In this paper, I go through the evolution of the learning environments to justify the need for Virtual Learning Places (VLP). I also describe, briefly, the design principle that are inspiring the development of a concrete realization of a VLP - LIFE - and the open challenge on which we are currently working on: a) the ecological monitoring of the experience and of the experience styles; b) the promotion of a Design literacy.
Long before "Technology Enhanced Learning" became popular, at the time the "web" had just taken off and everyone was enthusiastic about "e-learning", the technological solutions proposed to realize on-line learning processes relied on the so-called CMSs (Content Management Systems), and were basically identified with them. A fact that indicates how the focus of learning - in this case we cannot use the term "education" - was the content. Next step was the substitution of CMSs with LMSs (Learning Management Systems), "familiarly" called platforms that allowed to aggregate and organize contents along timelines and paths of sense, i.e. to organize and deliver courses and modules, accompaning them with periodic assessments and, eventually, evaluations. During the years, such deterministic vision of learning, that perfectly matched with a "corporate" vision of education, seeking mainly to optimize costs and efficiency of the learning processes, produced a plethora of "markers" (called tags) aimed to promote a standardized description, representation and delivering of contents and processes [1]. Educators, on the other hands, since the beginning, perceived such vision as inattentive to the pedagogical reasons. For educators, indeed, flexibility is a vital factor, on many different levels: methodological, procedural, of vision, content. It was during such climate of transformation that were introduced the so-called VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), some of which [2] over time reached a widespread diffusion thanks to the adoption of opensource strategies. Such environments, supported by considerably large communities of developers and users, have met, and continue to meet, needs and expectations that basic stakeholders (e.g. school educators) have about the technological support/enhancements to learning. The reason for this lies mainly in the still limited diffusion of a reasonable level of media, technological and technopedagogical literacies that, in turn, results in a preference for tools that allow one to replicate and to amplify activities usually carried on during learning processes they used to deliver face to face. Despite many attempts to update the VLEs with new features that, in the statements of the developers, should serve to support more open and collaborative educational processes, such environments remain basically LMS - centered on the object course - whose design and development are guided by the beacons of standardization and efficiency in the delivery of content. Inevitably, such a design philosophy stumbles in the following critical remarks: the structure of the platform is designed to create watertight compartments, coincident with the courses/modules, that do not foresee shared spaces; watertight compartments to which the process' manager may aggregate, as attributes of the module, all sort of constituent and functional elements which contribute to define a typical learning process: teachers, learners, contents, forum, chat, assessment module, etc. ...); relations are asymmetric and favor the maintenance of the roles that characterize traditional teaching processes (e.g. teacher and student); lack of efficient mechanisms to share and export content (Learning Objects, LO, have no relevance in the world of informal peer-to-peer exchanges); hence a weak interrelation with the "world" outside a specific training process, due to: i) poor external visibility of the outcomes produced during the training process, ii) a limited time windows within which students have access to contents and activities with a consequent weakening of the learning community, iii) lack of interrelation between different training processes.
From the pedagogical point of view, moreover, the design of the traditional VLE has been criticized [3], especially by those who deal with Life Long Learning, LLL for two main reasons: lack of attention to learning as social practice focused on dialogic exchange (including collaborative and cooperative ones) tends to prevent the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and, thus, its transfer/application outside the narrow confines of a given training process; the close structure of the traditional VLEs tend to prevent or slow down the construction of the virtual identity of individuals that, indeed, is one of the main objectives of people involved in LLL (and that led to the adoption of instruments such, for example, the eportfolio [4]).
Over the years we observed an astonishingly rapid transformation in the way people approaches the web and in the social practices hosted in there. Such phenomena are evident at most among the youngest generations [5] and, probably, are producing a modification of their brain-frame and, therefore, way to learn. Among the most evident transformations and trends: a) the tendency towards a more limited use of e-mail, due to the heavy "pollution" suffered by this communication channel because of the spamming and to its lack of immediacy in the construction of groups of discussion; unless, then, increase the demand for e-mail notifications to avoid presiding tents of socializing places, many of which are actually desert (the main goal of the greatest part of their inhabitants, in fact, is to appear rather than participate actively to the social exchanges); b) a flood of instant communication channels (eg.
