The Ed Techie

Last.uni

I'm a big fan of LastFM, and whenever I find some technology I like, I think 'what would this be like in education?'. Let's play the technology determinist game for a while, and imagine what would education (or even just a course) be like if it was built around something like Last.fm, would it be a Last.uni?

Here's how it might work. Imagine educators don't create courses or give lectures but they create loads of resources: podcasts, articles, blog postings, animations, video clips, etc. Last.uni draws on all the databases where these resources are stored. In your Last.uni player you enter a subject you are interested in, lets say it's 'technological determinism' (to be all ironic about it). Now, what you get back is a stream of resources that are initially about technological determinism, but as you work through them they will be about related subjects. These connections will have been established by tagging and data mining. So after the first couple of resources on technological determinism there is a podcast on Marshall McLuhan. You rank this as something you are interested in, and the search is further refined.

Being Last.uni it is of course a social networking tool, so you can see who has also listened to the podcast, and if you feel so inclined, invite them in to a chat. As you continue to use the tool it generates a set of neighbours, that is people who have 'studied' similar resources as you. This in effect becomes your loosely defined student cohort, and you can use tools to arrange weekly discussion sessions.

As you continue to use the tool and you build up the list of resources you have liked it creates a set of recommendations for you, effectively building your course.

Now, there's a bit of a need for guidance in there, (how do you know to look for technological determinism) and I'm not sure where the educator fits in. Maybe they become redundant - thats why it's the Last Uni (gulp)? Accrediting the knowledge you get through Last.uni would probably require an eportfolio type approach (which would of course be built in to the tool).

So, any takers?

Web 2.0 course designs

I did a presentation yesterday to a group at the OU looking at new models of course design (the feeling is that what can be termed OU Classic is not a flexible enough model to meet all of our needs). I suggested 5 models:

1. The self-updating course - the course designer creates general activities, for example 'Analyse three of the resources below using X's theory...' The resources come from RSS feeds, user tagged content, etc. So the actual resources are unknown at the time of writing, but if the feeds are reliable they will be current when the student studies.
2. The content-lite course - content produced by the course designer that is. This is essentially a resource based approach, so students or groups might have a general task, e.g. complete a business proposal for a web 2.0 product' and then have a range of resources such as user generated content (the proposals from previous years), blog feeds, podcasts, etc. Again some of this content will be unknown, but some will be selected by the educator.
3. The personalised course - this is more of a competency based approach, so the student has to show their competence or understanding of X, and gathers together the resources they feel they need.
4. All marketing is content - in this one I suggested that the OU doesn't do marketing anymore and instead simply creates content, which is made freely available through the OpenLearn space. Anyone can take and use this content (thus fulfilling the outreach function) and the OU also draws upon this as the central resource pool for creating its own courses.
5. Course as aggregation - really another take on number 4. Here the focus is not on creating content for a specific course, but rather on creating content in subject areas, which is stored in a central content management system. When we wish to create a specific course we take and adapt content from here, and combine it with some specifically created material. This makes the course production process much more flexible.

There are probably more, and what these models hide is a wealth of complexity in terms of academic practice, institutional process and also an individual's sense of identity. But I think there are merits to all of them.

Here is the presentation via Slideshare: