ALT-C

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Julian Beckton ALT-C, Learning Objects, Repositories, Second Life, Wikis

I thought I ought to show my face at at least one session on Learning Object repositories as I’m managing our own LOR. So the session I went to was advertised as having three papers on this very topic. Now, I have to fess up here. For a variety of reasons I had had a very early start to the day, and my body clock is never at it’s best in the early afternoon. To be honest I really struggled to stay awake. In fact I did find myself nodding off a little bit a couple of times. This was entirely down to me, and not the presenters. The  inexplicable fact that the topic of Learning Object Repositories does not get my adrenalin pumping is not their fault! Nevertheless through the haze I did glean a few useful nuggets.

Firstly, learning object repositories are not really stand alone items. Well, they are, but often they don’t easily fit into what the teacher wants to do with them – So they really need to be adaptable. Secondly there is a risk that they can become a solution looking for a problem. If they’re not wanted, there’s no point creating them. (If they are wanted, then creating them is a very good idea though. But make them adaptable, and also, as the first paper suggested, give some thought to the different devices on which they might be used.) It’s also an idea to think about how they might be used in a web 2.0 context

In the afternoon, I heard a number of papers. The first was on online silence (What if anything do you learn from “lurking”? Why do people lurk. What do you learn from participating in online conversations”. Was there any correlation between silence and learning styles?) Interestingly, the answer to the last question seemed to be that there was, but the presenter acknowledged that learning styles were situated, and that higher level learning occurred when the student reflected on the entire course.  Next up was a paper on Second Life – well, it was more about the SLOODLE project which mashes up Second Life and Moodle. The idea here seemed to be that Moodle (or a VLE in general) provided some of the structure that SL doesn’t in the shape of threaded discussions, chat support and logging,  drop boxes and quiz tools. Well, that’s all very well but what’s SL then bringing to the party? I’ve always suspected that SL’s technology is going to be more use in education when it’s taken out of SL itself. I can see the scope for immersive environments in many subjects – but not when you’re trying to run them across 4,000 servers in California or wherever it is – it’s just not reliable enough at present.  But perhaps I’m being short sighted – Who would have thought when I first saw the Louvre online back in 1994 that I’d be sitting here blogging about a 3-D world I could move around in.  Finished the “academic” work of the day with the presentation on blogging I described in my first post, so I won’t go into it here.  So who knows where it will all end.

Wednesday started with a paper on the e-learning benchmarking exercise. I was heavily involved in this, although if I’m absolutely honest, I never really saw the point of it. There’s a lot of talk about “institutions” doing this and that. Actually, what is happening, is that “some people in institiutions are doing some of this stuff”. Of course that raises the question of do we want everyone to be involved, and that was the question under discussion here although it was phrased rather differently  “Does this type of programme create a culture of dependency in HEIs, because the programmes are externally funded?”  Well, you can’t get away from the fact that the money’s coming from outside as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t think they reach far enough in to do so, but the feeling from those behind the programme was that they had envisioned an “interdependency” culture. – A network of institutions feeding off each other. But that, along with the external funding makes development very difficult to sustain. Having said that, there were some good examples of practice around – I very much liked Leicester’s Carpe Diem initiatives in which (As I understand) they take a whole department and redesign a course with them. That sounds exactly the sort of thing that EDUs should be doing, because the focus is on building institutional capacity rather than just staff development.  So perhaps that was the point of the benchmarking exercise!

 Next up was an excellent keynote speech from Dylan Williams, at the institute of Education. Again you can see it on the conference web site, so I’m not going to give a long account of it. The main points were that in terms of student achievement, it matters much less which school you go to, than which teacher you get when you get there, and that one of the most important things teachers could do to help students learn was to provide good quality formative assessment and respond to what it told them. This was an excellent talk, and I thoroughly recommend having a look at the live version. There were a couple of good throwaway lines that I liked too.

“Schools are places where kids go to watch teachers work!” (of course it is the kids who should be working.)

“Kids choosing not to ask a question are foregoing the opportunity to get smarter”

In the afternoon, I went to a couple of talks about wikis. It’s funny how these get such a bad press. In our own Blackboard training sessions I’ve had colleagues who won’t touch the concept because of what they’ve heard about the inaccuracies in Wikipedia. There’s some justification in that I suppose, but isn’t it the job of the teacher to correct misconceptions – in fact the whole concept gives the lie to the notion that ed. tech. is going to replace teachers. But one interesting point that came out of the session was that students tended to see Wikis as places for finished work rather than for drafts. The presenter had actually hoped to use it to look at drafts – but then, I suppose, who want’s to mark every bit of paper a student has struggled to make a mark on, or noted.  And of course, what student wants to hand all that in? Perhaps attitudes to written work haven’t really changed all that much. The conclusions were that a module leader needed to be clear about

  • how to use wikis
  • Targeted learning behaviour
  • Participation drivers (why would students want to join in?)

Next, I went to a Blackboard sponsored session, where they revealed their latest plug-in. This was something called Safe Assign, which is essentially Turnitin – although it didn’t search as many databases and doesn’t have the on-line marking feature that we’re using in Architecture. (Although I suppose Bb has it’s own gradebook.) I suppose I’ll have to download it and we’ll use it too.

 The final session of a busy day was about whether the sector was ready for learners in control. I was a bit late arriving for this session so had to stand at the back in a very hot room, so I’m afraid my notes are not terribly coherent. Although there was another great one liner “We have to address hearts and minds, not sim cards”  The one thing I did take away from this session was the interesting revelation that “digital natives” (i.e. kids who are well used to and brought up with technology) seem to be least receptive to on-line learning. Could this be because a lot of the subject matter in HE is conceptually very difficult and not readily conveyable in small bits of information?

