The Ed Techie

The question around learning design

Intellectual powerhouses (and me) - Stephen Downes, James Dalziel, me, Grainne Conole

I’m at the LAMS European Conference in Cadiz, where we’re presenting some of the work from the OU Learning Design project. Grainne gave a keynote on Thursday morning, along with Stephen Downes. Simon and Andrew presented their work in the afternoon, and I got co-opted (read press-ganged) onto the panel at the close.

Stephen was talking about he made an Audacity recording of his presentation, and that constituted a learning object in his view, although it wouldn’t meet many of the strict definitions of one. Grainne was talking about our Cloudworks project (loosely based on the Flickr for learning design concept) and the importance of adding in the social factor to encourage educators to share. Listening to Stephen and Grainne talk one thing struck me – education often seems very bad at solving some of these problems. For instance, learning object repositories haven’t been a resounding success despite being such a plainly good idea. And yet Slideshare is very successful and could be thought of as a repository. So why did they succeed where many smart, dedicated people in education failed? Here are my suggestions:

1. Educators tend to see all possible problems and thus create an overly complex solution – e.g. masses of metadata fields to cover every possible element of reuse.
2. Educators don’t actually like sharing much when it comes to teaching, but Slideshare is like sharing research.
3. Many of the projects have definite deadlines, and project milestones, etc. These can get in the way of the flexible, lightweight development you need.
4. The learning object repositories were too content-centric and didn’t utilise the social motivation – people put stuff up on Slideshare partly for altruistic reasons, but also because they get ego boosts from people favouriting, or commenting on their presentations.

So the question this raised for me was ‘is there an equivalent change we can do for learning design that happened for learning objects?’. I’m hoping it’s Cloudworks, but it may yet be some smart start-up in San Francisco.

Photo story: In the conference bags the LAMS people gave away a lamb in a can. My bag was devoid of this item, and I tweeted to this effect (it could constitute my travel gift for my daughter). An international incident of bodyline proportions was thus avoided when one was donated to me.

LAMS presentation as slidecast

The world's least engaging voice returns with another slidecast. This is the presentation I gave to the LAMS conference (via Skype). It looks at the differences between web 2.0 and higher ed and how learning design can help bridge the gap. I've covered this in previous posts, but just in case you want the semi-live version.

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Learning design as aspirin for the web 2.0 headache

In the last couple of posts I talked about some of the ways being online, and web 2.0 in particular, challenges some of our assumptions of higher education. The whole web 2.0 thing represents something of a problem, or headache if you will, for higher ed. On the one hand we can see how enthusiastic people are for it, and how it genuinely creates user participation, community, and quality content. All things we'd like to have in higher ed. And on the other we cherish lots of aspects of higher ed that seem at odds with it, such as the quality assurance of content, careful support and structure, hierarchical structures, etc.

So, one of the things I've been working on at Macquarie is how we can bridge this gap. I've been focusing on learning design (in its broadest, not IMS sense), but I would see that as only one means of attacking the problem. I've written a paper for the LAMS conference on this with James Dalziel, so when I give that I'll post the slides and do slidecast, and I'll also work it up into a longer chapter.

For now though, here are some ways in which learning design could help ease the 2.0 headache:

• Meno’s paradox – or, the need for guidance if you prefer. Learners still often seek guidance and structure. For some subjects they are satisfied with creating this structure themselves, for example by finding resources such as blog postings, tutorials, articles, podcasts and video clips. For other subjects, particularly when the subject is itself complex, or the learner feels less confident in the subject area, then providing a scaffolding structure is essential to help the learner build concepts and skills in a robust manner.
• Granularity of learning – in the post on granularity, I argued that the size of educational unit we commonly recognise has been largely determined by physical factors. If learning designs were created and shared by a community of users, what might be thought of as a Flickr for learning designs, and these could be run by individuals, or by groups of interest, then many of the restrictions on size which derive from a hierarchical, centralised model disappear. I've used the the music industry as an analogy previously, but in education perhaps a more relevant model is that of blogging. Prior to the advent of blogs, the type of academic output was usually limited to books or journal articles. The granularity of these was partly driven by the economics of publishing, as Shirky argues:
  “Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes."
  With the advent of blogging, academics (as well as many other bloggers) have found the format liberating, so that blog posts can vary in size from small links with comments to full essays.
• Topography of formality – as with granularity, a set of user generated learning designs allows users to bundle their recent experience together into a course which can be formally recorded more frequently. This would be possible not only because the monopoly of formality is removed from universities, but also because a distributed model of learning design production is the best way to attack the long tail of possible learner interests. If a user wants to find small courses to formally accredit their understanding of highland knitting patterns, history of Sydney in the 1960s or anthropology amongst football fans, then most current formal providers will not meet their requirements, but a sufficiently distributed pool of user generated designs might.
• Web 2.0 quality – much of the concern educators have around web 2.0 is of the quality, and how it can be assured. A set of user generated learning designs could go someway to addressing this by providing a pedagogical structure around resources, and those resources are then changeable. Users can see who has created any given learning design, so some designers may be trusted more than others, rather like sellers and buyers on eBay gain reputational status by recommendations from other users. Similarly, users will be able to comment on designs, thus providing information and context for other users. However, by allowing users to create and select learning sequences it is necessary to accept some of the bottom-up metrics mentioned previously, as the ‘filtering on the way in’ approach currently used in education is replaced by filtering on the way out. This is necessary to encourage participation.
• Personalisation – if a learning design pool reached a sufficient critical mass, then users will be able to select designs that are appropriate to them in a number of different ways: subject area, style of learning, level, range of resources, duration, assessment method, etc.

