Research
Overview
My main research interest is in e-learning. In particular, I am interested in how systems affect behaviour and how behaviour can affect systems. These kinds of system can help crowds to become teachers. This leads me to dabble in fields as diverse as architecture, evolution, complexity theory, distance learning theory and software design, plus a whole load of others.
Amongst other things my sub-interests include:
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•Social navigation
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•Educational social software systems
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•Adaptive educational software systems
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•Catering for and adapting to diversity in learners
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•Self-organising systems for learning
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•Learning objects and their abuses (and how they should be done)
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•The evils of learning management systems (and how they should be done)
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•Software to support learning communities
I am a fellow of TEKRI, the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University where we explore a range of issues relating to social, adaptive and mobile technologies for learning.
Lately I've been wondering about the pedagogical/technological divide that has defined the camps of the e-learning community for some time, and am thinking about how they can be brought together in a single conceptual framework.
Things to read
Many of my ideas are brought together in a book, Control & Constraint in E-Learning: Choosing When to Choose. You can order it from all good bookshops and online bookstores. Here are a few places you could get it:
Control & Constraint in E-Learning presents a theory of control in education, and applies it to a range of e-learning tools and processes. The main arguments of the book lead inexorably to the conclusion that social software, in which the group is a first class object in the system, is a really good idea but that, in order for it to really work well, it should be designed and used in accordance with a set of ten principles that I set out in the book.
If you are interested in some earlier thoughts on the subject, try my PhD.
If you want more of an overview, here are some selected papers you might find interesting:
Collectives, Networks and Groups in Social Software for Learning (written with Terry Anderson, explores the different kinds of many that social software enables. Won an outstanding paper award at E-Learn 2007)
Designing the Undesignable: Social Software and Control (covers the main themes of the book in a brief and digestible form)
Social Software and the Emergence of Control (brief version of the journal paper above, won a top paper award at ICALT 2006, covers the central arguments of the book in 5 pages)
Things to play with