Subverting and integrating at cetis10

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“Subverting and integration corporate systems for educational purposes” was the title of the session I facilitated at the CETIS 2010 conference earlier this week.

There’s some blurb on the website about the session, but my underlying thinking around the session was to bring together people to discuss the many ways that institutions have to not just subvert and integrate corporate systems to fit educational needs, but also, and perhaps more importantly how to subvert and integrate users and data to meet a range of needs and stakeholders. My primary thoughts around this stemmed very much from the JISC Curriculum Design programme where we have seen a range of solutions from completely corporate (e.g IBM, SunBanner) to more ad-hoc integrations of a range of systems including Sharepoint. Almost half of the Design projects are using Sharepoint to some extent. At the same time the work in the JISC DVLE programme is looking much more at integration of systems and not providing flexibility to add-in to VLEs etc without having to install major upgrades.

To give a range of scenarios I had four speakers give an overview of their institutional landscape – Hugh Davies, University of Southampton; Jim Everett, University of Strathclyde; Sam Rowley, Staffordshire University and Mark Stubbs, MMU.

Although all quite different, there were some key consensus points. It’s not the data collection and storage that is the issue – it would seem that most institutions actually do have most of the data they need. The key issue is the sharing of the data in ways that are useful to others. The benchmarking process that the curriculum design projects undertook has been instrumental in highlighting the lack of communication between key stakeholders, and the at times unnecessary duplication of effort which takes place. Each speaker highlighted that creating models and opportunities for discussion around underlying infrastructure has provides means for subversion and integration which go much deeper than the technology itself.

As Hugh Davies highlighted, for Southampton is has allowed them to have a debate about the wider educational experience the institution wants to provide – how can the infrastructure support and encourage digital literacies for example? The are also challenging some long held assumptions around openness of data. In Southampton they are now going to make all data open unless there is a very good reason not to. Which is the direct opposite of the current situation where you have to have a good reason to make data open.

Jim Everett described the usefulness of having a being able to produce a process model of the key information decision points in the course approval process. Although not an easy task it has now allowed the team to have structured discussions around possible innovations as they can see the whole process. Jim also observed how creating the model highlighted the lack of contact between the people involved. The real interoperability issues lie between human communications not system ones. They are now proposing a data management system to facilitate workflows, and provide access to the data to all stakeholders as and when they need it. Jim also advocated strongly the using of BPMN.

Sam Rowley took us on an entertaining “ramble” through the the experiences of the Staffordshire development team in recent years. They are now trying to take a more coherent EA based view of their overall system requirements. Like many institutions Staffs has a number of data silos which have been wired together on a pretty ad-hoc basis as and when needed. In terms of business intelligence, there key system is actually a lady called Sheila, and to quote Sam “if Sheila doesn’t know it, then it’s not worth knowing” ( oh how I wish that were true in my life :-) ). By taking an EA approach Sam also hopes to help alleviate the tension between innovation and operation between his small team using agile development processes and the wider more traditional corporate IT services. Having a larger EA based model should help to reduce some of the tensions between potential lock-in to larger systems and more flexible solutions.

Mark Stubbs highlighted how the work of the Curriculum Design projects has help to surface the lack of a some key institutional infrastructure around course information and approval processes. Currently MMU is restructuring the whole of its first year provision for rollout in September 2011. Mark’s team are involved in both the Curriculum Design and DVLE programmes but these projects are part of this much larger, radical change within the institution. Mark used a really nice analogy of Japanese willow pattern as a way to describe understanding the islands and bridges that need to be integrated.

Willow pattern islands and bridges in institutional systems

Willow pattern islands and bridges in institutional systems

Echoing Jim’s point about communication Mark also highlighted the need to sell change to people and to carry stakeholders with you on the journey and involve them in all stages of the process. By introducing a new front end to their sharepoint installation the team increased pressure on their corporate systems to provide feeds to other information sources. Student feedback clearly indicated the types of things students wanted e.g. timetabling and assessment information. In terms of subversion, by producing a new model form (linking to new curriculum database) they have introduced commonality across the institution. Each module will have 5 (and only 5) learning outcomes, which need to be linked to an assessment strategy. There can be no vagueness when filling in the form.

