused level of awareness (4.5)Currently, we can
only speculate if Webpublishing practices also support a shift from task-
focused to learning-focused awareness. Systematic collections of observational data are still
very rare here. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that we can find a growing body of evidence
that people who start to experiment with personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational
tool for their own learning, often seem to review and improve their own processes over time.
They tweak the templates of the Webpublishing space, their workflows, their categorization
systems, navigation schemes, their personal organization of content syndication and
aggregation, and so forth. It appears that the content free nature of personal Webpublishing
systems and the particularities of their use can contribute to a gradual shift towards process
awareness that often results in an explicit quest for optimization. The chronological organization
of Weblogs probably facilitates this process awareness, too. If we begin to use personal
Webpublishing as a tool for the "conversational construction of personally significant, relevant
and viable meaning" (Harri-Augstein & Thomas, 1991, p. 6 ), it is likely that the continuous
production of meaningful items and their chronological organization and display can also
facilitate a growing awareness of how one constructs meaning over time. (4.5.1)
I would also like
to maintain that the often reflective, informal, and very personal writing style
that we can find in current Weblog authoring practice, facilitates the elicitation and explication
of personal learning myths. These personal myths often surface when people try to make sense
out of statements, suggestions, and comments of other authors on topics such as learning,
workflows, processes, teaching, knowledge, change, growth, problem-solving, and so forth.
Being confronted with representations of patterns of meaning from other nodes of personal
knowing (that is people), people often activate their deeply engrained "personal learning myths,"
and frequently come up with statements like:
This is wonderful material to engage in learning-focused conversations with yourself
and
others. It seems that the world of personal Webpublishing potentially provides a constant
confrontation with other patterns of meaning and alternative interpretations. In turn, this
confrontation facilitates the elicitation of personal learning myths. (4.5.3)
Reflecting upon the representations (4.3)Artifacts can represent
personal learning experiences, accounts of learning activities, products
created as part of the project, learning resources, and reflections. Such a "learning log"
captures
the history of a learning project in action and records the personally meaningful material that can
foster and facilitate reflective practices such as conversations with one- self and others.
Externalizing these activities through writing and visual representation, and publishing them in a
Web- based format, opens up the individual and rather isolated projects to a wider community,
thus creating additional opportunities for discussion, critique, negotiation, and shared
knowledge construction. The triggers for focused reflection and conversation can now come
from many more different sources. I will come back to this issue later in the article. (4.3.1)
The built in chronological
organization and navigation capability of personal Webpublishing
systems can significantly support efforts of focused, intentional reflection. Other forms of
systematic retrieval such as text-based search, directories of assigned topics, and so forth, can
play an important role, too. We can search for similarities and differences among our items of
meaning, construct new relationships, reconstruct relationships previously forgotten, and feed
our results back into our personal Webpublishing spaces. Thus, personal Webpublishing
systems also support the reiteration of the process of explication and reflection another of
the
design requirements for reflective conversational tools mentioned above. (4.3.2)
Reiterating the process of explication and reflection (4.4)
So far, I have
mostly examined the features of personal Webpublishing from the perspective of
a single person who uses the technology for the gradual creation of a collection of artifacts in
relation to an ongoing learning project. Such a collection of digital artifacts can then function as
the basic material for reflective conversational practices resulting in further elaboration,
organization, and integration of patterns of meaning and action over time. (4.4.1)
I have already
suggested that one's inner conversation is usually intertwined with a number of
outer conversations with material and human resources that feed into our meaning making
activities in significant ways. Personal Webpublishing technologies offer interesting opportunities
to intentionally support and integrate various parallel conversational exchanges. This is where
RSS, the lingua franca of content syndication and aggregation, comes into play. This simple, but
