Changing Roles of Higher Educators

This blog post is my submission for assignment 2 in CCK11.  I have used links to previous posts to support my arguments.

The shifting basis of certainty has been a critical focus during week 5-8. Through readings and discussions, we have focused on complexity, chaos theory, instructional design, power and control, and the changing roles for educators.

For your second paper, select your point of emphasis as that of the instructional designer or educator. Explore changing roles for your selected field. Do you agree their roles are changing? If so, what are appropriate responses? What are impediments to change? If not, how can current trends be best utilized to serve in the traditional role of educator or designer? In your paper, focus on creative conceptualizations of different roles (or different approaches to serve new needs in existing roles) played by educators. Consider metaphors that capture your views. Times of change permit reformulations of existing viewpoints. Take this opportunity to enjoy a creative stroll in rethinking “what could be”.

~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~ – ~

The changing roles of higher educators

My description of the future will be based on hopes and dreams, rather than an objective/rational prediction.  A creative view through a full (rather than half empty) glass.  My perspective will be from a teacher (instructor/lecturer/academic) in higher education.

I would like to see education in the future to be learner centred, controlled and personalised/individualised.  This is probably influenced by my personal politics which are more left than right, and my personal disrespect for power and control.

I have written a comprehensive blog post that articulates in a large part my vision.  It would be worthwhile to read this post as it provides a good backdrop to this article and evidence to support my view, but I have provided a brief summary as an excerpt in the following paragraph.

Learning can be managed and controlled by a teacher to the extent that it is necessary.  Leading into adult education, teachers and learners should work together to determine when this is necessary and to what extent.  A partnership if you will.  This is the personalisation that I speak of.  It is necessary when the learner does not know sufficiently enough to make informed decisions about how they go about learning something.  The old adage, “you don’t know what you don’t know” fits here for example.  Think of this level of control as a bootstrapping process (if you are knowledgeable of computers). Wikipedia describes bootstrapping (or booting a computer) as “a technique by which a simple computer program activates a more complicated system of programs.”  This is part of a computer’s startup process.  The teacher provides the simple (or not so simple) computer program that activates a more complicated system of programs – self-learning.  Put another way, the teacher provides the structure to assist the learner in making good decisions about how to learn what they wish to learn and achieve through the learning.  Depending on the context, this may be little or no assistance through to continuous and comprehensive management and support of learning.

So a metaphor for higher educators of the future to me will be that of a mentor or a learning coach.   Consider Stephen Downes 10 things you really need to learn.  These are general life-long learning skills, that once learnt, can be used to develop more specific skills and attributes – to be self-sufficient autonomous learners.

Impediments to change

There are many impediments to such a substantial change in thinking as expressed above.  This second part of my article will take a look at pattern entrainment, ignorance of education as a complex system, fixation on measurement and control, and the commodification of education as impediments to change.

Pattern Entrainment

Pattern Entrainment as explained by David Jones is:

… the tendency for peoples conceptions to be limited, entrained based on the successes of the past. What has worked for us in the past, becomes the source of all our thinking about the future.

Sir Ken Robinson suggests the current education system was designed and conceived for a different age – the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and at the time of the industrial revolution.  There are examples of entrainment in higher education with even greater distance of time.  Consider the quote by Phillips (2005): “Laurrillard (2002: 93) claims that the traditional lecture approach is ‘legitimised only by 800 years of tradition’.”  Another clear example of pattern entrainment that is impeding the advancement of education systems relates to current management practices, which are still ignorant of the fact that education systems are complex, and unpredictable.

Education as a complex system

Jean Boulton has written an article titled Managing in an Age of Complexity.  The key message of Boulton’s article is that current decision-making is founded on the assumption of certainty.  But is this assumption sound in the context of higher education?  Do we educate in a world of certainty and determinism?  Is there a simple cause and effect relationship to our decision-making?  I have previously reflected on these questions and come to the conclusion that the answer is largely no. Yet higher education continues to be managed on the assumption of certainty and determinism. I see this at our institution all the time as expressed in my reflections.

Boulton warns against too much reliance on measurement to tell you what is happening in a complex system.

Measurement and Control

One of the most significant impediments to change is the ongoing preoccupation with measurement and control.

Universities came into existence during the pre-modern period, approximately 1000 years ago, and were the ‘holders’ and controllers of knowledge (Phillips, 2005).  This notion of control is still evident in the culture of Universities today (Phillips, 2005).

Sir Ken Robinson has had much to say about the current education system.  Robinson says that a story told to past generations was that if you worked hard, do well, go to university, then you will get a job.  The current generation of kids don’t believe this, and they are right according to Robinson.  Having a university degree no longer guarantees a job in modern society. Add to this that another detractor of college study being that it “marginalises what you think is important about yourself” (Robinson).  A result of being institutionalised.

Mark Smith reflects on the views of Ivan Illich relating to the process of institutionalisation in education.  Smith suggests that it undermines people by diminishing their confidence, their creativity, and their capacity to solve problems.  All critical elements of self-sufficient autonomous learners.

Phillips (2005) has this to say about how teachers perceive their responsibilities as educators:

While some teachers see their responsibility as laying out ‘knowledge’, in the form of content, they are not always confident that learning will occur. Instead, they hope students will learn (Phillips and Baudains 2002: 15). In this scenario, the teacher’s responsibility is to ‘teach’, which implies determining the content, and controlling its sequence. The teacher assumes a pre-modern position of power, while the learner has the responsibility to ‘learn’. If a student fails, it is their fault (Laurillard 2002: 11).

This pre-occupation with content, rather than process (learning to learn) is an element of the problem.  It promotes a reliance or dependence on the teacher to learn, because they know what you must learn.  Again, an impediment to autonomous and self-sufficiency.

According to Robinson, education systems around the world are moving more and more to standardisation and measurement, when they should be moving in opposite direction.  He asserts that a casuality of standardisation is the loss of divergent thinking.  The ability to think laterally or to question the question, a critical skill for life-long learning.  Robinson provides statistics that show that as children grow up, they lose their ability to think divergently.  The implication is that our education systems kill divergent thinking.