After the presentations we broke into groups with the task of describing a “fantasy curriculum management system”. Links to video clips of the feedback from each group is available here. Again a lot of consensus was coming through from the groups – particularly around views to information for different stakeholders such as students, staff etc and the need for data to be able to be re-used in a variety of ways.

Copies of the presentations and podscasts of each of the speakers presentations are available on the session webpage.

#cetis10 snapshot of backchannel and amplification

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Another year, another CETIS conference. Monday and Tuesday this week saw around 140 delegates join us at the National College for Leadership of Schools and Childrens’ Services Conference Centre in Nottingham for the 2010 CETIS Conference “Never Waste a Good Crisis – Innovation & Technology in Institutions.”

Over the past few years, the backchannel conversations via twitter have provided a valuable addition to the conference surfacing opinions and alternative discussions, and also as a view into to conference for those not there in person. Despite some fears over the robustness of the venue internet connection, this year again saw a lot of online activity via twitter and blogs.

We utilised the twapper keeper service with the conference hash tag #cetis10 and the summarizr report it automatically generates is a useful snapshot of the conversations that took place. Our top (non CETIS) tweeter this year was David Kernohan – as he said himself nothing can stop him from tweeting.
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Our top “conversation” was had between Paul Walk and @mIke_ellis. From a personal point of view, seems I tweet quite a bit but don’t really generate that much response – which is a quite like how I feel in real life at times too ;-)
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Other uses of twitter came from Lorna Campbell who blogged about a twitter exchange during the first keynote by Anya Kamanetz, and James Burke who used the storify service to create a view of the collate, aggregate and locate session. (BTW I really like storify but seem to be bottom of the their invite list, so a quick plea, if anyone has spare invitations, can I have one please?). Paul walk also used flickr to create a summary of the open innovation strand, using the “picture speaks a thousand words” metaphor.

We also set up a lanyard site for the conference this year. This was quite useful for pre-conference activity but to be honest I didn’t use it during the conference so probably need a bit more reflection on how it integrated with our existing conference site. I would of course be interested to hear other’s views on it – is this something we should use for other CETIS events?

As an experiment we’ve also used the paper.li service to create an online newspaper once again using the conference hashtag. We’ll only do this for a limited time (i.e a couple of days) but I’m wondering if this might be useful for our other events which have dedicated hashtags, to collate tweet, blog posts and a some other randomly related “stuff’.

So there you have it, a short summary of some of the online activity from this year’s conference. Thanks to everyone who took the time to engage with the conference. There will be more blogs (and tweets) over the coming days posted onto our website.

Design Studio video walkthrough

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Finding resources from JISC programmes is an perennial problem. Websites wither and die once funding ends, people move on, we forget project names and resources become increasingly difficult to track down. The current JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes are trying to help solve this problem through the development of the Design Studio.

The Design Studio is a wiki-based resource which links and contextualizes resources created by the projects in both programmes, and other related resources from previous JISC and HEA funded activities. As part of a session for the upcoming JISC Online conference, Marianne Sheppard (JISC Infonet) has created a short introductory video to the Design Studio – if you are interested in tracking down resources related to innovative teaching and learning practice then this is a great place to start and the video is a great introduction to the resource.

Webinar on (IMS) Simple Outcomes available online

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Chuck Severance joined us this afternoon to give an update on developments with simple outcomes and LTI.

Simple Outcomes is currently to quote Chuck an “IMS experiment”. It’s not a formal specification, but is part of more lite touch, open development approach that Chuck has been pioneering within IMS. Taking this approach it is possible to develop more robust code, get early vendor buy-in and adoption and (hopefully) speed up the formal specification process. Chuck gave us a demo of grades being passed between Sakai, Wimba and Moodle. A recent demo at Educase included a number of other vendors. A recording of the presentation is available online by following this link and lasts approximately an hour.