Twitter) that at present integrate also easy ways to exchange data in real time (Messenger) and/or voice interaction (Skype); all such communication channels favor a one-to-one emotionally dense interaction that, usually, takes place between members of small communities (easy to create thanks to simple and rapid procedures for links aggregation); c) an explosion of blogs and personal websites through which individuals satisfy their need to act as protagonists of the great game of internet, even if, in reality, except for a few cases, everything reduces to the publication of personal diaries written to the advantage of few members of small communities of bloggers - easily identifiable from the list of the linked blogs - and/or friends; d) a continuous development of new web services which include, inter alia, a plethora of social systems for publishing and sharing contents - link (de.licio.us), images (flickr), video (youtube), etc. that have become real "must"; showcases where one should appear and to which one has to refer, for example, from their blogs, often used, right now, as pseudo-aggregators; these social and personal media are causing a so relevant crisis of the traditional ones that nowadays the "strategic planning" departments of the advertising agencies includes in their strategies synergistic use of the social environments ("viral advertisement") in order to boost the effectiveness of their traditional campaigns of "advertisement"; e) the increasing availability of atoms of information that can be easily captured by special aggregators able to raise their level of dissemination and social sharing; f) the widespread use of folksonomies that as spontaneous emergencies (bottom-up approach) represent a valid alternative to traditional ontologies (top-down approach); The above transformations induced a certain number of TEL's experts to theorize the deconstruction of traditional VLEs to give all students the possibility to build up and manage their own learning environment, content and process. Such position intercepted a diffuse desire for more open social interactions and for a greater independence in determining their own destiny. In some sense it can be seen as a revised version of the naturalistic approach to learning and led to the concepting of a new typology of learning environments: the PLE (Personal Learning Environment) [6], services and content aggregators that can be freely and fully reconfigured by individuals.
Of course, the management of a PLE would require: ability to interact socially not only within their own PLE, but also on those of others, to contribute to the collaborative production of content.
It is quite evident that all the above skills cannot be found all together in a single individual at any age. Perhaps they could in part emerge as a characteristic of what we may define, using an oxymoron, the "collective-connective individual" but, undoubtedly, remain the following critical issues: the difficulty to produce "sense" from an ensemble of limited information (such as those derived from RSS) and to filter resources potentially of the same order of the size of the web; the difficulty of extracting significant "patterns" from the "chaos" of internet, that may make very hard to manage the trajectories of any educational process; theencouragement of what we call "territorial individualism", whose outcome is the production of weak aggregates, or virtual non-places [7,8] i.e. places that have no peculiar characteristics and that may easily lead also to live "non-experience" Not to be misunderstood, I would like to stress that the production of non-virtual places is dangerous not because it questions the existence of training agencies, but because, it prevents the stratification of the memory. This latter is the process that drives the transformation of a physical space in a "place" [9] where it is worth to live. The challenge for the future, thus, in our opinion, is not the transition from VLE to PLE, but, rather the construction of virtual "places" that from one hand allow the osmosis of contents and people and, on the other, manage to maintain a high degree of recognizability and attractiveness: i.e. interconnected organisms able to reconfigure themselves, while maintaining their own identity, and to expand into the everyday life, far beyond the boundaries of the "virtual". In the DULP perspective [10, 11] we call such places: "liquid learning places"
In a whatever complex framework the liquidity becomes a dominant characteristic of the system that can be viewed either as a pathological condition [12] or as an opportunity [10] to restart, for example from a renewed attention to the individual, not considered any longer as "user" but, rather, as "person" wishing to use the mediated communication to add "sense" to her/his education through the immersion in meaningful experiences, supported by the presence of a discrete machine.
Refocusing on the individual means recover her/his motivation and putting her/him in a position to develop a critical attitude to analyze the "fluid" in which s/he is immersed, to identify significant relationships that might allow her/him to design her/his own experencial trajectory. It means also to ensure that such experiences can sediment and stratify to make "places", included virtual ones, recognizable. It means, as well, to ensure that all dimensions of the experience benefit of the same level of attention. By the way, which are the characteristics of a personal experience (including educational ones) that can be considered universal and meaningful? We do think [13] that the definition of the multidimensional space of the personal experiences may derive from the integration of: a) b) c) personal characteristics; dimensions of the human interaction; any further dimension that can help to describe, in a manner as complete as possible, an "experience" "Experiences", indeed, are complex processes based on interactions, or communicative acts, that operate simultaneously on multiple levels, the main fuels being the personal motivation, possibly supported and/or amplified by a general curiosity or specific expectations (grounded in your own mental models).
