Electric Pilgrim

Seen and heard: December 2011

2012-01-22T08:54:00.000-08:00

Henry V, production by Propellor Theatre Company at Milton Keynes Theatre
The Ides of March, new film about US election politics, with George Clooney
"Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook", BBC TV documentary, in The Money Programme series
Rev, BBC TV comedy series, with Tom Hollander
Accidental Empires, book about the early history of the personal computer industry, by Robert X Cringely (1992 revised 1996)
The Colours of Christmas, new CD with cracking performances of Christmas music, by John Rutter
Midnight Mass at Turvey Abbey, actually held at 7:30 in deference to the stamina of older members of the order
Meet Your Brain, The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, by Bruce Hood
The Book of Unwritten Tales, wonderful new point-and-click adventure game

Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?

2012-01-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

To take in something external and make it part of oneself: assimilation or digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. It's a long-established one too; the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer famously asks that believers should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the holy scriptures. Today, "assimilative tasks" are one of the categories of learning activities in the classification system used by learning designers at the Open University. According to this system, the characteristic "assimilative tasks" are reading, viewing and listening, which even in the digital world remain the core activities of a university student.

But there's something slightly pejorative about the label "assimilative" in that classification, especially when set alongside the other categories: experiential, information-handling, communicative, productive and adaptive (simulations to you and me). Grainné Conole puts her finger on it when she describes assimilative tasks as "essentially passive in nature" (Conole 2007, p 84). Taking it for granted that we're all aiming to get students to be active in their learning, the implication is that reading text, watching video or listening to audio is somehow less active than, say, communicating, handling information or getting new experiences.

Now it's certainly possible to listen passively to a lecture or a podcast, or to read through written words passively without thinking about their meaning. But that's not assimilation: that's swallowing. To take in food takes minutes, or seconds; to digest it takes hours, and that digestion is a very active process, involving peristaltic movement, gastric acids, enzymes and so on. If we're to take assimilation as a model of learning, then the important part isn't putting the stuff in the mouth, or eyes or ears, but working on it to break it down and make it part of oneself. And that's the part on which a good teacher will focus.

This is something in which the Open University has excelled for the past forty years. The reasons its course materials are so good is not that the information is well-organised or that the explanations are clear - although they are - but that they're always accompanied by learning activities to help students build their own understanding of the subject. It's these activities, rather than the reading, viewing and listening, which are the real assimilative tasks. Here are some of the most common types, divided for convenience into three levels:

Basic

summarising - for example: "List the three most important characteristics of theory X." "Write a single sentence explanation of concept Y."
representing diagrammatically - for example: "Draw a mind map to show the relationship between the concepts of theory X., including examples from case study Y."
organising - for example: "List the different aspects of this topic, and create a system for arranging them."
classifying - for example: "Sort the instances A., B., C.… into the categories / concepts X., Y., Z.."
comparing and contrasting - for example: "List points of similarity and difference between X. and Y."
identifying - for example: "Identify the features of concept X. which make it an instance of concept Y."
exemplifying - for example: "Find an example of concept X. in material Y., or in your own experience."

Intermediate

interpreting - for example: "Describe the most important features of case X., according to theory Y."
analysing - for example: "Outline the structure of case X., according to theory Y."
applying - for example: "Describe what you would do in case X., according to principles / procedure Y." "Identify the salient features of case A., according to theory B."
reflecting - for example: "Interpret your experience of X. according to theory / framework / protocol Y."

Advanced

contextualising - for example: "Relate case X. to its theoretical / social / historical / political / environmental etc. context."
evaluating - for example: "Say how far case X. meets standards Y., and give reasons for your judgements."
discussing critically (in the academic sense) - for example: "Argue for an interpretation of case X., and give reasons for preferring this over other possible interpretations."

A better name for this category of tasks might be "comprehension and application", rather than "assimilative", if assimilation is going to be mistaken for simple reception of material. But whatever we call it, properly conceiving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding as an active process is vital to higher education, since every academic discipline requires it to a greater or lesser extent. In the face of subject matter experts' tendency to teach a subject just by expounding it, the reminder which we need is that good teaching requires not only clear exposition but a process for learners to assimilate it.

References

Book of Common Prayer (1662), Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Talking teaching or technology? A lesson from Pixar

2011-12-06T23:50:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on how we train tutors to use Elluminate (our audiographic conferencing system) for a meeting of the Open University's eLearning Community, I realised that our attitude has done a 180 degree turn in just a few years.

When we began, we thought it was very important that tutors learned how to use all the Elluminate controls before thinking about how to teach with it, despite the time it would take them to do so. (The full manual is 365 pages long!) Now we're more inclined to the view that the first thing a tutor should do is to watch an Elluminate tutorial, or even better - with just a little basic preparation - to take part in one, run by someone else. Once they know what can be done, they can find out how to do it for themselves, with the aid of the manual if need be - and now with the motivation to do so.

The great thing about this approach is that it values the competences which tutors already have, rather than plunging them into an area where they're unskilled and are liable to become demoralised when the inevitable technical problems arise. ("There you are, I told you I'm rubbish with computers.") Our tutors are already brilliant at bulding rapport with students, with reassuring and challenging them, and creating a safe space in which they can admit to problems and make mistakes. All they need to do is to learn to do these things through a new medium.

To encourage tutors feeling nervous about the technology, I tell them the story of John Lasseter: the director or executive producer of some of Pixar's greatest computer-animated films (Toy Story, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, etc).

In 1981, when he moved from Disney to the division of Lucasfilm which would become Pixar, computer animation was still very much dominated by programmers and technologists, and the sorts of films they made showed rotating cubes with changing images on each side, or geometrical shapes rising out of pools of molten liquid, or the play of light on complex textured surfaces. (I remember going to a computer animation festival at this time, where one of the presenters got very, very excited about the precise fractal algorithm he'd used to generate the texture of ice and snow on a simulated glacier.)

By contrast, Lasseter's 1984 film "André and Wally B" was a story about a little man and a bee, and it was shown at a computer graphics conference where it got a tremendous reception. After the showing, a guy came up to him and said: "Hey, your film was really funny!" to which Lasster made a polite and appreciative response. Then the guy asked: "What software do you use?" and Lasseter explained that it was just a basic key-frame animation tool, pretty much what everyone else was using, nothing very special. The guy was visibly disappointed. "Yeah," he mused, "but your film was so funny!"

And Lasseter realised that the computer guy was assuming that the film's being funny was somehow a product of the software. It wasn't, of course: it was a product of character, emotion, narrative and timing - all things that Lasseter, as a former Disney animator, knew how to do, and do well.

So what I remind our tutors is that if someone says to them, as we hope they will, "Hey, that was a really great online tutorial you gave!" it won't be because of the excellence of the software or even their expertise in using it. It will be because of those qualities which already make them great tutors face-to-face and which they've learned to apply in the online environment.

