Online Educa Berlin

Guest post authored by David Kernohan

At about the size of one of our Bristol meeting rooms, the joint JISC-SURF stand at Online Educa was by far the biggest and most comfortable, and by any reckoning the busiest, stand in the exhibition space. Far from my plans of taking in some of the jucier-looking sessions, I found myself answering all kinds of queries on JISC and eLearning... from interested companies, counterparts from all over europe, the occasional UK academic stopping in to say hello...

From what I'd heard previously I was not expecting such a response. Certainly if you'd have told me that I'd be being interviewed for a swedish video blog (http://swedishlearningspace.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/the-future-of-digital-learning/ - wish I'd had more than 30s warning!), fielding questions on the limitations of LEAP (whilst frantically trying to catch Wilbert's attention), getting people excited about our lifelong learning work, explaining JORUM to content creation companies and having UK academics come up to me, shame-faced, to confess that they really don't like Second Life all that much... then, well, I would have been a lot more worried! But it was fun getting people interested in, and engaging with all the many amazing things that JISC and SURF do.

The sessions, when I managed to get to them, were distinctly underwhelming. Everything seemed to start right from basics... most of a session on using Web 2.0 in lifelong learning was taken up by explaining what blogs and wikis was, the sessions on the "future of digital learning" came over like the JISC strategic plan before last. Others seemed to agree, and JISC will shortly be publishing a podcast interview with the organiser of the conference which will hopefully answer these questions and concerns

There were some interesting people about, I had a lovely chat with euroPACE (http://www.europace.org) who are a non-profit network based in Belgium with the aim of linking between educational technology activities across Europe, making it easier to find people who are doing (or have already done) stuff others may be struggling with. I'm sure we could benefit from engaging further - I was impressed with what they told me about the way institutions in France are grouped regionally and thematically to develop learning content as communities in collaboration.

Under the category of "other cool stuff" comes the OLPC (one laptop per child) project - I saw a working production model of the laptop and it is lovely. Small, cheap, can be powered by a hand-crank! It is intended for use in developing countries but I could see many educational establishments being very interested in making use of it around the world. It runs a linux-based os which also makes me cheer in a faintly fanboy-ish fashion.

Finally, videopodcasting appeared to be a major theme. One quick and easy resource I was made aware of is Talking Letters (http://www.talkingletters.com) which allows you to very simply record an annotated slide presentation with live video and audio, apparently for free. An option for all those presentations we need to give...

JISC-CETIS conference, 20-21 Nov 2007

I'm sure there will be lots of posts written about this event elsewhere, and far better than I will be able to write, so instead of an overview of the conference as a whole (which in general I thought was pretty good - particularly in terms of networking) I will just list here some of the things I will be taking away from the event:

• sharing privacy and trust in our networked world report. (OCLC)
• difficulty of deploying new technologies is a real issue - institutions not enabling admin rights etc.
• the concept of a 'digital will' - i.e. a record of all the digital content you have created & how to access it (in admin terms) to pass on to trusted individuals should anything happen to you.
• enabling choice (for students - and i think tutors too) in terms of new technology

There was a lot of other stuff covered in the conference which whilst not new things for me to take away (as the list above) do warrant mentioning as it is an indicator of the interest that is still very strong in these areas:

• personalisation
• user needs
• user expectations
• ...and lots of discussion around how or even if institutions should be tackling these issues.

OpenID, London - 8 Nov 2007

Online identity for the social network generation of learners and researchers


This was yet another popular and oversubscribed event run by eduserve. It aimed to ask questions like: What are the fundamental changes taking place in our educational landscape? How ready are institutions to deal with those changes? What role do OpenID and related technologies have to play in our institutional and external services in the future? What are the issues, challenges and potential pitfalls in their use?

The primary aims of the meeting were to:
* raise awareness (why is OpenID of interest?);
* discuss issues (what are the problems with OpenID?, how can it be implemented?);
* help to influence practice and inform policy at both institutional and national levels.

This turned out to be a very interesting and stimulating event, even though some of the technical discussion went over my head a bit. Some of the key themes included:

• Use of the web is for many a lifelong activity, crossing all aspects of their lives - education, social, work.
• The need for different (multiple identities) to cope with this
• OpenID - trust & business models.

