Category Archives: elearning

Use of repositories and data mash-ups in the Curriculum Delivery Programme

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Formal repositories didn’t feature to highly in the programme with only one project (COWL) really integrating content into an institutional repository. Learning materials tended to be stored in the VLE. However a number of projects have been using of more online sharing or “fauxpository” services. Photosharing services such as Flickr proved to have multidisciplinary appeal being used in this programme in design and geography courses.

Institutional Repository
* Cowl – Curve, University of Coventry repository

Flickr
*Atelier-D (this project also developed its own flickr like sharing, Open Studio)
*Morse
*Middlesex

Diigo
*Morse

In terms of data mash-ups, the MORSE project used a number of audio, photographic and geo-location services on geography field trips feeding back to their VLE. However the project did also note that lectures felt that in enabling these approaches, students were losing some traditional field work skills particularly field sketches.

Qik
*Morse
Instamapper
*Morse
Gabcast
*Morse

Morse also explored the the use of AR technologies, in particular Layar and Wikitude.

The Design Studio is also perhaps turning into another fauxpository where selected resources created by the programme are showcased.

Assessment technologies in use in the Curriculum Delivery Programme

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Developing practice around assessment is central to a number of the Curriculum Delivery projects. There has been an emphasis on improving feedback methods and processes, with a mixture of dedicated formal assessment tools (such as Turnitin) and more generic tools (such as excel, google forms, adapting moodle modules) being used. The later often proving a simple and effective way to trial new pedagogic methodologies, without the need for investment in dedicated software.

Excel
*Ebiolabs (excel macros embedded into moodle for marking)
*ESCAPE (WATS – weekly assessment tutorial sheets, again used for submission, also generates a weekly league table)

EVS
*Escape

Turnitin
*Making the new diploma a success
*Integrative Technologies Project

Moodle
*Cascade (submission extension)

ARS
*Integrative Technologies Project

Google forms
*Making Assessment Count

IMS QTI
None of the projects have actually implemented IMS QTI, however the Escape project did highlight it in their project plan, but didn’t actually need to use the specification for the work they undertook.

More information on the projects can be found by following the specific links in the text. More detailed information about the the technological approaches is also available from our PROD database. Specific assessment resources (including case studies) are also being made available through the Design Studio.

SHEEN Sharing – getting the web 2.0 habit

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Sometimes I forget how integral web 2 technologies are to my working life. I blog, facebook, twitter, bookmark, aggregate RSS feed, do a bit of ‘waving’, you know all the usual suspects. And I’m always up for trying any new shiny service or widgety type thing that comes along. There are certain services that have helped to revolutionize the way I interact with my colleagues, peers and that whole “t’internet” thang. They’re a habit, part of my daily working life. So, last week I was fascinated to hear about the journey the SHEEN Sharing project has been on over the last year exploring the use of web2.0 tools for a group of practitioners that have barely got into the web 1 habit.

SHEEN, the Scottish Higher Education Employability Network, was set up in 2005. Employability is one of the SFC’s enhancement themes and almost £4million was made available to Scottish HE institutions towards developments in this area. This led to a network of professionals – the ECN (employabilty co-ordinators network) who had some fairly common needs. They all wanted to reduce duplication of effort in finding resources, share and comment on resources being used and to work collaboratively on creating new resources. As actual posts were on fixed term contracts, there was the additional need to capture developing expertise in the field. So, they started the way most networks do with an email list. Which worked to a point, but had more than a few issues particularly when it came to effectively managing resource sharing and collaboration.

One of the members of this network, Cherie Woolmer, is based in the same department as a number of us Scottish Cetisians. So in true chats that happen when making coffee style, we had a few discussions around what they were trying to do. They did have a small amount of funding and one early idea was to look at building their own repository. However we were able to give an alternative view where they didn’t actually need a full blown repository and that there were probably quite a few freely available services that could more than adequately meet their needs. So, the funding was used to conduct a study (SHEEN Sharing) into the potential of web2.0 tools for sharing.

Sarah Currier was hired as a consultant and her overview presentation of the project is available here. Over a period on just about a year (there was a extension of funding to allow some training at the end of last year/early this) without any budget for technology Sarah, along with a number of volunteers from the network explored what web tools/services would actually work for this community.

It was quite a journey summarized in the presentation linked to above. Sarah used videos (hosted on Jing) of the volunteers to illustrate some of the issues they were dealing with. However I think a lot of it boiled down to habit and getting people to be confident in use tools such as bookmarking, shared document spaces, rss feeds etc. It was also interesting to see tension between professional/formal use of technology and informal use. Web 2 does blur boundaries, but for some people, that blurring can be an uncomfortable space. One thing that came through strongly was the need for face to face training and support to help (and maybe very gently force!) people use or at least try new technologies and more importantly for them to see themselves how they could use it in their daily working lives. In effect how they could get into the habit of using some technologies.

