Category Archives: learning design

LAMS 2008 European conference

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Despite the shadow of the lambsgate affair, the LAMS 2008 European conference was another bit step forward (imho) towards a consensus about the future development of learning design tools and the mechanisms for sharing designs. It seems that the pieces of the jigsaw are starting to come together and, from the cross section of projects in attendance, there was a genuine willingness to share best practice and not re-invent the wheel.

Grainne Conole has already done an excellent job of summarizing the conference keynotes from Stephen Downes, Helen Beetham and James Dalziel. Grainne’s own keynote gave an excellent overview not only of the work she and her team are doing at the OU, but also of the key issues researchers are faced with in the design for learning space such as just how/can design for learning help to exploit engaging technologies to create better learning experiences? Grainne highlighted some of the contradictions that they are finding through workshop and interviews with OU staff around design including:
*design as a process -v- design as a product
*the capturing of designs: when/what to concentrate on – the explicit or the implicit?
*representations: when to use textual or visual (or both)
*the life-cycle of designs: tensions between static and dynamic elements.

This mirrors the experience of the JISC Design for Learning programme. It was in a way re-assuring to see that even with the different production process that are in place in an institution like the OU, there is a commonality around the key issues in terms of capturing (and sharing) the design process.

One of the projects the OU is working on is a social networking site for designs called Cloudworks. In previous meetings Martin Weller has described this as a “flickr for learning designs”. The social networking aspect of the site could help move forward sharing of designs as many projects have found that the peer aspects of sharing are incredibly important to practitioners.

Grainne ended her presentation around the need to develop more simple widgets around the pedagogy of designing learning activities which could help to bring some more fun into the design process. The OU have started to develop some widgets and the ReCourse team is doing that too (as highlighted at the recent CETIS learning design meeting). An other example of convergence of development and exploiting of web 2.0 technologies for education.

My presentation focused on the sharing solution we (CETIS) as the JISC Design for Learning programme support project initiated. One thing we didn’t include was any form of social networking, so it was really useful was to catch up with the OU team and discuss possible ways in which we can work together to integrate outputs from the programme into their Cloudworks site.

BTW I think we now might have a theme tune for learning design events. Martin Weller created an animoto video of the conference and by some bizarre coincidence he chose the same music as I did for the video I made for the Design for Learning Programme Design Bash last year . . . spooky or just the result of limited choices of copyright free music :-)

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.

JISC Infonet Learning Resources and Activies resource

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JISC Infonet have produced a web resource showcasing JISC projects that have carried out work in the area of learning resources and activities, connecting them across a range of JISC programme initiatives.

Five themes have been developed providing some context and the current state of play as well as examples of projects. The themes are:

* developing learning resources
* sharing learning resources
* re-purposing learning resources
* curriculum design and effective use of learning resources
* managing learning resources

Additional outputs from programmes such as Design for Learning will be added to the site to create an infokit. More information @ www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/themes/lra

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.

Design Bash: moving towards learning design interoperability

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Question: How do you get a group of projects with a common overarching goal, but with disparate outputs to share outputs? Answer: Hold a design bash. . .

Codebashes and CETIS are quite synonymous now and they have proved to be an effective way for our community to feedback into specification bodies and increase our own knowledge of how specs actually need to be implemented to allow interoperability. So, we decided that with a few modifications, the general codebash approach would be a great way for the current JISC Design for Learning Programme projects to share their outputs and start to get to grips with the many levels of interoperability the varied outputs of the programme present.

To prepare for the day the projects were asked to submit resources which fitted into four broad categories (tools, guidelines/resources, inspirational designs and runnable designs). These resources were tagged into the programmes’ del.icio.us site and using the DFL SUM (see Wilbert’s blog for more information on that) we were able to aggregrate resources and use rss feeds to pull them into the programme wiki. Over 60 resources were submitted, offering a great snapshot of the huge level activity within the programme.