The net effect of this focus on standardisation and measurement is task corruption.  It’s no longer about the learning.  Teachers are focused on the measurement.  They are teaching to the test.  Furthermore, as learners move into higher education, they have been conditioned to do the same – learn to the test.  How many times have you been asked, “do I need to know this for the exam?”  So we have our measurement, the learner can do xyz in a classroom with an invigilator, pen and paper, and a wall-clock.  Rowntree said of exams, as quoted by Phillips:

The traditional three hour examination tests the student’s ability to write at abnormal speed, under unusual stress, on someone else’s topic without reference to his customary sources of information, and with a premium on question spotting, lucky memorisation, and often on readiness to attempt a cockshy at problems that would confound the subject’s experts

Is this how we perform in the real world?  Modern education is an assembly line – a sausage factory, churning out shrink-wrapped uniform graduates, with a GPA stamped on their forehead, in the name of quality and standards.  I acknowledge that graduates need to differentiate themselves and that employment is a competitive market, but when you are learning to a test, ultimately how meaningful is a GPA?  My point is that we are too focused on standardisation and measurement.  We need to get the balance right.

Commodification of education

Education is increasingly a commodity in these times. More and more, Australian Universities are pitted against one another competing for students.  The more students you have, the more money you get.  This is in a country where almost all Universities are government owned and run.  I think there are maybe 2 or 3 Universities in Australia that are privately owned.  While in contrast to the United States for example where many Universities are not Government owned and run, education is increasingly a customer-driven industry, and their products to be traded.

There is support for the idea that people learn better by collaborating rather than competing.  While not an absolute and dependent on context, it is a reasonable assertion within the higher education context.  With universities competing, there is greater focus on “commercial in-confidence” than on openness.  The problem is that in competing for students, focus of institutions can stray from being “about the students and their learning journey and quality” to the less noble “how can we recruit and retain as many students as possible?”  Another example of task corruption.

Conclusions

There are many impediments to my vision.  But how exciting would it be to have a system of education that is individualistic and  empowers learners to work in partnership with educators to achieve their goals, whatever they might be.  Where the focus is on the learner, and not corrupted by the growing need to measure what is arguably unmeasurable.  A system that does not churn out standardised products in graduates with a grade stamped into their forehead, which means little other than the graduate can complete tests.  The higher education system, and Universities will hopefully unlearn their entrained views and processes and move into the 21st century anew.

As Colin puts it, “I think it [how universities operate] will [change], and it will also get very ugly when it does.”

Academic Publication References

Phillips, R., (2005), Challenging The Primacy of Lectures:  The Dissonance Between Theory and Practice In University Teaching, Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, Vol 2, Issue 1.

Learner Autonomy, Control and the Balance of Power

This blog post relates to my study of CCK11.

I have been struggling with how to express my view of the future role of educators in the 21st century.  I have had an idea that centres around learner centred, control and individualism, but simply haven’t been able to articulate this in my writing.

I have just listened to the Facilitator’s elluminate session for the 11th of March.  I am excited to say that after listening to this session, I think I have figured it out, and it is with the help of the participants and the facilitators.  So this article is my first attempt at putting into writing what I believe is the future role of the educator.

Towards the end of the elluminate session, discussion centred around learner empowerment.  The class was asked “What Can Educators Do to Empower learners?”  Many responses included the idea that learners should have choices and control over learning.  Stephen provided a quote from an article by Tony Bates that reviews an article by Sarah Guri-Rosenblit and Begoñia Gros where they state:

… the time seems ripe to acknowledge the fact that putting the students in the center of the learning process, and assuming that the information and communication technologies have the power of turning them into self-directed and autonomous learners have turned out to be quite naïve and unsubstantiated assumptions.

Stephen’s interpretation of the article is that in order to educate people properly, you have to exert power and control.  This then implies the above idea of empowerment as incorrect.

So it would seem that there are two opposing positions.

1. That learning should be learner focused, and controlled.  Learners decide for themselves what they need to learn, and how to learn it.  Learners are self-sufficient & autonomous.
2. That learners are incapable of managing their own learning and therefore must be managed and controlled by the teacher – by an expert.  Learning should produce consistent outcomes to assure competency.

Is this a dichotomy?  Funnily enough, a participant in the elluminate session made the point: “its not either / or”.

I have this little philosophy that when faced with two extremes, often (but not always) the answer is somewhere in the middle.  In this case, neither extreme is ideal, so the hard part is finding that middle ground.  The middle is a compromise in gaining most of the benefits of each extreme, with the least of the drawbacks. In this vein, I can see benefits and drawbacks from both positions above.  Too much control and learners become stifled, constrained, inculcated – they become a cog in “the [education] system”.  Too little control and in some circumstances, the learner may be unable to manage their learning to achieve their goals.

So from my perspective, learning can be managed and controlled by a teacher to the extent that it is necessary.  Leading into adult education, teachers and learners should work together to determine when this is necessary and to what extent.  A partnership if you will.  It is necessary when the learner does not know sufficiently enough to make informed decisions about how they go about learning something.  The old adage, “you don’t know what you don’t know” fits here for example.  Think of this level of control as a bootstrapping process (if you are knowledgeable of computers). Wikipedia describes bootstrapping (or booting a computer) as “a technique by which a simple computer program activates a more complicated system of programs.”  This is part of a computer’s startup process.  The teacher provides the simple (or not so simple) computer program that activates a more complicated system of programs – self-learning.  Put another way, the teacher provides the structure to assist the learner in making good decisions about how to learn what they wish to learn and achieve through the learning.  Depending on the context, this may be little or no assistance through to continuous and comprehensive management and support of learning.

Guri-Rosenblit and Gros continue in their concluding remarks: “Most students, even digital natives that were born with a mouse in their hand, are unable and unwilling to control fully or largely their studies.”  I have blogged previously on the notion of learner management in the context of PLEs/PLNs, but I believe it also fits here.  The excerpt below from my article is in response to the suggestion by Educause that “… less experienced students may not be ready for the responsibility that comes with building and managing a PLE”:

Managing one’s own learning is not a trivial task – it’s a big responsibility.  Is it reasonable to expect that everyone be able to manage their own learning to this level of detail?  A noble vision, but is it practical or reasonably attainable, or simply a fairy-tale view of education? … I believe this downside is understated, and why I don’t believe this ideal [PLEs/PLNs] is realistic in a global way – a panacea.