References: John Lasseter has told this story in interviews for the BBC TV programme 'From pencils to pixels' ('Imagine' series, transmitted 10 December 2003) and at the 2001 London Film Festival.
For OU staff only: a video of my talk to the eLearning Community is at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/webcast-ou/ (under 15 November 2011, Session 3, 27 mins in) and details of the event are at http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=9612.

Seen and heard - November 2011

2011-12-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

"Living in the Material World" (film biography of George Harrison, on TV) - the quiet but interesting Beatle
"Strictly Gershwin" (ENB Ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre)
The Invincible, by Stanislaw Lem (1964 hardcore SF novel from the innovative Polish writer, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad)
"The Making of the Drum" (choral piece by Bob Chilcott) - sung with chamber choir Polymnia, powerful African-inspired text on the sacred process involving death (killing the goat, cutting the tree) and voices ("speak when we touch you")
"The Elusive Technological Future" - John Naughton's keynote speech at Alt-C in September 2011.

24 words on how to write a restaurant review

2011-11-20T05:20:00.000-08:00

In higher education, we tend to assume that students all know how to communicate online: that they instinctively know the right genre, register and tone for the context. And then we're surprised when forum communication either fails to take off or goes up in flames.

The Qype website makes no such assumptions. Beside the box allowing you to post a review of, for example, a restaurant, it carries the following instructions:

Write as if you were talking to a good friend (in front of your mother) No spam, no self promotion and no offensive language.

No long guidance document, no course in study skills. Just 24 words, which anyone about to make a comment is bound to see. Neat!

Seen and heard October 2011

2011-11-16T00:49:00.000-08:00

Obituaries and memories of Steve Jobs (1955-2011), including a quote on design as not merely surface veneer but the soul of a device
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the 1979 TV series with Alec Guiness as George Smiley) - after rewatching this on DVD, the new film seemed pretty trite and superficial
"Copenhagen" (play by Michael Frayn about Werner Heisenberg's mysterious 1941 visit to Niels Bohr in German-occupied Denmark) - repeat of the tremendous TV film version
"Mixed Britannia" (on the history of mixed-race people in Britain) - sensitive and moving TV documentary series by George Alagiah
"Strictly Come Dancing" and "Merlin", new seasons - so that's Saturday evenings sorted then
"Lavinia" by Ursula Le Guin (novel telling the story of the Latin woman married by proto-Roman Aeneas) - lovely re-writing of Virgil, more about household gods than battles
"Downton Abbey", second series - increasingly-soapy, but still hugely compelling
The Plenary Producer - wonderful resource with zillions of ideas for group activities by schoolteacher Mark Gershon

What can online teaching add to printed materials?

2011-10-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

Here are 10 things you can do online, which add value to printed distance learning materials.

1 Make the printed materials available in digital form - for example, as a PDF or an ePub (e-book) file. This makes the materials searchable, portable (if loaded onto a mobile device), and copy-and-pasteable. (Even if students primarily read the materials in their printed form, they may find a digital version a useful alternative.)

2 Include time-limited subject matter. This is useful where a topic is essentially volatile (for example, because it is dependent on government policy), or topical examples or case studies are in danger of becoming dated. Rather than avoid them totally, you can include them in the knowledge that you can revise them if necessary later at relatively low production cost.

3 Provide exercises or learning activities - to help students develop their own knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Where a question or task is followed by a model answer, comment or feedback, the online medium allows you to hide this (for example, just by putting it on another web page), so that students don't see it immediately. (Even if you can't force them to answer a question, you can still make them pause - and the dialogic question-and-answer form can help support students' own metacognitive processes.)

4 Include interactive presentations - for example, animated diagrams. These can repay their development cost by helping students develop their own mental models of structures, processes or concepts.

5 Provide self-tests - for example, quizzes, which (with careful writing) can test analytical or even evaluative skills, as well as knowledge and understanding. These are only practical where the subject matter allows for questions with closed, well-defined answers, but where they are students usually greatly value the immediacy of feedback on their study.

6 Link to external online resources - not only resources which present or teach the subject matter well (if they exist and are free, why write your own?) but resources which can you can use as objects or exemplars of different perspectives for students to analyse and critique.

7 Develop digital skills and information literacy - the skills of digital reading, writing and note-taking, and finding, evaluating and using online sources, which are now expected of graduates.

8 Integrate learning activities with digital resources - so that students can for example move smoothly between audio-visual resources and the accompanying analytic questions, or between their current learning task and their products from previous tasks held in the “cloud”.

9 Include cooperative activities - for example, through an online forum, to enable students to share their experiences or findings, or to form each other's conceptual development through discussion, as well as developing communicative skills.

10 Include collaborative activities - for example, through a wiki, in which students work together to produce a shared product, thus requiring them to develop the meta-skills of work organisation and negotiation.

Mobile vs desktop vs print

2011-10-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

If you’re trying to predict which delivery medium will predominate in the distance learning of the future, there are some wise words – supported as usual by decent empirical data – in a recent post from Jakob Nielsen on how people use mobile devices and desktop computers for accessing the internet.

His first prediction is that – contrary to the sayings of some enthusiasts – mobile devices will not be replacing desktop computers. (In general, new technologies seldom displace older ones entirely; theatre, radio and cinema co-exist alongside television, YouTube and download services.) People prefer, if they can, to have all options open to them. The question is how they use them.

His second prediction is that “highest-value use will stay predominantly on desktop”. Even if the split of time-spent-on-internet swings increasingly towards tablets and smartphones (because the best computer for an immediate need, like the best camera, is the one you have with you), desktop machines will retain users’ preference for a large proportion of complex high value tasks, because of their superior screen size and keyboards, as well as (currently) superior internet speed and printing connectivity.

Nielsen’s predictions are about internet use in general. How might they apply to distance learning?

First, they confirm the correctness of the Open University’s strategy of giving students flexibility of delivery medium as far as possible. An increasing proportion of them will own one or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop computer and will expect to be able to transfer study materials and their own notes between them. The new feature enabling students to re-render onscreen structured content on formats for eBook readers and MP3 players, as well as printing, will go a long way towards meeting these expectations.

Nevertheless, Nielsen’s observations suggest that students will still prefer to do much of their work through print (whether supplied by us or printed by themselves) or on a desktop computer. The “high value use” which requires a large screen (or printed page) and keyboard (or physical notebook) is the reading of complex texts, requiring regular scanning and skipping backwards and forwards, and the simultaneous taking of content-rich notes: the core study activities at higher education level. Though small-screen devices such as smartphones will be increasingly used for brief, low-intensity activities such as checking the due-date for a TMA or monitoring activity on a forum, their use for core study activities is likely to be secondary and less-preferred – though still convenient as a backup mode, for example when taking study materials to work on during a child’s evening class.

(For Open University staff: updates on our ongoing work to extend and enrich mobile access are available from:

http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/teaching/learning-systems/development/projects/mobile-vle-development – updates on developments as part of the Roadmap Acceleration Programme
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/mLearn/?cat=19 – OU blog by Rhodri Thomas on mobile learner support
http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/mobile/guidance/module-websites/ou-staff-demonstrator-mobile-vle – simulation of the mobile view of a module website on your desktop machine)

Moodle tools – and the teaching / learning they support

2011-04-04T03:45:00.000-07:00

This quick and concise guide to Moodle tools – from the nicely named Cats Pyjamas blog – has a couple of really lovely features.

First, it’s a chart. You can read through it horizontally or vertically, or you can print it out at poster size and put it on the wall while you’re writing materials, or on the table when you’re working with a group.

Second, it’s pedagogically rich, and just browsing through it sharpens up one’s thinking. For each Moodle tool (including the ultra-basic “Add resource / Upload a file”), it comments on each of the possible teaching / learning uses to which you might put it (Information transfer, Assess learning, Communication and interaction, Co-create content), as well as its affordance in terms of Bloom’s hierarchy and its ease of use.

(Note for Open University staff: as this is a guide to Moodle in general, it doesn’t quite correspond to Moodle as implemented at the Open University. But the differences are minor, and the principles are great.)

MP3 files from an Audacity audio recording

2011-03-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

Audacity is a great piece of free software for audio recording and editing, but unfortunately creating an MP3 file from a recording isn't entirely straight-forward and regularly perplexes some of the Open University's Languages students (who have to record themselves speaking their target language and upload the audio file to the online assessment submission system). The fact that questions about this keep coming to me suggests that not all OU staff are entirely clear about it either...

There are two complications.

(1) The "encoder" which Audacity needs to produce an MP3 file isn't built in. (Apparently US patent law says that the Audacity people aren't allowed to build it into the software, but they ARE allowed to point us to another website where we can download it and build it in ourselves. This is one of those cases where the law is an ass and makes additional work for the rest of us. D'oh!)

Assuming you've already downloaded and installed Audacity (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), you also need to follow the link to the "LAME MP3 encoder" and install that too. When you first try to export a recording as an MP3 file (see below), Audacity will ask you to find a file called "lame_enc.dll"; hopefully it will be in somewhere obvious like C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity, and once you've pointed Audacity towards it you won't have to do it again.

(2) The second complication is (apparently) simpler, and therefore (paradoxically) more difficult: the difficulty isn't obvious so the solution is harder to remember. To create an MP3 file from your recording you DON'T select "Save As" (or its nearest equivalent, "Save Project As") from the file menu, as you would if you were saving a Word file in a different format (such as .RTF or .DOC instead of .DOCX). You don't want to do that, because that would save your recording as an Audacity project, which won't be readable by anything other than Audacity.

What you need to do is to select "Export..." from the file menu; then under "Save as type..." select "MP3 files".

Easy when you know how. (But harder to remember.)

(For Open University staff: you can see the Department of Languages' guidance on installing and using Audacity on the website for any Modern Languages module, amongst the resources for assessment.)

Seen and heard January 2010

2010-01-31T05:09:00.000-08:00

New Year's Day concert from Vienna (shown live on BBC TV)
"Kindlemania could suffer from bite of the Apple", John Naughton Observer column - including reflections on how new information technologies don't necessarily displace old ones but usually co-exist alongside them (as when email led to increase in paper consumption).
"The Secret Life of the Dog" (Horizon programme on BBC TV, on experimental investigation of social and cognitive kinship of humans and dogs)
"The E-nigma decoder: A teacher’s guide to intercepting enemy communication" (blog post on pontydysgu.org - revealing list of online kidspeak abbreviations)
"Delia through the Decades" (BBC series)
"The British Family" (BBC series)
"Up in the Air" (new film, black romantic comedy, with George Clooney - on how technology can be used to keep relationships from becoming compassionate and intimate, for those who prefer them that way)

Seen and heard - December 2009

2009-12-31T05:13:00.000-08:00

"The Art of Russia" (BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon)
"Cranford" (BBC TV series, inspired by the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell)
"Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films" (BBC documentary about the Quaker storyteller, whose animations with Peter Firmin touched the lives of every child growing up in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s, and who died at the end of 2009)
"Carols from Kings" (the Xmas eve service of nine lessons and carols)
"A Celebration of Classic MGM Musicals" (BBC Promenade Concert 22, reshowing of live broadcast from the summe)
"The Incredibles" (Pixar animation, the BBC Christmas Day family film)
"Hamlet" (filmed version of RSC production, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart)
"Black Books" (repeats of Channel 4 comedy series from 2000, with Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, and Tamsin Grieg, written by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan)

Seen and heard - November 2009

2009-12-01T06:40:00.000-08:00

Enneagram workshop at Turvey Abbey

"Is It Better to Be Mixed Race?" (Channel 4 TV)
"Two Cheers for Cyberspace?", long blog post by John Naughton

"Bright Star" (new Jane Campion film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne)
"Literacy in the Digital University", seminar by Robin Goodfellow to the Open University's Technology and Learning Research Group (see his notes, slides, and blog post)
"The Waters of Mars", episode of "Doctor Who"
"A History of Christianity" (BBC series)
"The Legacy of Domestic Violence" (article in The Guardian - Patrick Stewart, actor and patron of Refuge, on his own violent upbringing and how it has affected him)
"How to Save the World with eLearning Scenarios" (slideshare presentation by Cathy Moore - itself a scenario about re-designing an information-heavy course in competition with a flashy business rival)

Digital literacies (2): Why academic literacy is about texts

2009-11-24T05:55:00.000-08:00

This arises from a long blog by Robin Goodfellow for the Literacy in the Digital University project, following up a presentation in which he started from the position that "literacy" is not just about reading and writing and the comparable digital activities ("new literacies"), or about communication skills (presenting, reviewing, discussing) but about social practices: that is to say, literacy is purposeful and relational, drawing on "a complex and distributed understanding of the network of personal and occupational relationships that give the text its purpose".

All fairly uncontroversial, one might think. But there was one question which was posed in discussion, and which stayed with him and which is the subject of his blog: "If Literacy is 'social practice' why talk about Texts? Why not just talk about social practice?"

His immediate response had been that "we are focusing on practices in the university, which are uniquely defined in terms of texts" - while explaining that he meant the word "text" in an extended sense, referring to any kind of communicative artefact, not just printed words and not just words at all (so including pictures and recorded music).

But in his blog he poses the question: "it is always going to be the case that what we currently call texts are what define practice in higher education? As HE gets more intermingled with other social fields (industry, commerce, the professions, popular culture - see Mandelson's 'Higher Ambitions' framework) and as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?"

I think the answer is No - or at least, it shouldn't. I follow Diana Laurillard (Re-thinking University Teaching, 2nd edn, p. 21-2) in taking the defining feature of university practice to be its second-order character: "the point about academic knowledge is that, being articulated, it is known through exposition, argument, interpretation ... through reflection on experience and represents therefore a second-order experience of the world." Academic discourse is characteristically not only about knowledge, but about knowledge-about-knowledge: epistemology, or how-we-come-to-know. It is not only what we believe to be the case, but why we believe it to be the case, or why my view of what is the case is better than yours. It is about theories and models, interpretations and frameworks, inferences and arguments.