One of the main differences between the design bash and the more established codebashes was the fact that there wasn’t really much code to bash. So we outlined three broad areas of interoperability to help begin conversations between projects. These were:
* conceptual interoperability: the two designs or design systems won’t work together because they make very different assumptions about the learning process, or are aimed at different parts of the process;
* semantic interoperability: the two designs or design systems won’t work together because they provide or expect functionality that the other doesn’t have. E.g. a learning design that calls for a shared whiteboard presented to a design system that doesn’t have such a service;
* syntactic interoperability:the two designs or design systems won’t work together because required or expected functionality is expressed in a format that is not understood by the other.

So did it work? Well in a word yes. As the programme was exploring general issues around designing for learning and not just looking at for example the IMS LD specification there wasn’t as much ‘hard’ interoperability evidence as one would expect from a codebash. However there were many levels of discussions between projects. It would be nigh on impossible to convey the depth and range of discussions in this article, but using the three broad categories above, I’ll try and summarize some of the emerging issues.

In terms of conceptual interoperability one of the main discussion points was the role of context in designing for learning. Was the influence coming from bottom up or top down? This has a clear effect on the way projects have been working and the tools they are using and outcomes produced. Also in some cases the tools sometimes didn’t really fit with the pedagogical concepts of some projects which led to a discussion around the need to start facilitating student design tools -what would these tools look like/work?

In terms of semantic interoperability there were wide ranging discussions around the levels of granularity of designs from the self contained learning object level to the issues of extending and embellishing designs created in LAMS by using IMS LD and tools such as Reload and SLeD.

At the syntactic level there were a number of discussions not just around the more obvious interoperability issues between systems such as LAMS and Reload, but also around the use of wikis and how best to access and share resources It was good to hear that some of the projects are now thinking of looking at the programme SUM as a possible way to access and share resources. There was also a lot of discussion around the incorporation of course description specifications such as XCRI into the pedagogic planner tools.

Overall a number of key issues were teased out over the day, with lots of firm commitment shown by all the projects to continue to work together and increase all levels of interoperability. There was also the acknowledgement that these discussions cannot take place in a vacuum and we need to connect with the rest of the learning design community. This is something which the CETIS support project will continue during the coming months.

More information about the Design Bash and the programme in general can be found on the programme support wiki.

The problem with pedagogic planners . . .

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. . .is the fact we can’t decide what we want them to be and who and what they are really for. Although this is said with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I’ve just been at a meeting hosed by Diana Laurillard (IOE) and James Dalziel (LAMS Foundation) where a group of people involved in developing a number of tools which could be collectively described as “pedagogic planners” spent the day grappling with the issues of what exactly is a pedagogic planner and what makes it/them different from any other kind of planning/decision making tool.

Unsurprisingly we didn’t arrive at any firm conclusions – I did have to leave early to catch my (delayed) flight home so I did miss the final discussion. However the range of tools/projects demonstrated clearly illustrated that there is a need for such tools; and the drivers are coming not just from funders such as the JISC (with their Phoebe and London Projects ), but from teachers themselves as demonstrated by Helen Walmsley (University of Staffordshire) with her best practice models for elearning project.

The number of projects represented showed the growing international interest and need for some kind of pre (learning)design process. Yet key questions remain unanswered in terms of the fundamental aims of such tools. Are they really about changing practice by encouraging and supporting teachers to expand their knowledge of pedagogic approaches? Or is this really more about some fundamental research questions for educational technologist and their progression of knowledge around e-learning pedagogies? What should the outputs of such tools be – XML, word documents, a LAMS template? Is there any way to begin to draw some common elements that can then be used in learning systems? Can we do the unthinkable and actually start building schemas of pedagogic elements that are common across all learning systems? Well of course I can’t answer that, but there certainly seems a genuine willingness continue the dialogue started at the meeting and to explore these issues more most importantly a commitment to building tools that are easy to use and useful to teachers.