The project explored a number of technologies including scribd (for public sharing documents), google docs (for collaborative working)twitter (which actually ended up being more effective at a project level in terms of extending connections /raising awareness) and diigo for bookmarking and sharing resources. Diigo has ended up being a core tool for the community, as well as providing bookmarking services the group and privacy functions it offers gave the flexibility that this group needed. Issues of online identity were key to members of the network – not everyone wants to have an online presence.

I hadn’t really explored diigo before this and I was really taken with the facility to create webslides widgets of bookmarked lists which could be embedded into other sites. A great way to share resources and something I’m playing around with now myself.

I think the SHEEN Sharing journey is a great example of the importance of supporting people in using technology. Yes, there is “loads of stuff” out there ready to be used, but to actually make choices and create effective sharing and use, we rely on human participation. Supporting people is just, if not more, important if we want to really exploit technology to its fullest potential. It also shows the growing need to share expertise in use of web2.0 technologies. You don’t need a developer to create a website/space to share resources – but you do need experience in how to use these technologies effectively to allow groups like SHEEN to exploit their potential. I was struck by how many tools I could see Sarah had used throughout the evaluation phase. Only a couple of years ago it would have been almost impossible for one person to easily (and freely) capture, edited and replayed video for example. A good example to highlight the changing balance of funding from software to “peopleware” perhaps?

More information about SHEEN sharing can be found on their recently launched web resources site – a great example of a community based learning environment.

Amplification and online identity (or wot I do and wot it looks like)

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but do you ever dread answering the question, “so what is it you do?” To those who don’t work in education, or in a technology related field, it can take quite a while for me to explain just exactly what it is that I do. Often, I just opt for the slightly tongue in cheek “I type and go to meetings” option. However, over the last year I have found myself increasingly using the term “amplify” when describing what I do. Over the past two years blogging and twittering have become an integral part of my working life. Without actually realising it, the ins and outs of my working life have become increasingly amplified, visible and searchable through technology.

This week I’ve been reading (via a link from twitter of course) “The Future of Work Perspectives” report. This report starts with a section on the amplified individual worker of the future and outlines their four main characteristics which I (and I suspect many of my colleagues/peers) found myself identifying with.
*Social: “They use tagging software, wikis, social networks and other human intelliegence aggregators to understand what their individual contributions means in the context of the organization.” (which made me think of Adam’s presentation at the CETIS conference last year where he used our collective blog posts to illustrate connections across all the organizations areas of interest).
*Collective: “taking advantage of online collaboration software, mobile communications tools, and immersive virtual environments . . ..” (which made me reflect on how a 3G dongle has made me a true road warrior).
*Improvisational: “capable of banding together to form effective networks and infrastructures” (what would we do without “dear lazyweb” and the almost instant answers we can get from the twitterati?).
*Augmented: “they employ visualization tools, attention filters, e-displays and ambient presence systems to enhance their cognitive abilities and coordination skills, thus enabling them to quickly access and process massive amounts of information.” (I’m not sure I’m there yet, but I can see that coming too and the presentation from Adam mentioned above was I think the first time I really saw a coherent visualization of the collective intelligence of CETIS being represented through the collation of individual contributions).

The report is worth a read if a bit scary in parts. I’m not sure if I really want my laptop to be recording my biometric data and telling me to go home if I’m coughing too much. However three years ago if anyone told me I would be regularly broadcasting 140 character messages throughout the day I would have told them just where to stick their Orwellian Big Brother ideas.

I’m actually very comfortable with being an “amplifier” it has been a natural progression for me. However I have started to think more about the “amplified” student and how/if/can/should we translate these traits into students and lecturers. It has been relatively easy for me to integrate social networking into my working life. I’m pretty much desk bound – even when I’m travelling as long as I have my laptop + dongle and/or mobile phone I am pretty much always online. I don’t have teach x hours a week, and write research papers to secure my position. Using and being part of online social networks is easy and crucially, imho, relevant and useful to me. My direct professional peer network are in the same position. We’re all pretty much research as opposed to teaching focused.

Although I can see how the traits of an amplified individual equate with the kind of students we’d ideally like, I think we still have a way to go to persuade students and teachers alike of the real benefits of social networking in an educational context. There needs to be a fundamental change the recognition system for staff and assessment process for students to recognise/integrate these types of activities. I know there are many pockets of innovative work going on which are starting to address these issues and hopefully these will become more and more commonplace. It’s also up to us, the amplifiers, to continue to reach out and show how useful and relevant the use collaborative technologies can be in an educational context.

