The Ed Techie

Future learning environments (the talk I never gave)

I was supposed to give a keynote at University of London this week, but I was laid up with a really bad chest infection (I blog heroically today). If anyone from there is reading this, my apologies. Below is the talk I was going to give. It was about future learning environments. The first half is familiar stuff - looking at the current state of play and setting out the succession model. The main slide is the penultimate one. Here I wanted to demonstrate all the different dimensions to a future learning environment. So I have the following elements and examples:

• Open content - examples are iTunesU, Openlearn and Slideshare. The point was that good quality content is now readily available and set to grow, so students will be pulling this in from elsewhere not just your centralised system.
• Virtual Presence - examples were Gabbly and Medium. The point here was that you can now have good synchronous engagement around content.
• PLE - examples were Stringle, someone's blog, and Pageflakes. The point I wanted to make was that users will increasingly gather together widgets and tools in a site of their own making.
• Devices - mobile, Microsoft surface and Nintendo Wii. Changes in interface design make different things possible, they also remove many of our reservations about training and development.
• Social Network - Facebook, 43Things, LastFM. Lots of points to make here, including the really powerful ways that Facebook has of motivating users to come back to its site (gifts, status updates, friends, etc) - we don't do this in VLEs. Also the way in which the open API approach means we can go out to them - our VLEs should be feeding into Facebook if that is what students want. And the power of the network to aid content discovery as seen with LastFM, which I've blogged about before.
• Virtual worlds - SecondLife, WorldofWarcraft. Not a lot said on these, but the point about establishing a presence where your students are, e.g. setting up a SL campus, repeated here.
• Learning Design - Compendium, LAMS. With lots of content what you need are tools to string it together to make meaningful pathways.
• User generated content - wikiversity, YouTube, Flickr. The general point that producing content isn't the monopoly of universities in education anymore.

What does the Facebook API extravaganza tell us?

I know everyone has blogged about the recent openning up of Facebook to allow lots of new applications, but hey, it's half term and I've only just got around to looking at it. Tony Hirst makes the point that it's beginning to look like a learning environment. I've had a play with it, looked at the widgets, updated some stuff and here are some random thoughts on what it signifies:

• Technology acts as a pull factor - I've gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last week, that is by doing fun stuff with technology you drive traffic to your site from the users of that technology who are keen to see how it is being used. In educational terms this means doing fun stuff with educational content so that people want to see what you've done with Google maps, or twitter say.
• The social network is the starting point - rather than content being the main focus and creating a network around this, Facebook demonstrates that the network is the key asset, and then you add value to this.
• Adding features generates interest - I keep finding things in Facebook that I need to do. I'm not an avid user, so for instance I've only just joined a network (the Open University) and a group (Educational Technologists). But having these tasks makes me want to come back and see what else I can do. The educational point is that often we resist adding more features or tasks for fear it will confuse students. I've written about this in the VLE book - that a lot of the web 2.0 approach (of which rapid development is one) is at odds with higher education approaches (such as testing and scoping  features rigorously). What the pull in to Facebook illustrates is that more features creates a more vibrant environment. Not rocket science I admit, but still not something we necessarily apply to VLEs.
• Openness is the key to development - if we didn't know it before, then the Facebook example provides further evidence that open APIs and mixing of 3rd party software is the way to create a dynamic, vibrant site. The educational point is that most VLEs and many universities still want to create their own versions of tools.

I mentioned some work we were doing on a new social network based model of learning, which looks to be moving forward. It strikes me that 'Facebook + some educational widgets + open content' wouldn't be a bad starting point.

My book is (finally) out

With definitely more of a whimper than a bang, my book Virtual Learning Environments, was published by Routledge last week. I'd contacted them the week before and asked 'when is it coming out?' 'Next week' was the response.

Anyway, it was good to receive the advance copies last week, although I made the mistake of reading it and immediately finding a second book of omissions, changes, changes of mind, etc lurking beneath the surface of this one. Perhaps I'll write a post on things I should have covered in a few months time.

The book is aimed at a range of users - anyone involved in e-learing basically. It will be interesting to see whether it meets the needs of the techies, the educator who is tentatively using their VLE, and the manager choosing their institutional VLE.

Stringle implications

The last in this trilogy of posts...

Several things occurred to me when playing with Stringle yesterday. I'll try to elucidate them here:

Course design - increasingly I feel that writing course resources is a redundant activity. I think course design will move towards creating activities around as yet unknown content. For instance, we added in a feed for any content that is tagged elearning and evolution. Now it's a reasonable bet that this will contain some decent (and not so decent material). But it helps future-proof the course. I don't think you could quite rely on such resources but the ratio of educator derived material to external resources is surely going to decrease.

