Presentation titled "Changing Conditions for PBL? A Critical View on Digital Technologies as a Springboard to Unfold the Potentials. Given at the annual Teaching Day in Aalborg University

1. Changing Conditions
for PBL?
A Critical View on Digital Technologies as
a Springboard to Unfold the Potentials
Thomas Ryberg (ryberg@hum.aau.dk)
@tryberg (twitter)
Professor mso (Maybe Sort Of)
E-Learning Lab – center for user driven innovation,
learning and design
Dept. Of communication and Psychology
Aalborg University

2. Outline
Beyond educational hype – a springboard to singling out the novel
An historical perspective on educational technology
What are the challenges to PBL? What are the opportunities
Rather than concrete suggestions and examples a hopefully provocative
invitation to think critically and creatively about IT in edcuation

3. Vocal discourses of imminent and radical changes
– Game-changers, disruptions, paradigm-shifts, 2.0s, don’t miss the train
Huge gaps between:
The actual qualitative changes technologies have brought about in
edcuation and the speed of those changes
The same ‘train of thought’ seems to return to the station without
realising it has been there before…a city ring

4. #EDTECH IS BIG BUSINESS
IT’S FULL OF:
But also unrealised potential…

5. “There must be an industrial revolution in education in
which educational science and the ingenuity of
educational technology combine to modernize the
grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of
conventional education.”
- Sidney Pressey, 1924, inventor
of the Automatic Teacher, the first
electronic device used in schools
The motion picture is destined to revolutionize
our educational system and...in a few years it will
supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of
textbooks.
—Thomas Edison, 1922

6. Prof. C. C. Clark of New York University conducting a class from his home (1935)
Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/predictions-for-educational-tv-in-the-1930s-107574983
“The scene will be a
commonplace one tomorrow,
without a doubt, when television
will be as indispensable to our
every day home life as the radio
program receiver is today.”
(The April 1935 issue of Short Wave
Craft magazine)

7. “Tomorrow our whole radio
broadcast background, so
far as the listener is
concerned, will be changed
when television becomes a
common everyday
convenience. Not only will
various subjects be taught
or lectured upon and
brought into our homes, but
the latest styles in men’s
and women’s clothes,
furniture, etc., will be
flashed on our home
television screen, and
dozens of other advertised
products, travel tours, etc.,
as well.”
Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/predictions-for-educational-tv-in-the-1930s-107574983
Nailed it!
….With the advertising….

8. Please sit idly back and let’s bask
in the successes of TV education

9. 1954
http://www.idealearninggroup.com/blog/history-of-elearning-e-is-for-evolutionary
Often heard and recited in relation to X
learning technology….Laptops, Ipads,
MOOCs (individual, self-paced learning)

10. http://www.teacherstechworkshop.com/2013/10/a-nice-timeline-of-virtual-learning.html
60’ies: Several US universities adopt online courses
Illich 1972: Deschooling society and learning networks
MOODLE: Designed to enable dialogue and collaboration – mostly used for slides
MOOCs: Before 2012? And how are some MOOCs different from televised courses
from 1930 - 1960
Networked Learning: A conference series since 1998

11. History of #edtech not a neat and orderly
progression – rather a struggle between
perspectives / pedagogical ideals (Weller, 2007)
Broadcast view
• Deliver or make content and
resources globally available -
on demand
• Self-paced, individualised
• Reuse, scalability, cost
efficiency (reducing the role
of the teacher)
• Learning objects, OER
• Also: Control,
standardisation,
institutionalisation,
industrialisation
• “The broadcast view can be
found in higher education
and national policies and it is
also common in corporate
training” (Jones & Dirckinck-
Holmfeld, 2009)
Discussion view
• Focusing on knowledge as
developing through dialogue,
collaboration and
communcation
• Mutual dependency or
relations between students
and between students and
facilitators
• Groups, intimacy, relations,
cooperation and collaboration
– dependency in time
• A fringe perspective – mostly
in Higher Ed
Jones, C., & Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L. (2009). Analysing Networked Learning
Practices. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, C. Jones, & B. Lindström (Eds.),
Analysing Networked Learning Practices in Higher Education and
Continuing Professional Development (pp. 10–27). Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers.
Weller, M. (2007). Virtual learning environments : effective development
and use. London: Routledge.