A really good overview of the event can be found on Scott's blog - EduServ OpenID event


Useful url(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID, http://openid.net, https://www.myopenid.com/

Conference url: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/EduservCETIS_20Sep2007
Venue: The Hatton, London
Wireless: Reasonable
Power access: Poor but possible

Joint Eduserv/JISC CETIS Second Life in Education Meeting - 20 Sept 07

This event was intended primarily to showcase the four Second Life (SL) project’s that Eduserv have awarded their annual research grant to. The interest shown in this meeting, and the speed at which it was completely fully booked, just goes to show the level of interest in this area at the moment - and this seems to be growing.

I would have liked to post a screenshot of Heather Makira (me) inside SL whilst at this RL conference to accompany this blog post, but as I was unable to log in to SL this just was not possible. The irony of the inability for most delegates to log into SL whilst at the conference due to firewall issues was not lost on the conference organisers – but fortunately the speakers (through some creative use of cables) were able to connect to SL and so able provide in-world demonstrations of what they were up to.

In addition to the presentations from the projects there were also presentations from Andy Powell (Eduserve) and our very own Lawrie Phipps. Andy used his extensive collection of SL T-shirts as the basis for his presentation (you’ll have to view the presentation to see what I mean) - if only I could script in SL, I'd like to do my slides on an SL t-shirt! Lawrie gave an overview of JISC’s activities within SL (which is not a lot!). JISC is doing very little indeed in SL. There is the emerge island for Lawries user innovation projects and some of the JISC Regional Centres have set up spaces in SL too, but that is about it so far.

The day ended with a lively debate on where we are with SL and education led by Paul Hollins. Overall this was a really interesting day - I made some new SL friends, met one of my SL friends in person for the first time (which was great) and it has inspired me to revisit priorities I had previously identified around virtual/immersive worlds.

Conference url: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/EduservCETIS_20Sep2007
Venue: London Knowledge Lab
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Poor but possible

Serious Virtual Worlds, Coventry - 14 Sept 07

I only attended the second day of this two day conference - due to a mixture of other commitments, the relatively high cost of the event and the strong commercial focus (in contrast I will be going to a SL event run by CETIS and Eduserve next week in London which is completely educationally focussed and is FREE!). Although there were some excellent and extremely interesting presentations, I don't regret only attending one of the days as I don't think that I would have got the additional value needed to reflect the increased cost.

Once at the event, I found out that it was being streamed, free of charge, into SL - had I known this beforehand I would have tried to attend at least some of the presentations on the first day 'in world' - if not both days! However, there was a downside to this for SL delegates, in that they could only see the speakers, not their presentations, which was a shame. Andy Powell blogged about this and compiled a video of the experience which is worth a look (I even have a cameo at one point as I did visit the conference in-world as well as being present in RL).

Some of the presentations that I did get to see on the second day were not quite what I expected - but were interesting never-the-less. The keynote, Digital Earth and Virtual Worlds, looked at how serious games and virtual worlds can be exploited to have a positive impact on global issues especially climate (in terms of reducing our combined carbon footprint etc.). Well worth a look. Prof Lizbeth Goodman then gave another thought provoking presentation on what she and her team had been able to do with games and virtual worlds that are having real and positive impacts on the children and parents of children with terminal illnesses. Some amazing stuff.

The other presentations Serious Medical Uses of VW, Virtual Disaster Management, were much more the kind of thing that I was expecting and provided examples of the current and cutting edge developments in terms of photo-realism and how serious games were being used as educating tools within medicine and disaster management - in fact there seems to be quite a lot about modelling terrorist attacks and how different agencies (medical, military) react to them and getting them to improve what they do by immersing the students in what were (in some cases) extremely realistic virtual simulations.


Conference url: http://www.seriousvirtualworlds.net/index.php
Venue: Coventry TechnoCentre
Wireless: Excellent
Power access: Very poor (unfortunately)

Programme Office Liaison Meeting - 12 Sept 07

The main points of interest from this meeting was the decisions made around the progress report template and the next template to be reviewed.

