The Ed Techie

FLOSScom summer school is go!

As part of the FLOSScom project I'm involved with we are running a FLOSScom Summer University. The idea is that we want to recreate some of the characteristics found in open source communities in an educational context.

Participants will create resources around FLOSS topics and then create a 'toolkit'. This is meant to be a guide for anyone who comes afterwards and wants to adapt or create a course (in any subject area) that uses FLOSS principles. Having created the resources the participants will have the experience and the knowledge to do this, we hope.

Like participation in FLOSS communities the idea is that anyone can join at any time. Participants take on the role(s) they feel comfortable with and they create the content, working towards a 'release'.

If you fancy having a look it can be found at the Ubuntu site https://wiki.ubuntu.com/flosscom Just register and take part.

You can see me talking incoherently about it here via Flashmeeting http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/3b8624-9146

OpenLearn Netvibes Universe

Stuart Brown has developed a Netvibes Universe for openlearn which pulls in all the openlearn material and mixes it with some widgets and tools.  It's neat and reinforces the feeling I've had for a while that Pageflakes and Netvibes are not far off being a learning environment, at least an individual one. The question I ask whenever I see this stuff (usually via Stuart or Tony Hirst) is why are universities, including my own, still persisting in developing their own portals?

Anyway, have a look and a play.

Battleground future

A few people have been blogging about the battle for the future (coming to a cinema near you), particularly as it relates to how people feel about technological change. Stowe Boyd has been getting in to some good discussions. After Virginia Postrel he calls web 2.0 detractors enemies of the future. He says that Postrel “argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate.” I think there might be something in this. Left and right, as others have argued, are in some ways definitions from the last century. Other polar opposites have been suggested such as fundamentalism and moderatism, east and west, etc. I do wonder how much of my reaction to events is grounded in my general pro-technology and change stance, regardless of left and right.

I don’t go in for the rather confrontational stance of Postrel or Boyd however, particularly in education, there are those who have valid reservations, have seen a lot of it before, and may just take longer to get around to this stuff. I remember Peter Knight saying to me, after I had been disgruntled about a negative reaction to some proposed change, that disruption was one of the things he relished about academic life. My concern about this labelling anyone who doesn't agree with us about the wonders of new technology as an enemy, we are stifling valid debate. But, as I’ve posted before, I think a lot of surface valid reasons often hide a much more fundamental position on technology and change.

And then via John Connell there is a quote from Alan Kay, who inverts his own ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’ maxim to ‘the best way to predict the future is to prevent it.’

This did make me stop and think. Rather than just being reticent about change, the opposers could be seen as deliberately trying to limit the future. As Stowe Boyd suggests with web 2.0 we need to let it run. This sense of openness is a real mind shift. I came across a good presentation from Brian Kelly (via Beth’s Blog), who has a quote from Michael Nowlan who says his mantra is now ‘Yes before no; allow before disallow; open rather than closed; connect to the network on a device-agnostic basis.’ That could be an approach for any educator, not just an IT director and is very much about letting go of control – control of content, control of interaction, control of the environment, control of the future.

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.

Finding the message in medium

I had a play with medium the other day. It's an interesting bit of software - it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found the means of communicating didn't really lend itself to decent conversation with people posting rather banal comments.

As I said in an earlier post on Gabbly, I think there is something in these tools for e-learning as they can promote informal discussion around content. I think medium would need to work on the group allocation though - I can see it being a good tool for an agreed set of users to collaborate on a specific task, for instance a tutor group could perform online research using it. There is a friends option, so maybe this could perform that function (as usual I didn't have any friends so couldn't experiment) but I think you'd want to allow simple group allocation and lose the general waffle.

The scrobbling of sites you visit to create the web radar is a good idea also, although I don't want others observing what I do (not that I do anything unsavoury, unless one counts going to some Spurs discussion sites).

When I missed the Gabbly bus

No. 2 in an occassional series of things I didn't follow up on (see When I missed the wiki bus). A few years ago I suggested that we develop a tool that allowed instant messaging on a specific page, ie it showed you who was reading that page at the same time and you could chat with them. This was intended for study, so students reading the same page in a VLE could say 'I don't get this, do you?'. I even had a natty name for it - 'StudyBuddy'. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but recently I've been looking at Gabbly (possibly as a tool for the FLOSScom summer school), which does exactly this. I think this incidental 'I've bumped in to someone else around a resource' type of dialogue has huge potential for e-learning.

Andreas Meiszner pointed me at me.dium.com (I hate these urls that split up a word, I can never remember them. Delicious has a lot to answer for) which potentially looks even better, although I have twice applied to participate and not heard anything back, so can't verify this yet.

I still think StuddyBuddy is a better name...

A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content

I haven't looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including:

• Cardiff news stories
• Cardiff photos
• A google map with Cardiff events marked on it
• Cardiff weather

Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking 'that's cool!' (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term 'cool' in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info to go on, that's not bad personalisation. Imagine what a learning system could do that had course history, user preferences, learning styles (if such things really existed), scores, etc to go on?