efficient and rather robust, encoding standard allows for the explicit modeling of content flows,
feedback loops, and monitoring procedures of various kind, thus supporting an ongoing
reiterative process of explication and reflection. (4.4.2)
Most personal Webpublishing
applications already offer the automatic generation of RSS
encoded output streams of the content a particular author publishes. This capability allows
basically anybody to get into the content syndication and aggregation business. So far we have
seen a remarkable proliferation of a simple and somewhat rough subscription model on the
basis of RSS. RSS encoded output files of different sources can be aggregated, monitored,
categorized, and sometimes even fed back into the editing and (re- )publishing flow of
particular Webpublishing solutions. (4.4.3)
RSS becomes really
interesting when we gain more control over the creation of specific RSS
output files. If we are able to create specific output files we can design content flows that
directly support our conversational meaning making activities. Being able to put out a RSS
encoded summary of all items that I have previously categorized in a personally meaningful way
does not only allow others to subscribe to this particular output channel, but also offers
opportunities to feedback the newly packaged content into my personal learning space. There I
can display it, for example, on a dedicated page along other related content or hyperlinks to
additional material. Thus I can support my search for higher order concepts, similarities, or new
patterns of meaning. Of course, this becomes even more powerful when I can directly
incorporate items in a specific RSS feed that are sitting somewhere on the Web. Now, I can
string together distributed content in meaningful ways and feed this back into my conversational
learning process. (4.4.4)
Since RSS encoded
content can come from anywhere we also get a whole new toolkit for the
intentional design of content flows between people. The more specific and fine- grained RSS
outputs individual Weblog authors can provide the more focused we can support
conversational exchanges. Instead of sifting through a general output file with an impressionistic
collection of items we can then decide to monitor only items that focus on a particular topic or
theme. In addition we can actually negotiate and agree upon temporary content flow designs
between people who agree to join a collaborative learning project of some sort. (4.13)
While this is certainly
not the place to get to deep into the specifics of RSS and the design
opportunities that it holds, even a quick and rather sketchy review, like the one above, already
demonstrates that we have only started to explore this technology for the intentional design of
content flows that can support the conversational exchanges with ourselves and others. (4.14)
Shifting from a task-focused level to a learning-focused level of awareness (4.5)
Currently, we can
only speculate if Webpublishing practices also support a shift from task-
focused to learning-focused awareness. Systematic collections of observational data are still
very rare here. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that we can find a growing body of evidence
that people who start to experiment with personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational
tool for their own learning, often seem to review and improve their own processes over time.
They tweak the templates of the Webpublishing space, their workflows, their categorization
systems, navigation schemes, their personal organization of content syndication and
aggregation, and so forth. It appears that the content free nature of personal Webpublishing
systems and the particularities of their use can contribute to a gradual shift towards process
awareness that often results in an explicit quest for optimization. The chronological organization
of Weblogs probably facilitates this process awareness, too. If we begin to use personal
Webpublishing as a tool for the "conversational construction of personally significant, relevant
and viable meaning" (Harri-Augstein & Thomas, 1991, p. 6 ), it is likely that the continuous
production of meaningful items and their chronological organization and display can also
facilitate a growing awareness of how one constructs meaning over time. (4.5.1)
I would also like
to maintain that the often reflective, informal, and very personal writing style
that we can find in current Weblog authoring practice, facilitates the elicitation and explication
of personal learning myths. These personal myths often surface when people try to make sense
out of statements, suggestions, and comments of other authors on topics such as learning,
workflows, processes, teaching, knowledge, change, growth, problem-solving, and so forth.
Being confronted with representations of patterns of meaning from other nodes of personal
knowing (that is people), people often activate their deeply engrained "personal learning myths,"
and frequently come up with statements like:
This is wonderful
material to engage in learning-focused conversations with yourself and others.
