Technology

Has E-learning lived up to its early promise?

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Higher Education, Technology, Uncategorized, Virtual Learning Environments , , ,

After the rather bitty liveblogs from the Blackboard conference, I’ve started to write up the other presentations where I took notes with a pen. (Now there’s a reliable, resilient and portable technology!) Hopefully, they’re a bit more reflective and readable. Rather than try and write up the whole conference in one post, I’m going to release an account of each presentation as a single post. This one’s probably the longest!

See the slides at http://connections.blackboard.com/files/edccbd7423/andy_r_reality_check_durham_09.ppt

The first keynote presentation which was from Andy Ramsden, head of e-learning at the University of Bath, who set about exploring whether e-learning has lived up to its early promise. In one respect he showed that it has, by using an electronic voting system throughout the presentation which would have been very unusual a few years ago, and did lead to quite a lot of interactivity in the session. He started by reminding us that those of us involved in e-learning were actually small cogs in big institutional machines, but that didn’t stop us from doing quite a lot to bring about change. In the first electronic poll he showed that at least 25% of the audience had been involved with virtual learning environments for more than 8 years, (including, it has to be said, your correspondent!) which led to the unspoken conclusion that if e-learning hadn’t lived up to its promise, we’d no-one to blame but ourselves!

He then presented the results of a survey at Bath, which found that 51.7% of academics didn’t post their lecture material before the lecture, and that 21.9% didn’t do it afterwards. In fact 10% of academics at Bath don’t engage with learning technology in any shape or form! Even those that do, tend to use things like PowerPoint, or even OHP transparencies. That said, there was some encouraging use of newer technologies like Twitter and videoconferencing. So, it appears, on the face of it at least, that the newer technologies have not changed teaching very much. But as Andy indicated, that kind of conclusion didn’t sit very easily with the array of technological gadgetry sitting on the desk in front of him, and he also noted that most people do in fact share things like web resources quite a lot. But there was another question about how they did this sharing, and we had another poll this time using a service called Edutext (I’ve got us a free trial by the way I’ll post here when the details come through) This time we all texted in the ways we shared information with colleagues. Predictably e-mail was by far the most common communication method in HE. (By a very large distance indeed.) So, there are at least two technologies, e-mail and the web that have very much lived up to their early promise.

What might explain this phenomenon. We were introduced to something called the 4-Es model developed by Collis & Moonen, (Which I shall be stealing, ahem, referencing for my ED thesis). This states that an individual’s likelihood of making use of a technological innovation for a learning related purpose is determined by four factors

• Educational effectiveness
• Environmental (that is, institutional) factors,
• Ease of use
• Engagement.

Without going into more detail this explains why people are perfectly happy to post word documents purporting to be the “course handbook” but less happy to spend time designing and posting on-line quizzes, learning how to use text messaging to promote interactivity in a lecture, developing multimedia etc. etc. Essentially if you want to get a technology adopted (the “success threshold”) you have to balance all these four factors. Take the example of the course handbook. The institution encourages the posting of these things. ||It’s easy to attach a document to a file (well, it is for most people). It’s information students need, so it’s educationally effective. (Actually, I think that’s questionable, but I take the point that it meets a need that students believe that they have.). I’m not all that convinced that it’s all that engaging, but course handbooks are something that people are familiar with. You can see that quizzes don’t really tick the same boxes, and you might say the same about some of the other technological floribunda, that grow in the e-learning garden, such as Second Life, blogs, wikis, and so forth. (They’re often engaging, but not easy if you’re new to them, nor are they institutionally encouraged, (well, OK, they’re not discouraged, but setting up a wiki isn’t an obvious route to academic advancement) and their educational effectiveness is, to date at least, unproven.

One of the things that we can do is to try and lower the environmental factors. If we can do this, we should be able to push the success threshold down.

The second strand is concerned with ease of use and engagement. Most obviously the network must be sufficiently robust to allow users to do what they want to do. Engagement does of course cover things like the relative attractiveness, ease of navigation, and other attributes, but it can also be encouraged by modifying the environmental factors. If, for example, posting high quality interactive materials was seen as a route to career progression then it is quite likely that more people would be inclined to do it. (That, of course, is precisely the argument we’re making for the deposit of material in the institutional repository.) The fact is though that Universities are in general rather more geared up to running relatively simple teaching and learning activities than they are to operating riskier programmes that have higher level learning objectives.