Second, this level of purely automatic content selection (I don't suppose there was a little man selecting content for me at the Pageflakes garage) has only really been realisable recently as we have reached a critical mass of content that is tagged (the photos were from Flickr and just used the tag Cardiff) and which is subscribable and available. Having been an advocate of learning objects a few years back (and as a means of writing, I am still a fan), this critical mass was something they never really achieved and so the visions of a personalised course didn't materialise. It also demonstrates, if further demonstration were needed, that making your content available in RSS and accessible (ie not behind authentication) is the key to both getting it seen and to a personalised future.

The last thing was what could an institution like the OU do with something like this, maybe in conjunction with the BBC? Users could receive calendars with appropriate programmes slotted in, maps with relevant  'learning events' highlighted in their locality (which could be user generated e.g. a meeting of the physics club in the Cayo at 8pm), content that relates to both their subject and geographical area (e.g. an example of classic Georgian architecture can be found at...), plus a range of general subject content feeds.

Chasing the Hawthorne effect

In a response to a comment from Alan Cann I glibly mentioned the Hawthorne effect and that maybe it wasn't the evil it is usually portrayed as. I've been thinking about this since, and wanted to explore the idea. It goes something like this:

The Hawthorne effect says that because you start experimenting that can change the behaviour of the people you are observing (see also the related Pygmalion and halo effects) . It bedevils educational technology, because say you introduce podcasting on a course and then measure student performance or satisfaction then you can't be sure that any change is really due to a pedagogic benefit of the podcasts, it could just as well be due to the novelty of having podcasts, or of being part of the experiment. There are ways of controlling it, but a lot of educational technology research is quite small scale, done with one teacher and a cohort, and this is particularly prone to the effect.

The teacher effect is probably more significant, in that if you are the teacher who introduces the technology then the very fact that you have done so will modify your behaviour. It may make you more motivated (it's fun again!), it may change what or how you teach, it may make you more reflective. In short it can rejuvenate the way you are teaching a course because you have to think about it in a different way. Now this is likely to have an effect on the students, almost regardless of what the actual technology is.

So generally researchers get sniffy about such studies. But my point is that if it does have this effect, then regardless of the cause - isn't that a good thing? Introducing a new technology (or it could be a new approach, doesn't have to be technology related) every couple of years keeps you on your toes as an educator, makes you think about the design of your course, your approach, the content. It's rather like all those studies that show that introducing new IT systems doesn't actually improve productivity, but you have to do it to keep up. If you hadn't introduced them then the organisation wouldn't  be able to compete. So maybe there isn't this great pedagogical motivation for using the new technologies, but their incidental effects are more significant.

So rather than dismissing the Hawthorne effect maybe we should be actively pursuing it, and asking yourself 'How have I Hawthorned recently?'

Reasons for not doing elearning 2.0

Tony Karrer recently did a post suggesting that educators should just do it and try using web 2.0 technologies in education. He's right of course, this stuff isn't rocket science, the tools are being used by millions of people everyday, so why do so many educators resist even thinking about them? This came back to me during the recent OU curriculum and technology conference. There were some good examples of part-time tutors who had 'just done it', but also a lot of resistance. This resistance isn't usually voiced as direct opposition, but is rather couched in 'reasons to be cautious'. Here are the main reasons to be cautious that I've come across, and for each why I think they're misfounded and what the (unkind) translation might be:

1. Quality - any 2.0 approach has a degree of 'letting go' associated with it. As academics, and particularly OU academics who have fought hard to overcome the distance education legitimacy deficit, any relinquising of quality control is hard to do.
   It's misfounded because - quality is important, but you need to focus on certain areas. It is worth creating some good quality content, and lots of good quality activities, but there is a trade-off between controlling all the content and allowing learners access to a wide range of material, and also very current material. It also assumes that the content out there (be it user generated or otherwise) is of lesser quality. This is not necessarily so. If the course is well designed it can accommodate a range of content and be much richer for it.
   Translation - I am experienced at producing content, and this is my default mode of operation, so don't want anything to do with an approach that undermines that.
2. Student experience - related to above, we haven't had the time to test all these technologies so can't be entirely sure of how they will hold up for large numbers of students.
   It's misfounded because - thousands of non-experts are using these technologies every day. They are designed to be easy to use and robust.
   Translation - education is different from everything else and must always have its own version of any tool.
3. Staff development - if we are to use any of this stuff we need a big programme of staff development first.
   It's misfounded because - errm, thousands of non-experts are using these technologies every day! The best way to learn about them is not to go on a two day workshop but to use them.
   Translation - I don't need to do anything because I haven't had the official training yet.
4. Pedagogical research - there isn't enough research on these approaches and technologies yet to know how to use them effectively.
   It's misfounded because - we won't have any research unless we use them, and besides we're the educators so if we can't think of good ways of using them who can?
   Translation - I don't need to do anything because there isn't enough research yet.

There are some other more valid reasons, which include 'I'm trying to but the institution is making it difficult!', but the above represent the four most common ones I've come across. I'm not entirely sure how to overcome them. One can do it by example, but I've done that with e-learning in general (when I created a course with 15,000 students in 1999) only to be met by 'ah, yes, but it wouldn't work in my subject area.' Just got to keep plugging away I guess.