Progress report template(s)
Two progress report templates have been reviewed by the Programme Office. It has been agreed that both templates (with a few minor alterations to ensure heading consistency and JISC branding) would be made available from the JISC website, to replace the current template available to projects. The longer one was submitted by me (on behalf of the eLearning team) and the second, much shorter one, by James (on behalf of the eResearch Team). It was agreed by the group that Programme Managers could use their judgement on which template they use with projects - with the suggestion that projects being asked for less frequent progress updates should use the longer template and those being asked for more frequent reports should be given the shorter one to use for most reporting periods, possibly using the longer one on an annual basis to capture additional information.

Note: It was confirmed that it is not expected that progress reports will be uploaded to JISC project websites. This would be at the discretion of the Programme Manager concerned and if published, should be checked by the Programme Manager for any sensitive data that needs to be removed before being made public.

Next template review
It was agreed by the group that the next template to be reviewed, at the request of me/eLearning team, would be the Final and Completion Reports. Richard McK said that Policy would need to be consulted on any changes to these, but that he was happy for a revised template to be put forward by the eLearning team, which could then be reviewed by the wider Programme Office Liaison Group and Policy.

Action: HW to pull together another small working group from the eLearning Team to work on developing updated Final and Completion Report templates.

Toolkits & Demonstrators Greatest Hits Movie - progress so far

Wilbert Kraan has released the first beta version of the Toolkits & Demonstrators Greatest Hits CD (now movie) which so far includes demonstrations of the R2Q2 and the MINTED projects. The quality of the movie is variable, especially in terms of sound, but it gives a useful insight into the final end product. What is not yet available is a simple lists of the 'Greatest Hits' projects, but I'm sure that this will be following very soon!
To view the first prototype, go here: http://ovod.net/wilbert/sundry/GreatestHits2.mov

The movie is set up to be modular, so that in the finished version, individual project demonstrations can be selected and viewed. The movie definitely needs a better ending (!) but this IS being worked on as we speak... suggestions on a postcard are welcome though ;-)

A "snapshot" of UK higher and further education developments in SL

A study by John Kirriemuir entitled July 2007 "snapshot" of UK HE and FE developments in SL is now available on the Eduserv Foundation Web site at: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/sl/uksnapshot072007
This is an interesting read, and is due to be updated later on in the year.

As John notes in the conclusion:

This report shows that a growing number of UK academic institutions, departments and groups are at different stages of SL development. It is, perhaps, presumptuous to conclude that UK Higher Education has reached a "tipping point" in terms of using and developing facilities in SL. However, there has been a considerable increase in activity between March and July 2007, marked by the beginning and end of this survey. The appendix lists over 40 UK Universities and Colleges that have a building, land or island on the grid, many appearing in the last few weeks and not yet open for public visiting while they are being developed.

While some institutions are openly and actively developing in SL, others are doing so less publicly, and others still are either watching developments before making a decision, or being slowed down by institutional bureaucracy. Support services for Higher and Further Education are noting a high level of consideration.

Several institutions are interested in SL from the income stream perspectives of marketing (future students) and alumni (previous students). It will be interesting to observe how these different perspectives – marketing, teaching and learning – drive institutions’ developments on the grid. One point that came through very strongly in this survey was that many academics are developing in SL with a view to providing facilities for the 2007-2008 academic year. The end of the 2007-08 academic year, therefore, should provide an opportunity to take stock
of these developments and discover how widespread and “mature” they are. At that point, there should be sufficient qualitative and quantitative data to provide a more considered analysis of the effectiveness or usefulness of SL in the provision of learning services within UK education.

Accessibility SIG Meeting - 24 July 07

I found this SIG meeting a bit of a mixed bag. The tour of the “Student Development and Enablement Centre” was extremely interesting. It gave some practical insights into putting such a centre together – especially in terms of financial viability and the siting of the centre - outside of the library/learning centre, and within (and staffed by) the School of Applied Sciences. These staff are both conversant with the technology available in the suite, and are all qualified in the area of Applied Sciences so can not only advise students how to use the various tools available, they can also advise if the student is attempting to use the right tool for the work in hand. This is a relatively new development and will only really be ‘marketed’ fully for the first time next term. It is only a small space, but it has a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable team supporting it, so it will be interesting to see how this progresses.