Here perhaps is the practical meaning of Helen Beetham's summary of the key difference between academic knowledge and internet knowledge (referenced by Robin Goodfellow): that academic knowledge practice is about truth value while internet knowledge practice is about use value. If you value knowledge only for how it can be used, you will not be interested in how the knowledge is derived; you only care about whether it is reliable: Yes, or No. But if you care about the process by which knowledge is made and justified, challenged and revised, then you will need to get into second-order discourse.

Does second-order discourse require the use of texts? No, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. By making the knowledge (the theory, the data, the model, the interpretation) an artefact, it becomes easier for us to stand back from it and view it as an object and conduct the second-order discourse. The text does not need to be a physical thing, or even a digital thing: it can be a spoken object, as for example the thesis or the various points of argument in the formal disputations at pre-modern universities. The technology to accomplish a second-order discourse can be rhetorical and procedural, as well as physical and material.

But do we need this second-order discourse? Do we actually need academics and universities to conduct it, to look at the foundations of knowledge, instead of just using it?

As the historian Susan Faye Canon observed a long time ago (Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, 1978), the best justification for the existence of historians is that, unless you have people whose professional responsibility is the reconstruction of the past in all its complexity and subtlety, then the only accounts of the past which are available will be the simplified and interested accounts of politicians and those with a political axe to grind.

I think we need academics and academies for essentially the same reason: that unless we have people whose professional responsibility is in defining and challenging the basis of knowledge, then all we will have is the claim and counter-claim of parties who value knowledge only for its usefulness to them and its service of their interests.

When learning isn't "learning"

2009-11-23T06:04:00.001-08:00

One problem which confronts anyone trying to investigate learning in workplace culture is that much of what you, as a researcher, want to count as learning isn't called or maybe even recognised as "learning" by the people concerned. This is particularly the case with so-called "informal learning".

I've just seen this issue nicely typologised in a white paper on "performance toolkits" by Peter Casebow and Owen Ferguson. There they distinguish three levels of engagement from an employee:

Just-in-time: "Employee seeks help and suport at the time they need it to deal with an unfamiliar task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this as learning, but as "getting the job done".
Explore: "Employee recognises that the issue justifies investing some time to investigating the task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this learning, but rather "research" or "investigation".
Deep dive: "Employee recognises that they need time away from work to immerse him/herself in 'learning mode' to acquire new skills and perspectives." This is where formal learning is involved, and is the only one which employees are likely to consider unproblematically as "learning".

The implication, of course, is that corporate training and development should be concerned not only with helping people "learn" but also with helping people "research", "investigate" and "get the job done". I wonder what parts of learning in higher education might not be recognised by students (or lecturers) as "learning"? Some of the administration and organisation needed to carry it out, perhaps, which tends to be undervalued by lecturers but is high up on the list of desirable study skills.

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

2009-11-23T01:24:00.001-08:00

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).

See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.

Digital literacies (1): They've read the research so we don't have to

2009-11-12T09:03:00.000-08:00

One of the sessions which excited me at Alt-C was the workshop by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe on "Frameworks for developing digital literacies". But why it was exciting isn't very evident from the PowerPoint - hence this further blog.

What was exciting was that they drew on two enormous pieces of summarising work - one on conceptions of digital literacy, and one on learners' experience - and brought them together.

Conceptions of digital literacy

The summarising work here was done as part of the Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA) project. From nine major frameworks attempting to define the components of digital lteracy, or learning literacy in a digital environment, they constructed a "framework of frameworks" (see the project report, pp 35-38). The resulting set of "top-level terms, framing ideas" is not so exceptional: learning to learn, metacognition; academic practice / study skills; information literacy; communication and collaboration skills; media literacy ; computer literacy; employability; citizenship. What is more interesting is the way they break these top-level framing ideas down into practices, both non-digital ("what competent learners do") and digital ("what competent digitally enabled learners do"). For example, "learning to learn, metacognition" is broken down into the following non-digital and digital practices:

manage time and study commitments / use digital tools to manage time and study commitments
balance learning and life / use digital networks and online resources to fit learning into life
know where and how to access support / access support online including learning communities
construct strategies for learning, articulate goals / diagnose learning needs [and] choose appropriate learning tools
reflect on own learning and progression / use digital tools to record and reflect on progress.

What this presents very clearly is the position that digital learning literacy is just a matter of doing learning literacy practices, only with digital tools and in a digital environment. Or, to put it another way, there's no such thing as e-learning: only learning done with e-tools.
The "framework of frameworks" seems like a good starting place for planning progression in digital learning literacy across course pathways.
(See also comment on the LLiDA report by Robin Goodfellow, for the Literacy in a Digital University project.)
Learners' experience
The summarising work here was done by the Support and Synthesis Project at Oxford Brookes University, synthesising outputs from the many projects in the JISC "Learners' experiences of e-learning" programme.
The "Dissemination" section of the project website includes workshop materials, of which the ones used at Alt-C are:

a document "Developing effective e-learners", presenting a pyramid model of development, listing both technical and learning competences at the ascending levels of Access, Skills, Practices and behaviours, and Attributes and identities (under "Session 5: Learners are different")
a set of one-paragraph summaries of students' strategies for learning with technology (not all of them necessarily desirable), suitable for printing on card for use as a workshop activity (also under "Session 5: Learners are different")
a set of "Key messages" cards, as a nutshell summary of the results of the JISC projects (under "Session 3: Themes and issues" - although a nicer designed-up and slightly different version is on the JISC website)

These "Key messages" are worth reproducing here, for the benefit of all those of us who are never going to read through all the reports of all the JISC learners' experience of e-learning projects (the originals include illustrative quotes also:

