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

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.