FOTE2008: 3rd Session
Mile Metcalfe, Ravensbourne
Miles started by discussing the college’s move to Greenwich. The innovative ideas for ICT include:
- Flexible Learnings Spaces (you had to hear the visualisation)
- Serendipitous Commons
- Subsidise personal technology
- high end reources integrated with user owned workflows
- Software as a service (google), opensource alternatives to ‘money grabbing’ proprietory systems
The curse of the Mobile - Mobile Phones did away with the need punctuality.
Technology
- The VLE is no longer the whole answer
- RSS, OpenID preserve the VLEpanopticon
- Bounded systems give way to more open collaboration
Some parting shots
- OpenID is far from perfect
- I don’t trust these extra-institutional software as a service
Miles did an excellent and entertaining presentation which is available at http://www.slideshare.net/mmetcalfe/ravensbourne-tomorrow-fote-2008-presentation/
FOTE2008: 2nd Session ?, Ian Forresster (BBC), Ian Broad (Yahoo), Phil Butler (ULCC)
Mobile technology, Harold ?
Not quite sure what is being said other than it’s been suggested that we revisit Vygotsky and apply it to the use of mobile technology in learning and teaching.
He asserts that education ‘will’ move toward a more consumerist based economy, and that the customer choice will be based on the use of technology, mobile technology. And that they will do this because they will have better job prospects.
..l and then he just stopped.
Why Portability Matters - Ian Forrester, BBC backstage
There is a revolution in tech, this is based on the user being in control. But are they?
- Data portability - principles
- Bill of Rights for users
Cloud computing - beware of propriety tools in the cloud, “how do you get stuff out of SL”, there is a lot of service lock in. Good quote from Stallman:
cloud computing forces people to hand over control of their information to a third party. His objections echo his longstanding belief in non-proprietary software. One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program.
Likes Bascamp for project management and Yammer as an alternative for Twitter, BlipTV instead of youtube
Opening up the Web, James Broad, Yahoo
“Yahoo is my home,
my girlfriend hates my job,
I do css and stuff
http://www.carbonsilk.com/”
How lucky are we - tech innovation, SatNav, Mobiles, sharing stuff across all activities
The Web 10 years ago, mostly read only, 1996 45 million users, mainly company websites, homepages, portals, basic webforms, Netscape or IE.
The Advances, Javascript, PHP, ASP, JSP, XML, RSS, Web Services, Communities, Tagging, Web Apps (The Web of today)
He seems to be trying to atribute a lot of social activity to tech advances, which it can, but.. “the web as gone through a a massive advancement (image of Facebook)”
We (Yahoo) realise that trust is a big issue
Dismisses encarta as something that we could have been ‘fed’, it could be biased by the author, whereas he asserts that wikipedia is something that is safer! He is very dissapointed that he didn’t have wikipedia during his education (I think he’s serious!).
A quick reflection on the title of the conference - I’m sure that he’ll make a reference to education.
Phil Butler
Lunch is Next (Phil’s first slide).
I’m not a technologist, I don’t even like technology.
The future of technology for me is something that does what it does when I need it to.
Harnessing Technology Review
It [technology] motivates learners
It opens up a world of resources and materials
Learning will be personalised
Learning culture is shifting
- individual > social
- information > communication
- passive > interactive
- insitutional tools > personalised tools
Q&A
Melissa Highton: Who should be responsible for teaching digital literacies
- Harold - there is a new paradigm of digital culture
- Ian F - the BBC is good, everyone needs to learn, a combination of teachers, friends and peers should be responsible
- IanB - I’ve got a little sister and I believe in this, Yahoo answers is the answer
- Phil B - Digital literacies - immigrants and natives, we’re all immigrants
FOTE 2008: 1st Session Google and Second Life
Here at FOTE (Future OF Technology in Education) 2008, Welcome from Tim Bush (organised the event) and David Rippon the Director of ULCC.
Sam Peters from Google
What’s driving cloud computing:
- Falling cost of storage
- Ubiquitous Computing
- Democratisation of production
“We’re all part of the revolution”
Sam described how the previous technology paradigm was focused on products that did only one thing - this led into a description of google apps for education. She suggested that cloud computing provides leverage with existing infrastructure. She also suggests that the Cloud computing model allows us to break out of existing software cycles.