In Figure 1 we have schematically summarized the
characteristics of the human communication that, of
course, are also the basis of all activities experienced by
the individuals:
i)
the four levels of interaction - physical-motor,
cognitive, social and emotional - that when combined
may produce further dependent dimensions, e.g. the
combination of social and emotional levels produces
affect & x-pathy (i.e. sym-pathy, uni-pathy ,
empathy), while the combination of cognitive and social
levels leads to the definition and stratification of the
culture, i.e. the codified DNA that makes a place
(included virtual ones) recognizable:
ii) the continuos coevolution of individuals and
environment;
iii) the temporal dimension, either objective and
subjective
The equivalence between educational processes and
experiences, which has strong historical roots [14],
demands also for the identification of a universal process
able to incorporates and reproduces the essential features
of every kind of activities. To this end we have tried to
identify those features that characterize the behavior of all
organisms of any degree of complexity; the outcome was
the design of the organic processes (OP) [15], a process
based on three parallel layer of functionalities:
- explore: the environment to collect information &
learn;
- elaborate: the information to design/produce;
- communicate: the "products" by means of "actions"
that, in the case of very complex organisms, can
make use also of highly structured and conventional
languages
The correlation of the descriptive multidimensional space
of the personal experience with the organic processes led
us [13] to obtain the framework of Table 1which defines
a set of "experience styles" and their relationship with
each of the three functional layers of the process.
To the 'explore/learn' layer are associated the perceptual
preferences of the individual; for example, the
preferences about specific sensorial channels of input, or
about the media through which communicate (images,
text, sounds, etc.). Each of such preferences, then, may be
further detailed by specifying what we call 'exploring
styles' (used to visualize images, to read, to listen, to
handle, etc.) [
To the 'elaborate/design' layer belong personal styles used
to process the information (e.g. analytical and sequential
or intuitive and global [
The third layer of the OP, 'actuate/communicate', can be related to the inclinations of individuals toward extroversion/introversion, combined with their preferences regarding mode of social interaction and communication that, of course, may partially overlap perceptual preferences (do, say, write, produce images, etc.) and depend strongly on the ability to interact emotionally.
As shown in Figure 1 there is at least one "horizontal"
dimension of the "experience" that cannot be neglected in
defining the "experience styles": time. The 'ante', 'during'
and 'post' of an "experience", regardless of their objective
value, are often perceived in a very subjective manner.
The subjectivity of the experience shows itself either at
the perceptual level (duration of time intervals), as
differences in the expectations about an experience and,
as well, in its memory. The subjectivity of the time
dimension is clearly related also to motivation.
Another cross-cutting dimension of the "experience" is
the ludic one, related to the propensity of individuals to
play. Although not completely independent of the other
styles discussed above, it adds to the overall picture the
inclinations of individuals toward 'alea', competition
('agon'), vertigo ('ilinx') and 'mimicry' [
Although the one described here is a reasonable framework, we would like, anyway, to stress that the reo ing lp rn xE eaL s s ircecoP ltraaeboE isengD n a g r O e t a te ic a n tu u c m A om
C
To conclude this paragraph I would like to underline that the above descriptive model of an experience should be considered as an ideal one because does not take into account constrains/limits that may be introduced by machines/systems that are involved in the mediation of the experience. Indeed only rarely such mediation can be defined ecological, transparent; almost ever the mediation introduce filters that modify the relevance of the various dimensions of the experience. Of course one has to put enough care in distinguish between filters' effect and truly relevance of the experience's dimensions. e m i t e v i t c e j b u s ) n o g a , y r c i m i m , x n i l ,i a e l a ( c i d u l
We started to put in practice the above considerations by
designing and developing a Virtual Learning Place called
LIFE (Learning in Interactive Framework to Experience)
[
At the same time, according to the dictates of the
connectivism [
While we are approaching faster and faster a world in which everyone will be constantly connected to the net at a flat rate by means her/his own personal devices, there are still a considerable number of relevant scenarios within which it would be preferable to work off-line. This is why the LP, in the future, should be able also to export some content and services in a off-line usable format from desktops of laptops or mobile phones, through widgets and apps.
Another important aspect of the design for "learning
place" is the attention that should be payed to support the
personal experience of the place. In particular, it is
important to make understand the actors that every act
done during a collective activity can also be used to build
their own digital identity. It is relevant, therefore, to offer
personal environments/corners within which one can
build her/his identity with as much as possible freedom
and creativity, drawing from what is has been produced
by the individuals within and outside the learning place.
