Can blogging help me motivate my adult learners?

I’m finding my own enthusiasm for the blog project, waxes and wanes dramatically with the learners reactions and workload!.  Having to chivvy several less enthusiastic learners into their groups with at elast one bluntly commenting “We’re not doing that now are we”, did not put me in a particularly postive frame of mind, although the learner in question regularly and loudly expresses their disinterest even during those projects such as the maths classes  which they’ve chosen to attend!

We were looking at adding images this time and most people were keen as they’d been asking how to do this from the start.

As usual there were a fair number missing and one group complained that their absentee had their folder of resources they’d been putting together.  I may have to remind people to not take those sort of things home.

We went through it initially on the “sandpit” practice site I’d set up to practise on, then they had the remaining half of the lesson to conitue with their own blogs.

They seem to be moving quite slowly.  I think I may have to severely compress the list of things I wanted to teach them in order to allow them enough time to actually contribute content.

I’ve also been informed that this is now going to be a regular “thing” every group starts, and we’re going to use it towards their Key Skills qualification.  Thats means that since we’re on a rolling programme and I’m the only one who teaches it I think I’m going to have to crop the taught sessions down to one month’s worth rather then three in order to be able to cover the content quickly enough to be able to turn the later groups loose while I work on showing the newer groups the basics.  I’m not wild about that idea as it’s taken longer than expected to cover even enough to get them going.

The nice long copyright discussion we had last week will have to be reduced to “don’t copy, or if you must, give credit where due” for a start!

I’m a bit gloomy about this news, as part of the point as I saw it was to broaden the learners’ experience of IT in a relaxed and interesting way, not just jam out another qualification.

Funding however trumps all, so it’s back to the (lesson planning) drawing board.

I’m using group discussion work with the class a lot more than usual during this project and it’s starting to work quite nicely. They always start out a bit stilted but soon relax into it. I’m hoping this is proving helpful to them, verbal skills are often a ’soft skill’ not really taught, and which could well be one of the things holding them back from work. If you can’t converse with your peers how on earth are you going to handle a job interview?

So hopefully it will prove helpful to them in the longer term, even though we’re not primarily a basic skills centre.

Today the discussion was on copyright and I had prepared some handouts for them to list all the things they could think of to which copyright might apply, and a definition in their own words of what “copyright” meant.

In order to get across the idea of copyright as being about “control” rather than a blanket ban on copying I asked them to make a list of things they want to stop people doing with their own work.  They came up with pretty much all the things that can typically feature in copyright statements, such as “keep my name on it” “don’t make money out of it” “ask my permission”.

I thought this was quite successful.  We came back together as a class and I clarified some of the detail and talked variously about the idea of “fair dealings” and how it various across the world — and that since the Internet is worldwide the issues of jurisdiction and potential pitfalls.

Some of the fair dealings stuff is so very vague here that I suspect a lot of it is too much of a judgment call for most of the students.   We therefore came up with some simple rules such as “don’t quote more than a paragraph of so”.  “make sure it’s clear i’s a quote and from where.” and “Link back to the original website rather than copying and pasting content.

I also explained about the alternatives, that some people have explicitly decided to allow copying and reusing of their work, and showed some examples, in particular the Creative Commons project.

I next sent them off to look up the copyright statements on a variety of websites.  I’d chosen these in advance for two reasons.  One, a good selection of different restrictions and allowances, and two, for being (relatively) short and easy to understand.

I’d wanted to get around to some practical work actually uploading images and setting up links on the blog sites but this took the whole hour and a half session so I didn’t manage that.

After the session I was playing with the WebQuest creation tools at http://www.zunal.com and thought that might be an interesting way of tackling this topic next time — having them look stuff up themselves, and being able to integrate the links from a single site rather than have them type them in from a paper handout.

Not directly related to the blog project but I’ve just come across a brilliant web based tool I can use for the annotating texts. Spotted it on the RS Teacher blog and can see enormous advantage for the “Reading and Summarising” elements of the Communications Key Skills. It’s an element which always proves tricky to teach, and to get the learners to make a good job of and to assess!

http://annotator.thinkport.org
You can copy and paste a chunk of text and then overwrite it with highlighters.

