This document summarizes a research study on the relationship between trust and attitudes towards sharing in distributed personal learning environments. The study surveyed 32 students to understand their general trust levels online, attitudes towards sharing learning resources publicly, and preferences for features in blog-based learning tools. The results showed that while most students were open to public sharing, they also wanted control over privacy settings for different groups. The researchers concluded PLEs should support evaluating relationships and setting varied sharing levels for ad-hoc groups.

1. Interrelation between Trust and Sharing 
Attitudes in Distributed PLE:
Sonia C. Sousa, Vladimir Tomberg, David R.
Lamas, Mart Laanpere (presenting)
Centre for Educational Technology :: htk.tlu.ee
Tallinn University, Estonia
ICWL 2011, Hong Kong http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lepress-20/

2. Background
 Cultural switch in experiencing the Internet: from closed
to open environments, from protecting to sharing
 Trends: LMS use decreases, PLE use increases
 Pedagogical arguments: social negotiation of
meaning, collaborative knowledge building, connectivist
learning
 Trust could play an important role in hindering or
supporting the adoption of new technology
 The affordances of next-gen learning tools can be
designed so that they address also the trust-related
factors

3. Research problem
 Aim: to identify interrelation between general trust level and
attitudes towards sharing within open, blog-based learning
environments
 Research questions:
 1.What are the student’s attitudes and expectations towards (a)
sharing learning resources via the public Web, (b) sharing the
assignment submissions and teacher’s feedback with fellow
students; and (c) participating in the negotiation of shared
meaning?
 2.How is the generic trust level of LePress users related with their
attitudes towards affordances they expect from an online
learning environment?

4. Trust: the hidden factor
 Social media, blogs and the culture of sharing and remixing
 Trust can affect individuals’ predisposition to interact, by
shaping their willingness to rely on others, or by influencing
their ability to believe that other’s actions will eventually lead
to expected results
 Trust can influence individuals’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviors
towards learning and sharing process using blogs
 Developers of blog-based learning environments should take
into account the potential impact of trust-related factors to the
attitudes and expectations of users

5. LePress: a Wordpress-based PLE
 LePress: an open-source plug-in for WordPress, made in Tallinn
University, Estonia
 LePress is providing Course Coordination Space (S.
Wilson), reduces the teacher’s overhead work
 Provides built-in workflows for course enrollment and learning
(assignments, feedback, assessment),
 Non-intrusive implementation, using native features of
Wordpress: categories, trackback, sidebar widget
 Everything is public
(assignments, submissions, feedback), except the grades for
assignments

6. Empirical study
 Online survey in English, Estonian, Russian (with LimeSurvey)
 The questionnaire contained 18 questions in four parts:
 demographic and background information questions
 attitudes towards sharing
 the level of trust in the context of generic online activities
 expected affordances in online learning environments
 32 respondents (age range 18..52, 13 F/ 16 M, 11 RUS/18 EST)
from two different higher education institutions: Mainor
College (IT BA) and Tallinn University (MEd informatics)

7. Results
 Ranking online activities regarding personal usefulness: majority
(65%) valued e-mail communication, content sharing was in the
bottom
 Respondents usually share their personal
information, comments and status only with the people they
trust
 Decision upon letting a new person to enter the “ring of trust”
is made on the basis of trust delegation (37%), similar interests
and preferences (34%) and perceived honesty (34%)

8. Results
 Respondents are more likely to be engaged in give and take actions
with persons who:
 Are willing to share their information and content (85%)
 Seem to be honest (48%)
 Seem to feel sympathy towards the respondent (41%)
 Respondents do not mind sharing their learning process and products
via blog-based PLE (45%), majority (39%) agrees that blogs make
learning process transparent and shareable; 31% prefer to have their
learning resources on public Web
 Majority prefers the affordances of a blog-based PLE (commenting,
tagging, feeds, openness) to that of a traditional LMS, but expect
higher level of control over their PLE (to specify sharing settings)

9. Discussion
 Conflicting preferences: on one hand, openness of PLE and
sharing with everyone would help to evaluate the
trustworthyness, but at the same time, a person would need to
evaluate the relation with others before she shares smth
 Evaluation of relationship: visualisation, avoiding
oversimplification/stereotyping
 There is a need to support ad-hoc groups within official study
groups, with varying level of openness (public, only for
authenticated users, only for coursemates, only for sub-group
members, only for “friends”)

10. Conclusion
 The study explored interrelation between generic trust level and
attitudes towards sharing and affordances of PLE
 Majority of students prefer public sharing of learning resources
 Students with higher level of trust are more willing to share and also
more open towards keeping their learning paths public
 PLE should provide tools to evaluate/rank the quality of relationship
and to set the level of sharing on the group level
 The next steps: creating ad-hoc groups within a LePress
course, allowing a student to set the different access level to different
groups

11. Acknowledgments
 Participation in ICWL conference was supported by
DoRa programme of Archimedes Foundation and
European Social Fund