Younger learners will require much more bootstrapping than more mature learners – generally.   Another trend relates to the motivation of our learners.  Why are they learning something?  Is it to satisfy a burning desire or to attain a piece of paper to get a job?  Is it intrinsic, or extrinsic motivation.  Consider the example used by John Biggs in his theory of Constructive Alignment.  He described two very different students as I explain in my review of his book Teaching for Quality Learning at University:

Biggs introduces two student characters that represent two distinct groups of students that comprise a class.  They are also featured in a short film titled Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding.  Their names are Susan and Robert.  Susan is the typical academically minded student.  She comes to classes prepared, including pre-reading class materials, reflection on this material, and questions about her understanding of it.  Then there is Robert.  Robert is characterised as a student who is there out of necessity rather than desire.  He only wants to achieve sufficiently to be able to get a good job.  The course he is doing may not have been his first choice.  He comes to class with little preparation or prior reflection.  He hopes to rote learn and memorise to be able to pass his course.

Robert is not ready to manage his own learning – to be an autonomous learner, and requires considerably more bootstrapping than does Susan.  Susan is motivated to learn, rather than obtain a piece of paper (qualification).  Susan is better prepared and motivated to manage her learning and be autonomous.  She will require less bootstrapping because she is intrinsically motivated to take on the role of being an autonomous learner.

But bootstrapping only provides the contextual knowledge and structure required to support learners to the point that they can autonomously carry on and report back if necessary.  The skills to be autonomous and self-sufficient must also be learned.

This is where I believe our modern education system is letting down society.  The balance isn’t right.  In modern times it is becoming increasingly focused on control and measurement, particularly in K-12, to the detriment of broader skills such as learner autonomy.  The net effect of this focus is task corruption.  It’s no longer about the learning.  Teachers are focused on the measurement.  They are teaching to the test.  As learners move into higher education, they have been conditioned to do the same – learn to the test.  How many times have you been asked, “do I need to know this for the exam?”  So we have our measurement, the learner can do xyz in a classroom with an invigilator, pen and paper, and a wall-clock.  Rowntree said of exams, as quoted by Phillips:

The traditional three hour examination tests the student’s ability to write at abnormal speed, under unusual stress, on someone else’s topic without reference to his customary sources of information, and with a premium on question spotting, lucky memorisation, and often on readiness to attempt a cockshy at problems that would confound the subject’s experts

Is this how we perform in the real world?  Modern education is an assembly line – a sausage factory, churning out shrink-wrapped uniform graduates, with a GPA stamped on their forehead, in the name of quality and standards.  I acknowledge that graduates need to differentiate themselves and that employment is a competitive market, but when you are learning to a test, ultimately how meaningful is a GPA?  My point is that we are too focused on measurement.  We need to get the balance right.

I recently commented on Stephen Downes’ article 10 Things you really need to learn. With the exception of reading, none were integral components of my formal education.  Yet, they are sound in my view because they develop your ability to be self-sufficient – to be an autonomous learner.

So my hope for the future of education is that we can get the balance right.  That learners are sufficiently supported and encouraged to develop the life-long skills of learner autonomy and learning management.  Yet, there are also appropriate structures – a bootstrapping process to help learners make their way and achieve their goals, whatever they happen to be (personal enlightment, or a decent job).

Damien.

PLE/PLN and the commodified education industry

This blog post relates to my study of CCK11.

Sui Fai John Mak had this to say in response to a previous blog post of mine on PLE/PLNs.

So would the education system affect how and why PLE or PLN would be applied?  How about the learners learning under such education system?  What are the implications?

Very pertinent questions indeed.  I really do like the concept of learner centred and owned environments and networks.  However, the culture of higher education, at least in Australia does not align well with these ideals.  This I believe is as a result of commodification of the education industry.  More and more, Australian Universities are pitted against one another competing for students.  The more students you have, the more money you get.  This is in a country where almost all Universities are government owned and run.  I think there are maybe 2 or 3 Universities in Australia that are privately owned.  While in contrast to the United States for example where many Universities are not Government owned and run, education is increasingly a customer-driven industry, and product to be traded.

There is support for the idea that people learn better by collaborating rather than competing.  While not an absolute and dependent on context, it is a reasonable assertion within the higher education context.  With universities competing, there is greater focus on “commercial in-confidence” than on openness.  The problem is that in competing for students, focus of institutions can stray from being “about the students and their learning journey and quality” to the less noble “how can we recruit and retain as many students as possible?”.

Sadly, I don’t see the PLE/PLN concept getting very far, at least in the current climate.  I hope I am wrong.

Damien.

 

PLEs: for the connectives or collectives?

This blog post relates to my study of CCK11.

The concept of the personal learning environment is founded on the idea of learning control and autonomy.  It is a personal environment for the learner – learner centric.

Yet practically, formal education is a controlled environment.  We live in a world with tighter and tighter controls on learning.  The Australian Government for example has been pushing in recent years for a national curriculum for K-12, replacing the disparate state-based curriculum currently in place in our 6 states and 2 territories.  Tertiary education too in many disciplines requires accreditation with professional bodies, again requiring adherence to standardised requirements for students.  Students must develop specific skills and attitudes as a part of a program’s curriculum for the curriculum to be certified and for students to be acknowledged in the field in which they have studied.

I’m not suggesting this is all bad, but it is at odds (at least on some levels) with the ideals of personal learning environments – the learner having control of their own learning.  In fact, I have wrestled with a similar dilemma previously in my assessment of ePortfolios for higher education where there are competing goals.

This dichotomy of autonomy vs. control relates to week 5 discussions around networks and groups.  In particular, the idea of connectives, and collectives.  You could argue that collectives (accreditation/prof bodies & governments) have specific goals for students.  They want to ensure consistent outcomes for graduates.  This can be at odds with connectives – students who have their own goals for their learning.  Where is the happy medium on the spectrum?  If Europe can adopt a common currency, then perhaps education can too?

PLEs and PLNs

This blog post relates to my study of CCK11.

What are the downsides? (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7049.pdf)

As a learning platform that is by definition always evolving, a PLE requires students to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organise, and grow their learning environments.  The process of self-directed learning requires a degree of self-awareness, and it must be given time to mature.  Some students, however, may have never taken the time to think about their own metacognition or to reflect on how they learn best.  These less experienced students may not be ready for the responsibility that comes with building and managing a PLE.

Interesting, and a serious downside indeed.  Managing one’s own learning is not a trivial task – it’s a big responsibility.  Is it reasonable to expect that everyone be able to manage their own learning to this level of detail?  A noble vision, but is it practical or reasonably attainable, or simply a fairy-tale view of education?  Let me explain my context, and why I believe this downside is understated, and why I don’t believe this ideal is realistic in a global way – a panacea.