The challenge of moving to the cloud, Sam suggested how her grandparents kept their money under the mattress, whereas she uses a bank - this led to considerable mirth. Gartner suggested that in 2010 10% of all businesses will have their apps in the cloud. And that currently 70% of businesses are looking at the cloud.
Last Thoughts on a Cloudy future:
- Companies must focus on core business
- Employees need better tools
- The move to the cloud is imminent…
- …many are there already
Pauline Randal on Second Life
Pauline started by posing the question “Why am I in there?” followed by what are “we trying to achieve?”
Students will not be entranced by watching powerpoint slides whilst in Second Life
The killer question - is there a better tool? Pauline’s talk appears to be asking us to focus on user needs.
Her project is focused on bring mature buisiness students together to familarise?
How to engage students:
- clear purpose to being there
- make it interesting and challenging
- have definite outcomes
Not that impressed with her case studies - but good on the user stuff.
Final thoughts:
- students need a proper induction, base it on your experience - how long did it take you to become familiar?
- Don’t make the activities too simple (average age of an SL user is 35 - are we sure?)
- Ask students for help
Hand’s up who’s using Second Life to teach?
Reflecting on JIF08
This is a bit of an indulgence posting on my part, a few short reflections on the JISC Innovation Forum 2008. The sessions that I attended were excellent, and the diversity on show really made me think hard about what we do as the larger JISC Innovation Group. The really nice thing for me as a Programme Manager was meeting staff from the Users and Innovation projects and eliciting on the spot feedback from them. My favourite was:
“Lawrie, you should get the JISC to do this every six months or so and make it compulsory for all project staff”
My response then, as now, was thanks for the idea, we appreciate your feedback, but are you deliberately trying give us a nervous breakdown. I also hope that the person fills in the feedback form, because if they enjoyed it that much we need to know so we can plan and improve for the next time.
One of the most interesting themes that I picked up from the people I spoke to was the amount of sharing of information going on outside of sessions, and how they intended to take things forward once they left the event. Thinking this through I realised that even though we provide an online forum allowing collaboration in a virtual space, it is difficult to replace the kind of discussion that was occurring in face to face – obvious to some, but important to note. The impact of this on some projects is that they default to a silo position, even though we try and avoid that. This event, with its “wide open spaces” and active encouragement to talk, allows some synthesis from those silos that I hope my U&I projects will carry forward.
Finally, being male and over 35, I love gadgets – so my new gadget was the Flip Video camera. Almost instant boot up and 60 minutes of video – I ran it for the two days capturing 49 videos and never ran out of power. Some of the reflections available include Simon, Mark, Robert and also we have Sarah and Bob talking about their projects.
Solstice 2008 and Exit Strategies for VLEs
Today I’m at the Solstice conference, this is now an annual e-learning conference, but creating a lot deeper thinking spaces for people to engage in discourse. The event is usually preceded by a research panel session and this helps to frame the discussions in the main conference.
There were a lot of great sessions today and the keynotes were excellent. One of the presentations that got me thinking (and most did) was by Peter Reed and Richard Hall “Pathfinding: the impact of collaborative approaches in embedding elearning.” They discussed in detail the work they had done with web 2.0 tools. They used a lot of phrases and words that were user focused:
“Devolvement of responsibility for the technology”
“Trust”
“Ownership of web 2.0″
The way in which web2.0 was being deployed was extremely strategic and at the same time tailored to individual practice. Many of the learning activities that were discussed were independent of the institutional VLE.
I asked the question:
Is this an exit strategy for your VLE?
Richard responded that it wasn’t the intention and that if anything the approach is more about spreading risk. This lead into a discussion about the role of the VLE in this instance, and the fact that should any of the web 2.0 tools cease to be or there is a loss of service, then the VLE was there in the background. But what if the risk were reversed? What if the VLE was taken away from the institution?
Richard replied that he had confidence that e-learning would continue, using the tools and approaches they had deployed. Thoughts…
This was a good conference for this type of discussion and I’m sure that lots of people had similar experiences. However, if this event should be on your calendar for next year, and you’re a vegetarian, bring your own Sandwiches 
Research 2.0? Risks and Rewards of Using Emergent Technologies
This blog post supports a presentation at the UKGrad Yorkshire & North East Hub, E-Researcher Development Meeting, an e-learning day for trainers and developers.