We also need to highlight the need to maintain and protect online identities as we gain more and more presence and professional recognition of them. As I’ve been musing around this post and thinking of ways of visualizing (or agumenting) some of this I came across the Personas project at MIT which analyzes your personal profile and creates a ‘DNA’ of your online character. Of course I had to have a go. I’d also just read about a new free web-based screencasting tool, screenr that links directly to twitter. So in the interests of killing two birds with one stone I signed up for screenr using my twitter username and password and recorded my online DNA being built. Halfway through I realised that I had just glibly given my twitter ID to an unknown third party without actually knowing if it was secure. Scott Wilson’s voice was in my head saying “remember oAuth, never sign in anywhere without it” or words to that effect.

My online identity is now more than ever, key to my professional identity. I should be more careful when I sign up for new toys, or should I say amplification opportunities and I should be reminding others too.

Just in case you’re curious about my online DNA here’s a picture or you can watch the screencast of it being created.

picture of Sheila MacNeill's online DNA

picture of Sheila MacNeill's online DNA

Semantic Technologies in education survey site now available

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The next stage of the SemTech project (as reported earlier in Lorna’s blog) is now underway. The team are now conducting an online survey of relevant semantic tools and services. The survey website provides a catalogue of relevant semantic tools and services and information on how they relate to education.

If you have an interest in the use of semantic technologies in teaching and learning, you can register on the site and add any relevant technologies you are using, or add tags to the ones already in documented. As the project is due for completion by the end of February, the project team are looking for feedback by 2 February.

Pedagogy planners – where next?

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A meeting was held on 4th March to get some ‘real world’ input into how the development on the two pedagogy planning tools in the current JISC Design for Learning programme should progress.

The audience was made up mainly of teaching practitioners, most of whom have an interest in staff development and e-learning. Introducing the day, Helen Beetham (consultant to the JISC e-Learning programme) outlined some of the challenges around the changing economic, technical and pedagogical issues that face the teaching and learning community today. The role of planning teaching and learning is becoming of increasing importance as is the recognition of the need to share and represent practice. Although technology offers tantalising visions for the potential of shared learning design practice, the tools we have available at the moment still seem to fall short of the vision. Very few (if any) tools can capture and delivery the myriad of teaching practice that exist. So, is it time to start thinking about a set of teacher tools and services instead of trying to develop more one size fits all tools?

During the day participants had a the opportunity to have “hands-on” time with both Phoebe and the London Pedagogy Planner (LPP). Grainne Conole (0U) has already written about the day and reviews of Phoebe and LPP. The projects then presented their vision of how someone could use Phoebe to create an initial design, look for case studies and exemplars and then export that design into LLP and start ‘fleshing’ out the plan with actual teaching contact time etc.

While both prototypes offer a different (but complementary) approach to planning, they are both very much at the prototype stage. A key question that keeps arising is what is it that they actually produce? XML output allows a level of interoperability between the two just now but this needs to be extended much further so that there is a useful output which can relate to other institutional systems such as VLEs, CMS etc – “where’s the export to moodle” button was heard a few times during the day:-) During the feedback sessions it was clear exporting and importing data between systems will be crucial if such tools are to have any chance of having take up in institutions.

Latest poll results

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As a follow up to the recent JISC one day conference “Using Learning Resources: Transforming the Educational Experience”; I thought it would be interesting to see what the SIG thought of some of the common themes coming through from the day about potential areas for funding and what the community thought priorities should be. Once again there was a great response to the poll – so thank you if you voted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly developing more user friendly tools for creating and sharing learning resources was the clear winner with 63% of the votes. I think this reflects how much people in the SIG just want to get on and develop more ways to create and share – in particular activities, designs and assessments. This contrasts with the more strategic views coming through at the event where discussions around engaging middle management through developing business models and providing clear IPR/copyright guidance were coming to the fore.

The results were as follows:

*developing more user friendly tools for creating and sharing learning designs 63% (27 votes)
*developing more ‘open’ approaches eg a JISC equivalent of OpenLearn 19% (8 votes)
*developing use cases for middle management 5% (2 votes)
*developing clear IPR and copyright guidance 5% (2 votes)
*Other: open call for evaluation and research projects; Re-using and rejuvenating existing resources; Re-use/Rejuvenation of existing content; Finally doing something for FE
(43 votes in total)

More information about this poll is available from the EC SIG wiki.

Creating an “architecture of participation” – thoughts from JISC Learning Activities and Resources Conference, 22 January

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One of the comments that seemed to summarize the myriad of discussion that took place at the JISC Learning Resources an Activities Conference yesterday in Birmingham was that in the development of learning activities and resources, what we need to start exploring is ‘architectures of participation’ (I think this phrase came from Fred Garnett, Becta).