I’m from Australia.  Higher education in Australia is partly funded by the Australian Government.  Students pay a portion of the tuition fees, and can defer their payments until after they obtain a job.  In the meantime, the tuition debt only grows inline with the CPI.  In other words, Australian tertiary students do not pay interest on their loans, and only pay a proportion of the overall costs which are subsidised by the Government.  Tertiary education in Australia is very accessible. Given this accessibility, and the diminished cost to the individual, there is greater diversity in the motivations of students in Australian higher-ed.  The fall-out from failure isn’t as significant as other countries where the individual bears the burden of the full costs of their education.  Don’t get me wrong, I think we have an outstanding system in place, that provides equitable access to higher education.  You don’t have to be wealthy to have a go in Australia.

I’m getting to the point… promise.   Take the following quote from a blog post I wrote some time ago, where I was reflecting on the book Teaching for Quality Learning at University, written by John Biggs.

Biggs introduces two student characters that represent two distinct groups of students that comprise a class.  They are also featured in a short film titled Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding.  Their names are Susan and Robert.  Susan is the typical academically minded student.  She comes to classes prepared, including pre-reading class materials, reflection on this material, and questions about her understanding of it.  Then there is Robert.  Robert is characterised as a student who is there out of necessity rather than desire.  He only wants to achieve sufficiently to be able to get a good job.  The course he is doing may not have been his first choice.  He comes to class with little preparation or prior reflection.  He hopes to rote learn and memorise to be able to pass his course.  These two characters form the cornerstone of his theories into the effectiveness of active versus passive learning.

Not all students are motivated in the same way when it comes to managing their learning.  Robert is not so interested in managing his learning – its about hoops to jump through to get his piece of paper (qualification).  Constructive Alignment, a theory by John Biggs suggests amongst other things that learning must be active – it is all about what the students do.  This in my opinion has merit, but like all theories, is contextual.  That aside, Biggs believes that you can create learning situations that force students such as Robert to be more active learners. As John puts it in an epilogue to the Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding Video (Part 3):

Thus we see that alignment throughout the system is based on the relevant constructive student activity.  In our “apply” example, the intended learning outcome, the teaching/learning activities, and the assessment task are all focused on that single verb “apply”:  we have woven a constructive web from which students would find difficulty in escaping without learning.

However, this method of making it difficult for students to escape in my view can often lead to task corruption.  It astounds me what lengths students will go to to avoid doing something if their heart just isn’t in it.

When I reflect on my early teens as an undergraduate student, my level of maturity and my motivations at the time were not conducive to learning management.  I was more interested in drinking, girls, and having fun.  I’m not suggesting that all teenagers are this way, but I don’t believe I was unique either.  Only when I commenced my Master degree, in my mid-20s did I become mature enough to take on the responsibility of managing my own learning.  This is evident through my improved GPA.   At the time, the web 2.0 revolution had not yet hit mainstream and many of these ideas had not yet been conceived (Oh I’m getting old).

Some may be able to manage their learning using a PLE/PLN, and I see PLE/PLNs as but one way of student learning.  We must remember the crucial point that whatever we do, it must fit the context.  Forcing students to create their own PLE/PLN and be able to manage their learning through this personalised environment is thwart with danger.  Even if you spend the time developing students’ abilities to manage their own learning, doesn’t mean that they will actually do it.

My Personal Learning Environment

I have been assigned the task of mapping out my personal learning environment.  So using the IMHC Concept Mapping Tool, I have created the following map.

I have to say that I am not really happy with this map.  The thing with concept mapping is it is difficult to know when to stop, as you can map to infinity.  It lacks structure and abstractions, has duplication and is frustrating me.  I will need to think it through some more to see if there is a better way to represent my personal learning environment.  This while a start, is far from a true and accurate representation.

More to come…

Draft Introduction to Learning Plan for Web 2.0

I am developing an online course in conjunction with the PLE@CQUni project.  Following is an initial draft introduction for my learning design blueprint as part of my study of Instructional Design in Adult Education course.

My main concern with my plan is cognitive load, especially when learners have limited time.  I am thinking an approach to helping with this is to space out the course so there is less time pressure.  Hopefully this can be done in such a way that the learners do not lose their way.

Any feedback is most welcome.

Web 2.0 for Life Long Learners

Brief description and overall objective

The objective of this course is to expose teaching academics to social networking technologies, and to explore ways in which social networking tools can improve their learning and teaching practices through the lense of the seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education (7PGPUE).

This course introduces teaching academics of undergraduate and postgraduate courses to social networking concepts, technologies, and practice delivered online and supported by face-to-face classes.  Initially, the learner is guided through a series of activities that promote collaboration and reflection on the very technology they are learning and using.  Learners will then begin to reflect on the 7PGPUE and evaluate their own learning and teaching practices with an eye for how these social networking technologies may enhance their course designs.  It is expected that learners will develop their own simple personal learning environment (PLE) as a product of the course, and will be able to introduce the same type of intervention to a small aspect of their own course.

Description of learners, their context and that of the instructors and institution

Learners of the course will be primarily teaching academics, mostly those responsible for course management and development in a university context.  They will be of diverse ethnic backgrounds, attitudes to technology and teaching disciplines.  Most learners will be located on a single campus, while a small few learners may be sparsely located over 9 alternate campuses scattered across the country.  Learners are likely to have significant demands of their time in their day-to-day work commitments, and may need to dedicate some personal time to see the course through to completion.  The course will be voluntary, so it is expected that learners will be largely engaged and motivated to learn.  Technical skills will vary greatly among the cohort from laymen to experts.  It is expected that all learners will have access to high-speed Internet access, at the very least from the workplace, though dial-up Internet will be sufficient for most aspects of the course.  The course will be facilitated through web 2 technologies only, so despite the institution having an LMS, it will not be required for this unit.  The instructors will have a similar context to the learners, also with varying technical and instructional design skills.

The Eportfolio Tug-of-war

Foreword

This blog post has seen me fall into old habits with my blogging.  It has turned into a very large document and has taken considerable time to write.  Not how I wish to blog.  My apologies if its too much to digest.

Damien.

Introduction

I have tried to capture a broad, but shallow dissection of ePortfolios based on my recent attendence at the second Australian ePortfolio Symposium (AeP2) hosted by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in February 2009, and a brief survey of literature.  One of my observations is that there are many stakeholders involved in ePortfolios, and a tug-of-war exists over ownership and control.  It seems to me that ePortfolios are trying to do too much.