Expectations of technology - Learners have high expectations of technology with respect to access, choice and reliability.
Expectations of VLEs - Learners expect consistency across modules in use of the VLE: most see it as an essential aspect of course admin and communication.
Expectations of tutors' skills - Learners have high expectations of their tutors’ use of technology. They expect use of technology for learning to be appropriate and skillful.
Keeping the balance - Students stress that learning with ICT should be balanced with face to face and paper-based learning. A minority positively dislike the distractions from study that computers entail.
Tutors as mentors - The way in which learners use technology is still led by their tutors and the design of their courses. Even ‘google generation’ students are often introduced to educationally important technologies by their tutors.
Playing the game - As the use of technology makes more learning happen in ‘public’, learners are being socialized to play the academic game in new ways.
Personalisation - Learners expect to be able to personalise institutional technologies and to use personal technologies in the institutional environment. Disabled learners may be excluded if they cannot do so.
Meaningful choices - Learners want meaningful choices from technology. This is not about the look and feel of online services, but about key issues in how they learn.
Google generation - The Internet is the first port of call for information: sites such as google and wikipedia are referred to before academically approved resources.
Academic digital content - Access to academic digital content is regarded by learners as a unique benefit of attending HE and FE institutions.
Underworld - Communication technologies most used by learners are also often outside institutional control (mobile phones, skype, chat): there is an ‘underworld’ of social networking in support of learning.
Digital divide - There is evidence that the ‘digital divide’ is becoming deeper but narrower: a minority of students lack basic access and ICT skills, while an increasingly large majority have a wide range of devices and competences, especially with laptops
Skills gap - Despite their facility with personal technologies, learners often lack skills in using technology to support learning. This can be true even after considerable time at college.
Maturing - Students report an increased use of technology as they mature in their studies
Different strokes - Learners display enormous differences in past educational experiences, needs, and motivations. These have a profound influence over their preferred strategies for using technologies.
Attachment - Learners attach emotional significance to technologies, particularly ‘their own’ technologies, which many perceive as extensions of themselves.
Social software - Many students make extensive use of social software such as Facebook, including for informal discussions about their learning, but rarely for formal collaboration.
Public / private spaces - There are divergent opinions among learners about the use of social networks such as Facebook to support learning, and about how they manage their online identities.
Digital conservatism - Only a small minority of students actively investigate the potential of new software or technologies beyond those in general use. Disabled students can be among the most pioneering.
Technology hurdle - Where technologies require learners to adjust their usual study practices, they can become a barrier. Such technologies require careful introduction and clear communication about the benefits of use.
1000 words - Very many learners, particularly younger learners, are used to accessing knowledge via images and video. They can struggle with an academic practice which only values text as a medium for communicating ideas.
Collaboration - Technology-mediated collaboration is increasingly common. Student experiences range from pride in their collaborative work to fear of ‘free riders’ and frustration at the available technologies.

Learning as doing two things at once

2009-11-04T04:10:00.000-08:00

I'm having a problem with the screen layout of some online course materials. The student is being taught how to write definitions, and in one section they're presented with six different definitions of globalisation and have to fill in a table to analyse, for each of them, the different components of the definition. It's a common sort of distance learning activity, and the screen layout problem is a common one too: the student really needs to be able to see the definition they're working on and the table into which they're writing their analysis at the same time. I don't know how we're going to achieve this on our VLE - unless we put each of the definitions on a separate screen and repeat the table six times!

I find it astonishing that with all the effort and design talent which has gone into developing online learning platforms it is still the exception rather than the rule to find an easy way of enabling a learner to hold two things in view simultaneously. (For OU staff only: here is a rare exemple from D821.)

But this doing two things at once, or switching rapidly between them, is the essence of learning, is it not?

If we think we're simply transmitting information (as tends to be the assumption with people from the IT industry, which is based on information theory's conceptualisation of complex problems as the transmission, modification and reception of information), then a single view, single activity interface is not a problem. The student is just reading text, or looking at a picture, or watching a video, etc.

But if we're thinking about learning, then the student needs to be not only in the text, the picture or the video, but standing back from it and doing something else: relating it to their existing knowledge, forming new knowledge structures to accommodate it, thinking how to apply it to other circumstances. (It's the back end of the Kolb learning cycle.)

Good students, of course, do this whether we make it easy for them to do it or not. They take notes, they think about what we've shown them, they talk about it with their mates, they try it out.

But given how fundamental to learning is this doing-two-things-at-once (or, more accurately, switching between them quickly), and given that the distinctive capability of the contemporary digital computer is the integration of different functions on the same screen, isn't it extraordinary how little our VLEs and teaching platforms help our learners with this second function, being still designed on the assumption that they will be doing only one thing at a time?

Seen and heard - October 2009

2009-10-31T23:46:00.000-07:00

A.S. Byatt, "The Childrens Book"
Coll Bardolet paintings at the Fundació Cultural Coll Bardolet, Valdemossa, Mallorca
"Electric dreams" (BBC TV)
"An online university - with no fees", article in Education Guardian about University of the People
"Disney.Pixar" on The South Bank Show (ITV)
The Clerks, at Olney parish church - concert including items from their new album "Don't Talk - Just Listen!"
"Assignment feedback in language courses: current practice and student perceptions", research seminar by Maria Fernández-Toro and Concha Furnborough with Mike Truman, Department of Languages, The Open University
"Six Characters in Search of an Author", by Luigi Pirandello, in the new production by Rupert Goold and Ben Power, at Cambridge Arts Theatre
"Glamour's Golden Age" (BBC TV)

Electric dreams - what historical reconstructions can't show

2009-10-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

The OU / BBC co-production Electric Dreams - following a contemporary family re-experience the household technologies of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with time advancing at the rate of a year a day - has turned out to be a really good talking point. You didn't need to like the people or assume that they were representative to see lovely issues emerging about how we use technology and the effect it has on us.

But I was struck that despite the heroic and largely successful efforts to find and recondition authentic period gadgets (the Tech Team were at least as much the stars of the show as the Family), one thing which they could not recreate was the social milieu. So for example, to my surprise (and the surprise of the Tech Team) when the children were offered a choice between a Sinclair Spectrum and a BBC Microcomputer, they chose the BBC Micro, despite its nerdy image, talked up by one of the presenters. Had they been subject to the peer pressure of their friends, I'm sure they'd have chosen the Spectrum instead, because it had more of a games image. (Or should we take comfort from this, that young people can actually make sensible decisions, if separated from peer pressure?!)

The arrival of the computer and hand-held gaming devices (Game and Watches) in the home was interesting for its social effects. In the 1970s the family had all been together in the living room, playing Buckaroo or watching television (Saturday nights in the '70s = The Generation Game + The Two Ronnies + Ironside / Kojak / Starskey and Hutch) - at least partly because their bedrooms were bitterly cold (the central heating having been turned off, most houses not having it in 1970) and anyway there was nothing to do there. In the 1980s they all turned to their own gadgets and the family focus was broken. There was also a gender divide which opened up between Dad and the boy and Mum and the two girls (not including the toddler, who must have been mystified by the whole experiment).

All of that rang true to my experience of home computers in the 1980s. But even if we largely used our computers on our own, or maybe with a mate from school or (in my case) university, this didn't mean that we were isolated, because of the social environment created by the user magazines. Every machine had its own magazine; most had several. From them, you could find out what other people were playing and which games were worth buying. For anyone who was into adventure games, as I was, the network of other players was critical because when you got stuck with one of the puzzles you wrote to or phoned someone else who had completed the game: the magazines published their contact details. Anyone who played adventures on the Amstrad CPC in the 1980s will recall the name of Joan Pancott - an elderly woman, who didn't get out much because of her arthritis, but who had completed pretty much every adventure written for the machine and who must have helped hundreds and hundreds of much younger gamers. I owe her my sanity.

And there were fanzines too - word processed on our dot-matrix printers and photocopied. I subscribed to Adventure Quest, set up by Pat Winstanley for adventure game writers, where we exchanged ideas for plots and puzzles and tips for coding on the various authoring systems. It was through Adventure Quest and its sister fanzine for players Adventure Probe that I distributed my own adventure Bestiary.