Unfortunately my dental appointment obliged me to miss the last keynote, but before heading back to Nottingham station I attended a session on using podcasts for pre-lecture preparation. This turned out to be a report into some research about whether those students who had been given pre-lecture material did better than those who had not. I was tempted to ask about the ethical implications of this, but in fact the results showed a slight improvement among those who had been given the material in advance, it was quite small and not statistically significant. Still, I did wonder what might have happened if there had been shown to be a significant difference.

So, a good conference, and I’m glad I went. I haven’t blogged about the social events, although they were very good and enjoyable, and I did make some useful contacts. But the “holiday” is over now and I really need to get my Ed D head back on. I’ve been sitting at the PC since I got back today indulging in every kind of distraction activity to avoid doing any work, but one potential benefit of blogging is that it gets you writing.

ALT-C 2007

Julian Beckton ALT-C, learning

I’ve been meaning to get to an ALT-C conference for years, but something always seems to come up,  so I really made the effort to book my place in advance this year, and I’m glad I did. (Inevitably something came up this year too, in the shape of an enormous abcess under one of my front teeth.  Fortunately my dentist was able to drain it before the conference so I wasn’t in any pain, but I had to miss the last keynote speaker to get back home to have the root canal excavated.)  Still, all the keynotes are available as video downloads via Elluminate, so I’ll try and have a look at it on line.)

Anyway. The conference itself. The first keynote was from Michelle Selinger, and entitled “You cant’ cross a chasm in two small jumps” As the title suggests this was an argument that institutions have to be prepared to take risks. Yes, you might fall in the river and get wet, but you will usually scramble out the other side. Rather than give a full account here, which would make for very boring reading here’s a link to the conference web site. http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/index.html  Essentially I felt Michelle was arguing that it was no longer realistic for providers (that is universities) to be organising IT services in ways that suited them. Really they needed to respond to student needs. But that presumes two things, one that “student needs” are an identifiable entity, which I very much doubt. Students may quite legitimately need quite different and possibly conflicting things to complete their studies. The second presumption is that “student needs” are independent of what we provide. I actually think the environment might play a part in the construction of needs.

There’s another issue here too. There is a lot of evidence that students are using Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. There seems to be a feeling that Universities ought to be “in there” in some way. Actually, I wonder if the attraction of these sites is precisely that they are not “official” and some students might be horrified if we were to start setting up shop in them! Some wouldn’t of course, which goes back to my point about the heterogeneity of “student needs”.

None of this invalidates Michelle’s arguments though. There are chasms to be crossed, between informal and formal learning, between school and HE and between cultures and economies. I think the most telling story she told  though was about the Technical University in Eindhoven, where students are treated as employees and given work placements with local employers. There is apparently a very high drop out rate as students find it difficult to cope with the critical thinking and flexibility that the employers require of them – Perhaps they’re just not ready for it (Learning is surely a process of maturing as much as it is of application and industry). On the other hand one of the remote questions did ask what support the students were given in this approach. I can’ t recall whether this question was answered and if it was, what the answer might have been. I don’t think it was.

There’s also a gap between what needs to be taught, (needed by whom, I wonder) what is actually taught and what is learnt. I quite liked her distinction between the “knowledge society” and the “knowledgeable society” The first has always struck me as being a pretty meaningless buzz phrase, but the second implies people who are interested and active in contributing to the development of knowledge. To achieve a knowledgeable society, we should move away from the three Rs and towards the three Ps (Persistence, Power Tools, and Play) to create richer and more engaging learning experiences. These might include podcasts instead of lectures (NOT “as well as”) more use of e-portfolios as learning passports, closer links between schools and work places.  It’s important to think differently. Curiously she articulated some of my objections to evaluating everything by quoting Henry Ford (although he gets alot of this sort of stuff attributed – I haven’t checked this one) “If I’d asked the customers they’d have asked for a faster horse” If you really want to innovate, I think this means that it’s crucial to give yourself space and time to experiment and play.  This is one of the themes of my research. I don’t think Educational Development Units do have this sort of time and space, because they are forced to play a sort of political game to ensure their own survival.

(It’s hard work, this blogging lark. I’ll have to come back to this tomorrow. Perhaps I should have taken the laptop and liveblogged, but you get given so much paper at these things I’d have struggled to carry everything home!)  Anyway the next entries are going to be about Learning Object Repositories, Online Silence, Second Life, E-learning benchmarking, technology and assessment, Blackboard’s new plagiarism detection tool, Wikis and Podcasts. Quite a varied conference then!

First post

Julian Beckton ALT-C, Geocaching

Hmm. Well, I’ve just got back from the ALT-C Conference in Nottingham and was inspired by a brilliant presentation from two members of staff at the Open University to start my own research blog. I’m about to embark on a piece of research into the role of the Educational Development Unit in higher education, although I’ve already done quite a lot of the preliminary reading.  The challenge is to focus it all into questions that are both researchable and worthwhile. I’ll come back to this later, but as this is the first post, and I’m still experimenting with blogging, I thought it would be useful to blog a brief account of the conference. The first entry in my blogroll though is going to be the one that started me off. It’s called Research Essentials and contains a different perspective (from a much more experienced blogger) about the conference.  I should also say that I was quite fascinated by the idea of Geocaching. I’d never heard of it before, and it sounds quite fun. How anyone has the time though, I can’t imagine!