Every time you highlight, it pops up a box for you to make a note of your own and then it compiles the notes at the end.

You can have different coloured pens for different topics, e.g. One colour for dates, one for technical terms, one for interesting facts you want to include etc etc. (it gives you a default set of pens but you can rename them)

Got to be easier and more fun than messing about with felt tips and bits of paper and scribbled notes everywhere!

Everyone now has some content up and the blogs are looking good.  Some learners were worried that other groups are progressing faster than them and worried about keeping up so I spent a few minutes to reassure them that, by definition, there’s no such thing as a “finished” blog!

The majority of the lesson today was just posting content and setting up categories and so forth.

Lots of learners asking about linking and putting images up but I’ve tried to put them off until next week when I can go over it with the whole group. Today I just wanted them to consolidate the skills they’d learned so far and get some content up there.

One reason for this was I wanted to go over copyright issues before we started posting pictures or using content from elsewhere, but here the learners where ahead of me and I had to have a hasty “copyright 101″ with one group who were wholesale copying and pasting from other sites.

“But it’s free if it’s on the Internet isn’t it…?” No one actually said as much but the assumption was hovering over the classroom!

I’m going to do a group session on it next time and am compiling a list of some “copyright friendly” resources for them to use.

The wholesale copied text was amended to short quotes with a link back to the site it came from.

Accrediting source material is something they’ll have to do in their upcoming Key Skills projects anyway, so hopefully it will be useful and relevant.

Today we were starting on the real ‘meat’ of the project and the class would have their first taste of the Wordpress blogging tool.

I was excited myself, as well as a little apprehensive, since the group is extremely mixed ability and some of them are only just become familiar with a word processor, never mind the ‘wonders’ of “Web 2.0″!

I was therefore keen to stress the transferable skills, and point out for example, that the formatting tools, like Bold, Italic, Underline etc. would have the same icons and work in much the same way as in Microsoft Word.

I had set up in advance a blog which with could use as a ’sandpit’ to mess about with the tools without the pressure of worrying about somehow ‘breaking’ or spoiling the learners’ own group blogs.

This was a success in that in encouraged experimentation and allowed me to demonstrate the tools without worrying about content, but there were a few hiccups caused by the fact I’d only set up one user and we were all logged in together.

Not a major issue but another time I think I’d get everyone registered and signed up first.

In fact I had the learners, do this part themselves, talking them through signing up for a Wordpress account, using their existing email address.

I discussed the various user privilege levels available in Wordpress and the learners agreed in their groups who should be the blog administrator.  One learners raised the good point that they should have more than one administrator in case they were absent. 

I was glad to see them considering absence in terms of the effect on other learners!

The groups are starting to work together quite nicely now.  Several people offered to take handouts for the absentees (although it appeared from my “catch up” session that not all of them followed through on that!)

A few people had even gone to the trouble of registering with the local library, unprompted, to gather source materials for their chosen topic!  I was impressed!

I set up a shared directory on the server to act as a “drop box” for scanned material since, unfortunately the learners don’t have access to a scanner and that had to be done by reception.  I must see if we can get hold of a low cost scanner they could use.

I helped a volunteer administrator from each group to setup the blog, and the group choose suitable URLs.  Again i was surprised at the level of ’savvy’ being shown.  Comments such as “We don’t want to make it too long or people won’t remember it” were being thrown about, and there was a lot of back and forth discussion.

Some patterns are emerging in the groups with some people adopting various roles, and some demonstrating a commendable amount of leadership.

Some groups got as far as selecting their template for the blog, others I spotted adding content in their self-study time.

Most people seem to be enjoying it so far, although some dislike having to give over time from their “main” qualification to the workshops and would rather just focus on the one qualification.

This is often the case with all the project / Key Skills related programmes though, so I’m not too worried.  Some people seem to naturally prefer to work on just the “main” qualification and go onto other things only after it is complete, if at all.

I’m not sure quite how to convince people that the workshops and Key Skills and things actually do contribute to their IT skills and knowledge.

Maybe I should map some lesson objectives against the ECDL and eQuals syllabuses and put them up at the start of the workshops to try and make it more explicit.  (Or maybe we should drop the phrase “main” qualification when talking to the student, even though we need it for paperwork purposes!)