So, how might we change the situation.

Well, at this point, Andy went into a discussion of QR codes. Careful readers of this blog (and if you aren’t, may I ask why not?) may remember these being discussed in a previous posting about mobile technologies. A QR code is a variant on the bar code that can be scanned with a camera phone. Once it has been scanned it can link to a web site, send an SMS message to a phone, transfer a phone number, or simply provide more text. They are appearing in posters and advertisements in our larger cities, (although I haven’t noticed one in Lincoln yet). There are all sorts of potential educational and administrative uses, including campus tours, Library catalogue information, (although I wasn’t clear how this would work), they can be appended to printouts and the user can scan them for further guidance, and more exotically they can be used in Augmented Reality Gaming (Again, I hope you’ve been paying attention, – I wrote about this back in June – it’s a project at Manchester Metropolitan University where they send the students off around the city to find these QR codes. Not that I’m exactly sure about the wisdom sending students into some parts of Manchester flashing expensive technology around, but I guess it’s their city and their project!)

There is no suggestion that QR codes are the solution to lowering institutional barriers. Andy was using them as an example of the way of thinking we need to adopt if we are going to keep on developing technology. We need to ditch large scale workshops, and focus more on specific projects, which we might lead, but ensure all the team delivers on. We should prioritise profiling at meetings, (i.e. who does what, what are people’s capabilities) and produce short frequent publications reporting on our projects, and we should do it in all media. The point is there’s a long term commitment to be made, and it involves a change in the way we think about educational development.

Great Expectations of ICT – JISC report 2008

Julian Beckton Research, Technology, Uncategorized

Just read this very interesting report on what students expect in terms of ICT provision when they arrive at university.  I did think the methodology was a little questionable in that an on line survey and discussion groups is, by default, going to pick up on students who are inherently more enthusiastic about IT, but bearing that in mind there were some intriguing findings. Not least that

  • Students are fine with Web 2.0 tools as long as they are in control of the environment – they don’t in general want lecturers leading their use of these tools.
  • Students generally are very comfortable with VLEs which do pretty much what is expected of them.
  • There is not much apparent interest in mobile learning
  • Students place very little value on virtual worlds (so my trip to Nottingham last week might have been a bit of a waste of time!)
  • There seems to be a desire for universities to provide training in thinking about the implications of different technologies, than just providing access to different technologies, and training in how to use them.

None of which is all that surprising I suppose. In some ways I think the first finding is the most interesting because it raises some issues about control of the learning environment. When you think about it it fits with the way of thinking that argues that learning is better when the students produce their own learning, rather than consume it.  Although another interesting finding was that relatively few students knew what a wiki was, let alone how to use it, which rather supports the argument that there is a need to think about what you do with information, rather than just how to retrieve it. Haven’t got time to write a longer post about this now, but I might well return to this topic – For the time being the full report is at

Click to access jiscgreatexpectationsfinalreportjune08.pdf

Protecting your computer – web 2.0 style.

Julian Beckton Technology ,

Just spent all afternoon fiddling about with anti-virus software. I’ve been using Norton Internet Security for some years now, and never had a problem with it, but their latest update seemed to have a bug in it. At least it kept telling my that I didn’t have a DLL file I needed and that I didn’t have any anti virus protection. After running through several of their suggested fixes, none of which worked, I gave up and decided to uninstall and the whole package and download and install it again from scratch. Which did work.

I don’t normally plug commercial companies here, and I only mention this as they seem to have produced an interesting plug in for browsers – essentially, if you do a google search you get a little icon against each result which tells you whether it’s safe to click on it or not. Increasingly web sites can hold malicious code which can infect your computer if you do nothing more than visit them, so this seems like a good idea. But the real point of this post is that while they appear to be using their anti-virus software to check out the sites, they’ve also set up a community, where users can review and report any site that is dodgy. Or in one of the cases I looked at, the users had found a site that certainly contained potentially malicious software, but was very explicit about the fact that it was there to test vulnerabilities. Well, so they said. I didn’t check it out by visiting it myself. I do find it interesting that a major software company is trying to take on some of the ideas from Web 2.0 and the Open Source community.

