This is probably going to be a long circuitous route to talk about this week’s articles but, I’d like to start off by talking about Canvas Day and the TLT symposium and what I found most useful from the experience. For those not working at Penn State you may be unaware that the University is transitioning to a new Learning Management System (LMS) and that system is called Canvas by Instructure.
Soon, but not soon enough for many, the current LMS Angel (don’t let the name fool you…Lucifer was once an angel too) will be scrapped. In the brief time that I have been exploring Canvas I have become more enthusiastic about this tool that will be part of the educational landscape at Penn State for many years to come. All LMS’ try to incorporate different educational tools into them to make teaching easier and Canvas is no different. The big difference that I see is that they also have taken the student perspective into consideration in the programs design and successive redesigns.
Now I will admit that the articles assigned for this week really didn’t hold much interest for me when I first started reading them. Now it might be the difficulties that were occurring all this week with LionPATH (I’m the Abington Liaison) or maybe with my daughter getting up every night this week at three in the morning either laughing or crying hysterically or with driving three and a half hours to University Park for Canvas Day and then cheating on my diet or staying till the end of the TLT Symposium (by which time I was so brain dead I couldn’t think to ask Dr. Mimi Ito a single question) but I just wasn’t feeling that enthusiastic about deeper definitions of models regardless if they were about seamless learning or about m-learning from socio-cultural perspectives.
On the drive home, having ample time to think, the point that jumped out at me when reflecting on the article by Looi (2010) was on page 161. “An important consideration in seamless learning research with mobile devices is understanding the enactment of learning activities that unfold in various situations.” In comparing it to Canvas I substituted materials for the above activities and integration for learning. As a tool Canvas is being developed to try and have seamless integration from disparate sources, from various creators, irrespective of space with all artifacts easily at hand in a fairly straightforward intuitive product.
Once the team assigned with the task finishes the vetting process, materials from publishers as well as sites like Turnitin, Youtube and many others will be accessible within canvas. For example Students using Pearson’s system MyMathLab or MindTap from Cengage will not need to log into those publishers systems since they will be incorporated into Canvas. A virtual a one stop shop for student access . Again for me this seamless integration was just an easy parallel to the idea of seamless learning.
So to me, the Looi article is more about what is needed for seamless learning when thinking about the tools and context of how they interact with the community. In the Kearney et al (2012) article it is more about the where, when, who with and how it is used in relation to the three main characteristics of personalization, collaboration and authenticity, page 8. The learner’s ability to “have control over the place…. pace and time they learn” gives them a higher level of personalization. The ability to network with peers or adults for meaningful dialogue develops the sense of collaboration and the use of “real world” practices, page 9, provides authenticity.
The final article I read was Exploring the use of mobile technologies for the acquisition of clinical skills Clay, C. (2011). In it both models are in evidence. In considering seamless learning, the devices used allowed for generating artifacts in the assessment of infant’s health, to communicate with members of the neonatal team while reviewing in public and private spaces allowing the users to feel “empowered to learn and that the flexibility of where the learning could take place enhanced their acquisition of the performance skills. The social aspects model attribute of personalization and collaboration are evident in “allowing a flexible pace of learning to allow learners to access digital space for discussion and reflection with and through others”, page 585. Give that this was in a real world setting of developing their clinical skills provided the authenticity.
Looi, C. K., et al. (2010). Leveraging mobile technology for seamless learning. (pages 154 through 169).
Kearney, M., et al. (2012). Viewing mobile learning from a pedagogical perspective. (pages 1 through 17).
Clay, C. (2011). Exploring the use of mobile technologies for the acquisition of clinical skills. Nurse education today, 31(6), 582-6. Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.nedt.2010.10.011
I totally can relate to what you are dealing with. We actually made stickers that say “RIP ANGEL 2001-2017. 🙂 We are managing a lot of change…and as much of a devil as ANGEL is, change is never easy. I missed the TLT Symposium for the first this year due to another commitment. As for Canvas integrations, right now, McGraw Hill has been approved for PSU’s Canvas integration, but Pearson has not. Turnitin is being fast-tracked because it is a University-supported tool. YouTube should be interesting because we have not got the best history of negotiating with Google. The process for approving third-party tools is really cumbersome. It makes it difficult to implement the best tools for the job when we are considering matters of seamless learning. In regards to Canvas, one thing that is a major benefit of Canvas that ANGEL couldn’t begin to do is that students have some options to personalize their LMS interactions (https://guides.instructure.com/m/4152/l/420619-how-do-i-use-the-dashboard-new-canvas-ui). Students are responding positively to Canvas. I think that the flexibility provided along with built-in collaboration tools will heighten the learning experience and provide a platform to achieve the seamless learning and pedagogical principles discussed in this week’s articles. With the integrations like McGraw hill, we can now even seamlessly integrate adaptive learning tools within the Canvas chrome. We are also building communities of practice around the Canvas transition which is another benefit as we support one another through the process.