The presentation will open with a brief introduction to the JISC Users and Innovation Programme and discuss the importance of eliciting user needs. This section uses an image from a Flickr user (pauliepaul).
The presentation then moves on to discuss the growth in 2.0 tools, not only in terms of the number of web 2.0 start-up companies, but also in terms of the number of areas that are using the ‘2.0’ suffix as a way of demonstrating that we are now doing something different. To illustrate the number of web 2.0 tools that are available the montages created by Stabilo Boss are used.
However, whilst some of the characteristics of web 2.0 as defined by people such as O’Reilly are discussed, for the purposes of the presentation the presentation centres on the existing web 2.0 tools that may be of use to delegates and their communities. This user centric approach is first illustrated by discussing ‘Ross’, one of the students who has worked with the programme and presented at JISC events. Are there a set of activities that Ross would need to do as a researcher that can be achieved with either greater ease, or more efficiently? These should be two primary drivers. However, there is a third – security.
So, having identified that there are things we want to do more efficiently or easier, what sort of activities might they be?
- Publishing and Disseminating
- Networking and Communities
- Collaboration
- Sharing stories (privately and publicly)
Having identified tools the idea of digital footprints will be covered and the implications that may have. The feedback from why PhD students think that online profiles are important:
- Collaboration: finding colleagues and peers to work with
- Advertising or Promoting ‘you’: a way of showing what you can do
- Dissemination: either of information or ‘products’, where products could be ‘papers’ or ‘software’
- Networking / Community Building: all online communities require you to have an online ‘persona’
- Contact: a way of people finding you, perhaps after seeing a presentation or reading a paper – often they will ‘Google you’
- Saving time, having an online presence is something you can send people to if they want to know more about your work etc, rather than you writing individual emails
- The Web is an established medium: “if you’re not on the web, you don’t exist”
Rather than cover many of the issues that were to be covered in the parallel sessions, this session looked at some of the issues around blogging as an example of some the things some research students are engaging with, including:
- as a way of building a literature review
- to share ideas with an overseas supervisor
- to practice English
- to get interact with the ‘subjects’
- to self promote
Finally, the session looked at some of the issues around security and some of the negative impacts that may occur of using the technologies.
The slides for this session are below
Managing Online Identity
This is a topic that is gaining a lot of coverage, and is extremely important in an academic setting. I’ll be facilitating a workshop next week at the Next Generation Environments event at Aston University with James Farnhill and trying to elicit some issues from both teaching and research practitioners.
We’ll be running a couple of exercises during the session, asking delegates to look at their online identity and asking them to reconcile their ‘results’ with their actual identity.
If you’d had any experience with identity issues then post a comment and I’ll use the example in the session, if you’re interested in listening in on the day, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
The slides will be posted on this blog after the session along with feedback from the delegates and pointers to further resources and ongoing work.
Immersion or Augmentation: A culture or just another tool?
As well as developing technology and processes many of the Users and Innovation projects are also engaged in much wider debates, pushing our understanding of the role of technology in the wider education sector.
The Habitat project is currently exploring the role of virtual worlds such as Second Life, which may on one hand be described as ‘immersive’ but in some pedagogical circles may be described as ‘augmentative’ The immersion verses augmentation debate may become more important as the sector looks at integrating these technologies into educational and research practice.
The immersion ‘camp’ tends to describe virtual worlds as a culture or society in which we play a role and/or become a member while the augmentationist ‘camp’ describes them as simply an addition to the range of tools we already use to communicate. Whilst for people not in either camp the debate looks reasonably esoteric, the debate is actually quite divisive and feeds the desire of those involved to be in a particular ‘camp’. In this way it is similar to the classic mac vs PC discussion we all like to partake of occasionally. Nevertheless the immersion vs augmentation concept could act as a useful yardstick for the projects such as the Habitat project which is piloting the
educational use of virtual worlds with art & design students and philosophy students.