Joint MDR and EC SIG meeting, 29 June

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The MDR and EC SIGs held a joint meeting on 29 June at the University of Strathclyde. The focus of the meeting was on innovative ways of creating, storing, sharing and using content.

As this was a joint meeting the presenters were a mix of people and projects working a the more formal ‘coal face’ repository end of things and those working more with staff and students in creating content using more informal technologies.

The day got off to a great start with David Davies (IVIMEDS, University of Warwick) who gave us an overview of the way he is starting to mash up content from various sources (including their formal repository) to create new and dynamic resources for students. A process which he described as being potentially both transformative and disruptive – for everyone involved. David gave a really practical insight into the way he has been combining RSS feeds with yahoo pipes to create resources which are directly embedded into the institutions’ learning environment. Using this type of technology staff area able to share content in mulitple ways with students, without the student having to access the learning object repository. David also strongly advocated the use of offline aggregators, describing these as personal repositories. As well as using RSS feeds from their repository and various relevant journals, Warwick are increasingly creating and using podcasts. David described how a podcast is basically and RSS feed with binary enclosures which means that they can do much more than just contain audio. At Warwick they are creating podcasts which include flash animations. So in this way they are again providing another way for students to access content.

Of course the system David was describing is quite mature, has stable workflow processes with agreed metadata. However it did show the great potential for ‘remixing’ content within an academic environment and how more informal interfaces can interact with formal repositories to create dynamic, personalised content. A real inspiration if like me you’ve been meaning to do something with pipes but just haven’t quite got round to it yet :-)

Charles Duncan (Intrallect Ltd) then presented the SRU (Search and Retrive via a URL) tool they have developed as part of the CD-LOR project. SRU allows a way to embedded a simple query directly into a web-page. The tool was developed to meet a use case from CD-LOR which would allow someone (staff or student) to search a repository without actually having to ‘join’ it ( or become a member of that community) – a sort of try before you buy. Charles give an overview of the history of the development of SRU (and SRW) and then a demonstration of creating queries with the tool and then searching a number of respositories. The tool retrives XML metadata recordings which then can be transformed (using XSL generally) and then using style sheets the results are made ‘viewable’ on a webpage. Limitations of the tool include the fact that it is limited to a single repository search and there are a number of security issues surrounding XSL transforms from repositories. However using this approach does provide another way to access content (or at least the metadata about content) stored in repositories. As this was developed as part of a JISC project, the tool open source and is available on sourceforge.

Before lunch we had a short demonstration from Sue Manuel (University of Loughborough) of the PEDESTAL project. Part of current JISC Digital Repositories programme, the Platform for Exchange of Documents and Expertise Showcasing Teaching project created a service to provide new opportunities for the sharing of materials and discussion related to teaching and to provide new opportunities for showcasing teaching and research interests. Sue gave us a demo of the system, illustrating how it related content and people. It is now staring to be used by staff at Loughborough, unfortunately the future of the system is somewhat in doubt due to the implementation of a new VLE system throughout the institution.

After lunch we moved to more issues surrounding student generated content with Caroline Breslin and Andrew Wodehouse from the DIDET project. Part of the JISC/NSL funded digitial libraries in the classroom programme, DIDET is a collaborative project between the University of Strathclyde, Stanford University and Olin College. Based in a design engineering course DIDET actively encourages (global) online collaboration using online tools to create, store, share and assess coursework. Caroline and Andrew gave an overview of the project, the tools they had created (including an online collaborative learning environment and a digital library). They then outlined some of the challenges they’ve had to face particularly when putting resources into the formal repository and also how to capture some of the more tacit learning process that are taking place in this type of learning situation.

