Category Archives: innovation

Bridging the tool development gap

Posted on by

A post this morning on the WebPA discussion list raised an issue that I’ve long felt has a negative impact on the uptake of JISC project outputs: how to support the use of tools produced by JISC projects in an institutional environment that is not interested in supporting them.

WebPA is a great project success story, being adopted by a number of institutions and winning a Bronze Award at the 2008 IMS Learning Impact awards.  It provides an innovative approach to peer assessment evaluation, allowing individual marks for each participant in a piece of group work.  The system generated a lot of interest when they presented at a CETIS event last year.

The poster has identified WebPA as a possible tool to support his teaching, but says:

Unfortunately there is little if any chance of the application ever being hosted on my University servers, I won’t even waste my time trying to get this on their radar […] I should say that while I am not completely IT illiterate I am not going to install the application myself since this is well beyond my personal skill level.

This highlights what I feel is a gap in the project lifecycle: bridging the support gap between the production of useable tools and enabling those outputs to be used in real educational contexts.  Although some lecturers have a high level of technical confidence and competence, this absolutely cannot be expected for the vast majority, and there seems to be a lack of support for those who are keen to use these innovative tools but lack the confidence or expertise to do so.  How do we encourage institutions to be willing to broaden their horizons and support those lecturers who wish to use what they feel are the best tools for their teaching practice?  The poster references commercial companies which host open source systems such as Moodle, but what about newer systems that lack the wide uptake that make providing support and hosting services commercially attractive?

So who should be responsible for supporting projects after the end of their formal funding period, and supporting lecturers and institutions in using these tools?  We’ve addressed this issue before in relation to supporting emerging developer communities in an open source model, but what about tools that are ready for use in actual teaching practice?

VIEWS of the future

Posted on by

Yesterday I attended the first VIrtual Education Worlds Scotland (VIEWS) Forum meeting, hosted by the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland South and East and facilitated by the irrepressible Kenji Lamb from the JISC RSC Scotland N&E.  There were about fifteen of us in total, from a wide range of institutions and organisations, with developers, educators, support services and the simply curious all represented.

I really enjoyed this event, and particularly welcomed the conscious decision of the organisers to focus on virtual worlds other than just Second Life, with demonstrations of Open Sim and Metaplace featuring on the agenda.  The discussion sessions covered a range of issues facing educators and developers trying to work with virtual worlds, with a few topics in particular seeming to stand out:

  • Lack of support from institutional IT departments for VW-related activities, even to the point of refusing to unblock the ports necessary to actually run them.  Here at Strathclyde, for example, we’re in the fortunate position that Second Life runs fine on the wired network, but (as we found at January’s joint event with Eduserv) the ports necessary for voice to run are still blocked.  Some institutions apparently blame JISC/Janet policies for this, but the inconsistent application of these supposed policies suggests that there might be other reasons for this…
  • Monitoring and evaluation of in-world activities particuarly for the purpose of summative assessment, and tie-in to other systems such as BlackBoard and Moodle to support this and other educational and administrative functions.
  • The relatively steep learning curve of SL in particular, especially when contrasted with the high level of useability of alternatives such as Metaplace and commerical games.
  • Age-related issues.  SL is currently restricted to over-18s only, as is Metaplace, at least during its beta phase.  This is a problem nationally for FE, and a significant issue for Scottish HE given the number of students entering university after their Highers at age 17 rather than at 18 after Sixth Year as is more common elsewhere.  Open Sim is an obvious solution for this, but the relative obscurity of it and other VWs compared with SL mean that it’s often not an obvious answer for people who are just begining their exploration of how VWs can be used in education.  There’s a lot of talk at the moment about Linden Labs merging the adult and teen SL grids which may eventually overcome this, but in the short term it can place apparently insurmountable barriers to adoption.
  • Even the basic processes of registering and selecting an avatar can be problematic.  Registration for multiple SL accounts from a single location requires advance ‘whitelisting’ of the IP range with Linden Labs, updated every six months, to prevent blocking after just a handful of accounts have been created.  Students can be asked to create their account from home in advance of the session, but this has its own problems: students may not have access to a computer capable of running SL, may not get around to doing so, and may require the support of an experienced user that can be provided in a lab session but not at home (no matter how good the documentation prepared for the class may be).  Third-party registration sites can allow mass registrations, but pre-made accounts don’t allow students to select their own avatars which may reduce engagement and identification and therefore the effectiveness of using VWs in the first place.

All present agreed that the RSCs should lead support of the VIEWS Forum, at least in these early stages.  Plans for the future of the Forum include events showcasing other alternatives to SL, a shared space for discussion and knowledge exchange, and the development of a training package for staff and students including items such as a getting started guide, etc.

So what can CETIS do to support this work?  Should it, even?  To me there’s no doubt that this is an area with which we need to engage, but I’m not sure what exactly we can do to meet the needs of our communities while allowing this new and exciting field to develop and mature.  So please, let us know!  Either here, on Twitter, or by getting in touch offline, I’m really keen to know what we can do to help :)

A few more places available for our MUVEs event

Posted on by

Due to the level of interest in our forthcoming joint event with Eduserv, Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning, we’ve managed to make a few more places available.  If you’d like to attend, please make sure you register as soon as possible to secure your place!