Snapshots of standards and technologies in use in the DVLE programme

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The JISC DVLE programme is well underway now, and as part of our support role for the programme we have been discussing with the projects, the different approaches, technologies and standards they are hoping to use. A record of the discussions is stored in our PROD project database. We find these discussions a really useful way for us to get a clear idea of what projects are actually doing – as opposed to what they say they are going to do in a project plan.

PROD is also growing into a substantial record of the technological approaches from a growing number of JISC programmes, almost a collective memory if you like. Over the past few months my colleague David Sherlock has been developing some easier ways to get information out of PROD and provide some visualisations of the data we are recording, you can read more in his blog. So, in relation to the DVLE programme here are a couple of snapshot views of the data we’ve been recording.

Firstly a wordle of the standards and technologies. Quite interesting surface overview, but doesn’t give much detailed information.

DVLE standards and technologies wordle

DVLE standards and technologies wordle

A mindmap showing each project entry, you can click through to moved down from project name to standards/technologies and then comments. I think this provides a useful, digestible summary of the programme. We’d like to develop this more to include links to project home pages, date stamps for comments etc.

And yes, we will be creating a wookie mindmap widget but it was just quicker to use this existing google one for proof of concept.

A manyeyes view of the numbers of each standard/technology. This allows us to show the numbers of projects using each standard/technology. I think this could be increasingly useful to use across programmes to allow us to start building richer pictures of emerging trends.

We will be developing more of these visualisations over the coming months so watch this space and you can of course view the complete entries directly in PROD.</p

What’s in a name?

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Names, they’re funny things aren’t they? Particularly project ones. I’ve never really been great at coming up with project names, or clever acronyms. However remembering what acronyms stand for is almost a prerequisite for anyone who works for CETIS, and has anything to do with JISC :-). The issue of meaningful names/acronyms came up yesterday at the session the CCLiP project ran at the Festival of The Assemblies meeting in Oxford.

Working with 11 partners from the education and cultural sectors, the CCLiP project has been developing a CPD portal using XCRI as a common data standard. The experiences of working with such a cross sector of organisations has led members of the team to be involved in a benefits realisation project, the BR XCRI Knowledge Base. This project is investigating ways to for want of a better word, sell, the benefits of using XCRI. However, one of the major challenges is actually explaining what XCRI is to key (more often than not, non-technical) staff. Of course the obvious answer to some, is that it stands for eXchanging Course Related Information and that pretty much sums it up. But it’s not exactly something that naturally rolls of the tongue and encapsulates its potential uses is it? So, in terms of wider benefits realisation how do you explain the potential of XCRI and encourage wide adoption?

Of course, this is far a from unique problem, particularly in the standards world. They tend not have the most of exciting of names, and of course a lot of actual end users never need to know what they’re called either. However, at this stage in the XCRI life-cycle, there is a need for explanation for both the technical and non-technically minded. And of course that is happening with case-studies etc being developed.

During a lively and good natured discussion participants in the session discussed the possibility of changing the name from XCRI to “opportunity knocks” as way to encapsulate the potential benefits that had been demonstrated to us by the CCLiP team, and create a bit of curiosity and interest. I’m not sure if that would get a very positive clappometer response from certain circles, but I’d be interested in any thoughts you may have.

Challenging times, challenging curriculum(s)

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The fact that we are living in increasingly challenging times is becoming ever more apparent. With the release of the Browne Report on HE funding and student finance, and the results of the Comprehensive Spending Review imminent; we are faced with radical changes to the current models of funding for our Universities. This is raising fundamental questions about the nature of teaching and learning provision, the role and relationship of students to institutions, the role and relationship of institutions and government and how institutions work with industry (in the widest sense of the word). It was in the wake of this complex backdrop, the current JISC funded Curriculum Delivery and Design programmes held a joint programme meeting last week Nottingham. The projects in these programmes are all grappling with issues around effective use of technology to enhance curriculum design and delivery process and provide a range of more flexible, adaptable curricula.