For these to be realisable we would need very easy means of generating and sharing learning designs, which is where tools such as LAMS and also the OU's Compendium (we have adapted a prototype of this for learning design, which I'll release soon).

Last in the series, gratuitous Home and Away daggy tourist photo:

 

Thoughts on LAMS conference

I was at the LAMS 07 conference in Greenwich last week. I was presenting about the learning design project at the OU, see slideshare presentation below. As well as giving an overview of the project, I raised a couple of points. The first of these was that there is a continuum at the heart of pedagogic planners, (ie tools that are aimed at helping educators plan activities), which goes from open to structured. Some users want help and to be stepped through, while others want to do what they want and only have the tool as a canvas on which they work. The second point was that learning design represents one node in the future learning world, which may be more or less significant at any given learning moment, but it does need to be one of the components. This is particularly true when you view content as miscellaneous, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

A couple of other things I noticed:

• Moodle was by far the most common VLE, and integrating LAMS with Moodle was one of the main areas of interest.
• The new version of LAMS has been built with an open architecture in mind. This required a complete rebuild, but it was necessary to survive. This reinforced the open API message.

Learning design and the miscellaneous

I was at the LAMS 07 conference on Thursday, and then at a follow up session on pedagogical planners at the London Knowledge Lab on Friday. I was showing how we have been using Compendium to aid the design process, and there was presentations from Oxford's Phoebe and the London Planner as well as LAMS.

Like a lot of people I've read Everything Is Miscellaneous recently, and it is one of those books where you see its implications everywhere. I have had this uneasy feeling that my learning design work may not sit comfortably with the web 2.0 work. There is something perhaps a bit rigid in a lot of the learning design work, and maybe even a bit hierarchical. I feel this with the pedagogic planners where the implication seems to be that we should that there is a best way to teach, or that we should be educating practitioners in 'proper' pedagogy.

I was pondering this and I eventually came to a resolution that at least makes me feel less schizophrenic. It goes something like this:

i) Yes, content is miscellaneous and that adds a hitherto unprecedented degree of randomness and variety to learning, so learning becomes, to a degree, miscellaneous. Learning is just a lot less controlled than it used to be (and this is going to be the big change in education over the next ten years).

ii) But learning isn't just content as we all know, it is also about activity, dialogue, engagement, social construction, motivation, personality, etc. These other dimensions are no less true, and in fact may be more significant, in a miscellaneous world (see previous post for a Facebook for learning type scenario which is very socially oriented).

iii) What you need then is a means of bringing together these two strands. Step forward learning design/pedagogic planning tools! The emphasis here for me is that such tools need to be very easy to use, sort of like Yahoo Pipes for learning. LAMS is a good example. In such a tool you can sequence activities, content and tools. These can be done by educators, but not necessarily and that is the key for me. They should be viewed as tools for learners, not teachers.

Let's imagine I want to share some resources with some colleagues and we need to all develop our understanding of a topic (let's say 'Understanding the EU research bidding world'), then I might find some resources, suggest some areas of research we each might undertake, have a chat session, develop a joint proposal, have a virtual meeting with someone from the EU and then vote on whether we go ahead or not. That is both a learning and activity sequence. Now you might trust educators more than others to produce 'good' sequences, but like everything else in a miscellaneous world they don't have any status except that which they earn.

OU Learning Design workshops

I ran four workshops this week for the OU Learning Design project. My colleague Grainne Conole had prepared the slides and done four the previous week, so I can't take any credit for the sessions being well structured. We have been using the Compendium tool develop by KMI as a means of eliciting and representing learning designs. We added in an LD icon set, with icons for activity, task, role, VLE tool, resource, output and assignment.

We got attendees to play with this tool, and I was surprised at how well received it was. There is always a danger when giving people a prototype tool that they get mired in small usability details and the bigger picture gets lost. But the reverse happened and people really got the point of a learning design approach by playing with the tool.