Why does HE develop tools - I know, I've commented on this before, but looking at the range of tools that are just out there, and the ease with which you can pull them in to a system made me wonder it all over again. I would like to propose Weller's rule of educational software development which goes something like 'if an educational establishment wants to develop a tool then by the time it has reached the functional requirements stage a better one will be freely available'. Allright, it's not a snappy one, but you get the idea.

PLEs are possible - I've been a bit of a critic of PLEs, partly because they seemed obsessed with clients and partly because they underestimated some of the challenges I felt. But I can see how a mid-ground between the 'it's all down to the user' and 'central control' models could be found, by providing default tools, and allowing users to pull in their preferred ones if they wish.

Openness is the new king - if the struggle to get Vista shipped hadn't convinced me that the proprietary model of software development was dead, then this has. I kept thinking of the time I had spent getting a course ready for the UK e-university, who spent somewhere between 10 and 18 million pounds on developing a VLE. It wasn't very good. Imagine what you could do with something like a Stringle approach for a tenth (even a hundredth) of that money.

Anyway that's enough on Stringle.

Is which VLE even the question to ask?

I've been up in Inverness as part of a panel looking at UHI's VLE strategy for the past couple of days (I write this while delayed at Edinburgh airport - not the best place to spend your Friday night). A few things about the rather intense two day process - the first was how much it mirrored the debates we had gone through at the OU. You find yourself continually oscillating between options, which demonstrates that it is a hard decision. The second issue was the tension between what is needed or good now, and what is the better long term, strategic option. The third is the manner in which the decision making approach itself influences the outcome however much we might like to think it is a purely objective, rational process.

What was perhaps different was that with the advent of web 2.0 and portals was whether choosing a VLE was that important anymore. In the end I think getting that enterprise system in place is actually a vital step in then moving beyond it. Even if the technology was mature (which it isn't) an institution couldn't go straight to an open portal-based PLE type environment without first having gone through the centralised VLE stage. You have to suck everything in before you can breathe it all out.

BB patent reexamination - all good news?

As you'll probably have seen elsewhere, the Blackboard patent is being re-examined, the prior art raising serious concerns (never!). While this has generally met as a welcome development (it would be more worrying if it wasn't being reexamined), a cynical part of me thinks that it may not be the victory it seems. These reexaminations can take two years, during which time the patent hangs in limbo. Perhaps this was BB's intention all the time - it isn't about actually getting the patent, it is a means of undermining competitors while making yourself look dominant. If you were an institution choosing a VLE now, the threat of the patent might make you decide against another commercial system such as Desire2Learn, and make you think that BB was the only way to go, whether you liked it or not. The panopticon works as a control method because you could be monitored, not because you are being watched all the time. In the same way the patent works because it could put others out of business, not because it will. And the longer that uncertainty reigns, the better.

It might also make you nervous about going down the open source route (despite those reassurances from BB), but I think this is where the patent has backfired. It has inadvertently raised both the profile and the imperative for open source solutions, and thus made the commercial option seem more precarious.

SOA at SUNY

A JISC interview with Patrick Masson, (via EdTechPost) formerly of State University of New York, who implemented a service oriented architecture, based around a mixture of LAMS, uPortal, Sakai and their own tools. He is honest about some of the difficulties, but still remains convinced about the need for a SOA solution for VLEs.

A few things from my perspective - firstly SUNY is a case study I use in my book, but this section would now obviously benefit from this kind of material. So once again one is faced with the time lag between writing something and it being published - the book is out in March and there are already bits of it that feel dated (ahem, it's still worth buying though!).

Secondly, he reflects my own feeling on Sakai, saying "I wonder why Sakai isn’t devoting its time and energy to producing a framework which at the end of the day many people could use, what do we gain from getting another Moodle?". I always felt that this was what Sakai really offered, a method of integrating different services, but they seem to have been distracted by the need to deliver a product. In doing so I think they have lost some of the clarity of their approach.

Lastly, it reinforces for me that the OU was right to adopt Moodle as a kind of middle ground between the full SOA and a monolithic system. As project director I had recommended the SOA, but Moodle provided a firm enough technological base to work from, while still allowing us freedom to develop. Whether Moodle remains the right choice in the face of web 2.0 technologies will be the next question.

A Google Desktopesque VLE?