Curious to think about it all now, because if we were doing it all today of course we'd be doing it on the internet, through Ning or some other kind of social networking software. The social relationships were the same, even though our technology was Royal Mail and printer paper. Things have perhaps changed less than we think.

Seen and heard - September 2009

2009-09-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

"How to Write an Instruction Manual" (BBC Radio 4, 21 August 2009, via podcast).
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967 film, shown on TV).
"Dummes' Guides to Teaching Insult Our Intelligence" (Times Higher Education article, plus long online discussion)."
"The Beatles on Record" (BBC2, 5 September 2009).
Michael Wesch, Keynote address at Alt-C, 8 September 2009, "Mediated culture / mediated education".
Rhona Sharpe and Helen Beetham, "Frameworks for developing digitally literate learners", workshop at Alt-C 8 September 2009, based on the Learning Literacies for a Digital Age (LLida) project.
David White, "It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there: using the 'Visitor-Resident' principle to guide approches to the participatory web", paper at Alt-C, 9 September 2009.
Chris Jones, "Is there a Net generation coming to university?", paper at Alt-C, 9 September 2009.
Martin Bean, Keynote address at Alt-C, 9 September 2009
"Duet for One", with Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman (Milton Keynes Theatre)
"The Frankincense Trail" (BBC TV)
"Julie and Julia" (film, in cinema)
"The Fountain" (film, on television)
Profile of David Hargreaves in Guardian Education
"Upgrade me" (BBC TV)
"Is that message really necessary?", Guardian article about information overload by Paul Hemp, based on his article in Harvard Business Review.

Audio feedback on written assignments (2)

2009-09-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

Since my previous post on this subject, there's been a lot of talk about audio feedback at Alt-C (the Association of Learning Technology Conference): at least two papers on it and mentions in many more.

Much of the talk has been wildly enthusiastic, but as Isobel Falconer observed to me, most of the examples presented of good audio feedback were just examples of good feedback pure and simple, which would have been good even if they were given in print. People found it hard to distinguish the benefits which were due to the audio medium and the benefits which were simply due to giving better feedback. For example, in one workshop, we were invited to compare a piece of written feedback which was impersonal, brief and bueaucratic, written to a form template, with a piece of audio feedback which was warm and personal, supportive and encouraging, with suggestions for how to improve. Not exactly comparing like with like.

The Open University since its foundation has made it its business to provide its students with personal, supportive and extended feedback; in fact, it is is this, rather than its TV programmes or even its printed course materials to which its success is chiefly attributable. So what WE want to know is whether there is anything additional which the audio medium adds.

From the sessions I attended - together with the much more sophisticated research paper also presented at Alt-C by Sue Rodway-Dyer et al - here are some of the potential advantages.
It may make it easier for tutors to give better feedback, for example:

they are less likely to slip into academic language
it may be easier for non-native speakers of English, the medium being more tolerant of verbal idiosyncracies
by making their feedback more of an object, from which they can stand back and experience it as students will, it prompts tutors to be more critical.

It may be easier for students to make good use of feedback, for example:

they may find it easier to take in, if their literacy is poor
it forces them to pay attention, because it can't be skimmed over the way written feedback can (we know this is a problem) - in fact, students apparently often listen to audio feedback two or three times and sometimes make notes
BUT where their assignments are long and discursive, it can be harder for them to locate the particular places being referred to in the feedback.

Some lecturers are reporting that audio feedback has encouraged dialogue between students and tutors, and between students themselves. Others have reported additional benefits if students themselves start to submit assignments in audio form also - for example, health studies students started to become more critical of how they related to their clients.

Having just heard Mike Wesch's keynote address on how media are not just tools but mediate relationships, it occured to me that this may be a case where a change in medium opens the possibility, at least of a change to the relationship: making it more personal, more aware, and more critical.

Don't you wish your professor was cool like mine (2)

2009-09-09T00:34:00.000-07:00

Alt-C had an inspiring conference keynote address yesterday from Michael Wesch, including extracts from his three excellent videos, all available on YouTube: The Machine is Us/ing Us, A Vision of Students Today, and An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube - the last two of which were the results of class projects. How cool must it be to study with him!

The keynote was pretty good too. I loved the idea of starting a conference about educational technology - in which every other person in the room had a netbook open and was madly blogging or tweeting - with an anthropologist talking about his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, where there was not only no wi-fi or broadband, but no electricity or running water, and the people don't have fixed personal names (making census-taking - which is what Wesch was there to observe - highly problematic, until they invented the concept of the "census name").

His basic message - that media are not just tools but mediate relationships, so that when you change the medium you change the relationship, creating new ways of relating to others and knowing ourselves - was especially welcome to me, since I've been contending for a long time that we need to stop thinking of educational technology in the IT terms of information transfer or the liberal individualist terms of choice and consumption, and more in terms of the network of relationships in which all these activities happen.

Training the unconfident: reading first or experience first?

2009-09-09T00:23:00.000-07:00

Last week, a colleague urgently needed training in Elluminate (a synchronous audiographic conferencing tool) in order to support a live Elluminate session. I arranged for us to meet to set up a live online session together, working on separate machines in adjacent rooms, and on the advice of our local Elluminate "champion" urged her first to read the basic introductory guide so that she would "get the most out of the session", as we learning designers say. I also suggested that she prepare by going into the Elluminate "room" on her own, so that she could practice finding and using all the tools and buttons, even if there was nobody there to talk to.

As things turned out, she wasn't able to do any of the preparation - and I wonder if in fact this wasn't for the best. She was a very unconfident explorer of new software, despite being an experienced computer user, and perhaps the most useful thing I was able to do for her was to sit by her and take her on a tour of Elluminate - which I could do quite briefly, because I could say "and you can follow that up later in the documentation which I sent you".

Many computer users are confident enough within their regular everyday comfort zone but are paralysed when attempting to move outside it for fear of something going wrong which they can't repair. It's mistakes and difficulties which IT training never seems to address (unless it's following John Carroll's "minimalist" approach): trainers only tell you the procedure to follow, not how to recover when things go wrong. For many users, our standard "read first, experience afterwards" will be fine, but for such unconfident users it may be the company of a person (or the support of a personal relationship) which they need first to take them over the threshold. Then, once they have the experience and the confidence, they can explore and read on their own.

Games design and learning design

2009-08-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

This isn't one of those blog posts about how learning could be much better if it was more like a computer game. It's a blog post about how learning DESIGN could be much better if it was more like computer games DESIGN.

I have long seen an analogy between designing games and desgning learning materials. In both cases, your goal is to give your user a good experience - yet you have no direct control over what they actually do with your materials. This analogy is particularly strong with "adventure games", which are based more on puzzles and exploration than on fast reactions and accuracy of hand-eye coordination.

I was reminded of this again through an article by Aaron Connors, the co-author of the highly-respected Tex Avery series of games and a strong proponent of story-centric gaming. Just try substituting "learning" for "game" in these extracts to see how well the analogy applies.