This blog post introduces briefly the concept of ePortfolios, including definitions and example products on the market.  It then introduces the various stakeholders, and attributes goals/challenges to these groups in the use of ePortfolios.  I explain my perspective on the tug-of-war situation, and how it may undermine the entire concept.  The blog post concludes with a summary of my observations and my opinions on the future of ePortfolios.

What is an ePortfolio?

My organisation as far as I’m aware has done little if anything meaningful in the area of ePortfolios. Having only limited knowledge/understanding of ePortfolios prior to the Symposium, I did a little googling to find out more.

For those who appreciate concrete examples, rather than abstract explanations, here is a list of common ePortfolio software to check out.

• CareerHub
• Desire2Learn
• Mahara
• PebblePAD
• Sakai OSP

Visiting their websites will give you a quick mainstream view of what ePortfolios are.

Now onto the abstract by way of a definition by Jackie Miers of Magill Primary School in South Australia where she writes:

From my readings of various articles on ePortfolios, I have come up with a composite definition that I feel encompasses the views of most of the experts in the field.

An ePortfolio is a purposeful collection of work and information that:

• represents an individual’s efforts, progress and achievements over time
• is goal-driven, performance-based and indicates evidence of the attainment of knowledge, skills and attitudes
• includes self-reflection
• is a tool for facilitating life-long learning and career development

Note specifically that Jackie’s definition states: “…encompasses the views of most of the experts in the field…”  The concept and technology of ePortfolios is still very much in its infancy.  People (especially formal educators) are still trying to decide what they want to do with an ePortfolio, and also working out what is possible with ePortfolios.  This makes for a very erratic, chaotic time to attempt implementation of such a concept.  A dream for the early adopter, a nightmare for the cautious.  In fact, a colleague has highlighted an interesting and related point in his blog post Why am I a ePortfolio Skeptic? He draws attention to the ideas of Geoghegan (based on the work of Moore) where a chasm exists between the early adopters and the early majority.

During the Symposium, Wijnand Aalderinck and Marij Veugelers presented Creating sustainable ePortfolio development: An update from the Netherlands higher education community, with an international view.  Wijnand provided the following model from their early work on ePortfolios, which I have reproduced below:

Simple model for ePortfolios (reproduced from presentation of Wijnand Aalderinck - ePortfolio Symposium - QUT 2009)

As you can see, one size does not fit all.  This is an interesting challenge for those attempting to develop ePortfolio systems.  How a learners may wish to use an ePortfolio can vary greatly.

Another model that Wijnand illustrated during the presentation was that of the Balance Model.  The goals of the learning are central, and supported by learning activities, which are then supported by the learning environment.  This learning environment is supported by people, infrastructure, and management.

Balance model (reproduced from presentation of Wijnand Aalderinck - ePortfolio Symposium - QUT 2009)

Wijnand makes the explicit point that management support is crucial to the success of this model, but may be overlooked (or side-stepped).

The stakeholders

ePortfolio Stakeholders (Wijnand Aalderinck - ePortfolio Symposium - QUT 2009)

Wijnand introduced another interesting model illustrating the various stakeholders in ePortfolios as shown right.

Keeping in mind, this is from a Dutch perspective.  I have developed an adaptation of Wijnand’s model (below) which also includes the Government as a stakeholder.  This is particularly true of the England where the English Government announced last year it was developing a national database to track student results from the age of 14.  This was discussed at the Symposium, and there were many comments surrounding privacy, security and big brother.

Without this extreme, I believe that government policy will play a part in ePortfolio usage in some way. In fact, the first two recommendations to come out of the Australian ePortfolio Project’s (AeP) final project report relate to Government involvement and policy creation.

Adapted Stakeholders diagram

From my adapted diagram, you can see that governmental influence interelates with other stakeholders, and that research encompasses all aspects from all stakeholders.

The tug-of-war

The ePortfolio concept has many stakeholders – those who have a vested interest in its development.  Unfortunately, these stakeholders sometimes have competing goals.  This has resulted in a tug-of-war situation.

The ePortfolio (Okinawa) tug-of-war (http://flickr.com/photos/43277403@N00/1573849720/).

So what does this mean?  We have various groups competing with one another in influencing the design and implementation of ePortfolio to meet their own objectives.  Somebody inevitably will lose out.

I have composed a list of goals/issues/challenges around ePortfolios.  It is not an exhaustive list, but the key points that I have discovered in my short ePortfolio journey.  I have then mapped these goals/issues/challenges to the adapted stakeholder’s map to give a visual representation of the competing requirements of ePortfolios.

ePortfolio Stakeholders and their competing goals/challenges

Click the above image to zoom.

The mapping is how I see these goals/challenges aligned with stakeholders.  In particular, stakeholders with a primary interest of focus.  While privacy and security is mandated by government legislation, I have not added it to the Governmental domain because it is not a primary focus of that group in this context.  Of course, the mapping is from only my perspective.  I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules here, just generalisations.

Accreditation standards

Depending on discipline, some students require accreditation before they can practice.  This is true of medicine, psychology, law and so on.  ePortfolios could be one way that students can track their progress through their studies and check off the various benchmarks and attributes they require to meet accreditation.  It may also allow the exchange of this information with accrediting bodies providing a more efficient and authentic accreditation process.

Key Stakeholder:  Institutional, Educational

Sharing/publishing student achievement/credentials

By students documenting their lifelong learning achievements into an ePortfolio, it allows them to share their exploits with a world-wide audience.  The opportunity to forge relationships with others in their field (engage in communities of practice), or to promote themselves to employers is very attractive to students.  Of course, not all students are comfortable with exposing their achievements in this way.  This comes back to privacy issues (discussed later).

Key Stakeholder:  Educational

Institutional collaboration

Using ePortfolios, there is an opportunity for teaching institutions to more easily collaborate on a range of activities.  An example presented at the Symposium was the DEAMES (DEEWR EU Australia Mobilisation of Engineering Students) project (see 4.3.1.3 of the AeP Final Report).  This project is headed up by the Queensland University of Technology and seeks to support mobility of students, graduates and academics in the discipline of Engineering. One of the problems is that there are disparate accreditation bodies for Engineering worldwide and currently they are incompatible.  So the group wanted to develop double degrees in Engineering where students would complete a semester of their degree overseas in Germany which forms part of the European CLUSTER group of universities.  Likewise, students from the CLUSTER group in Germany would complete a semester in Australia. The goal is to have the students accredited by both the Australian and European accreditation bodies. They hope to facilitate this collaboration through the use of ePortfolios.