It seems that the world of personal Webpublishing potentially provides a constant confrontation
with other patterns of meaning and alternative interpretations. In turn, this confrontation
facilitates the elicitation of personal learning myths. (4.5.3)
Supporting the construction of a personal mini-language to converse about the process
of
learning (4.6)
In its rather short
history, personal Webpublishing as a practice has already produced an, albeit
rather small, vocabulary of its own. Every single day more people get familiar with terms like
Weblog, post, permanent link, title, item, category, RSS feed, aggregation, syndication,
referrer, time stamp, archive, editor, authoring, topic, trackback, meta- data, comment, outline,
and so forth. The dynamic development of the entire field of personal Webpublishing frequently
adds new terms and concepts to this emerging mini- language. It might be too early to speculate
about the long- term effects of this specialist language on the way we converse about projects
of individual and collaborative meaning construction. Nevertheless, I suspect that this growing
vocabulary of personal Webpublishing might serve as a proto- language for the conversational
construction of a personal language for learning. Its current vocabulary is certainly too limited to
model the construction of new meaning but it might provide some conceptual "handles" that
could be merged with other existing vocabularies. I am thinking here of Ausubel's (1963) notion
of Meaningful Learning, von Glasersfeld's (1995) Radical Constructivist ideas on meaning
construction, Piaget's (1972) notion of Perturbation, Assimilation, and Accommodation, Kelly's
(1955) Personal Construct Psychology, Harri-Augstein & Thomas' (1991) Learning
Conversations framework, Schön's (1987) description of the Reflective Practitioner, and
Novak's (1998) Human Constructivism, and other theoretical models of human meaning
construction. This issue certainly requires more thought and discussion than I could possibly
provide in this paper. (4.6.1)
Supporting a gradual internalization of the tool (4.7)
Finally, we are
confronted with the question if personal Webpublishing practices and
procedures could gradually be internalized. On the currently available data basis we probably
cannot answer this question. We would need a couple of qualitative research projects that try
to determine if and how personal Webpublishing practices influence the way people go about
their learning and meaning construction in general. The often reported addictive potential, the
growing accessibility and integration of the technologies in our daily routines, the emerging
interfaces with mobile devices, the feedback mechanisms, the focus on contextualization and
process optimization, ... all this suggests that personal Webpublishing practice holds the
potential for an internalization of some of its procedures and characteristics. I think it is even
likely that we will see theories of human cognition (like memory, meaning construction, etc.)
that resemble more the distributed, loosely- coupled, client-server architecture of personal
Webpublishing networks than the hierarchical information-processing models that the micro-
computer revolution brought along. (4.7)
Personal Webpublishing networks as conversational learning environments for self-
organized learners
I think it is quite
illuminating to conceptualize the emerging networks of personal Webpublishing
outlets as a giant, self- actualizing conversational learning environment for self- organized
learners. We can observe almost in real-time how individuals use personal Webpublishing
technologies to facilitate and feed their own change and learning processes. Watching this rich
fabric of learning conversations unfold makes you wonder why people still believe that e-
learning is all about content delivery and the production of polished instructional products.
People in the personal Webpublishing realm successfully learn outside any institutionally
organized system of instruction. They exhibit remarkable skills for the initiation and maintenance
of personally meaningful learning projects. They construct their personal learning domains on
the fly while they are listening, observing, and sometimes contacting others who publish visible
traces of their meaning making activities on the Web. These published and continuously
updated collections of artifacts represent a living part of the constantly expanding mind-pool.
(6.1)
While the public
mind pool offers uncountable artifacts that can be incorporated into a personal
learning domain, these artifacts cannot be aware of themselves and they cannot engage in
conversation with someone who tries to interpret their underlying patterns of meaning. A book
simply won't tell you that you are interpreting its content in a way that was not intended by its
author. Personal Webpublishing changes this picture considerably. Suddenly we are not dealing
with artifacts alone. Behind every personal Webpublishing outlet is another self-reflective being,
another node of personal knowing, often ready to engage in conversational exchanges of
various kinds. This is when the boundaries of roles begin to dissolve, when we become learners
and facilitators at the same time, when we get aware of each other's personal learning myths,
when we begin to construct new meanings in the light of our experience, and when we become
a learning resource for each other. (6.2)
I believe that
self-organized learners will quickly understand the potential of personal
Webpublishing networks and practices, while other-organized learners will need considerable
support and carefully designed interventions before they can profit from this dynamic
conversational learning environment. (6.3) |
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1. Andreas Agiorgitis