"When you boil game design down to the atomic level ... it’s pretty basic: Create an obstacle for the player. Give them the means to overcome it. Repeat. That’s it."

"[During the 1990s] too much focus was put on the technology. Often, some new innovation was enough to sell an otherwise miserable game."

"The two things casual gamers hate are frustration and confusion. And many of the “classic” adventure games were not only frustrating and confusing, they banked on it to extend gameplay. It may be an oversimplification, but in some respects, casual games could be adventure games with the frustration and confusion removed. In other words, take out the aimless wandering with no idea what (if anything) there is to find; always try to make certain the player knows what the current objective is."

"Better pacing, less navel-gazing, and I also think it’s a great idea to reduce frustration and confusion. We don’t have to get rid of them altogether – that’s what multiple levels of difficulty are for – but we can’t make games that rely on obscurity and repetition to pad game length. Some of you may love games where you’re free to get lost, stuck, annoyed, etc. – but you’re in the vast minority. Most people want games that are accessible, scalable to their skill level, intuitive, and fun. They want to be able to get in and out easily and do something satisfying without making a huge time commitment."

Convinced? I hope so. I don't know how useful this analogy will be in practice though, except to those of us used to thinking about games design, because the sad fact - often overlooked by those who want to make their course materials more like computer games - is that designing a good game is no easier than designing a good course. As Aaron Connors comments: "Have you noticed how seldom you hear well-known game designers criticizing other designers’ work? It’s because we know how tough it is to make a really great game."

Audio assignments for students?

2009-08-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

A previous post (Audio feedback on written assignments) listed a few examples of tutors giving feedback to students in audio form. (Collective feedback, as a podcast to an entire class, is common; individual audio feedback is rarer and I think more interesting.)

I've since found out that in my own faculty (Education and Language Studies) tutors on the language courses give audio feedback quite regularly - which should not be surprising: these being distance learning courses, students make audio recordings to practice their language productive skills, so it's natural for tutors to give feedback in the same medium.

But reading about some highly successful podcasts by a philosophy lecturer at Glasgow made me wonder whether this model of spoken-assignment, spoken-feedback could be extended further. Why are these podcasts so popular? Of course, it may just be that she's a brilliant lecturer. But there's another possible reason, to do with the nature of philosophy itself: that it's a discipline which is practiced through language. To do philosophy is to talk. One can do philosophy through writing, of course, but talking is the original technology through which philosophy was created, and through which its business (the persuasive engagement of another soul) is most intimately conducted.

If it were not for the traditions of the modern university, which since about 1800 have based their systems of assessment on written examinations, we might place more value on the spoken production of language. Philosophy is just one discipline where we might reasonably expect students to be able not only to think and write persuasively but to speak persuasively. Management is another (eg the team briefing, the strategy presentation, the three-minute business case to the Board). In fact, most professional disciplines have a communicative and persuasive component, which in practical situations is more often conducted in speech than in writing. Perhaps it's time that our assessment methods reflected this?

Online collaborative work for beginners

2009-08-20T22:36:00.000-07:00

We seem to have realised, at last, that one cannot simply provide online collaborative technology to students and expect them to collaborate. (One of the most interesting findings from the JISC Great Expectations survey was that although young people may be experienced in social networking technology, on arrival at university they struggle to see how it can be used in learning.) So how should one introduce online collaborative work to students? What kinds of scaffolding and support do beginning students need?

I've just come across a paper (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online) by Andy Northedge, author of The Good Study Guide, describing how he and colleagues designed "a fail-safe online group project work environment" for students on an entry level Open University course in health and social care (KZX100). A high degree of structuring to tasks, supported by custom online software, meant that after an initial set-up stage student teams could work largely independently with little teacher support. Satisfaction levels were high, and - most remarkably - students were actually interested in each others' work. (This happens much more rarely than teachers suppose!)

The key features of the learning design were as follows.

(1) A highly structured team set-up stage. This addressed the critical issue for all collaborative work: that students need to be doing their work at roughly the same time - not trivial to arrange with distance learning students, for whom flexibility of study is often critical. Students began by indicating their availability during a six-week period, after which their tutor divided them into teams who could work on the project during the same two-week block. A coordinator in each team then obtained students' commitment to precise start and end dates. Importantly, students received credit for tasks in this stage, even before actually doing any work on their project, "to stimulate them to participate in a timely way and to commit to the team enterprise". (Without the custom software, other courses could do some of these tasks on Doodle.com - a free public web application for event scheduling.)

(2) Visible time targets for project milestones. These were initially generated by the software, from the start and end dates, but could then be adjusted by coordinators, allowing teams to re-plan their time strategy.

(3) An interface which rendered each student's work visible to other members of their team. Each student had first to find three websites relevant to their chosen concern and review them using an online proforma, and then to review two high-rated and two low-rated websites found by other students. The software displayed students' review of the same website in parallel columns, as well as a "hit parade" of websites in rank order.

(4) Discussion to facilitate the transition from exploration to production. After reviewing the websites, the students used an online forum to discuss six evaluation criteria (breadth, accessibility, trustworthiness, etc), drawing on their experience, and also working towards the joint report which they would next be writing.

(5) Individual authorship of discrete parts of the joint product. Each student wrote a separate section of the final report, summarising the team's discussion of one of the six evaluation criteria. The software only allowed them to work on their own section (or sections), but reading and suggesting improvements to other sections was encouraged.

(6) Assessment not of team product ("to reduce strain on team relations"), but of individual reflective essay on what has been learned from the project.

Although the course has now been superceded, the learning design remains valid. Like the InterLoc tool for structuring online discussion, this is an example of how structure and constraints on action can be useful in a teaching environment, as scaffolding to help students attain a level they would have found it difficult to reach on their own - in contradiction to the freedom ethos of Web 2.0.

(The full reference of the paper: Northedge A, 2006. Designing a fail-safe online group project work environment, Proceedings of International Conference on e-Learning: Learning Theories vs. Technologies, 14–16 December, 2006, Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, pp 12.1-7)

Audio feedback on written assignments

2009-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

A colleague has just asked me whether I know of any courses where students get feedback to their written assignments in audio form - either as audio annotations to the document or a separate audio file.

I remembered hearing about people trying this, but I couldn't put my finger on any specific instances. There are none in my own faculty, as far as I can establish. The Open University's Cloudworks website includes some notes form people trying it at Athabasca University (Canada), Marietta College (USA), and Sheffield Hallam (UK) - but not the OU itself!

A quick check turned up some people at Staffordshire University using it in biosciences (August 2007), and a just-finished JISC-funded project at Leeds Metropolitan called "Sounds good", reported in The Guardian with a link to the new project website.

Sounds good indeed! They seem to have found some benefits for students, but I'm wondering what it does to the tutor workload. It ought to make it lighter, of course, but things are never so simple.