I also found the presentation from the PebblePad team enjoyable and it was great to see a live demo of an accessibility avatar (a first for me!). However, and it might only be me, I did not find the remaining presentations as useful. This was particularly a shame for the Peepo presentation as Jonathan was certainly very inspired and driven, and I genuinely think he had some very useful thoughts in there somewhere, but I found his train of thought very difficult to follow and I’m fairly sure I didn’t quite take away what he was probably hoping/intending for me to take away.

Working with JAWS and PebblePad - Shane Sutherland and Emelye Evans, University of Wolverhampton
Interesting presentation that provided a demonstration of the work that they have been doing in making their product (PebblePad) accessible. Began by going through their original journey in trying to make PebblePad (built in flash 7.0) work with the JAWS screen reader. Although Flash 7.0 does include some accessibility options (i.e. ability to: make text bigger, making lines more spaced and to change text type) they still had lots of problems with getting the screen reader to work with PebblePad as Flash didn’t tend to keep up with the updates to JAWS. This was found to be a particular issue where forms were concerned, as they (forms) are used extensively by PebblePad.

These issues led to the investigation in using an Avatar providing text to speech as part of the accessibility solution for PebblePad. Originally looked into purchasing an avatar to use, but this turned out to be prohibitively expensive so instead decided to develop their own (called Mia). Working alongside the RNCB (as TechDis will not provide advice to commercial companies) they have been using a blind tester who has now tested several iterations of the Mia Avatar, resulting in a number of changes. They are hoping for a wider rollout of testing to more users (via the RNCB) for the next version.

Emelye then gave an impressive demonstration of Mia, showing how it (she) worked and giving a good insight into the benefits (and some of the drawbacks) of the Avatar currently in devlopment. I found the voice speed a little fast to keep up with sometimes, but Mia was on the setting preferred by their blind tester, so I think that their choice pulls rank over mine! And in any case, the speed and pitch of the Avatar voice is in full control of the user and is not fixed.

Generally the (more-experienced-than-me-in-these-issues) audience were impressed by what they had achieved, and a number of them had a good understanding of the amount of code/work required to get the avatar to do what appeared to be relatively simple things. However, they did point out a couple of key issues, such as importing text into PebblePad for a user with screen reader needs would be difficult, as Mia only works with PebblePad and requires software such as JAWS to be switched off (otherwise JAWS had a nasty habit of ‘taking over’). For a user to import from Word they would need to be using some other form of software to grab it. In addition, the issue of catering for other types of accessibility issues (not just sight) was highlighted and various other research/contacts were suggested. Emelye and Shane very much seemed to take the comments received on board and I think it will be interesting to see how this solution develops.

A link to the presentation will be released shortly by the PebblePad team, and I will link to it here when it is available.

EU4All project – Andy Heath and Chris Douce, OU
The first part of this presentation gave an overview of accessibility issues and accessibility projects/developments currently underway in the OU. However, as Andy started the presentation with a much more general ‘why-accessibility-is-important’ message (which seemed a bit odd to me given that the audience (as far as I am aware) was full of people who are already converted to this point of view given the nature of the SIG) he was not able to fully cover the update and the end was extremely rushed. For those interested, a copy of the full set of slides will be made available shortly, and I will link to them in this post.

The second part of the presentation was provided by Chris Douce and focused on their involvement with the EU4All project – my notes from which can be found below – however, I do note that having had a look at the EU4All site, it is clear that the OU are part of a much bigger project – this was not made clear during the presentation, so I am not sure how much of what is listed below is directly the responsibility of the OU team involved and how much will be undertaken by the other partners listed on the EU4All site.

Presentation notes:
The project aims to develop a flexible open standards based architecture of services to support lifelong learning within higher education institutions for all people, including those with special needs.

OU has more than 10k students with disabilities currently enrolled on courses.