Students are increasingly using sites like youtube, flickr, etc when they are working – and this is actively encourged by staff. However a continuing challenge for staff and students alike is the issue of creativity versus legality. In a design course when students are expected to research existing products, and with the international dimension to this project, there is the added problem of differences between copyright laws in the UK and the US. As librarians as involved in course design and teaching information literacy is an underlying theme of the curriculum. There are QA procedures in place for any content that is going to be archived and made available in the formal repository. The project has a team of staff including lectures, learning technologists and librarians however they are still grabbing with workflow issues when it comes to adding content to the formal repository – mainly due to lack of time. However on the plus side the overall approach has been sucessful and gets positive feedback from students, staff and employers. The project also shows how newer collaborative content creation and sharing technologies can be integrated with more institutional based ones to allow students to use the technologies that suit their needs.

We then moved to the Resource Browser project, presented by Michael Gardner (University of Essex). Part the JISC eLearning programme’s current toolkits and demonstrators projects, Resource Browser is a tool which aims to help improve searching by linking resources with information about the people who created them and vice versa. Building on the work of a their previous Delta project (which was aiming to help practitioners find and share resources) Resource Browser combines a web service tool for storing FOAF (friend of a friend) profiles with exsiting functionality of Delta. Michael then gave a demo of the sytem. If you are familiar with topic maps it looks like quite a similar interface but uses a technology called touchgraph for viewing. By clicking on a person an extended view of that persons profile, the resources they have created and the people they are linked with is viewable. As this is only a six month project it is very much at a prototype stage but it does look like it could have potential. With the use of educational ontologies created in Delta it could be very useful for sharing learning designs as peer recommendation seems to be very important when searching for learning designs. Michael also outlined some ideas they have for automatic metadata creation where an application scans the documents on a users pc then creates a concept map which can be uploaded to the Delta system . . .I have to say the thought of what useful metadata might come back from such a scan on my documents does seem a little scary :-)

The final presentation of the day came from Julie Allinson (UKOLN, University of Bath) who presented the SWORD (simple webservice offering respository deposit). As Julie pointed out her presentation nicely ended the day as it dealt with putting ‘stuff’ into a repository and not just getting it out. The project is looking to improve ways to populate repositories through a standards based approach and they are looking at ATOM in particular. Perhaps the best summary of this talk comes from David Davies blog – where he describes how the project has restored his faith in educational technology – can’t get better than that really.

Overall a great day with lots of interesting presentations and hopefully some useful linking of people and projects – in fact a bit of f2f mash up of ideas! Presentations and audio recordings are available from the JISC CETIS wiki.

Joint Pedagogy Forum and EC SIG meeting, 26 April

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Liverpool Hope University hosted the joint meeting of the Pedagogy Forum and EC SIG last Thursday. The meeting focused on design for learning, with presentations from a number of the projects involved in the current JISC Design for Learning Programme.

The team from Liverpool Hope started the meeting with an overview of their experiences of using IMS Learning Design with teachers and students. Mark Barrett- Baxendale, Paul Hazelwood and Amanda Oddie explained the work they are doing in the LD4P (learning design for practitioners) project where they are working on making a more user-friendly interface for the RELOAD LD editor, the DesignShare project (part of the current JISC tools and demonstrators projects) where they are linking a learning design repository into reload, and the the D4LD (developing for learning design) where they are working on improving the presentation of the OU learning design player. The team are working with practitioners in both HE and FE (and are running a number of courses with students) and so far, have received positive feedback about using learning design. The screenshots they showed of the interface they are working on for RELOAD certainly looked much more user friendly and intuitive. The team are also looking at the role of web2.0 in the DesignShare project as it will link RELOAD and the Opendoc repository using widget like technology.

Professor Diana Laurillard then gave us an overview of the the London Pedagogic Planner tool. This system, although still very much in prototype, has been designed to help scaffold the planning process for staff. Taking a process driven approach, the system prompts the user to input all the factors relating to a course/session/lesson design i.e. room availability, number of teaching hours, number of student hours outside the classroom available. It is hoped that this scaffolded approach to planning can help to exploit the pedagogic value of learning technology as it allows the user to ensure that their designs (whatever their pedagogical approach and what technology they exploit) are workable within the instutional constraints they have to sit in. An important focus of the tool is to put control back into the hands of teachers and so in turn help the wider teaching community come to more informed decisions about how to integrate learning technology into their own practice.