The enforcement of rational chat

2009-07-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

InterLoc (formerly AcademicTalk) is a tool for synchronous online discussion, or chat, which has been specifically designed to force participants to follow the rules of rational academic discussion.

Its creators, Andrew Ravenscroft and Simon McAlister, were responding to concerns about the low levels of online debate - not only in public chatrooms, where dialogue can often take the form of "You suck!" "No, you suck!", but even in organised student discussions, where the tendency is for students to give each other an easy time and resort to "trading" opinions ("I think this." "I think that." "Okay, shall we go for a drink now?")

The InterLoc interface forces participants to start each message with one of a number of prescribed openers, not only to state a position ("I think...", "Let me explain...") but to ask questions ("Why do you think that...?" "Can you give an example...?") and make challenges ("I disagree because...", "An alternative view is...", "How reliable is that evidence...?) Student discussions with InterLoc are found to stay more on topic and go deeper than synchronous discussions conducted without it; in particular, students seem to be more willing to question and challenge each other when socially protected by the formal structure of the system.

Of course this goes directly against the cultural assumptions of freedom and spontaneity associated with online discussion and chat in particular, and some students reported resenting the restrictive openers. But as the authors comment: "It is only by being restrictive in some degree that they will have a positive benefit for the student, by forcing them to reformulate intuitive, reactive thoughts into a more well crafted and, hopefully, thoughtful contribution" (Final report, p. 37)

The InterLoc project's website includes details of publications as well as the latest version of the tool and links to other users. The list of message openers used in the original AcademicTalk is published as an appendix to McAlister, Ravenscroft and Scanlon (2004), "Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC", Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20, pp 194-204.

Techno-fear

2009-07-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

People who have to manage information in their job are often worried about the loss of control entailed by new technologies - in particular social media, Web 2.0 etc.

"New technology: the threat to our information" is a wickedly satirical slidecast on this by Norman Lamont. I can't say much about it without spoiling the joke; you'll have to watch it for yourself. (It won't take you more than a couple of minutes.) I'll just say that it's a reflection of how quickly we adapt our expectations and our organisations with the arrival of new technology, and how quickly we forget that we've done so.

The "presenter" of the slidecast is a corporate manager, but the same joke could be done for academics too. My wife recalls a meeting, not so long ago, where the library staff's proposals to make more resources available to students over the internet was met with horror by lecturers, because that would mean that students might read things which they had not read themselves.

Benefits of e-learning: ROI or R&D?

2009-07-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice graph, which I found in a JISC report with the compelling title Tangible benefits of e-learning (p.15). The authors used it to categorise their 37 case studies of e-learning in UK universities, and it's very useful to keep the different kinds of potential benefits clear in one's mind.

Here's how they explain the graph:

X Axis – Nature of issue. The x axis of the graph in Figure 1 shows the type of tangible benefit demonstrated and the sort of metrics that can be used to evaluate such benefits…. A well-defined problem such as how to assess large cohorts of students within a tight time-frame can be measured against a very specific and readily quantifiable set of metrics and that it is relatively easy to put accurate figures on time and cost savings. …Towards the middle of the scale we find activities where the intended benefit is to improve learners‟ understanding of a particular subject – in other words a pedagogically-driven change where the tangible benefits can be measured in terms of course or module pass rates or other direct measures of achievement. At the
far end of the scale, we encounter approaches intended to address far ‘softer’ and more complex issues of student engagement. …

Y Axis – e-Approach. The y axis shows how the ‘e-approaches’ differ in nature from those that seek to automate existing practices through those that add increased value by the application of information to those that ultimately seek to transform the learning process. The term ‘informate’ is taken from Zuboff (1988)…. Schein (1989) makes the further distinction between ‘informating down’ whereby control type information is passed downwards and ‘informating up’ whereby those closest to the issues pass information up the chain (in our case upwards from the student to the lecturer). It can thus be seen that the approaches clustered in the bottom left quadrant are those that represent the clearest return on investment (ROI) and it is easily possible to assess their scalability and the value for money represented by further investment. Those in the top right quadrant however are more research and development (R&D) in nature and in their present form may represent overheads without any immediately obvious return.

When you're talking to people about the use of technology in teaching, it can be helpful to clarify whether you're looking at ROI (saving time, effort and money, eg in development, production, revision, administration), R&D (eg virtual worlds, mobile interactivity, "blue skies" technologies), or most likely somewhere in between: improving learning and teaching by making it more engaging, more penetrating and more effective.

Assessment: oh no not another essay

2009-07-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

A survey of written assignments in British higher education, for an ESRC project, helpfully lists 12 "genres" of student writing - useful for broadening your ideas if you're trying to design an assessment task:

Case study: A description of a particular case with suggestions for future action, to understand professional practice (eg in business, medicine, or engineering).
Critique: A description, explanation and evaluation to show understanding of the object of study and to show ability to assess its importance.
Design specification: An explanation of the design of an item, including its purpose, parts, development and any testing of parts and procedures.
Empathy writing: A letter, newspaper article or similar non-academic genre showing understanding and appreciation of the relevance of academic ideas by adapting them for a non-specialist readership.
Essay: A piece of writing showing writer's ability to argue coherently and develop thinking and critical skills.
Exercise: Data analysis or a series of responses to questions, to provide practice in key skills and to show knowledge of key concepts.
Explanation: A descriptive account and explanation to show understanding of the object of study and ability to describe and/or assess its significance.
Literature survey: A summary to show familiarity with literature relevant to the focus of study and ability to assess its place in literature generally.
Methodology recount: A description of procedures undertaken by the writer, possibly including Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, written to develop familiarity with disciplinary methods, and to record experimental findings.
Narrative recount: A fictional or factual recount of events to develop awareness of motives and/or the behaviour of organisations or individuals (including oneself).
Problem question: A text presenting relevant arguments around a problem, written to practise application of specific methods in response to simulated professional scenarios.
Proposal: A text including an expression of purpose, a detailed plan, and a persuasive argument to demonstrate ability to make a case for future action.
Research report: A text often including Literature Review, Methods, Findings, and Discussion, or several 'chapters' relating to the same theme, written to demonstrate ability to undertake a complete piece of research, including research design, and to appreciate its significance in the field.

More details, with examples from a variety of subjects, are in Table 4 (pp 23-26) of the full report (accessible from the link above).

Don't you wish your professor was cool like mine

2009-07-09T05:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a great video of a 20 minute talk by Ken Robinson, former Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick, on how schools kill creativity.

Reasons why this is worth seeing:
(1) It's LOL funny. (I had dealings with Ken Robinson nearly 20 years ago, and I knew he spoke very well, but never dreamed he'd be so good at stand-up!)
(2) There's an interesting and provocative message: that creativity should be as important as literacy and numeracy in the curriculum
(3) The parent website TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a useful source of videos of inspiring talks on a range of subjects
(4) It's a reminder of how good a good lecture can be - useful to remember when people cite "the lecture" as the archetype of a passive-receptive transmission-of-knowledge pedagogy which has no place in the Web 2.0 world.