At the end of this paragraph is worth noting that, in any
case, support for the experiential dimensions lies only in
part in the development of ad hoc tools/technologies,
since the environment must be sufficiently flexible to
accommodate any sort of educational process/experience.
The experience is to be largely supported by the design
process and its management, as well as by the motivation
of individuals. Certainly it is necessary to offer a wide
range of possibilities, in order to minimize the
technological filtering we were referring to at the end of
paragraph 3. For example, in order to promote the game
dimension, we have developed a prototype of serious
game engine [
It is my deep conviction that technology should not reduce the educational processes to stereotypes but rather encourage: a) the acquisition of meta-design skills; b) provide tools for self-evaluation with respect to all dimensions of an experience, possibly in action; c) promote personalization and contextualization of educational processes. To the first two themes are devoted the last two paragraphs of this article, while the third one will be dealt with in future papers to come.
One of the logical consequences of the increasingly complexity of the educational processes, like the "organic" one, is that assessment and evaluation should converge and integrate into the monitoring of the educational experience's qualities.
Being well aware of the objective difficulty to define the relevant qualities/dimensions of an experience and to assign them a corresponding reasonable weight with respect to the learning processes (see paragraph 3), we are, anyway, faced with the challenge to equip trainers, and students as well, with tools that may help them in the quantitative and qualitative monitoring of the activities carried on during such processes. A request that becomes even more stringent in on-line processes which lack multimodal face-to-face interaction.
Luckily, the educational processes mediated by the machine, like those taking place on-line or in blended configuration, generate copious amounts of electronic traces that, when properly filtered and analyzed, can serve to achieve our purposes.
Not by chance, in fact, whatever the tools and methodologies used, a shrewdness of those who design educational processes should be to pay attention that each activity leave at least some traces in a given place. Ideal from this point of view is the forum because it is particularly suited to collect analysis, brainstorming, storytelling, design diaries, etc..
Texts, in fact, are still the most common traces left by the learners during their training and, consequently, text analysis is still the most ecological way to obtain information on individuals, their socio-relational skills, the learning process.
Of course, once that traces have been collected we must
ask ourselves what aspects and qualities of the
educational experience we intend to monitor and which
indicators are the most appropriate ones. This is a very
challenging and quite new field of investigation!
In the past we have shown how monitor the cognitive
evolution by mean of a quantitative evaluation of concept
maps [
The acquisition of meta-design abilities requires first of
all the spread of a sufficient level of "design literacy"
among the new generations. Indeed in a situation
dominated by the complexity the ability to design her/his
own trajectory is assuming more and more a central
relevance in education. As compared to the fluctuations
that have characterized the history of education [14]
nature/culture, utopia/pragmatism, humanities/sciences,
theoretical/practical activities - the central position of the
Design, indeed, can be claimed [
[1] http://www.imsglobal.org [2] See for example: http://moodle.org; http://www.atutor.ca; http://sakaiproject.org; http://www.ilias.de [3] Downes S. (2005) E-Learning 2.0, eLearn Magazine, URL: http://www.elearning.org/subpage.cfm?section=articl es&article=29-1 [4] See for example http://electronicportfolios.com/ [5] Prensky M., "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants On the Horizon", MCB University Press, 2001 [6] Wilson S., "Can web service technology really help enable ’coherent diversity’ in e-learning?", 2005, URL: http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/pedagandws [7] Augé M., "Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité", Le Seuil, Paris, 1992 [8] Giovannella C., "From 'Learning Space' to 'Design Place': transorming the present and challenging the future, Metamorfosi, N. 62, 2006, 62-65 [9] Tuan Y., "Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience", Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977 [10] Giovannella C., "DULP: Complexity, organicity, liquidity", IxD&A Journal, 7-8, 2009, pp. 11-15 [11] Giovannella C., Graf S., "Challenging technologies, Rethinking Pedagogy, Being Design Inspired", eLearn Magazine, Feb 2010, www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&a rticle=114-1 [12] Bauman Z., "Liquid Modernity" Cambridge: Polity, 2000 [13] Giovannella C., Camusi A., Spadavecchia C., "From Learning Styles to Experience styles.", in ICALT2010, IEEE Press, New York, 2010; pp. 732733. [14] Cambi F., "Manuale di storia della pedagogia",
Editori Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2003 [15] Giovannella C., "An Organic Process for the Organic Era of the Interaction", in Creativity(cube): Experiencing to edcate and design, Proceeedings of HCIEd2007, Aveiro Portugal, pp. 129-133, ISBN 978-972-789-227-3