The meeting began with a very timely keynote from Peter Finlay from the QAA. Dispelling some of the current myths around the point and processes involved in QAA audits, Peter illustrated how inter-dependencies of what he described as the “triad” forces (State, Institutions and National Agencies) influence the quality assurance processes. The triad tends to work in a cyclical fashion with the interactions and developments of each stakeholder oscillating between extremes of autonomy within institutions to extremes of regulation from the State. The later most noticeably enforced by QA procedures. Peter highlighted how forward thinking institutions can use the QA process to create and foster institutional cultures of enquiry, based on informed reflection which should allow planned enhancement strategies.

The work of both the curriculum design and delivery programmes is already helping the institutions involved to take this approach as the projects are fundamentally about transforming course delivery and the course design and validation processes. Peter encouraged projects to promote and enhance the work they are doing. The current political context is unpredictable. However, by being proactive, institutions can influence the practice of QA. Peter finished by restating that he felt the programmes, and the work already highlighted within the Design Studio, is of great relevance and a major asset to the wider community.

The rest of the first day was then divided into a number of breakout session centred around some barriers/drivers to institutional change. Notes from each of the sessions will be available from the Circle website later this week. The day culminated with the Great Exhibition Awards Ceremony. Each of the Delivery projects set up their stall (you can get a feel for the stands from the pre event adverts for each project in the Design Studio ). Delegates had time to visit each stand then vote. The two runaway winners were Springboard TV (College of West Anglia) and Integrate (University of Exeter). Both teams thoroughly deserved the thoroughly outrageous chocolate prizes.

The second day started with another timely keynote, this time from Professor Betty Collis. Betty’s talk focused on her experiences learning from a workplace perspective -in particular through some of the key trends from her experiences of working with Shell. Taking us on a journey through some of the stages in the development of task orientated, work-based learning activities, Betty explained how they had developed a culture change from “I learn from myself, through to I learn with my group, to I learning in order to contribute to the learning of others throughout the enterprise.” Quite a leap – even for highly qualified, professionals. Shell had identified that their new graduate staff (even those at PhD level) had little experience of multidisciplinary, high pressured team working situations. By introducing a framework encapsulated by three verbs “ask, share, learn”, Betty and her team fostered the notion of coaching and effective organisational knowledge sharing. The use of a wiki as a common platform for knowledge sharing was fundamental to this process.

Betty encouraged the audience to think about formal education settings in a similar way by designing more cross discipline activities to help develop sharing/coaching and team working skills and to start thinking of e-portfolios not just as individual collation tools but as shared learning resources. She also challenged the programmes definition of design for learning which “refers to the complex processes by which practitioners devise, structure and realise learning for others” and reframe thinking to ask is it ultimately the task of formal education to fosters methods for learners (and teachers) to work with others to become more mature members of a learning organisation?

A number of the breakout sessions again highlighted some of the inroads projects are making in a number of these areas. Student engagement was high on the agenda and Integrate project from the University of Exeter has some excellent examples of students acting as real change agents.

The meeting finished was a panel session, which unsurprisingly focused on many of the issues the Brown report highlighted – particularly around fees and contact hours. Today’s education space is more complicated than ever. At a sectoral level we need to get politicians to understand the complexities, and we be able to provide accurate, update information about courses at a range of levels for a range of stakeholders. We are of course making good inroads with the work of XCRI in particular, but we need to do more and think more about how we can harness the principles of linked data to share information internally and externally. Peter Finlay also highlighted the need for greater clarity about when students are part of the learning partnership and when they are more service based customers i.e. paying for halls of residence as opposed to choosing a course of study. We need to ensure that students are able to commit to a learning partnership, as co-creators of knowledge and not just passive recipients.

We live in challenging times. However, there is a huge amount of experience within these two programmes (and across a range of JISC funded projects and beyond). We need to ensure that the lessons learned about the effective use of technology throughout the curriculum design and delivery process are being used as positive change agents to help us ensure the quality of our sector.

More information about the programme meeting is available from the Circle website and resources from the projects are available from the Design Studio. A timeline of the events twitter activity is also available online.

Cooking up networks, community and learning environments

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I spent the early part of last week at OpenEdTech 2010 in Barcelona. Organised by Eva de Lera from the UOC, this 2 day gathering with 30 international participants, was a truly engaging and thought provoking experience.