Strictly speaking it’s not really a web 2.0 application as Norton are a commercial operation and while the plug-in is free you have to have Norton’s Internet Security installed first  but like social bookmarking which it rather resembles, it seems to be a very useful tool. No doubt someone in the Open Source community will come up with something very similar. If they haven’t already.

Second Life Workshop, Nottingham

Julian Beckton Second Life, Technology ,

I’ve been interested in the potential that Virtual Worlds offer for education for some time, so a workshop organised by ALT on Second Life, (one of quite a large number of virtual worlds that are available these days) seemed quite an interesting prospect. I went along with a colleague from Forensic Science who has also been quite interested in Second Life, probably spending more time in there than I do. (Actually, I’ve made myself dip out of it, while I focus on finishing my doctoral thesis, so I haven’t been in for quite a while.  

In the event much of the activity was focussed on really quite basic stuff – moving around, talking to people, personalising your avatar, which we both thought might have been better dealt with in an orientation session in Second Life itself – that kind of finding your feet is probably best done in the virtual world, rather than in a formal classroom event, although of course, as anyone who has ever delivered any form of IT training knows, you can not make assumptions about the level of knowledge that members of a group will have, and it’s always safer to start with the lowest common denominator.  There again, in the afternoon, we did start building (and managed to build an Art Gallery by the end of the day) and I found myself struggling to keep up.

There wasn’t a great deal of time for discussion of the educational potential of Second Life which was a pity – we started by going round the table and asking what people were hoping to do with it, which was a promising start. Among the interesting ideas that people wanted to do were role-playing (might be less nerve-wracking in a virtual world), building simulations (One lady from the Royal Veterinary College wanted to build a simulation of the rear end of a cow!), dealing with questions of identity, (we all had to change the appearance of our avatars – I ended up wearing a very fetching Raspberry dress – in-world, I hasten to add!) supporting language learning, or simply providing a different environment for distance learners to interact, the production of assessment artefacts, and many others. There’s certainly a lot of potential, but we all identified quite a lot of downsides too. – It’s a strange world, which can be lonely and a bit scary when you first enter it, and a few of those present noted that it is more popular with older people than with the traditional 18-21 year age groups. (The average age of a Second Life user is 33). My view is that you do need to develop quite high levels of tolerance for oddity if you’re going to use Second Life, because people are playing with identity, and behaving in ways they probably wouldn’t in real life. Anecdotally, it seems that a lot of 18-21 year olds seem very nervous about interacting with people they meet in Second Life. There again, you might argue that the 18-21 year old isn’t really the typical student these days.

There are also fairly serious issues around accessibility. You need a powerful graphics card, a fast Broadband connection and lots of time to make the best use of it. In a classroom situation there will be real issues about setting up students with accounts, getting them to choose names for their avatars, let alone personalising the appearance of those avatars. SL is also a seductive environment (in the nicest possible way of course). What I mean by that is that it is easy to get drawn in, and forget that other people have different preferences. We were told one cautionary tale of an American lecturer who was running all his classes in Second Life, and when the evaluation sheets came in, was horrified to discover that his students hated it! 

I think it comes down to the fact that if you have a teaching and learning problem that Second Life can help with then it’s worth experimenting.  But don’t just go in for the sake of it because it’s an interesting bit of new technology.

Chrome

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology ,

I’ve just downloaded Google’s new browser, (http://www.google.co.uk/chrome)   ostensibly to test Blackboard in it, (but also to have a little play). First off, it’s noticeably faster, and as usual with Google, has a nice clean interface. I’m not sure how configurable it is for a lay user like me,  (hey, I’ve only had it 5 minutes!) but as it’s open source, I guess the variety of plug-ins that Firefox users have come to know and love will soon follow. 

As far as Blackboard is concerned… Hmm, I dunno. It seems to work OK – but there’s no text editor tools visible when you upload an item – personally I rarely use those, so that’s not a problem for me (and it may be just a default setting that I haven’t worked out how to turn off as yet. I certainly uploaded an item with a file attached without any problem. 

All the features in WordPress seem to be working fine though, including the “kitchen sink” (wordpress’s own text editor), so the problem may lie within Bb.  Anyhow, I’d better get back to doing some real work…

Hah! And in doing so I caught it out. One of the alleged features of Chrome is that if a process causes a problem in one tab the others should remain unaffected. Well, I tried to download a PDF of JISC’s latest infokit on e-portfolios and guess what? Yep, the whole browser froze. Couldn’t move between tabs or open a new one.  Eventually it claimed that the Adobe plug in was unresponsive. (I could have told it that myself!).

Degrees in Second Life

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology , ,

http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1117-Getting-Your-Degree-in-Second-Life.html

Well, I guess it had to happen. A college in Texas is offering what it believes to be the first degree offered via Second Life. I haven’t had a good look around  (the web site mentioned in the blog entry I linked to above is down) yet but I can think of all sorts of reasons why this might be problematic. Before I go into that, I do want to make it clear that I do think that Virtual Worlds like SL do have a lot of potential for educators (Yes, I do have an avatar in Second Life – Feather Congrejo, although I’m a fairly rare visitor these days)

So what are my reservations. Firstly, Second Life gives me a headache if I use it for any length of time. (Must be my aging eyes, but a colleague who attended a 6 hour conference in SL reported the same phenomenon!) Secondly, it needs quite powerful graphics cards, a requirement which seems to increase with every upgrade they produce, and I think that is a big accessibility issue. Thirdly, SL is a public site, and has, inevitably, some less than salubrious areas. (Quite a lot actually!)  OK, I suspect this is actually quite a small proportion of SL’s total facilities, and students in HE are adults and we can’t hold their hands all the time, but I can’t see any HEI relishing the prospects of misinformed local media announcing that it is directing students into what might be described as “adult” web services. I suppose you could get round that by using something like Open Sim http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page for a stand alone environment but you’d lose a lot of connectivity in doing so.

It also requires quite a lot of skill in building a properly immersive environment. It can be done, but it takes time and skill, and teaching in SL seems to require that quite a lot of time is devoted to orientation. (I suppose that’s a one off cost with each cohort of students though) The other issue is about how to devote sufficient time to each student, while continuing with Real World work.  I’ve always thought that one great advantage of technology enhanced learning is that it does allow the “quieter” students a chance to get involved. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it does take more time to deal with 30 problems or questions than it does to deal with the 5 or so assertive students in any class.

PDP and academic literacy

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Personal Development Planning, Technology , , ,

Looks like PDP is back on the agenda. Not that it ever really went away of course, but it did rather get overwhelmed by Blackboard. (For the uninitiated PDP stands for Personal Development Planning and is about getting students to take a more rigorous and reflective approach to their learning. If I’m honest, I don’t think we’ve yet had much success with rolling out PDP across the university, though it’s not for a lack of effort or investment.  I’ve certainly done numerous training courses, and we’ve invested in Pebble Pad, which I think is probably the best tool on the market for supporting PDP. Here’s a useful little PowerPoint video explaining PDP (annoyingly though it cuts off a few seconds before the narrator ends. And between you and me I think it could have done with a professional voice actor too. )

http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/pp_website_resources/pp_overview.ppt

The thing is PebblePad is quite an expensive product and we do need to justify continuing spending money on it.  I don’t think the problem is with the technology though. (We can also use the Blackboard Portfolios for PDP although they’re not as good) I think it lies with the fact that there is very little interest in study skills. I’ve been starting to argue for a reconceptualisation of study skills as “academic literacy” I’ve taught on skills programmes in the past, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the high level of skills that most students actually do have. Of course there are some students who do need a lot of help with what might be termed basic skills, but not that many.  Where many students are weak is in what might be termed disciplinary and some generic HE skills (Historical writing, writing up experiments, referencing, assessing the quality of information, reflection.)  I like the concept of academic literacy because it doesn’t start by telling the students they’re generically weak, rather it emphasises what you need to do to become a good physicist, lawyer or whatever.