Here are some of the general responses from the workshops:

• Using the tool helped generate discussion and get consensus.
• It helped surface hidden complexity in some activities.
• It made users consider the whole range of support, tools and assets.
• It suggested using new technologies to some people.

There was general support for the project, and our next step is to build up the knowledge base, so that we can bridge the gap between pedagogy and technology. We have lots of case studies that we're going to populate it with.

RSS as universal acid - revisited

I blogged before about RSS becoming the universal acid or lingua franca of web 2.0. Yahoo have just released the beta of their pipes, which is a way of remixing feeds and creating mash-ups without getting too dirty in the programming. With his talent for understatement Tim O'Reilly says it is "a milestone in the history of the internet."

Tony Hirst has had a go creating a pipe for the openlearn content, and seems to like using them.

I'm not quite as convinced that they are a) as easy to use as people think (what techies think is easy is not the same as the rest of us) and b) they will have quite the impact suggested. However, I do think they mark another step in the RSS march to domination, and that is what will be interesting. When RSS is the standard format for all content, then aggregating it, sharing it and reusing it become standard practice. If one thinks of all content like this then the idea of creating static stuff locked away in a VLE seems at odds with the rest of the world, and rather uninspiring.

With my learning design hat on, I also wondered whether the pipes interface might be combined with something like LAMS to produce a powerful means of mixing content and activity.

The dilemma at the heart of learning design

I've been up in Birmingham for a couple of days at a workshop for the JISC D4L projects (I'm the director on the D4LD project). The two pedagogic planner projects generated quite a bit of interest. I know about IOE's planner, so went to the session on Oxford's Phoebe. This is a wiki-based resource that helps users with two main pathways in - 'I want to do activity X' and 'I want to use technology Y'. This multiple perspective is essential I think in any design tool - I'd probably add in 'I need resources on Z'. It's a good resource, but as they recognise not something that is really stand alone, ie you wouldn't let any educator loose on it, since it doesn't have enough guidance. This is intentional, it is an open model, and this contrasts with the IOE planner which offers a level of guidance (based on Laurillard's Conversational model but this could be swapped out with any theory of your choice). This gets to one of the problems for me in developing a learning design aid (something we're trying to do for OU course teams) - people have many different ways of working, so you need to have an open, broad system that accommodates these, and yet if the system is too broad then it doesn't help the user enough. You need to add in a level of guidance and interpetation, but as soon as you do that you are imposing a method of working, which if it doesn't match the way you operate can become tedious.

I remember when we were developing a course for the ill-fated UKeU. Sun, who were developing their VLE, created a complicated workflow system that you had to go through. This didn't match the way any of us worked and the best feature they provided was a 'select all' button which would just tick all the workflow stages so you could bypass it. Obviously you don't want the same to happen to any design tool, so getting the balance right between flexibility and suitable guidance and affordance is the key issue I feel.

A dash of 2.0

I was up in London yesterday visiting Diana Laurillard to talk about their Pedagogic Planner project (which is part of the JISC D4L programme along with our own D4LD project). I was quite impressed with what they've done. They've taken a pragmatic approach which allows users to define a course using some of the standard data (e.g. learning outcomes, number of hours, etc), and then added a layer of pedagogic planning to this that builds on Diana's conversational framework (although it could be any approach and is likely to be extended). They have framed it around a number of questions learners want answers for and then matched these with exemplars. The next step is to represent these as LAMS sequences.

I could see how we in the OU might take such a tool and rebadge it, so the labels were much more specific (and thus meaningful) to our practice.

But all the way through I kept seeing opportunities for a bit more "2.0" in there. I think this will come, and they are seeding the database at the moment, but it struck me that I have become something of a monomaniac about this now. I remember someone saying they were a fan of Tabasco and they found it impossible to eat any meal without thinking what it would be like with a dash of the hot stuff. I find the same with 2.0 - and not just to do with technology. I have recently suggested an open, 2.0 solution to managerial styles, an evening out and children's entertainment. I now admit that web 2.0 doesn't have anything to do with these really. But even so, I can't stop looking at something and thinking, 'what would a dash of 2.0 do to it?'

D4LD progress

The children are back in school (in their expensive new uniforms in my case), the holidays are over, back to work...

First up was a conference call with the D4LD team at the OUNL and Liverpool Hope. Over the summer we have mainly been concentrating on looking at some of the performance issues of Coppercore and SLeD. It seems the iTunesesque (I know, I know, let it be Martin) response times we were experiencing have been replicated by the OUNL team when they have duplicated our set up. The likely suspect was optimisation of the HSQL database. By fixing this and some minor code tweaks and an improvement to the caching method response times now seem to be down to a couple of seconds. Not ideal but a world away from the minutes we were getting at one stage.

At the OU Juliette White has been concentrating on some interface changes and bug fixes.

What we will find out now is what happens with real users as Liverpool Hope will commence using the system next week.