Key points of project:
o Embedding accessibility into learning environments
o Investigating personalisation of user experience
o Investigating user needs provision processes
o Development and exploration of international standards
o Creation of open service oriented architecture (soa) / eFramework

They are only in the early stages of the project at the moment – but it is good to see that the implementation of eFramework seems integral to the project (possible hook-up for Susan K?)

As part of the project they will be looking to create the following guidelines:
o Pedagogical guidelines
o Psychological guidelines

Other reports produced by the project will look at
o Issues of accessibility in ePortfolios
o Best practices in online assessment

Aims to
o Create an open, standard-based architecture of services
o Contribute to e-learning body of knowledge’
o Contribute to international learning technology standards
o Contribute to policy development in Europe

www.open.ac.uk/iet and http://www.eu4all-project.eu/


Putting the User at the Heart of the W3C Process - Jonathan Chetwynd, Peepo www.peepo.co.uk
According to the agenda notes, Jonathan’s presentation aimed to discuss the issues around ensuring that W3C specifications reflects the needs of users, as well as the aspirations or developers and the corporations that they work for with particular reference to CDF (Common Data Format), RDF (Resource Description Framework), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative). However, I think all I was able to get from the presentation was that he felt strongly about the use of images and icons as a (good) way of bridging a number of accessibility issues and that some online providers do this better than others – apart from that I am not sure what points he was making. He did recommend the following site http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ - especially the Google talk on human interaction (so I have duly made a note of it and included a link to it here!)

Presentations available at: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Accessibility_SIG_Meeting_24th_July_2007
Location: Wolverhampton University, Millenium City Building
Wireless: Not available
Power: Not available

Second Life and avatars

An interesting article in the New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/05/avatar-other-you.html

Accessibility SIG meeting, 4 June 2007

(Taken from the CETIS website) In conjunction with TechDis, this meeting took the form of a discussion meeting, where both the TechDis and CETIS services tried to ascertain the community's views on accessibility and e-learning, areas where the community felt more (funded) work needed to be done, and how the community felt the SIG should move forward. The meeting therefore had the following aims:

• to find out where there are gaps in accessibility requirements;
• to ascertain in what areas future (funded) work is required;
• to discover in what projects the community should be involved;
• a chance for the community to say what they felt TechDis and the SIG should be doing;
• to discuss whether areas such as UID (Universal Instructional Design), inclusion, and/or personalisation should be part of TechDis' and/or the SIG's remit;
• to understand why the IMS Accessibility Specifications (now ISO Standards) aren't being implemented;
• to address support issues surrounding Brian Kelly and Lawrie Phipp's paper on Holistic Accessibility (what practical steps could be taken to implement this approach).

The outputs of the three main discussion themes can be found via the links below:

Discussion Session 1: Funding and Future Work - Presentation, Discussion Questions and Feedback

Discussion Session 2: TechDis' and the Accessibility SIG's Remit - Presentation, Discussion Questions and Feedback

Discussion Session 3: Specifications, Standards and the Holistic Approach - Presentation, Discussion Questions and Feedback

virtual worlds, real learning? Eduserve Symposium

Not the only (virtual) life...

This was a really excellent (and well organised) event. Eduserve described the symposium as an "attempt to look past the hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life and evaluate whether they offer real opportunities for learners at UK educational institutions". Although it did touch on a few other virtual worlds, it is fair to say that the content of the day focussed almost exclusively on Second Life. The speakers provided a diverse range of inspiring and thought provoking views on SL and learning, ranging from the very positive (Jim Purbrick, Linden Labs - no surprise there) through to the extremely sceptical (Stephen Downes, OLDaily and Institute for Information Technology, Canada).

In addition to the 'real life' event in London, the symposium was also being streamed live into 3 venues within SL (with a 6 second delay, which was interesting at times!). Eduserve also screened the live SL symposium activity on large screens within the venue, adjacent to the presentation screens. I'm not sure what others thought of this, but I really liked it as it gave me a good feel for the audience outside of the congress centre that were joining us. Having this beamed to us also highlighted any techie problems that SL delegates were having, which though did not appear to be many, was nevertheless interesting (to me anyway!). Those participating in SL could also (and did) pose questions to the speakers/panel - and I think that worked pretty well. However, Eduserve have clearly been engaging, and building, in SL for a while - and I do think you need that kind of technical know-how/familiarity with SL before it is sensible to try anything like this - so JISC would not be quite ready for something like this just yet!