The mobility aspect would also apply to students moving between schooling, vocational educational training (VET), and higher education (HE), and so using ePortfolios would be one approach to better integrated relationships between these groups in support of lifelong learning (discussed below).

Key Stakeholder: Institutional

Government policy

As previously discussed, the English Government last year revealed new policy that would see the academic performance of students 14 years and over tracked in a central database by a unique learner number.

The AeP Final Report (2008, p. iv) includes the following two recommendations:

1. It is recommended that the government departments with responsibilities for education engage with peak industry, professional and employer bodies to develop a shared understanding of the potential of ePortfolio practice to articulate employability skills.
2. It is recommended that government policy recognise ePortfolio practice as a strategy to build an integrated relationship between higher education and the vocational education and schools sector, in order to support the individual’s lifelong and lifewide learning needs and to increase the potential for career progression.

Key Stakeholder: Governmental

Standards and interoperability

The whole idea of a standard is to reach agreement or consensus. Why is this so important for the data storage of ePortfolios?  Students can invest a significant amount of time in the development of their ePortfolio. They want to be sure that it is transferable to other systems and environments to faciliate their lifelong learning.  Refer to discussion on lifelong learning.  This is one very good reason, but not the only one.

There was a general disquiet surrounding the industry specifications supporting interoperability of ePortfolios.  A delegate at the symposium made the following statement:  “Standards take away from me – the way I work.”  Another delegate asked the question (which I have paraphrased):  aren’t specifications suppose to give me freedom, yet all they end up doing is constraining?

Standards and interoperability in education is just plain hard.  Education rarely fits into neat definitions, agreed best practices, or optimum solutions.  Education is ultra contextual – its just plain messy.  So how do you standardise messy?  That was rhetorical – I don’t have any insight there. There are so many stakeholders involved in ePortfolios, and there are so many definitions.  Those who develop the standards will do so from their own perspective.  Even if there is industry consultation, there is so much diversity that no one size fits all. A point highlighted by Wijnand in his triangle model of an ePortfolio.  If you do not fit within the view of the standards developers, then you will feel constrained and disempowered.

The EIfEL team blog has an article discussing the state of ePortfolio standards. Some of the more popular specifications discussed by the EIfEL team include:

• IMS ePortfolio (eP)
  
• IMS Learner Information Package (LIP)
• UK Leap
• HR-XML

One of the leaders from the above list of standards is The IMS Global Learning Consortium and their ePortfolio specification.  This is not the first time I have been exposed to the work of IMS Global.  In the past, I have conducted research in the area of computer aided assessment (CAA) and developed addendums to their Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) Specification.  That experience reminds of me of just how complex and detailed their specifications can be.  The current state of play sees the IMS’ ePortfolio specification as one of the main players in the specifications stakes.  Yet amongst the group, there was much disquiet about the effectiveness of this specification.  It was described as over-detailed, complex, and difficult to implement.  In fact, it was commented that there is a very limited number of products that adhere to the new specification.

At the Symposium, there was discussion on the need for more generic/simple specifications rather than the specific/detailed/complex specifications that currently exist.  The benefit of the more detailed complex standards is that they can make data more meaningful.  The benefit of the generic/simple specifications is it provides more freedom for diversity and would be simplier to implement.  An example of a generic/simple specification could be the use of the web 2 protocols, RSS and Atom (see Web 2.0 section).  Of course, this freedom does not come without a cost. By designing and implementing a more generic/simple specification, you are limiting the scope of what is standardised and so interoperability can once again suffer.  In my view, there needs to be a balance between these two end-points.

Key Stakeholders: Educational, Technological, Institutional, Governmental

Commercial and open-source products

This long standing battle in Information Technology also extends to ePortfolios.  The same old arguments are bantered about from both camps. Open source solutions are free and not constrained by the whims of any one vendor.  Commercial products have better support and are more enterprise level.  Really, these blanket arguments cannot be applied across the board of commercial and open source solutions.  Some open source solutions have excellent enterprise level support, while some commercial products have good TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and listen carefully to the needs of their customers and respond to changes well.  I spoke with a delegate at the Symposium who mentioned that his management exclusively use commercial products for their L&T.  While my own institution initiated a review of our LMS and decided to shortlist only open-source products for selection based on software licencing costs. I find it somewhat frustrating to hear the rhetoric of the purists, who believe commercial or open-source is the best way for everything and ignore anything else.  It’s very close-minded and short-sighted.

Two common commercial products are Desire2Learn and PebblePAD.  Two common open-source products are Mahara and Sakai OSP.

Key Stakeholder: Technological

Web 2.0

There has been a growing interest in the use of Web 2/Social networking applications to support learning and teaching.  There are many challenges to this approach, but there is great promise.  In fact, I can see considerable overlap between the ePortfolios and Web 2 approaches.  Yet, they appear to be in competition with one another.  You either do it with ePortfolios, or with Web 2.  One of the commercial ePortfolio products that I saw demonstrated at the Symposium discussed the idea of web 2 type interfaces to their system to be able to share syndicated data from your ePortfolio.  This I thought was a good start.  However, what about allowing data to come into your ePortfolio from other web 2 systems?  I don’t believe this was supported by the product.  To my way of thinking, it allows students/learners to use their own tools (something discussed in freedom/ownership vs. central control) to develop their ePortfolio, and then use web 2 tools to aggregate it into their ePortfolio and mash it up how they like.  This also feeds into the generic/simple specification approach discussed under standards and interoperability).

The opportunity of meshing web 2 and ePortfolios exist, but I believe it will be ignored as its not a priority of the top down group as discussed next.

Key Stakeholders:  Educational, Technological

Bottom up vs. top down motivation

The questions are: who is driving the need for ePortfolios and who has the most pull?

Tug of war from different contexts (http://flickr.com/photos/ames28/2669110959/)

Top down suggests governments and institutional management.  While bottom up suggests the learners and instructors. This epitomises the ePortfolio tug-of-war.  These groups have different perspectives on what an ePortfolio should be, so there are competing goals at play.

Those of the top down camp I believe are motivated by things such as streamlining administrative processes, improving institutional collaboration and gaining institutional competitive advantage.  The value to this group seems to be in the way information about students can be shared with government, industry and other institutions that is more meaningful and I fear a marketing tool to demonstrate institutional competitive advantage (discussed below).