When the project is developing its pilots, for example, for their philosophy students, the students may simply want to have a discussion at a distance so the only valid reason to use something like Second Life is if it brings a sense of presence beyond that of a straight text chat. In this sense the measure for the success of the pilot is focused on immersion. In contrast to this the art & design students will be in the same room whilst building aesthetic artefacts in world. This is a direct extension of their real life practice in the studio and could be said to fall into the augmentation category. Clearly the division between these principles and between the pilots is not black and white. Each aspect of the pilots contains elements of both immersion and augmentation. The Habitat team’s role is to delicately use the distinction to guide the pedagogical design of the pilots and to evaluate the success of their activities.
To keep an eye on the debate, and to contribute, monitor the Project Blog. Alternatively, if you are attending the Next Generation Environments conference (further information from Lawrie Phipps) there will be a chance to engage the Habitat team in the debate on day one of the event.
Connectivism at the Blackboard Users Conference
Last week I spoke at the Eighth Annual Durham Blackboard Users’ Conference (metaphors on a postcard!). The theme of the event was Connectivism and suggested reading prior to the event was George Siemen’s paper ‘Connectivism: a learning theory for a digital age’. I opened with a quote from Dave Cormier’s blog:
Many of us have taken a huge leap this year from the dungeons of our physical existence up to the light and wonder of connectivism. Each of us has had the wonderful experience of having hundreds of people send us a message in a hundred ways to in some way interact with what they’re doing. Each of us has also had the awful experience of having hundreds of people send us a message in a hundred ways to in some way interact with what they’re doing. Connecting is the only way we can succeed in the world of edtech.
The conference was a good example of connectivism, there were a lot of people with the same kinds of issues and a variety of solutions, and they were connecting and sharing. I know that there will be a few people who read this blog who, perhaps, aren’t that fond of Blackboard, but that shouldn’t colour our perceptions of the people out there that are having to use it and make the best of it. And the best of it was what I think I saw at the conference. There were several good presentations/discussions around how blackboard could fit with connectivism and what that might look like, and there were several really well presented cases of Blackboard and social networking tools being used in parallel.
In my presentation I tried to contextualise the future of the VLE in an educational system that accepts Connectivism as a valid and current theory. Several key points from George’s paper stood out for me and I staged my presentation around them:
- What is the impact on learning theories when knowledge is no longer linear?
There is a lot of use of VLEs where we see knowledge constructed with a beginning and an end point. Even the most constructivist tutor may have beginning and end points at the back of their minds. - How do we stay current in a rapidly evolving information ecology?
- I have no idea – my head hurts from trying to keep up with everything I need to know, what happens to the stuff that I should know. Connectivism seems to recognise that the ‘know where’ is at least as important, if not more so, than ‘know what’ and ‘know how’ which is an important survival strategy in this kind of information environment.
- Connectivism recognises that the pipe is more important than the content of the pipe.
Recognition that our capacity to learn is more important than what we already know. - Finally George’s paper suggests that the technology we use can shape the way we learn?
This final one hit home with me. I didn’t use mind mapping tools until 4 years ago, and I had to force myself to use it. Now it is my preferred method of taking notes and I often jot down mind maps when I’m thinking.
And on that note, here is the mind map for the presentation.
Lawrie’s Mind Map for the Bbd conference
Blackboard and Facebook
I missed day one of the conference, but day two was fun. For me (given my role) the paper that most caught my attention was Pat Parslow’s (Patrick Parslow, Shirley Williams, Michael Evans, Karsten Øster Lundqvist, Edwin Porter-Daniels, Robert Ashton) that discussed Facebook and Blackboard in a ‘competitive’ way. The paper will be written up so keep an eye on https://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/sir06pnp/weblog/ one of my favourite quotes from the presentation was:
Learners will learn through social networking; Even in the absence of course materials.
I won’t report more on the teams findings until the full paper is written up but it should make interesting reading.
