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.