My problem though, which I’m going to have to think hard about is how to present Pebble Pad in this light. I think it could be done through the use of the proformas – through working with colleagues in the disciplines we can get students to self assess in relevant areas, build action plans and thus get them into the habit of using Pebble Pad for some aspects of their future work, especially around CVs and Webfolios. (Shame about PP’s blogging tool though – it’s not a patch on WordPress!)
Never mind. I think I feel a project coming on!

Adobe Connect and Course Genie

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology , , ,

I’ve been doing some research into the way Educational Development Units (or Academic Development Units, for the benefit of the search engines!) interact with their university. The actual research is discussed in a separate blog listed in the blogroll, but a couple of technology applications have cropped up in discussions with participants that might be worth a look. They are Adobe Connect and Course Genie.

I’m struggling to find a way of summarising Adobe Connect in a simple sentence. It’s a sort of desktop videoconferencing system, mashed up with a virtual whiteboard and meeting system. But it seems to be a bit more than the sum of its parts. The trouble is when I say “videoconferencing” people say “oh we’ve got that…” Well, we are about to sign up to the Access Grid, that’s true. But that’s limited to one room. This appears to be desktop based so you can have meetings from your own computer. I haven’t had time to look much beyond the demos on the web site. But if you’re interested have a look at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/  

The other product was Course Genie, and I have to say this made me smile. Essentially it’s a way of producing web documents from Word using Word styles. Old Teknical Virtual Campus lags like me, will of course remember the Teknical Converter, which performed much the same function. (Although, in my view output much nicer pages than Course Genie did) The first problem was that very few colleagues understood the concept of styles in Word so it never really took off. And secondly, when those who did use it produced some (I thought) useful material, students all complained that they had to print out multiple pages, so we had to provide links back to the original word document. Ho hum. Looking at the Course Genie demonstration, they don’t seem to have addressed this at all. Course Genie is now part of the Wimba suite and has been renamed Wimba Create, (Wimba is something else I’ll have a look at when I have time) – But you can see the demo here http://www.wimba.com/demos/wimbacreate.php

JISC Innovation forum – Some conclusions (part 5)

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology, Uncategorized ,

Now, Sarah Porter is offering some conclusions about the event

The keywords, she thought were

  • Energy
  • Engagement
  • Breadth and Depth Activity
  • Huge Potential for links, sharing findings, knowledge, approaches
  • Conversations

And I think I’m inclined to agree with those.

Points that were raised

How can JISC help

  • institutions embed e-learning
  • Ensure the place of technology in the overall practice/development – scaleability of practice
  • Staff in their changing roles,
  • people to be effective
  • How to make repositories more compelling
  • Balance between deliver an IT service that works and innovation
  • understand the institutional barriers to change and innovations
  • Set standards in terms of mobile, web 2.0
  • provide better access an opportunities
  • institutions achieve sustainability

 

More on Supporting and understanding user needs

  • Impact of changing demographics
  • digital literacy
  • inclusivity
  • Academics as providers

 

Some useful stuff about how JISC can help projectts

  • Expert Registry
  • Jisc’s Funding models – are there more imaginative ones
  • Sharing good practice in a competitive environemt
  • Need to engage more institutions
  • Embedding projects – what happens when they finisn
  • Recruiting project staff for JISC funded projects – Pool of CVs>
  • Technical project resumes to help collaboration
  • Address time gap between implementation of technology and what happens when its used

Finally infrastructure issues

  • Joining up with national data sharing initiatives
  • data curation
  • Need to understand and develop shared service modeks
  • Open source and open standards
  • How do we develop a sense of technical authority. What other models exist?
  • How can we make the e-framework more accessible

Finally supporting communities and collaboration issues

  • Break down barriers between e-research
  • What can JISC do to help engage senior managers
  • Sustainability and business models

(Phew!) This was a bit of a gallop through what had come out of the conference. In the short term the web site will be kept open, and people will be able to contribute to the blog. Longer term, there will be some other form of communication structure, but it was suggested that the web sites blogs and wikis (blikis?) might be a good place for this.

And the battery really is fading fast now, so I’m about to sign off.  I plan to add a more reflective post, possibly even with pictures later in the week.