Where next for virtual worlds?

I attended the Eduserve event "Where next for virtual worlds in UK higher and further education?" on Monday 25 January held at the London Knowledge Lab and targetted towards learning technologists, HE and FE lecturers and policy makers (though it has to be said the vast majority of those there fell into the first category!).

The presentations for this will be available shortly from the event website: www.eduserv.org.uk/events/wn4vw

The day included a range of interesting presentations and views about the current and future state of virtual worlds (follow the link above for full details). Unsurprisingly Second Life was the most widely discussed virtual world, but other virtual worlds were included, with particular attention given to OpenSim, an open source virtual world. John Kirriemuir gave a slightly wandering, but still interesting presentation which is worth a look at, based on his experience of collating and producing Virtual World Watch reports (though it should be noted that it is rated 15 due to one of the SL maternity images included in it).

The closing presentation by Daniel Livingstone looked at the convergent nature of virtual worlds and other technologies (such as the web, augmented reality and mobiles) and I felt was a particularly thought provoking one.

At the end of the day Andy Powell (Eduserve) summarised his 'take-home' messages as:

• Virtual Worlds are (or can be) useful.
• Just because they are useful, it doesn't mean they should always be used.
• The future of virtual worlds is likely to be a mix of commercial and free technological environments BUT that the common factor is that they will be based on open standards.
• The changing nature of the student is important - the largest users of virtual worlds are currently the under 16s, which is something that HE/FE should be thinking about in terms of them as future students of their institutions.
• There are issues around long term ownership and preservation of virtual world artefacts.
• Search & discovery of virtual world artefacts is challenging. They are very far behind the search quality and power that users are used to (i.e. google).
• Increasing convergence of virtual worlds, the web, mobiles and augmented reality - in ways which we have yet to imagine.
• Dearth of good research or practical case studies and examples on the use of virtual worlds in education.

ALT-C: OERs Matter Symposium

This is only my personal reflections of this session - I have almost certainly missed things, but if I have missed things this is only due to my failings and not due to any deliberate intention to do so. (Also blogged here).

The symposium was chaired by Oleg Liber (Director of CETIS) and the symposium began with the pro's and con's of OER being outlined by a prestigious (and ficticious) panel:

• Polly Pegler - Academic & an enthusiast for open educational resources
• Prof. Ogden Wisden - Sceptical Academic
• Will Pileham-Highe - Pro-Vice Chancellor
• Joe Zawinul - civil servant representing the minister of BISCUIT (Business Colleges Universities and International Trade)
• Quentinna Yan - Chinese secondary school teacher

Each member of the panel stated their take on OERs (well summarised here on the OERs Matter cloudworks page), then the debate was opened to the audience.

The panel's position statements proved to be a good starting point for the audience debate which followed. The audience debate further highlighted some of the difficult and thorny issues around OER, whilst (I felt) still retaining a sense of the future potential that OERs can offer.

The discussion began by considering the approaches to adoption of OER and it was suggested that it was a mistake to talk about the adoption of OER in 'top-down' approach terms (which many of the panel had done in their opening statements). It was argued that there was a real need to factor in a more 'bottom-up' approach and to understand the barriers associated with this, not limited to but including, unrealistic expectations on the amount of metadata that needs to be attached to an OER in order for it to be ready for release.

There was also a plea for more positive (carrot) arguments rather than negative (stick) arguments for the adoption for OER. Negative (e.g. saving money) 'top-down' approaches are unlikely to create motivated and enthusiastic adopters of OER - so more needs to be done on this.

Issues around the quality of content was also raised. It was agreed that this needs to be clearly articulated (without being imperialist), but also raises issues of trust - something that it was felt needed more exploration.

Picking up on this, another member of the audience added that the issue of reputation could do much to encourage the adoption of OER in a positive way. Currently there is no real percieved benefit to the individual to make content open - unlike the publishing model. If OERs had some kind of recogised peer-review type model then this is likely to increase the level of material that is made available in this way.

Another participant suggested at looking at what already works in terms of rating resources - e.g. amazon, the rating systems used by digg etc. This then raised the interesting question on who should rate the resources: academics or students? It was felt that they would be likely to rate quite differently, which would raise all kinds of issues (that time did not permit to be discussed further during the symposium).

The important role that repuposing plays in the advantages and benefits of OERs was also raised - it was pointed out that an open licence doesn't just mean 'free' content, it can also mean content that can be used/repurposed and generally 'messed about'.

However, deciding on the best granularity for a particular resource was considered to be one of the more difficult tasks as the context of a resource is likely to have big impact on its usability, depending on the end user of that resource. Resources for the independent/lifelong learner need to be strongly contextualised and accompanied with supporting material. If it is to be used as part of wider course, then items with much less context would be fine (and probably would be preferred).

Looking to the future, the debate also considered the changing nature of educational paradigms, in particular the impact of globalised education and how OERs can help support this. It was argued that there was a need to think more strategically, that even with the inherent difficulties of adopting OER that education as a whole could lose out if it did not grasp the opportunities provided.

So lots to take away from this session - not least the extent to which the current OER Programme pilots will go towards investigating more fully a large part of the issues raised during the debates.

"OER Matters - maybe been more negative talk than positive in this session - but more openness remains inevitable!" (tweet from Patrick McAndrew)

blogging and eportfolios

I have been inspired by paper 0020 (the first paper during the staff skills session at ALT-C 2009) to revive my work blog, so this is my first post in a long time.

Their interesting study looked at piloting free web-based eportfolio tools (including wetpaint) with their learners, as a way of encourage them to document and build on their learning. However, they found that students only maintained these during the assessed part of their course - at the end of it only 1% continued to update their portfolio. They also found that students seemed to prefer working in a more chronologically and structured way, and started to treat their eportfolio wiki more like a blog. As a result they are going to pilot a blog-based eportfolio stucture with their next set of students - along with a few other changes along the way.

Whilst I suspect that more than simply the platform used by the project team will have had an impact on the students lack of engagement (it will be interesting to see if they manage to increase the 1% continued use after the end of the assessed element of the course), it has made me consider the way I have used this blog in the past, and how I can use it in the future.

In terms of an eportfolio, or record of my learning/learning development, I think it could be a useful tool - so lets see how it goes!

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