After lunch we were joined remoted by James Dalziel – thanks to James for staying up very late due to the audio gremlins having lots of fun in the morning :-) . James gave us an overview of LAMSv2 and some of his thoughts on the need and potential for pedagogic planners. LAMS v2 is based on a new modular architecture which the team hope will stand them in good stead for the foreseeable future. Whilst retaining the core concepts of the original system, this version introduces a number of new and improved features including: improved support for branching; live editing of sequences – no more runtime lock-in and the ability to export sequences as IMS LD Level A. (There’s no support for importing IMS designs as yet, but it’s something on the team’s to do list.) One other interesting feature is the inclusion of a portfolio export. Basically this feature allows a student to keep a record of all their activities. The system creates and exports a zip file which contains html copies of activies. Through work with the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the v2 can now provide joint classes using the Shibboleth federation system. In terms of pedagogic planners, James outlined his thoughts on current needs. He believes that we need lots of different versions of planners and more research on the the decision making process for designers and teachers. This is obviously an area of increasing focus, but hopefully the two JISC planners are making a good start in this area and it’s something that will be discussed at the LAMS UK conference in July.

Marion Manton and David Balch then gave us an overview of the Phoebe planner tool they have been developing at the University of Oxford. In contrast to the London planner tool, Phoebe has taken a wiki based approach with more emphasis being given to providing advice and support on potential pedagogic approaches. Though there is no reason why the two system couldn’t be used together and that is something that both projects are exploring. As with the London planner, Phoebe is now entering phase 2 and is looking at ways to improve the interface for users. David and Marion outlined the approaches they have been considering, which hopefully will provide looser connections between the content in the wiki and the notes that user create when they are using the system. They are hoping to take a more drag and drop, web 2.0 approach so that users can feel more in control of the system.

Dai Griffiths from the University of Bolton rounded up the day by giving an overview of his impressions of the learning design space. Dai has been involved in many projects relating to IMS Learning Design – notably the UNFOLD project. Dai began by questioning if IMS is agile enough to take advantage of the web 2 world. Increasingly specifications such as content packaging and learning design seem to be at odds with developments in social software. He then went on to highlight some of the confusions that exist around the purpose of IMS Learning Design. Being both a modeling language and an interoperability system there is still confusion about the purpose of the specification. Often projects only focus on one area and forget about the other. There is still a need for interoperability, but perhaps now we need to move to thinking about looser couplings between content, activities and infrastructure and not try to do everything by following one complex specification. IMS LD as it currently stands deals with formal education systems but what about informal learning, can it play a role there too? This is something the TenCompetence project is investigating and they are hoping to have a number of extension to RELOAD launched later this year which start to address that space. Dai closed by re-itterating the need for community engagement and sustaining and building of contacts within the learning design space which is one of the aims of the support wiki for the Design for Learning programme.

Thanks to everyone who presented and attended the meeting for making it such a worthwhile meeting. Also a big thank you to everyone at Liverpool Hope for being such generous hosts and having the patience to work through all our technological gremlins. Copies of all the presentations from the day are available @ http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/April_2007_Meeting.

Communities more important than models in developing learning design (thoughts on the Mod4L final report)

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The final report from the Mod4L project is now available online. The project is part of the current JISC Design for Learning Programme.

The aim of Mod4L was to “develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice.” The project adopted a working definition of practice model as “common but decontextualised, learning designs that are respresented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers etc).”

The report is structured into six main categories covering issues of representation (which I talked about in a previous post), granularity, an evaluation of several types of representation, the sharing of learning designs and the role of taxonomies.