Blackboard Scholar Terms and Conditions
Previous readers will know I have a little bee in my bonnet about terms and conditions, Facebook terms were of a little concern earlier in the year and when I put those relating to content in Facebook on a slide someone from the audience suggested they were the same as Blackboard Scholar. Although I missed it, and I’m sure that some one will correct me if I’m wrong, Blackboard talked about the ‘Scholar’ product on the previous day. When I checked the terms, it could be argued that they are perhaps a little similar 
4. User Content
Any Content that you upload or otherwise make available (”User Content”) as part of the Services, is and remains your sole property or the property of your licensors. By uploading or otherwise making available any User Content, you automatically grant and/or warrant that the owner has granted Blackboard, the perpetual royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, perform, display, and transmit the User Content to Scholar. You also permit any other user of Blackboard with access to that Services, subject to your restrictions, to access, view, store, and reproduce the User Content to the same extent permitted herein.
Once they have it, they have it forever.
Season’s Greetings to all, I’ll be back in the New Year.
Digital footprints
Dotsam. Defined as:
The wasteland of abandoned Web sites, Hotmail accounts, blogs, wikis, MySpace pages, etc., that their creators have ignored for months or years but which remain accessible. The word was coined in imitation of flotsam and jetsam; “flotsam” refers to goods that float in the water without having been thrown there, as after a shipwreck, while “jetsam” has been cast into the sea–jettisoned–usually to lighten a ship’s cargo in an emergency.
I did a quick check on myself and the oldest page I found was from 1997, a learning and teaching resource that shall remain nameless and is also defunct. Not a calamity and certainly nothing I wish I hadn’t written. When I wrote the material back in 97 the ability to publish to the net was not, arguably, easily available to everyone, certainly in universities. I remember filling out forms and visiting the faculty webmaster – “please Neil can I have some space?” the response was less than enthusiastic, and support whilst not grudgingly given was certainly given by someone whose primary concern was that I don’t do anything that will break the server (some mystical thingy which appeared to be something that sat under his desk!). The first webpage I loaded onto the server contained 4 images – each of which had been scanned from 10×8 photos at 600 dpi – the page took a while to load, in fact I think the phone call from the webmaster came through before the page did.
Today anyone can go online sign up for a dozen different tools to publish material online and be ‘live’ in minutes, and so the dotsam grows. Whereas you might have a vague sense of what you have written over the last 10 years, the dotsam created ‘about’ you by other people presents a completely different kind of problem.
Recently The Guardian published a reasonably balanced story about social networking in education. I and two colleagues, Sarah Knight and Philip Pothen, were quoted in it. Whilst looking for personal dotsam for this posting (or at least what I was going to post about) I found another story that quoted me “UK Universities brings web2.0 tools in education”. This piece was a rewrite of The Guardian article, in it they quote me:
Lawrie Phipps, JISC project Manager stated that universities can use web2.0 more sensibly in education. Social -networking sites allows students to create their own groups and academic communities in areas like bio-medicine.
No he didn’t! At least I was fairly sure he didn’t - so I checked in the original. The original quote is:
“We found social networking and instant messaging being used to support researchers working off-campus,” says Jisc’s e-learning programme manager, Sarah Knight. “Social networking was allowing students and researchers to create their own interest groups and academic communities in areas like bio-medicine.”
This is a fairly harmless misrepresentation, at least I think so, Sarah may feel differently. At least in this case Sarah and I were both saying similar things in the article. But what if we had been diametrically opposed and something that was said by one was attributed to the other?
With blogging, and the ability to instantly publish and cross refer works so easily on the net, this kind of incident will no doubt continue to occur. And it is not only things that you deliberately state online, I don’t think I’ve been to an event this year where there isn’t at least one person blogging what is being said by the speaker! A recent workshop I gave at a university was blogged by two delegates and their blogs referred to in a blog of someone who wasn’t actually there – the information was harmless, but the potential for the information to be misreported becomes greater the further from the original it travels.
Instant publishing might be a great idea enabling a lot of people to post thought provoking and interesting material and enabling a debate to be had. But we must be careful about who is saying what and how what we say is being used, The Guardian article mentioned earlier is a good example, several bloggers have used a headline quote from that article:
Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: “Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don’t want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.”
But they don’t use the line that I said directly afterwards to the reporter (and which admittedly is two further paragraphs away in the report).
“They appear to want to keep their online persona private but when you ask them whether they’d like instant communication with tutors or feedback on essays (via Skype or Facebook) the answer is always yes.”
The price of instant publishing for anyone that may be cited or quoted is constant vigilance!
-
Lawrie is available through Skype
-