I learned a few things (which is always good). In particular - that the evidence (so far) suggests that SL works best as a communication and collaborative tool, that although it is probably the best known virtual world/life, it certainly isn't alone (1), and that there are lots and lots of creative ways of using SL as a learning tool - the best examples of this came from Jim's presentation including designers, filmakers, business studies and marketing.

Not particularly surprising, but worth noting is the strong sentiment that very few (if any) of the speakers really knew where their dabble with SL would take them, nor what the future was likely to hold.


(1) A range of speakers gave lists of alternative virtual worlds - the most comprehensive was within Roo's (IBM) presentation, but another reasonable review of some of the alternatives was also given by Hamish (Edinburgh University).


Presentations available at: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/presentations
Location: Congress Centre
Wireless: Good
Power: Not great - but with the help of Alice G I managed to get a socket :)

a bit of a game

Unless you have been involved with the putting together of a short (in this case, 4 pages) glossy briefing paper I'm not sure you can fully appreciate just how much work goes into these 'brief' documents! I'm extremely pleased (relieved?) to report that after weeks of amendments and various versions that the 'Game-based Learning Briefing Paper' has now had its very last checks and is (as I type) winging it's way to the printers... The paper will be distributed at the forthcoming eduserve symposium virtual worlds, real learning? next week, which I will be attending and reporting on.

Update: The briefing paper can be downloaded from here.

peer review workshop - 25 April, Bolton

The second peer review workshop was held in a rather cloudy but warm Bolton. The focus of the workshop was very much about getting the projects to work together to share their findings and experiences of reviewing with their peer project(s). It ensured that they also had the time and space to consider the areas within their projects that could realistically be strengthened within the time/resource limits of their projects. To facilitate this, all of the morning and part of the afternoon was set aside for group work. Using the information in the Workshop Introduction guide, and completed SQA/OSSM review forms which peered projects had been asked to work on prior to the workshop, the (pre-defined) groups went through their review forms, feeding their findings to their peer project and then working on building roadmaps of priorities for their projects.
The latter part of the afternoon gave the four peer groups an opportunity to feed back to the wider group the issues, good practice and learning that they had identified during the peer review process so far. The presentations are available from the workshop page. Some general key themes emerged from these presentations:

Good practice:

• Code tended to be well commented and clear
• Generally there was a good level of documentation available on project websites
• In most cases the software was available to download

Issues:

• In general projects needed to work harder on improving the design/navigation of their websites so that visitors could more easily find the information and documentation that is there.
• In some instances more/better use cases needed to be made available on project websites
• More thought on support/documentation around installation of the software provided needed

Learned:

• The importance of ensuring the prominence of key documentation on the project website
• The strengh of having an FAQ section
• The usefulness of shared technical know-how with the peer project
• Being given a deadline for peer review helped focus the development of the project
  

Generally the review process appeared to have been a positive experience for the projects and one which they found to be helpful, though a couple of useful comments were also made:

• importance of maintaining flexibility within the review guidelines
• OSSM should include some review of use cases
• greater consideration needs to be given to how demonstrator projects (as opposed to toolkit projects) can and should engage with the peer review process

The code sprint debate
The day ended with an open discussion with the projects about the forthcoming Code Sprint day, allocated for early/mid June to find out what they would want to get from this and whether they had a preference for this to be online or face-to-face. From the discussions it was evident that there was not a strong requirement for this, nor a good understanding of how it would benefit them.