The report highlights the difference between design as a product and design as a process. It questions the current metaphor for learning design (particularly IMS learning design) as being too product driven and reliant on stable components and the linkages between them, which often don’t accurately reflect the unstable process that take place in most teaching and learning situations. It goes on to suggest that we may be better off thinking of design for learning as a loosely coupled system, which can provide access to the stable components of a design but also allow for the richer, more adaptive process that take place within a learning context. An analogy to a map of the London underground is given as an example. The map can show you (the learner) the entry points and how to get from point A to point B (even giving one some degree of flexibility of route or personalisation on how to get there) but what the map doesn’t give you is other information which could make your journey much more successful i.e. by letting you know that it might be quicker to get off the train one stop earlier, or (as a teacher) how to drive the train.

A detailed evaluation of a number of practice types are contained within the report, however it does also point out that “providing support for communities may be more important in changing practice, than developing particular representation types which will, inevitably, have limited audiences, and have prescribed forms.” Let’s hope that the current projects within the programme can help to build and sustain these types of communities.

Inspirational -v- runnable designs – some thoughts from d4l meetings last week

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The latest JISC epedagogy experts forum meeting took place in Birmingham last week, 26th October and included sessions from three of the projects in the current design for learning programme. (As you know we are providing the support project for this programme.) The projects involved were Mod4l, Pheobe and User-oriented Planner for Learning Analysis and Design. The former is concerned with developing practice models and the latter two with developing pedagogic planning tools.

The experts meeting was followed the next day with a smaller meeting for the three projects, the CETIS support team, JISC and Glenaffric ( programme evaluators). One interesting articulation from both days and coined by Isobel Falconer (MOD4L) is the difficulty in distinguishing and representing an inspirational design – one that really grabs teachers attention and imagination – and a runnable design – one that is machine (and sometimes human) readable but often lacks any information about the design which would motivate a teacher/course designer.

So when we are trying to produce generic models and tools such as pedagogic planners how do we represent examples of good designs ( if you can ever really know what a ‘good’ design is). How can we represent different types of designs in a conceptual way? Can there be a common abstraction(s), which is decontextualised from a subject specifc area, which still makes sense to all teachers? Patterns are one potential solution, but how are they actually implemented in the tools currently available? It seems that LAMS 2.0 may be able to create patterns but that is only one possible technical solution.

This discussion led onto a debate on what the three projects and indeed the programme as a whole is trying to achieve. Should the planner projects provide tools which help plan their teaching (taking into account institutional drivers such as room availability, class time, staff time etc) or should they be changing practice by providing examples which inspire, encourage self-reflection, and ultimately transform teaching practice. Or is it about providing tools to which help with more effective planning skills taking into account institutional factors such as room availability, staff availability, class size, time contraints, tools available through institution etc. Of course, the programme is trying to do all of these, and serendipitously each of the planners has taken a slightly different approach.

The User Orientated Planner (aka the London Project) is looking far more like a high level whole course planner which takes into account all the institutional issues and forces the user to include them. At the moment it has an excel prototype which the team are using with practitioners and there is a more interactive version (in Director) in development. The Pheobe project is taking a wiki based approach and what looks like (in the initial demo of the early prototype shown ) a softer approach with less of an emphasis on the higher level institutional issues – however they are included. The London project is closely tied into LAMS however Pheobe isn’t tied to any tools and would like to be flexible enough so that if any instituion wanted to use it they could list the tools they provide/support. Another interesting aside brought up by the Pheobe team was in relation to searching and the possibility of using personal recommendations as a search criteria, maybe based FOAF, as many practitioners would look at a design just because they knew who had created/and or recommened it.

The one common difficulty all the projects are having is when they want their tools provide examples of designs similar to those being constructed by users. There is still a dearth of examples and this leads us back to the representation issue.

The support wiki is starting to gather examples of designs and already has a discussion topic on the issues involved. Hopefully we can start to unpack these issues in more detail in the coming months.