We started off this session with me a whole class session on the advantages and disadvantages of working as a team.

As improving the groupwork skills is a major part of the aims of this project I was keen to get this part at least touched upon early on. The learners (perhaps predictably) on the other hand, were keener to get onto the business of actually doing rather than being told what they think is the “obvious” stuff.

I think a lot of people think they ‘know’ how to work in a team and I’m not entirely sure how to tackle “well actually your manners are dreadful and you don’t give anyone else a chance to speak up”

The ones who I’ve noticed in class do do that, were the same ones sticking their hand up to contribute “listen to each other” etc, as skills required for groupworking.

Coming from a technical rather than training background and sort of drifting into adult education, I’m not 100% certain on the best and most diplomatic way of tackling that.

We have some brilliant kit and software for doing class surveys using handheld voting units (e-instruction) and I’ve seen some good self-assessments of team working handouts (cadged from the Key Skills Support Programme “Working With Others” material) which I may convert to that format and use anonymously later on.

Next task was to get people into groups. I adopted the old “one two three” counting heads around the room approach, and asked all the Ones to gather at the front, all the Two’s to gather in the middle, and all the Threes to gather at the back.

Instant chaos. No one could remember their number. Half of them couldn’t remember where I’d asked them to go. Milling and chattering left, right and centre.

In the end they sorted themselves out, though some of those learners I’d rather wanted to split up seemed to have mysteriously ended up in the same groups anyway.

Next time I make a list of who I want in each group beforehand!

The other main topic I wanted to cover before we launched into the project itself was that on Internet Safety. I expected this to be one of those “get it out the way so we’ve covered it” sessions but was surprised by the amount of discussion it generated, and also the high level of awareness of the learners of the issues, even those who were quite new to IT.

I assume this is down to the amount of coverage it gets on television etc. Lots of people knew the buzzwords about “identity theft” and “phishing” and everyone could identify with having bags of “spam” turn up in their email!

Quite a few students even asked for extra copies of the handouts so they could go home and apply some of the things they hadn’t already known to their home computers.

We just had time at the end for them to start discussing in their groups what topic their blog was going to be on. I’d put a whole host of ideas on the board, anticipating that I’d get a certain amount “I dunno — I can’t think of anything”, but in fact each group agreed an idea quite quickly amongst themselves.

Everyone seemed motivated and happy as they piled off for lunch, and I was full of smiles myself — maybe this won’t be too agonising after all!

Some interesting posts on how other people have tackled a blog project in class.

A lot of these are with school age kids, but I think could adapt the basic ideas quite easily for use with adults.

The Grumpy Old Teacher blog has been something of an inspiration while I’ve been trying to get this idea up and running, it’s so good to see a teacher embracing the technology in spite of the occasional frustrations and limitations with such good humour and common sense. Lots of the tools mentioned I want to try out with my group. Especially bubbl.us for planning.

Having the learners actually post on a blog what they already know about blogging and how they feel about the project as Sheehy’s English Class have done strikes me as an excellent idea and one I might try next time around, or even as a reflective exercises for this group a few weeks down the line.

Details of a completed pilot project using blogs with adult learners can be downloaded from Aclearn. They seemed to have a fair few problems with the technology although the general feedback was positive.

A large project was also discussed during the JISC Summer Conference last year (2006).  Their conclusion were presented in a Powerpoint and includes some wonderful links to the blogs which learners created.

My rough plan has been to split the lesson periods (1.5 hours) roughly equally between whole class teaching / discussion and individual group work — at least until we’ve covered the theory and skills required for the learners to work more independantly.

This time I was looking at “What is a Blog”

About 2/3rds of the class had never come across the idea before and the discussion on the differences between a Blog and a ‘normal’ website took some times, and I think some of the subtleties may have been lost.

Another time I think I might get people to produce a written list of differnces and try and make that clearer.

I described the basic components of a blog, the elements most blogs will tend to have in common – posts, pages, categories, archives, links and feeds, and compared these to the familiar company blog which all trainees are introduced to at induction and encouraged to use regularly through their training.

I then introduced the idea of searching for blogs and had trainees use Google Blog Search to search for blogs on topics of interest, and try to identify these common elements.