Over the years I have seen the cookery book/recipe metaphor used for various purposes. However, Open Tech took it a stage further by actually having us take part in a cooking lesson. Not being the best chef in the world, I was slightly apprehensive beforehand. However, it turns cooking is a great way to create a build a sense of community, breakdown barriers and allow for free, frank and quite often totally unexpected conversations to happen. It’s amazing how much I learned about the Sakai implementation at UC Berkley whilst chopping onions :-)

The theme of the conference was “rethinking the online campus life of the 21st century”. We were challenged to come up with 15 recommendations that could be implemented next week to improve online life for students. The conference blog has a great summary of the activities. As ever, being taken out of one’s environment gives a chance to reflect and share on some of the great work that is being done here in the UK. And it was heartening to see how much interest there was in a range of work that is being funded by JISC including DVLE, Curriculum Delivery and Design and OER. It was also encouraging to see so many people highlighting the need for more open, flexible architectures, which support personalization and integration of formal and informal networks, content and structures.

There was also great positive spirit in the group, which in the current climate is increasingly hard to foster. We had many challenging discussions, but they never slipped into the negative “that’ll never work where I’m from” type. Everyone really wanted to share experiences, processes, content with everyone else. So thanks to Eva and the NMC team for organising and facilitating such a great event. A full report will be produced over the coming months, but you can read/see more at the conference website.

Engaging in standards development, lowering entry barriers

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I was hoping to live blog the the CETIS Future of Interoperability Standards (FIS) event last Friday, however a combination of the mainly group discussion focus of the day and more importantly lack of stable internet access thwarted that plan. So I’m now going to try and come to a more considered view of the day.

The second in a series, the focus of this event was on “technical approaches to creating standards: how should we model and document standards.” As with the initial event held in January this year, position papers were sought prior to the meeting. In total 12 were received covering most interested parties from developers to commercial companies.

In the morning we split into groups to discuss a number of common areas identified from the position papers. I was in the (small and select) group interested in requirements gathering. Most of the position papers did reflect that there there are recognised issues in setting the scale/scope of any specification/standard. And I think that most of the 30 or so people in the room recognised the issues around general engagement in the development process – which starts with requirements gathering.

One of the key issues (particularly in relation to educational technology standards, though I’m sure it is the same in other domains) is the tension between market forces and user needs. There is always a tension between the stability of a standard and its implementation/adoption. Often vendors don’t want to try anything new until it is stable, which can of course substantially delay the release and adoption of a specification/standard within a sector. If the big boys aren’t playing then often no-one else will. So, are (should) standards be about developing markets or about driving innovation? Is it possible to mitigate the risks involved in developing something new in unstable environments?

Some of the potential solutions we discussed were around a changing mindset to allow standards be more disposal, to have shorter release little and often approaches with more integrated feedback. We also discussed the possibility of some modelling some of the dependencies the standards processes and vendor development cycles – would that allow us some greater insight into more effective alignment?

However engagement with the standards development process is challenging. One of the suggestions that came from the “implementability” group that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit was that maybe some training around standards engagement is needed.
From personal experience I know going to spec development meetings can be initially quite intimidating. Getting your head around the language, the “rules” (written and unwritten), the personalities, the politics, all takes time. All the cliches around clubs/cliques are present. So maybe if people were better informed, some of the basics were covered in some kind of way, more people would be inclined to get involved and bring newer ideas with them.

I wouldn’t expect an influx of interest, this is always going to be a niche area attracting a certain type of geek ;-) Traditionally at CETIS it’s our staff who go to various standards/spec meetings then report back and forth between our communities and various bodies. But maybe there is something that we could help to develop some more ways to lower the barriers to effective engagement with standards bodies for anyone who was interested in being involved.

The FIS series are a set in the right direction to surface a range of issues around the standards development space, however the people in the room on Friday were all pretty experienced in the standards game – so maybe we need to target the layer below (if that exists). We at CETIS obviously have links to the JISC community, but this is something that should extend beyond that (imho). If you have any thoughts I’d really like to hear them.