The aim of the day, as outlined by Tish Roberts (Programme Director, E-Learning, JISC) was to provide an opportunity to bring together people and projects involved in creating and using learning resources and activities, discuss challenges and to get an indication of what areas the community think that JISC need to focus their development activities.

Professor Allison Littlejohn (Glasgow Caledonian University) started the day with her keynote presentation “Collective use of learning resources’. Allison took us through some of the work she and her colleagues are doing in relation to collective learning where learners consume and create knowledge and are encouraged to create and chart their own learning trails/paths. Advances in technology mean that these learning trails can be used by other students when they are planning their learning. Using web2 technologies, more connections can be made between the formal and informal systems students are using. This approach should take a rapid development approach with user needs analysis being at the forefront. Allison did concede that this methodology was perhaps more applicable to post graduate students and work based learning courses where sharing of knowledge is a key driver, unlike some undergraduate courses where sharing and providing access to information has more precedence.

After lunch Andrew Comrie (former VP of Lauder College and director of the TESEP project) gave the second keynote of the day outlining his own transformational journey in e-learning and some of the highs and lows he has experienced when trying to drive transformational change. Andrew admitted that the TESEP project hadn’t brought about wholeshale transformation in his institution but it had allowed for pockets of change to occur. For each of the partners the project had been an important step on their continuing transformational journey. It had provided an opportunity to allow staff and students to change their attitudes and behaviours in relation to teaching and learning. Andrew outlined the main principles of the TESEP transformational model being; non threating to staff, preparing learners to take more control of their learning and encouraging staff to spend more time designing learning activities rather than developing more content.

In between the keynotes there were 5 parallel sessions focusing on key questions around developing, sharing, re-purposing, managing and design and effective use of learning resources. The day ended with a plenary where the key issues from each session were discussed. And this is where the idea of ‘architecture of participation’ came to my attention. There seemed to be a general consensus that people were more concerned with developing methods to create and sharing learning designs/activities rather than creating more content (which maybe a bit of a “no-brainer” for some, but it was good to hear this come through so clearly). However there is increasing awareness of the need to incorporate students into the process and how to make use of informal and formal networks and technologies and develop and use appropriate pedagogical approaches. Of course this challenges the traditional approach of many of our HE institutions, who as Mark Stiles pointed out are more interested in maintaining control rather than managing changes in behaviour. To bring about transformational change we need to re-think all our traditional architectures, not just in terms of technical infrastructure but in terms of social networks too and explore the key connections between all of them.

Other key points raised were the need to engage middle management in development of practice. It would seem that we have a strong community of practitioners who are committed to sharing and developing practice but they can be thwarted by lack of support. One possible approach to this is to develop some business cases, but I’m really not sure just how much the JISC can do in reaching this sector. Another message coming through loudly was that IPR and copyright is still a key issues for practitioners, and despite lots of work being done by JISC in this area, people are crying out for good, clear simple advice on where they stand.

As ever it is hard to condense the whole day into one post, but it was heartening to see so many people at the event and we will try and build on key parts of the feedback in a future SIG meeting.

The limits of virtual worlds in academic research

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After the MUVE session at the JISC CETIS conference I was interested to see this article in the MIT Technology Review which outlines some of the problems faced by academics when trying to exploit the potential of virtual worlds and games in their research. In the article Edward Castronova outlines some of the problems his team faced when they tried to build a MMU game to test out economic theory. Although there is undeniably potential in these technologies for education and research, there a huge challenges to be faced by academics who are trying to build systems which are comparable to commercially produced ones.

As I reported in an earlier posting, Mark Bell (who worked on the Arden project referred to in the TR article) presented at the MUVE session. If you are interested in finding out in more depth about the issues the Arden project faced, then it’s worth listening to the podcast of his presentation as he gave a very full and frank account of his experiences of trying to create engaging MMUs with part time research students and a limited budget.

Multi User Virtual Environments and Games @ JISC CETIS Conference 2008

One approach to content creation and IPR

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Leigh Blackall, Otago Polytechnic, is the latest contributor to the Penn State Terra Incognito series on open educational resources. In his post he describes the approaches that Otago is taking in developing and reusing educational content and the development of IPR policies to help staff use existing content. This ” acknowledges staff and student’s individual ownership over their IP, but encourages the use of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license as the preferred copyright statement on works published with the Polytechnic’s name.” Leigh also outlines approaches to staff development in using blogs and the use of wikieducator to create and share content.

An interesting article on one institution’s journey towards creating open content and how they have integrated various technologies into staff and student practice.