While from the learners and teachers’ perspective, the value appears to be in things such as personal reflection on one’s journey and to gain perspective on where you are going (see career counselling below), and promoting your skills to an employer audience.

I’m sure there are other aspects that I have not covered, but this was the trend that I saw emerge from discussions at the Symposium, and the promotional material from the ePortfolio vendors.

For each group to maximise the effectiveness of the benefits they wish to draw from ePortfolios, the tug-of-war focuses around one particular aspect – control/ownership.

Key Stakeholders: Educational, Institutional

Freedom and ownership

Who should own an ePortfolio?  Who should have primary control over it?  The institition, or the learner?  Whomever has the primary control will be able to most influence its design to maximise their goals.

Academics at the Symposium made (paraphrased) comments such as:

“Students need to be able to choose their own tools.”

“Students need to be able to use what they are already using.”

“Institutions are responsible for guiding students in maximising its effectiveness for their goals, but ultimately it belongs to the student and they should be able to do with it as they wish.”

“The choice of whether to use an ePortfolio should be up to the student.”

These views does not fit well with the overarching goals of the institutions.

Yet, the products I saw at the symposium did not fit well with the comments made above.  They were the typical large integrated computer system and designed to integrate with learning institution systems, such as LMSes.

In my view, if the ePortfolio is optional, and students do not feel they have enough control or freedom to use it as they wish, they will probably not engage with it.  If they are forced to engage with it through policy, they will either work around it as best they can, or they will just go elsewhere.

Wijnand made the following point: we must seek balance between “free creative learning of motivated students” and “organisations capturing and controlling of student progress.”  I’m not sure trying to strike a balance here will generate a happy result for anyone.

Key Stakeholders: Educational, Institutional

Institutional competitive advantage

One of the salesmen for an ePortfolio product made the comment that there can be a competitive advantage to adopting their ePortfolio system and making is available for free to students who join the institution’s alumni.  The rationale is that it will maintain a link with the student after they have graduated in the hope that they will return to the institution when they decide to further their study.

It was also commented that having an ePortfolio system for students is a marketing tool to discern one institution from another.  Obviously this is very short-sighted as eventually all will have them in some shape or form.  This is all assuming that ePortfolios are what students want of course.

Key Stakeholder: Institutional

Career planning/Counselling

This is where I can see great value in an ePortfolio from an educational perspective.  Documenting your exploits as a students and plotting your progress is a great way to reflect on your journey.  It would be very useful for students to be able to work out where they want to go with the life.

Of course, there are other ways to do this besides an ePortfolio.  The weblog would be a classic example.

Key Stakeholders: Educational, Institutional

Educational design

There was a presentation at the Symposium which discussed the use of ePortfolios to support and enhance the first year student experience.  The presentation abstract highlights some of the exciting ways that ePortfolios can be utilised to support first year students:

• harnessing ePortfolio for entering self-assessment of knowledge, skills and attitudes
• enabling reflection on personal traits and dispositions
• embedding career modules and discipline reflections to mediate endemic course and career uncertainty
• harnessing early motivation and enthusiasm by making connections explicit between subject learning and the attainment of desirable employability skills (the latter as a subset of graduate attributes)

Some of the ePortfolio systems that I saw had integrated assessment systems where students could write a paper for example in their ePortfolio, and then links in the system would allow their teacher to assess it and store a grade.  I think this is another example of an ePortfolio system trying to do to much.

Key Stakeholder: Educational

Privacy/security

This was a big topic of conversation during the Symposium.  Given the nature of information being recorded in an ePortfolio, there is a clear justification for ensuring privacy/security.  However, whose responsibility is it? I guess it depends on who wins out in the freedom/ownership tug-of-war.  Privacy laws vary from country to country.  In Australia, the laws are reasonably firm in terms of maintaining privacy.  This is also true of the education sector.  In a time when online social networking is becoming a popular tool for learning, this presents some interesting challenges for educators in ensuring that student confidentiality is not compromised through these activities.  ePortfolios would certainly fall under this banner.

How much information a learner is prepared to make public about themselves is a very personal choice.  In fact, this is one challenge learners (and teachers) will face if attempting to use social networking software such as blogs.  It is especially true in an age where identity theft is as violating as someone breaking into your home.  The difference with identity theft is that the theft can continue over long periods of time as the thief uses your identity to steal from others, and in the process ruining your reputation.  It is vital that ePortfolios provide the appropriate security controls so that learners can set privacy levels that they are comfortable with.  Otherwise, there will simply not engage.

Key Stakeholders: Educational, Technological, Institutional

Lifelong/lifewide learning

Lifelong learning – the concept that learning occurs both formally and informally throughout one’s life, and is not limited to formal classroom or occupational settings.  There is also the aspect of learning skills to make you a lifelong learner – someone who can adapt to a changing world and be self-sufficient.

A new (to me at least) buzzword emerged known as lifewide learning.  I had to google this one and came up with the following definition:

Life-wide Learning (LWL) refers to student learning in real contexts and authentic settings. Such experiential learning enables students to achieve certain learning goals that are more difficult to attain through classroom learning alone. It helps students to achieve the aims of whole-person development and enables them to develop the life-long learning capabilities that are needed in our ever-changing society.

Oh I just love these buzzwords.

So I guess the point here is that ePortfolios can facilitate the learner’s journey throughout their life as they build a portfolio of life experiences, both formal and informal.  So it is important that their ePortfolio is able to grow and evolve over their lifelong journey.  This means it must be portable (refer to interoperability standards).

Interestingly, a parallel or overlap can be identified between the concepts of lifelong learning, ePortfolios, and Personal Learning Environments (PLE).  Thoughts I’ll try to capture in a separate blog post.

Key Stakeholder: Educational

Conclusions

From my education perspective, I think the greatest value of an ePortfolio is the ability of learners to reflect on their achievements.  It can assist with planning their future endeavours or to promote themselves to employers for example.  However, the tug-of-war between institutional and educational goals threatens to undermine the entire concept and make it unworkable for everyone.  What does it mean for those who lose the tug-of-war?

Who will lose in this tug-of-war (http://flickr.com/photos/missnewmexico2008/2582614711/)

If ePortfolios are hijacked by institutional needs, in my view it is unlikely that students will see value in engaging with them.  If they are not taken up by students, then it will clearly fail.  If the educational goals take precedence over institutional goals, then the concept may not reach its full potential.