The full set of position papers, notes from each of the discussion sessions from the meeting are available from the CETIS website.

Getting down to the business of building distributed virtual learning environments

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Over the past few years we have been following and developing the notion of distributed learning environments. This culminated earlier this year with the publication of the CETIS briefing paper on Distributed Learning Environments and the JISC DVLE programme.

Yesterday all eight of the funded projects made their way (well, actually the level of rain made it feel a bit like swimming) to Bolton for their first meet-up. The programme is divided into two strands, with the first comprising of three projects of six months duration, finishing in December this year. Glasgow Metropolitan College and Glasgow University and concentrating development of a specific widget/VLE plug-in each. Teesside University is taking a more user centric approach by running a number of workshops and then developing widgets from ideas that emerge from them. The other strand is made up of the remaining five projects (MMU, University of Reading, the Open University, University of Edinburgh and Southampton University). These projects are funded for a year, and are investigating the larger issues of integrating more flexible and interoperable approaches to institutional learning environments. More information about the projects is available from the JISC website.

The main technologies in use across the programme are W3C widgets (mainly through using Apache Wookie incubating), Open Social and IMS LTI and Basic LTI and their new Basic Outcomes. To help bring everyone up to speed on each of these a large part of the morning was given our to presentations on each. Ross Gardler (OSS Watch) did the honours for Open Social, Scott Wilson (CETIS) for Wookie and Wilbert Kraan (CETIS) for IMS. Copies of the presentations will be available via the CETIS programme support page over the next day or so. These set the scene for a round of breakout discussions. Mark Stubbs has already blogged about some of the specific security/ authentication/wookie issues the W2C project is grabbling with.

I sat in on the Open Social group where the security issue also came up. Ross argued quite strongly that the technical issues around security have to a large extend been solved outside the education sector and we just need to trust the technology. However, the group did agree that there were cultural issues with education (particularly HE) around knowledge and understanding of identity and authentication which needed to be broken down. We also discussed the possibilities of using open social in a portfolio context. The University of Reading are looking to extend the functionality and interoperability of their in-house developed portfolio tool. The group discussing the IMS options spent quite a bit of time musing over the time/cost implications of developing full LTI integrations over using Basic LTI and the limitations of both – from the wider when will the spec be finalised issue to smaller I can build it but how long will it last, and in the long run does that actually matter?

In the afternoon we had more discussion particularly around wookie implementation. One concern around wookie for a number of projects was its sustainability. As with any (relatively) new technology, sustainability of external systems is a key concern for anyone looking to deploy it in a significant context. However, as Ross pointed out more than once, the fact that wookie in now in part of the Apache foundation, the chances of sustainability are greatly increased. The University of Bolton are also committed to its development and again as with anything, the more use it gets the stronger it becomes.

Along side the more technical discussion there was a concurrent discussion around user-engagement. As explained earlier the Teesside project is very much focussed on gathering real user needs and has designed face to face work shops (adapting templates creating by the RLO CETL and the Sharing the Load project). We discussed many approaches to “paper design” including having print outs of various mobile devices to remind people of the actually size of the finished app/widget. The group all agreed that scope creep, nicely illustrated by Scott Wilson from some recent workshop experience where they found delegates trying to design a whole VLE instead of a specific “thing”, was something that teams needed to be mindful of.

W2C is taking a different approach towards user engagement. They are using an external company to build their first official iphone app (due out sometime next week), followed later in the year by blackberry, android and widget versions. The team are going to use this initial app with students and staff to get feedback and inform future developments. The cost of external development they feel is offset by time savings for the team and gives them something tangible to test with. There also seemed to be a general consensus that actually seeing “the app for that” was incredibly powerful in terms of user engagement – particularly for VCs :-)

There is a great deal of synergy between the projects and I hope that yesterday provided an opportunity to forge stronger relationships across the programme and beyond. It looks like there will be a number of apps/widgets to share with the community by the end of the year.

CETIS is providing support to the programme and we will be organising a number of open meetings over the next year for other to engage with the projects. So watch the space for more updates and information and if you are involved with similar work, please let us know.