Tuesday 22 January 2008

Using learning resources: transforming the educational experience - 22 January

I attended the Managing Learning Resources workshop in the morning and the Developing Learning Resources workshop in the afternoon of this conference. My notes on these workshops can be found below. It is worth noting that the structure of these notes reflect the format of the workshops: each workshop was intended to address 3 (different) questions, which were addressed by a different presenter during a strictly time-limited 10min presentation - to which the audience were invited to comment on/question.

Session 5. Managing Learning Resources Workshop (AM)

1. How far can the vision of open content be a reality given the current cultural, technical and legal issues? (Patrick McAndrew, Developing Learning Design Project / OpenLearn)

The session began with Patrick outlining the ethos and vision for OpenLearn project - with knowledge and education being common goods, and limited resources and geography not being barriers to an individuals passion to learn.

Issues:

Culture

Tension between the existing culture within the OU...

  • controlled technology, we know best philosophy, lots of review before release, individual achievement: very 'top down'

and the culture of OpenLearn (OpenCulture)...

  • informal learning, democracy, web as a platform: very 'bottom up'

Is this cultural conflict? Or cultural transformation?

Technology

  • Moodle, alternative formats (xml,rss,ims)
  • Lessons learned - the need to be flexible.
  • Reaching out (content leakage): through rss content is appearing in other spaces - e.g. delicious

Legal

Copyright: Big issue for the OU. They have gone for CreativeCommons on their content as they consider that an enabling approach is the direction to go in.

Q's
Q: How do you decide what content to put up?
A: Get the content creators to compile a 'top ten' of their resources - what they are most proud of/would like the world to see. Also, share information on which resources are being used and what is being looked for (but not available) .


2. Are user generated stores of content such as those found on flickr and YouTube superseding the need for formal repositories in providing education materials?
(Iain Wallace, Spoken Word Project)

Ian began tackling this question by asking the question, "why do we have libraries?"
A: authority, quality, access to particular resources & services, training & dissemination of resources, identity management, management of rights/permissions, persistent identifiers, standards across repositories, identity management (shibboleth). Standards are important.

Then considered user generated stores of content:

  • Flickr: tagging, rss feeds, sharing photos and content.
  • Berkley: lecture content available on YouTube, including tags and rss
  • TeacherTube: based on technology of YouTube (but mainly US high school).
  • iTunes: also has an amount of lecture based content.

He also noted the increasing collaboration between companies such as Google and FE/HE - google scholar, openscience etc. And that web2.0 can bring joy of use to users - building communities, enabling people to be interactive/participatory and so on.

In summary, Iain said that he felt that it is necessary to separate out functionality from what data needs to be stored. Web2.0 and social software can be used as good channels of dissemination, but there is still very much a place for the core of the library management system. The traditional opac may be dying - innovative interfaces are being built - but the core of the library system is important to hold the data.


3. How can we balance the varying approaches to producing and maintaining metadata to support effective resource discovery? (Phil Barker, CETIS)

Phil began by saying that he didn't know the answer.... so instead focused on highlighting different parts of the question.

  • metadata - structured resource description (his definition)
  • effectiveness of resource discovery depends on resource type and context

Google & search engines work well on full text scholarly work - but they are not so good for images, audio, video, flash, Java simulation. Google very much depends on text (i.e text on the same page, links to resources).

To help resource discovery, HEIs need to make sure that google can see their repositories as part of the web.

Varying approaches:

  • expert cataloguers: not scalable. although they are probably the only people who care enough to do it well
  • automatic metadata creation: same limitations as google for non-text based resources
  • cataloguing by content experts (often the creator): title, description and keyword is the max tutors tend to want to do. And there is always the problem of ‘metacrap’. BUT there are some things that only the resource creator would know.
  • user generated metadata: eg del.ici.ous (folksonomies), context metadata, attention metadata (who looked/used/recommended what). Social tagging. Whole general idea has been described as order on the way out...

Balance

  • options are not mutually exclusive
  • need to understand which method is good for what
  • need to think about where each method can be used (workflows)


Session 1. Developing Learning Resources Workshop (PM)

1. What is the value of adopting cross institutional collaborative approaches to developing learning resources? (Sally Jorjani, CeLLS Project)

Sally provided a lot of detailed background information to the project (collaborative eLearning in Life Science) and an overview of the project outputs. Also outlined the breadth of the collaboration of the project: 7 academic partners, a national agency and a learning technologist who worked together to create and deliver online content to drive a change in the way students learn and lecturers teach.

Sally ended the presentation with a very brief summary of the value of this approach (in response to the question):
  • Reduced duplication
  • Shared workload
  • Maximised skill set
  • Shared ownership
  • Good understanding of the differences in culture and work practice


2. Should we develop tools and resources to support a particular pedagogical approach or should appropriate pedagogical approaches be applied when they are used? (Steve Ryan, DART Project)

Steve said that the quick answer to these questions was yes to both, but then went on to provide a brief outline of the project. Approach used was exploring key pedagogic issues – rethinking the role of course elements that can be enhanced by digital technologies and developing tools that might help address these issues. As a result the project has produced a number of tools – all tend to ask students to do something or engage as a group to address a problem.

Lessons from DART:

  • Begin with the identification of real pedagogical contexts or issues
  • Identify context in which technologies can contribute
  • Development should be an iterative process working very closely with academics
  • Importance of the engagement of the teacher as researcher
  • Re-use and re-purposing will normally change the content and context of the original
  • The pedagogical approach or assumptions will be modified as well
  • The learning design is not ‘fixed’ but will be actively shaped and modified by the teacher when re-using
  • The original learning design is best seen as cognitive catalyst

In summary:
It is not a question of applying an appropriate pedagogy to the tools and resources, they already embody a pedagogical approach, this pedagogical approach however is not fixed but (should) be modified and re-contextualised as the tools are re-used.


3. What ways can we approach the integration of institutional and user owned technologies to enhance the learning experience? (Miles Metcalfe, Designs on Learning Project)

There are two sides to user-owned/user-used technology

Examples of user-owned technologies:

  • mobile phone, personal computer, music player

And user-used technologies:

  • Facebook, Blogger, iTunes, Amazon, Ebay


Miles then considered what users can get from this:

  • Personalisation, Preferences, Choice, Investment of time, Better equipment (than could be provided by institution), Better tools

Integration needs to look at:

Better learning spaces

  • Laptop friendly and plenty of power sockets, Network access a given, No mobile phone Nazism, Leverage of the technology, Involve the learners in learning space design
Play well with others
  • Shibboleth? Or OpenID?
  • IMS-Enterprise? Or Microformats?
Data-portability
  • http://dataportability.org, We are not alone, Common ground between institutions and the extra institutional web, Invent nothing…
The VLE is not a silo
  • Expose institutional systems through standards-based conduits (e.g. make a list of student cohorts)
  • Provide semantic sugar (microformats, RDFa) – make it more meaningful and machine readable
  • Syndicate what is useful

Build the scaffolding

  • Don’t start by banning google and wikipedia
  • Find ways to engage user owned tech (e.g. mobile phone voting)

Easily confused

  • TheirSpace – tech powerful, application often infantile
  • Your tools – students may not have heard of rss aggregator

Some Benefits

  • Extra institutional resources
  • Extra institutional communities of practice
  • Competencies recognised