I really wonder whether there is a happy middle ground between the needs of these two groups.  I wonder whether it is necessary to have one single monolithic system to support all functions desired by stakeholders of ePortfolios.  Why not support the educational goals through web 2 type technologies, which hand control and ownership to the learners, but can interface through simple standards such as RSS and Atom with administrative systems maintained by institutions?  This would mean a convergance perhaps of ePortfolios and Personal Learning Environments for learners, with links to institutional systems supporting other aspects of ePortfolios such as accreditation and institutional collaboration.  Want to prove to an employer that you have credentials, direct them to an institutional system that validates your qualifications.  Do this via your own PLE/ePortfolio using web 2 technologies.

Do you eat your own dogfood?

We are constantly promoting the use of social networking services to our teaching staff at CQUni as potential learning and teaching tools.  The educational technology landscape is abuzz with talk about reflective blogs, collaborative wikis and so on.  Of the roughly 139 papers presented at ASCILITE 2008 in Melbourne, 22 (~ 16%) were specifically related to Web 2.0 or social networking services.  More if you count papers relating to 3D immersive environment such as second life which too can be considered social networking services.  I’d consider that a buzz.

So my boss is constantly banging on about “eating our own dogfood“.  A phrase I’m not particularly excited about.  I don’t even like dogs, let alone dogfood. If we are going to promote the use of social networking services, we  need to use them ourselves.  Blogging was a good place to start.  Based on my initial experiences, I could certainly liken it to dogfood. Let’s get off the dogfood for now (hope nobody is eating while reading this).

Having a technological background, at first I thought this would be a cinch. In fact, using the technology for me has been a cinch. However, being able to put words on the screen, and then click that publish button, making my own thoughts publicly available for all to see has been incredibly challenging. In fact, writing this blog post is going to be one of the most difficult ones I have done so far. If you are reading this, then I may have started to overcome my problems.

My problems can be summarised as follows:

• I’m somewhat of a perfectionist (or anal-retentive in the words of my boss:) ) which means for me:
  • if you are going to do something, do it right (or do it well), otherwise don’t do it at all.
  • I must get it right – the first time.
  • I hate making mistakes.
  • to post to my blog, it can take hours, even days to complete, if I publish it at all.  At times, I can have half a dozen unpublished articles on my blog.  This posting has been in my drafts for more than 4 months.  I have even older ones remaining.
• I’m innately a private person.
  • Anne Bartlett-Bragg sums it up nicely in her talks around the “Issues and challenges for moving to social e-learning” (http://socialelearning.flexiblelearning.net.au/social_elearning/index.htm) by stating that some students while are happy to share their thoughts in the confines of a classroom, find it very difficult to put their thoughts out there for the whole world to see.

I was speaking with a colleague just last week who expressed almost the same difficulties with blogging as I have experienced.  Their edit page too is full of unpublished posts. They were asking themselves the same questions:  do I really want to make that comment public?  What are the ramifications of that?

These are the points I wish to highlight in this blog post.  Some (staff/students) are going to find this dogfood more difficult to swallow than others (sorry I won’t refer to dogfood again – promise).  This has major implications for those trying to integrate social networking services into their learning designs.

One of the projects we are working on is the implementation of Personal Learning Environments.  The title of the project is PLEs@CQUni.  As part of this project, I will (hopefully) be developing a learning program for staff and perhaps later for students around the use of social networking services.  This is a project that I started earlier in the year, but was put on hold due to other priorities.  The basis of this learning program was The 23 Things of the Learning 2.0 Program by Helene Blowers.

However our program here at CQUni will need to address more than the technical usability aspects of social networking services to be truly effective in preparing our teachers for using them with learning designs. It is important that we don’t just throw the technology at the staff and say away we go.

I hope to summarise some of the strategies I have been employing to assist me with blogging, and using other social networking services.  This is then something we can hopefully include in the learning designs for CQUni’s 23 Things.  The strategies I have employed are summarised below.  I’d like to invite people to contribute their own experiences in this regard and highlight strategies they have used to overcome these problems, or in fact other problems they have experienced as barriers that I have not covered.

Strategies for perfectionism

There are a few different strategies I use to help address my perfectionism when I write.

• Time limits.  I decide how much time I am going to spend on each post that I write.  I rarely adhere to these limits, but I am trying and getting better.  It is just getting used to the fact that the piece isn’t as complete as I would like it, but I need to move on – post it.  I can always revisit it later.
• Loosen up.  I’m not writing a research paper or a report, so a narrative style is okay.  I tend to write very factually with little fan-fare and to some, this can be dry and boring.  So I am trying to bring a little human into the mix.  How am I doing?   Furthermore, if I dont quite get the spelling, puntuation or grammer; quite right:  is it really gunna matter!
• If I get it wrong, just fix it.  It’s not a hard copy publication so it doesn’t need to be set in stone forever.  If I screwed something up, I make my apologies and correct it.
• Set a limit on the time a post can remain unpublished.  Not to be confused with the limit on the time you spend writing it.  Sometimes you are waiting on information or you need to give something further thought or you are just plain busy.  If your time limit has expired, publish without the missing information or thought.  You can always write a follow-up at a later stage.

Strategies for privacy

How you assess privacy in relation to your blog posts is a personal matter.  Everyone values privacy differently.  Here is my assessment:

• Nothing too personally identifiable.  I limit any identifiable information to my work associations only.
• Family is completely off limits.
• I only name colleagues where they demonstrate considerable openness in their own blogs and other online presences and only in relation to work matters.
• Will this post breach any confidentiality laws relating to my employer such as student details?  Have to be mindful of this point here.
• Don’t post when you are in an emotional state such as angry, grieving, or intoxicated.

For those with a far less strict regime for privacy, a few words of thought on where to draw the line.

• Am I breaking the law?  Is what I am writing/uploading copyrighted, or defamatory?
• Will posting this comment/photo/video affect an employer’s decision to hire me?
• Will these words/photos/videos bring any of my associations into disrepute such as my school/university or my employer?
• How would my mum feel if she saw/read this?

The mum test in particular is a good way to assess the appropriateness of what you are going to say or show.  Your post is potentially open to the world, this includes your mum, even if she is not computer illiterate.  She will have friends that are computer literate and word gets around.  These are social tools afterall.

So if I may open the floor, I’d love to hear from others who have struggled with some of these problems in terms of blogging, and how you may have overcome them. If you too wish to start blogging and are finding these things difficult, I’d love to hear what you are doing to get past it – even if you comment anonymously.

Thanks for reading.