Okay, this is probably so obvious that everyone has already thought of it, but bear with me - Now I've gone over to Google Desktop (read 'the dark side' for some), I thought 'why can't my VLE be like this?' Ie. a light client with dynamic panels that is always running. Just for starters here are the sections I'd have:

• Forum postings - any postings to forums I'd subscribed to (or been subscribed to automatically given my student role).
• Current content - links to the content that I am supposed to be working on. Especially if that content is wrapped in RSS or something similar so it can update dynamically.
• Related feeds - perhaps a mixture of feeds I had subscribed to and those automatically given me by the course designer e.g. all Psychology students get a news feed from the American Psychological Society. Not directly course related, but of academic relevance.
• To do list - maybe linked to a calendar so that central messages can be sent e.g. assignment due next week.
• Top tools - shortcuts to the tools I use most, or the default set provided by the university.
• Email - just give 'em Gmail.

As with GD you could expand any of these, and clicking on them would launch you in to the VLE proper.

Technically this wouldn't be rocket science, but it would require a few changes in academic practice, such as producing content in appropriate chunks. What would be interesting would be the influence it had (if any) on the learner. Would it promote (for those of a nervous disposition I'll refrain from saying 'afford') a learning strategy that breaks everything down in to small time slots? Would it help some learners to incorporate their education in to their everyday lives, for example if you are at work you don't have to separate out a lot of the education, it is something you do inbetween other tasks? Would it help schedule work for learners? Would this mean a loss of flexibility? And so on.

It is often quite simple tools such as this that have a subtle influence on the individual and their relationship to the formal learning experience, so at the very least it would make an interesting research project.

The irrationality of preference

Having posted about Google desktop and Netvibes it made me consider why Netvibes is my preferred personal portal. There are many others available and while I could come up with a justification for Netvibes over Pageflakes, say, it would all be a bit post hoc. In a recent survey on VLE use in universities the OECD pointed out that

"there was little to choose between different systems. The past seven years of intensive LMS development and adoption in tertiary education have seen considerable system convergence…. Some respondents asserted that a particular system was the “only genuine” enterprise LMS, or “by far the easiest” to use, but it was difficult to evidence such claims. "

I think in some ways we choose software on a much less rational basis than we might like to admit, and rather like our choice of football team (or religion if you prefer), this very irrationality of selection makes us defend our choice more vigorously. Having made a selection free from logic, we are then able to indulge it at an emotional level. I have often been struck by how emotionally attached people are to particular software packages. When deciding on a particular piece of software to use for a project or course I have found myself in very heated debates, which pretend to be about functionality, or database compatibility, but are in fact about personal identity, emotional attachment, love even. Within particular functions we tend to be monoamorous, so you only love one browser/operating system, etc. We can be happily be polyamorous across different functions ie you can love an operating system and a browser.

The analogy with football is too tempting (and obvious) for me to pass up. You have to be monoamorous supporting a team at one level (any football fan that tells you they support Arsenal and Chelsea say is by definition, not a football fan and deserves your contempt). But you can be polyamorous across different levels, e.g. you can support one national team, one main team and maybe your local non-league team also. I'm being slightly flippant here, but there does seem to be a similar process in operation - it may be an evolutionary tick, the process for promoting monogamy to secure the succession of your genes latching on to other aspects in life also.

And then you have to produce a 20 page business case for a committee that incorporates your software choice in an objective manner...

Outsourcing learning technologies

This article in the Economist Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing (via George Siemens) outlines how some universities are effectively outsourcing a lot of technical development, using the Google Apps for your domain bundle. The guy says that "Compared with the staid corporate-software industry, using these services is like “receiving technology from an advanced civilisation”, says Mr Sannier."

A couple of things on this - firstly there is often a delay between the rhetoric and the reality when new ideas come along. The whole service oriented approach was one of these. I found myself wisely telling everyone to think of everything as a service, without really being sure what this meant. Google have continued to demonstrate what this really means, and this is a good example. It's not about buying a big bit of kit for your IT guys to install, you simply say 'all our students get the Google services.' Secondly, it really does mark something of a watershed that universities are now formally recognising these consumer, real world apps and not insisting that somehow education is special and needs to develop its own tools. Thirdly, what sort of impact does this have on institutional practice? As a small example, at the OU we have struggled with a calendar project for a while (partly it isn't a calendar project but a multiple database problem), but at what point would it be effective to say 'hey, go with Google'. What the institution needs to concentrate on then is making data available in the right format. It's kind of analagous to educators needing to shift their focus from creating content to supporting understanding.