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Final Report - Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

Final Report - Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning

Final Report 1. Title of project Personal Learning Environments and Personal Development Planning 2. Project director/s Alan Cann1, Jon Scott1, Jo Badge1, Richard Mobbs2, Steve Rooney3 3. Department(s)/Unit(s) 1 School of Biological Sciences, 2IT Services, 3Student Support and Development Service 4. Keywords Personal learning environments, virtual learning environments, personal development planning, ePortfolios 5. Abstract The aim of this project was to develop an institutional exemplar of a personal and shared virtual space for students' learning, research and networking using Web 2.0 technologies independent of any institutional services. This will provide users with the skills to maintain such environments as the major component of their personal development planning (PDP) and as part of a lifelong learning agenda. The space was built around a range of freely available Web 2.0 tools and services, complemented by the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and other student support information repositories. 6. Pedagogic Background to the Project University of Leicester students are transients within our system, usually staying for three or four years full-time study, possibly longer if they are studying part-time or move on to post-graduate training. What they learn is relevant to their lifelong learning skills and future career progression and, as such, students will benefit from having continued access to a virtual study network based on their undergraduate and career experience. Resources for their formal learning not only originate from their university teachers but also from informal virtual sources of various kinds (e.g., comments by members of the public on a fieldwork photo uploaded onto a photosharing site such as Flickr, information from the student union, etc). Integrating formal and informal sources into a symbiotic whole to benefit the students is a worthwhile objective in its own right. At present, the School of Biological Sciences implements PDP as a paper-based exercise, supported by the personal tutor system, which students are encouraged but not compelled to take part in. This exercise terminates when, or frequently before, students graduate, so there is no guaranteed benefit in terms of lifelong learning. To complement this application, we submitted an application for funding to the HEA Subject Centre for Biosciences to introduce all first year Biological Sciences students to the concept of a PLE at the very start of their university career. Their progress and engagement was monitored and encouraged by regular summative assessment of individual e-portfolios. In the pilot project, we will use the personal tutor system to assess what proportion of second and third year students continue to maintain their eportfolio to document the development of their PLE as part of the School PDP programme without the lever of formal assessment. This information will be used in subsequent years to decide strategies to roll out the programme to all students throughout their degrees. This NTI project complemented an external grant award which was made and sought to use the experience within the School of Biological Sciences could be used as a model to roll out similar approaches across the whole University.

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Who are the Trojans?

Following on from my previous two posts, I'm still thinking about strategies in which social media can be used to advance open science.

An idea that we talked about some time ago (in a teaching rather than a research context) was to identify and invest in (groom) a few Trojans. Ideally, we could identify one per department, work hard at supporting them, then wait for peer-peer transmission of the sharing is good meme?

So the question is - who are the Trojans? My feeling is that they are probably not the younger academics - highly risk averse and too focused on outputs to experiment. So we need to find ways of putting out tasty bait and waiting for bites...

The Enzyme Club

There was some discussion on Twitter yesterday about molecular biology reagents and kits, etc. I started to tweet this, then realized it was more of a blog post than a tweet.

"In my day" i.e. when I started my PhD back in 197<cough>, the first few weeks were spent joining the Enzyme Club. This encompassed all the biomedical researchers at the University of Leicester. Each new student would prepare a batch enzyme for recombinant DNA work. In my case, I made Hsu I (an isoschizomer of Hae III but allegedly easier to prepare). Since it was years ago, I can't remember how many litres of the organism I grew up, but I remember very clearly doing the first assay on two litres of crude extract, and figuring out I was holding £40 million pounds worth of enzyme at the then current market prices. The first affinity column cut it down to £15 million, and a quick gel filtration to couple of millions pounds worth - still pretty good for two weeks work, especially when you remember that two million pounds was enough to buy you a house back in the 1970s!

Why did the Enzyme Club exist? Because these reagents were scarce in the 1970s, and rationed both by price and availability. Only a few years before, the only way to get hold of any of these enzymes was to make your own. This type of open science made sense. Why did the Enzyme Club cease to exist? Gradually, it became clear that the batch of enzyme I made wasn't very good. It had a persistent exonuclease activity which meant it was fine for restriction analysis but rubbish for cloning, and it went off very quickly in storage, so that after three months there wasn't much activity left. And although I've always been a rubbish protein chemist, that was a pretty common experience. Gradually, the companies dropped their prices and improved both the quality and availability of commercial enzymes. The day came when the Enzyme Club didn't make sense any more, and it quietly died. It's probably still moldering in the back of a coldroom over in the MSB.

So boys and girls, this is a story of the economics of open science, which made sense in response to scarce resources. When the availability of enzymes was limiting, this open approach made sense. When time became limiting, we all retreated back into our laboratories and got on with whatever we needed to do to get a PhD. The moral of this story is that open science pops up it's head when times are hard and resources are scarce, but retreats quickly as the balance changes.

So what are you going to do about it?

fuss

You may have heard there was a fuss over a paper entitled Perspectives of UK Vice-Chancellors on Leading Universities in a Knowledge-Based Economy which appeared briefly on the web site of the journal Higher Education Quarterly, then vanished. It contains quotes from ten different university vice-chancellors. Some of the comments caused quite a stir when they were quoted anonymously in an article of the Times Higher Education.

I think that universities need to be real about the world in which they inhabit and they need to be real in thinking how they are a business. They are in business with higher education at their heart. They are into marketing themselves, competitiveness and global market challenges (R. Burgess, University of Leicester).

Vice chancellors have to help colleagues to understand the nature of the competitive educational market, to shift thinking in how the institution needs to be managed, to raise aspirations about what the institution can achieve and to formulate a strategic vision that people are willing to implement (R. Burgess, University of Leicester).

Changing perceptions in the university involves getting people to start thinking about major issues by looking at the data on the institution (R. Burgess, University of Leicester).

Whatever the others may have said, it seems to me that Bob's on the money here. Hard times are coming. Hats off to him.

End of term report

At the beginning of the year I set myself a resolution:

Add value

At the risk of appearing smug, I'd give myself a pretty good report so far. So in the spirit of Gifted and Talented, I'm going to set myself an additional challenge:

Go after the twossers

Since the failure of Small Worlds, I've been pondering the way forward in promoting social media for scientific researchers. One possibility is to concede that "social media isn't for everyone" and simply talk to the receptive part of the audience. The problem with this approach is that as these technologies continue to gain traction, it will simply create a digital underclass, so the problem has to be tackled head on.

Although Martin Weller's post Arguments for social media engagement was not directly about the scientific research community, his list of responses to the objectors is highly relevant:

• The argument of recognition
• The argument of simplicity
• The argument of benefit
• The argument of imperative

It's an interesting list, but for most of the hardcore lab researchers I talk to, it's still going to be a very hard sell. Recognition? Impact factors. Simplicity? Not enough hours in the day. Benefit? Always managed without it, danger of revealing "secret" data. Imperative? I can make this argument with regard to teaching - how can you ask students to keep a reflective portfolio if you don't - but it's harder with researchers.

This is the task I've set myself in the run-up to Science Online London.