However, there was some consensus about the usefulness of working within their peer groups and that some kind of focussed support on getting them to their final deliverables stage at around that time would be helpful. The clear message was that projects either needed a much stronger argument for the usefulness/benefit of a code sprint day (regardless of whether it was online or face to face) or some kind or re-working of the day/event that would better reflect their needs. Myself, Wilbert, Sam and Warwick are due to discuss the future of the 'code sprint' day this week and I will be reporting back very soon on the outcome of this.

next generation environments conference - 27.04.07

In addition to my notes below, there is a plethora (OK, at least 3) other ways of following what happened during this conference:

• a 'blog' of the event is available (though this was actually captured by people posting comments to each of the presentation descriptions, so not as easily viewable as a true 'blog' of the event)
  
• Sarah Holyfield from CETIS also recorded the presentations, in preparation for putting together an article on the event, so look out for this on the eFocus site
• all presentations were recorded by the U&I team (erm, I think that's Lawrie?) and will be made available on the U&I blog (same url as for the first bullet point above)
  

In summary, this was an excellent conference. For me, the particular highlights were a short presentation by a student from Glasgow Caledonian (Ross Graham) who shared his thoughts on personalised services/web2.0 and the student-university relationship, and a SecondLife learning activity demonstration/video by Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. The conference was well attended and had a good mix of participants, leading to a very good day with lots of opportunity to network, as well as learn from those that were presenting.
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New Technology and the Modern University - Peter Hartley
Peter began his talk by highlighting the importance of 'learning' in 'e-learning' - although this is obviously not a new concept, it's always helpful to be reminded of this, especially at a conference entitled 'next generation environments'. He also made the point, very well supported by visual examples of the earliest train carriages (take a look at the slides when they're available), that visualising the future is inherently difficult and predicting it even harder. We naturally try and fit new 'stuff' into what we already know and do, rather than imagining new possibilities.

Peter went on to revisit some points of a presentation that he made last year, where he identified reasons not to be cheerful and reasons to be cheerful in eLearning.

• reasons not to be cheerful :-( which included that some applications were more of a step backwards rather than forwards, e-learning is just understood as meaning VLE and the implicit prioritisation of RAE.
• reasons to be cheerful :-) which included networked collaborative learning, cheaper/smarter stuff, new tools for social & collaborative working and smarter more technology savvy students.
  

He went on to argue that there is a new fight in the playground in the form of a collision of learning spaces. He articulated them in terms of 3 landscapes:

• landscape 1 (the museum) - formal, public controlled. the institutional world of control and individuals
• landscape 2 (the playground) - the collaborative, informal exploratory. the world of facilitation and enquiry.
• landscape 3 (the refuge) - the personal, private and exclusive. talking to invited friends only.

And the need to be able to bridge between these worlds. He argued that web2.0 software would be a good starting point for this, as it can be used in all three landscapes.

He finished by saying that the modern university would need to:

• know the students
• make its pedagogy explicit
• support all the learning journeys
• adopt the appropriate technologies
• manage the boundaries between environments
• align policies and practices

2. Blackboard (a community based development product...) - Derek Jones
US focussed presentation, which was not a sales pitch (well it couldn't have been, as Derek was at pains to remind us frequently during the talk) . The presentation only included US based case studies, which was a shame. The transferability from these to the UK was obvious, but it would have been nice to see some from the UK, or at the very least from outside the US.

Derek outlined 4 pillars of institutional effectiveness:

1. enhancing the student experience
2. responding to globalisation
3. improving institutional accountability
   
4. increasing resource use and revenue

BlackBoard's Vision of 21st Century Learning:

• student-centred.
• unconstrained by time and place.
• operating simultaneously in local & global contexts.
  

The Future plan

• Engaged students - web2.0 user experience. social learning within classes and in life. focus on writing and reflection
• collaborative communities - learning and life spaces outside of classes. academically focused social networking. inter-institution collaboration via blackboard (interesting concept!)
• well served constituents - academic, student and admin efficiencies. effective instititution - student & institutional assessment for local improvement. understanding relationships between activities and outcomes.
• optimised enterprise - continued improvement of emerging standards and elearning web services. easy openness for academixc choice. ever improving scalability.

Morning discussion session:
The obvious patent issue was raised during the morning Q&A session, to which Derek referred to the patent pledge that they have (uniquely) made following the world-wide reaction to their patent application. Peter was questioned on whether there was really a battle between the museum and the playground, or whether it was just a case of the tools being used creatively in the different areas. However, Peter still felt it was a battle, as the museum staff are trying to force order on the playground. The issue of finding time for tutors to learn how to work in this new environment was raised from the floor - Sarah Porter responded by saying that she saw this as a real policy and institutional issue - one that is a problem worldwide, but one that does need to be addressed. Peter added that it was also important that staff need to see that efforts in this area have a long lasting value and are so worth investing time in. The importance of developing high quality physical learning spaces to facilitate this kind of learning was also raised and supported.