Update: This is event is now fully booked.  We’ll be maintaining a reserve list in case any places become available; if you’d like to be added to this list please contact Sheila via the event link above.  If you’ve registered and now find that you’re unable to attend, please let us know so that we can make your place available to someone else.  Thanks!

Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning

Posted on by

That’s the title of a joint JISC CETIS and Eduserv event we’re running on Friday 16 January here at the University of Strathclyde, and it’s an event I’m looking forward to enormously.  If you fancy coming along I’d advise you to register as soon as possible, as places are already filling up rapidly and if you’re not on the list you ain’t getting in.

Although there is an understandable emphasis on Second Life, the event will look beyond that particular environment to consider some of the issues and barriers to the use of virtual worlds in general in education.  It should be a hugely interesting and valuable event.

BlackBoard investigate Second Life integration

Posted on by

BlackBoard have awarded a $25,000 Greenhouse Grant for Virtual Worlds to Ball State University to ‘to foster and promote the integration of virtual worlds into everyday teaching and learning’.  The work will explore a range of pedagogic and administrative issues (you’ll need to scroll down a bit to the right section) around linking BlackBoard with Second Life, some of which could have quite far-reaching outcomes for the use of virtual worlds in education. 

Security issues are explicitly addressed, as is the validated association of avatar names with student names for the use of assessment management and enterprise systems.  The development of a best practice model for instructional design within virtual environments could help produce structured and carefully directed learning activities with tight control over locations and sequencing of activities that may help overcome the aimlessness that students who don’t engage with SL complain about.  Although the award will directly fund development for BSU’s cinema arts course, outcomes will be made available to the BlackBoard community as a whole. 

There’s likely to be some way to go before this work can compete with Sloodle‘s achievements in linking Moodle with SL, but it does open up the possibility of secure and suitably controlled use of SL for institutions tied in to BlackBoard.

Thanks to Daniel Livingstone on the Virtualworlds JISCMail list for pointing out this award.

Happy median

Posted on by

I don’t know if it’s just that I’m becoming more aware of these things, or if new Web 2.0 sites and services really are emerging at an exponential rate at the moment, but I regularly find myself following the rush to the latest toy application to try it out, spending a little while playing with testing it, then never going back again.  One exciting exception to this, however, is Social|Median, a Digg-like social news network that launched its open beta last Thursday to an impressively positive reception.

I really like Social|Median.  I spent far too much of Thursday finding my way around the site, identifying the newsmakers and networks I wanted to engage with and wandering off across the internet in pursuit of fascinating new content.  By Friday morning, the site had become part of my daily routine: log into email, check Twitter, open SM.  Yes, that quickly.

There are a few reasons why I’m quite so taken with the site.  Partly it’s the interface, which is nicely intuitive to use and which, more than other such aggregator services I’ve used, provides you with enough of an advance snippet from the stories clipped by users to know whether you want to follow them further.  The really crucial element, however, is the quality of the content that people are clipping (the SM equivalent of digging or stumbling upon), aided by the fact that some of the key names in social media, the likes of Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, have engaged with the service, bringing their stamp of approval and quality content to the service as well as becoming the news themselves. 

One thing I’ve noticed since I started using SM is that I’m less interested in Twitter.  I don’t know if it’s just coincidental, some random application ennui that might just be a passing phase, or if there’s a connection with the rise of SM; I rather suspect the latter.  Recently I’ve been using Twitter less as a social tool and more as a source of content, following twitterers who post interesting links and opinions rather than announcing the local weather or that they’ve broken a nail.  The awkwardness of retrieving older tweets and the 140 character limit, which made it such a fun and exciting service in the past, simply doesn’t lend itself to such use, particularly when combined with my haphazard approach to delicious tagging interesting material I find.  Social|Median fulfills this need so effectively that at the moment I’m barely logging in to Twitter.  Criticising a service for being poor at a function it was never really designed for may be more than a little unfair, but I guess the point of a lot of these services is precisely that they are what their users want to make of them, and if we’re bored with them, we can either find new uses or move on.

Mouse over

Posted on by

Now this is just cool.  CamSoft is a software product that allows you to control your computer with, well, anything.  It uses a basic webcam to identify and lock onto your chosen object – examples from the video include empty soft drink bottles, maracas, even fingertips – and relate them to controls and actions within your programme.  The precision and sensitivity of control suggested by the video even in its current pre-release state is seriously impressive, particularly in the first person shooter, and frankly, it’s impossible to stop imagining the potential of this.  This could have some really exciting applications in educational simulations, could offer some creative accessibility options, and just looks like being thoroughly good fun, and best of all, they’ve promised it will always be free.  You can sign up for the beta here.