12. Recurring ideals – discussion view
Learning and Social media ’Progressive’ education (since 19XX)
User-driven Learner-centred
Collaboration Collaborative learning
Participation Active students vs passive recipients
2 -way communication Dialogues and interaction
Creating and sharing Knowledge construction vs acquistion
Bottom-up Ahierarchical, flat – students as co-producers
And the story of how these ideals are continously tamed, institutionalised and grinded into
pulp….(discussion view is subsumed in/ eaten by broadcast mode)
LMS to PLE: Moodle/LMSs – from social-constructionist ideals of ‘dialogical spaces of
activity’ to being viewed as retrograde, conservative silos for slides and teacher centred
teachings
MOOCs to MOOCs: Began as radical idea of opening courses to outsiders and designing
for non-controllable, non-measurable learning in social networks and blogs to becoming
commercialised Ivy-league video-courses with tests and certificates

13. You sez MUUUHKS won’t change
education az we knows it!?

14. Perhaps…I dunno….
What I do want to say is:
Technology will not radically reshape education to
become egalitarian, progressive or student centred…
Radical ideas of education will!....
PBL was (and is) a pretty radical idea within education
and thus a unique opportunity for us!

15. What would we like to become?!
Bøgelund. P. (2015). How supervisors perceive PhD supervision – And how they practice it. International
Journal of Doctoral Studies, 10, 39-55. Retrieved from http://ijds.org/Volume10/IJDSv10p039-055Bogelund0714.pdf

16. Ohh you two – get a room!
The original and hopefully future values of Problem
Oriented Project Work / Aalborg PBL model – in my
humble opinion these ideals are increasingly important

17. SO WHAT MIGHT BE NEW?
EMERGING MODES OF
WORK/LEARNING
*Personal learning networks*
*Mass collaboration*
Both challenging – in some ways – how we understand
collaboration and group work within PBL and collaborative learning

18. THIS!
Complexmaasivesocialand
personalnetworks

19. Personal Learning Networks
(PLNs)
Ego-centric networks formed
through e.g. social network sites
(facebook, twitter, pinterest)
Traversing and harvesting the
ego-centric network for
information, ideas, and resources
(and contributing)
The individual person’s ability to
form and sustain a personal
learning network
Many strengths and potentials –
but heavily individualised notions
of learning underpinning the
ideas of PLNs

20. Mass collaboration
Diffuse, uncoordinated mass of
people contribute to sustained or
more ephemeral constructs
Sustained: Wikipedia, Open
Source. #nlc2016, Some
MOOCs
Ephemeral: wild-fire or flash
activites – #jegharoplevet –
eruptions and burst of hectic
activies – short-lived activation of
massive networks
Many strengths and potentials –
but what is the quality of the
contributions, how to get an
overview, diffuse and chaotic, no
joint goal – requires knowledge
and literacy to draw from and
make sense of (information
overload)

21. Challenges:
Creating a coherent tapestry and connecting in a meaningful way the disparate
threads into a whole

22. Challenges:
Maintaining balances between hectic flows and streams and then puddles of
tranquility and peace – hectic collection and tranquil digestion

23. An intermediate level?:
The ”small” group (class, group, semester) with known members, trust,
cohesion and a partially joint enterprise (goal) – interpretative communities
Mediating both between the individual traversing of networks as well as the
chaotic, diffuse, and hectic mass collaborations (wild-fires)

24. Challenges to PBL in teaching (active learning) and PBL as project work:
How do we mediate between and knit together the individualised personal learning
networks of the students and engage them in meaningful mass-colaborations
We have a ‘wealth of personal learning networks’ in semesters and courses and we
have a ressource in students that can engage with others in mass collaborations on
important societal challenges (environment, fighting poverty)

25. Challenges to PBL in teaching (active learning) and PBL as project work:
How do we ensure that group and project work remains an important learning
experíence in a globalised networked world
That PBL remains an anchoring point for students learning experiences and
something which meaningfully connects the threads

26. Thanks
For
Your
Attention
It was. A. Pleasure. For me. #Itsallaboutpunctuation

27. References for pics
• CC-licensed material from Flickr – starring in no particular order and some not used..:
• https://flic.kr/p/8R3pxY
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• https://flic.kr/p/4TyeQM
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• https://flic.kr/p/PVNng