3. Community as an Education Model - Dave Cormier
Dave began his talk describing the work of Edtechtalk, which was set up to help improve the management and sharing of knowledge in an increasinly 'knowledge cluttered' world, evidenced by the growth of digital objects that we store and manage, the increased tendancy to store files/objects across multiple computers, the use of multiple email addresses, and the storage of items in multiple formats (to name a few!). He saw the targets to help address this as:

• a sacred dedicated space,
• filtering,
• security,
• collaboration (with a network of experts)

Edtechtalk is an emergent community -
* free knowledge exchange
* minimal infrastructure
* minimalist technology
* open government
* community focus

Dave also gave an interesting demonstration of how SecondLife (SL) can be used as a learning tool, taking advantage of the fact that SL is an immersive world (and refreshingly not using it as just another way of giving a lecture). The demonstration is available on YouTube and is well worth a look: Mayan Temple Tour.

4. New Technology: the learner perspective - Ross Graham, Glasgow Caledonian
This short, but revealing and insightul presentation gave an individual students (Ross Graham's) perspective on the use of social tools, and was the highlight of the conference for me. Whilst Graham did feel that social tools and academic tools needed to be brought closer together, especially in terms of helping academic tools feel like they related to him (which clearly they do not at the moment) - he strongly argued that he didn't want to see his uni appear in facebook, he didn't want to have lectures on his i-pod (he wanted to listen to HIS music on that!) and he didn't want to start receiving uni emails on his personal email account. He was very clear that he did not want uni to encroach on his personal social space and that he saw this as a separate refuge for him, outside of the university world. [Note: Scott Wilson recently reported on a paper in this area, which supports much of what Ross says]

5. New Technology: the institutional perspective - Linda Creanor, ALT
Linda talked about some of the key emergent themes in terms of the use of new technology taken from recent studies that that she has been involved with, they were:

• fitting learning around life
• control & choices
• expectations of technology
• discussion boards generally not popular
• strategies/ways of coping
• influence of/on family
• personalisation of environments
  
• course design issues

A couple of projects she mentioned in particular were MakingTracks (game-based) and the sage virtual reality project (looking at performance art).

I feel filed

After a long period of falling over piles and piles of unsorted papers in my home-office I finally went through them today - and discovered that my filing drawer could be used for more than dumping stray stationery into and hey presto I have one small pile (honest) of paperwork on my desk, a full (and labelled - that's the librarian in me) filing drawer and an overflowing paper recycling crate. And it feels good. Very good. I know I will get back into the mess again (experience tells me that!), but for now I'm savouring every moment :)

3 yr programme timetable

I think the 3 year project timetable I'm working on for the eLearning team is getting there... There's still a bit of work to do though, and to be honest this post is mainly about testing uploading an image to this blog...

ple workshop

The first get together of the new user-owned technology demonstrator projects took place yesterday in the delightful Lakeside Centre in Birmingham (albeit a little damp and rainy) in the form of the PLE Workshop. The afternoon began with an introduction and icebreaker session from me where the projects were asked to write a futuristic leader for a press article imagining they were in 2009 and at the end of their projects - this proved to be a challenging and lively task - but hopefully they all enjoyed it (in the end). However, the main event of the afternoon was a presentation from Oleg Liber* from CETIS. Oleg gave an excellent overview of PLE principles and began (though ran out of time to finish) a very interactive session with the projects on where they saw themselves contributing to (or not) the wider PLE domain. I'm going to pursue the possibility of Oleg turning this part of the presentation into a wiki so that the projects can continue to add to this - and especially the slides we did not get to cover. The presentations and agenda for the day will shortly be posted on to the JISC user-owned technology demonstrator page - links to follow soon. Now available - click here.

* I'd like to be able to link to Oleg's profile on the new CETIS site, but I don't seem to be able to find any detailed information about staff on there, which is a shame.