Will Twitter for money

Posted on by

I was more than a bit bemused to stumble upon this post discussing Andrew Baron‘s attempt to sell his Twitter account ‘and followers’ on eBay.  Although Baron is still the proud owner of his account after ending the auction early (now that wouldn’t have been a publicity stunt, would it?), bidding had reached a tidy $465 as Boyd was writing.  He also inspired one innovative entrepreneur to apparently net himself a similarly neat $375 by selling his phone number on the auction site.  If only it had been 867-5309, perhaps Baron would have bought it and the circle of Web 2.0 life would have been complete…

This does raise some interesting questions though.  As Boyd says, it seems more like a playful thought experiment than something that ‘shed[s] any light on the issues of identity and reputation in any real world fashion’, but some commenters on his post seem genuinely offended by the notion that ‘followers’ can be sold, likening it to selling your friends’ email addresses to the highest bidding spam advertiser.  Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Baron’s comment that Twitter ‘is not the place to get personal… networks are different’, and to be honest I feel pretty guilt-free about unfollowing people whose tweets I decide (link may offend) I don’t want to read. 

This experiment also highlights the implications of relationships underlying the debated issue of Twitter reciprocation etiquette (or twitiquette – I guess someone had to do it).  Baron appears to follow almost all of his over 2,300 followers, while Boyd has a thousand more followers but follows less than 700.  Baron is a performer perhaps relating to his followers as to an audience, whereas the majority of Boyd’s updates are @comments that are part of a series of dialogues with individuals.  Just as the thoughtful and extremely persuasive comments to my post on Twittering at conferences illustrate, there are as many different ways of using and relating to such technologies as there are people to use and relate to them. 

virtuALBA student showcase

Posted on by

I dropped in to the virtuALBA exhibition a couple of weeks ago to view projects created by some of Daniel Livingstone‘s students studying collaborative virtual environments at the University of the West of Scotland.  The projects explored various aspects of Scottish achievements in technology and sport, as well as some distinctive Scottish wildlife (of the non-human variety).

Displays on Scottish inventors were set up in a real-world style exhibition hall:

Although most of the exhibits replicated real life displays, one that particularly stood out as taking advantage of the opportunities offered by SL was the display on Charles McIntosh, which incorporated a mannequin in a raincoat being rained on by their own personal indoor climate (unfortunately my screenshot really doesn’t do it justice):

Outside the main exhibition hall, a virtual Hampden included an interactive game and displays of sporting achievements:

Various beasts, real (wildcats, cattle, seals) and debatable (haggi and the Loch Ness Monster) completed the exhibition, with a particularly skillfully built pair of peregrine falcons and the unofficial CETIS mascot, badgers (don’t ask…):

It was good to see that a number of people had turned out to visit the exhibition and discuss the students’ work with them.  The exhibition will be available at least for a few more days, and is well worth a visit.

Twitter ye not

Posted on by

Brian Kelly raises the delicate issue of conference wifi etiquette by highlighting complaints made to a live blogger at a recent event with respect to his ‘distracting‘ typing. Kelly supports the use of wifi and laptops, but for ‘purposes relevant to the session’ without suggesting how participants might be policed to ensure that their laptop use is indeed for relevant purposes (or who defines what is ‘relevant’). The notion of strutting, Sally Bowles-like around the conference venue flicking off switches with a riding crop whenever inappropriate use is discovered has a rather alarming appeal, but might not be the best approach to managing the issue.

There’s definitely been a signficant increase in laptop use at events in the time since I joined CETIS, although inevitably there was always a core of laptop users tapping away even in the earliest days. Wifi provision is a significant issue when considering venues, particularly for our annual conference, and people often seem disappointed, or even a bit nonplussed, when we can’t provide it. But why do we set so much store by it? Is that email really so urgent? Will your IRC channel collapse without you there? However did we network before CrowdStatus?

Kelly, Clow and those they cite comment on the value of live blogging, and the invaluable service it provides to people who can’t be at an event. But does it? I’ve followed, and thoroughly enjoyed, Twitter updates on events, but more for the subjective, qualitative impression they give of the event rather than for their information content. Live blogs are useful narratives, but out of context from the event they describe and lacking reflection in the light of the day as a whole and subsequent consideration, how much value do they actually provide beyond slidecasts and podcasts? If everyone’s live blogging and twittering to the world, who’s going to read the blogs – and who’s going to listen to the speakers?

It’s kind of ironic that I learned about Kelly’s post in the backchannel of this year’s Eduserv Foundation Symposium, as I found the live chat system wildly distracting itself. It didn’t help that, owing to a combination of non-Eduserv related factors, I could barely hear what was being said in the live streaming, but I found the activity in the backchannel so ‘loud’ that it completely drowned out what the speakers were trying to say. I’ve found this in the past in – of all things – training webinars where there were no sound problems at all, just a chatbox buzzing with babble and an increasingly demoralised sounding speaker struggling in vain to make his points. Yes, there can be useful information there – such as the alert to Kelly’s post – but it can itself be buried under the rest of the chatter.

Focusing on the technology, however, diverts attention away from the real issue, which is perceptions of courtesy towards presenters and delegates. Only a few people feel it’s appropriate to speak to each other during presentations (and even Paddington’s hardest stare won’t stop the truly dedicated disrupter), yet many people seem to feel that the same standards don’t apply to unspoken communications. Is this because there’s something inherent to these technologies that make their use somehow acceptable, or just because they’re so new that accepted standards of behaviour around their use simply haven’t emerged yet?