It was worth noting here that the vast majority of trainees could not identify the “Sponsored Links” as the adverts they were, and needed this explaining. The search terms chosen were also often rather weak. Another time I think I might devote a session before this one to ensuring everyone was up to speed on general Internet use.  We do have pre-exisiting learning material for selecting search terms and evaluating websites, which we use as part of the ICT Key Skills training.

However, with a greater or lesser degree of support all trainees were able to locate a suitable blog and identify the main points. The younger members of the class tended to race on ahead at this point, which wasn’t a problem as it kept them occupied with something at least vaugely related while I talked through the less expereinced learners.

To continue getting familiar with other people’s blogs and the kind of topics which can be covered I next gave out a handout listing some sample blogs and asking trainees to (in pairs) make lists of what they thought were the good points and bad points.

We then came back together as a group and discussed these.

The pairwork was the first taste of collaborative learning a lot of them had done in a long time (if ever) and as the group is still quite new and don’t know each other very well it was a slow start and needed a bit of encouragement to get discussion going.  I moved among the class prompting with questions where needed and agreeing with some of the good comments being made.

One learner in particular was very unenthusiastic about the pairwork and rather reluctant to contribute.  He was spoken to individually by a senior trainer and does seem to have improved his attitude dramatically since then.

The sessions seem to be over very quickly and could do with a bit more time allotted maybe, as it seemed to go very quickly, but the learners seemed much happier this session in spite of a lot of new material and information being covered.

Well, that was the most chaotic, depressing lesson I’ve had the misfortune to teach in some while!

Before launching into blogging the learners need at least the rudiments of email.  Not least so that they can sign up for the Wordpress service.

We have recently installed a new combined email/forum/chat system called CITADEL on our group server.  In principle it sounds fantastic everything in one place, instant messaging, threaded discussion boards and so forth.

We thought we’d tested it reasonably thoroughly.  It’s buggy in a fair few patches but we thought we had our workarounds in place.

Oh no.  Not only did I find a host of new ones which only show up when multiple users are logged on but the sheer volume of things it can do (when it works) utterly swamped the learners.

I don’t know who left more depressed and confused – me or them.

I really really would give quite a lot to have Der Management splash out and buy enough Exchange licenses that we could just give trainees email accounts on the same system the staff use.

The ECDL people in particular have to learn Outlook at some point anyway…

In theory CITADEL integrates with Outlook but in practice that’s one of the things which we haven’t really got working yet.

Ho hum.  Here’s hoping this isn’t a portent of things to come!

Our average attendance rate is frankly rubbish.  Typically 70-80% on a 4 days a week, three month programme.

We’ve tried a number of things to improve it all without success. 

Our learners have a number of barriers which affect their attendance, a high proportion of single parents, people returning to work after long term sickness, and those with previous negative experiences of education and all of these combine to make motivation a difficult task.

A while ago a colleague heard about a project another training provider had run, which involved the learner creating their own Wiki as a group effort and the positive effects it had had on attendance and motivation, and we decided it must be worth a go.

As we already use a blog to communicate with our learners and I was familiar with that software from personal use as well, I suggested a Blogging Project.

We have several main hopes for the project:

• One, that it will improve motivation by giving the trainees an opportunity to work on something of interest to them and using the kind of up to date modern technology that all over the news and popular media.
• Two, that the group working element will improve attendance through a sense of responsibility to the group and getting their share of the project done.  “Peer pressure” maybe, though that sounds negative.  It’s noticeable that the trainees who share lifts to the training centre are more likely to inform their car-sharer when they are going to be absent than they are to phone us trainers and let us know!  I hope this desire to not let their fellow students down will carry over to the groupwork.
• That the group working element will help develop their interpersonal and communication skills.  At the moment the general level of literacy is on the low side, and the verbal communication skills are patchy.  Many of the students currently, will talk over you or each other, fail to speak up when stuck or interrupt while you’re mid-explanation to another learner.  In additional the two groups of learners will often not mix, and the younger learners can end up a bit isolated or alternatively in a “Kiddies corner” requiring constant supervision to stop them sloping off and ending up on the Internet messing around.