QR Codes in education: watch this space
A QR (quick response) code is a two dimensional bar code that can be read on a mobile device, such as a camera phone. Once the device decodes the information then it will enable an action to be undertaken. For instance, this might be accessing a web page, displaying text information or subscribing to an RSS feed. For the learner this offers significant potential as it connects the physical and electronic worlds.
There are several free generators on the web, I use Kaywa. And there are also several free readers available for a variety of mobile phones, currently I’m using i-nigma. Andy Ramsden (University of Bath) is currently undertaking a small piece of work for the JISC Users and Innovation programme to develop a ‘beginners guide’ to using QR codes in education. So watch this space, and we’ll post information when it’s available. If you are already using QR codes in education please post information in the comments box and we’ll try include your details in the guide.
In the meantime, there is a prize of a box of chocolates for the first (UK based) person to contact me and tell me what the QR code is below.
Edupunk?
There’s a nice debate going on out there, this posting is just my own perspective and a signpost, if you want to engage more fully take a wander over to the funnymonkey posting and follow the trail.
“Punk-related ideologies are mostly concerned with individual freedom.”
Looking at the wikipedia entry for punk it identifies a plethora of social, political, fashion, music and philosophical standpoints all under the term punk. The views ascribed are not only diverse but in some cases diametrically opposed.
“Punk-related ideologies are mostly concerned with individual freedom.”
And so it is with great unease that I find that my educational technology inbox is filling up this month with a new phrase ‘Edupunk’, even the Guardian is on the bandwagon. I started to write this post because I was disturbed to find another fashion term on horizon that described what so many of our practitioners are doing, edupunk is another label, it comes hot on the heals of the 2.0 movement - you know, learning 2.0, learner 2.0, student 2.0 - and I’m as guilty as the next person for doing it. Here’s the irony, edupunk isn’t edupunk once it’s edupunk. The wikipedia entry as of today reads:
Edupunk is an ideology referring to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude. Many instructional applications can be described as DIY education or Edupunk. It describes inventive teaching and inventive learning.
There it is, some ‘edupunk’ as defined it as inventive teaching and inventive learning. Here’s the thing – that’s been happening since the concept of teaching and learning. So that surely can’t be the defining thing? So do we mean, as some commentators have suggested, that edupunk is associated with the 2.0 movement. Web 2.0 tools in education are allowing individuals to make small changes in their practice - the ability to ‘do different’. That might work.
Back in the mid 90’s I worked with an edupunk, he built stuff himself out of toolbook and used these small homemade programs in his teaching, he retired before we had web 2.0, but if he was around now he’d love it. I suggested that John was an edupunk, but I was corrected apparently he was a protoeducpunk. Is the creation of labels and the advent of a ‘new cool’ really what we want to be the defining characteristics of innovation in eduction. I’ve ranted about language before, arguing that these terms form exclusive cliques, and here I think we go again. I actually believe by inventing the term the originator thought they would do some good and that it was inclusive, however the debate started almost as soon as it was posted. I think the best thing I’ve read on this issue is from Bill Fitzgerald over at Funnymonkey:
I am not an edupunk, I work in education and try an make a difference through the use of technology in practice.
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.
Guardian Article
There’s a great article in today’s Guardian “Tracking technology in the corridors of learning“, it reports on the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antennas and tags at the University of Washington’s computer science department. Rather than the Orwellian overtones you might expect, where the ‘evil overseers’ monitor our every move, the system is open to all and everyone can see where you are. It also uses Google Calendar and a Twitter Gadget to update information.
Eliciting Answers using web 2.0 tools.
Linked-In is a tool for maintaining and developing contacts – one of the features is the ability to ask questions of your network of contacts and the ‘public visibility’ of these questions.
I thought it might be interesting to pose a question around web 2.0 and then see what sort of answers we got back.
The Question: Does Web 2.0 facilitate connectivism, circumvent constructivism, or just pollute the knowledge stream with contradictory chatter?
In one week I received 8 ‘public’ responses and 2 private responses. The private ones were from contacts that aren’t involved in this sector, and know me from separate routes - both of them questioned my sobriety at the time of posting the question!
The answers to the question are all below, so now it’s over to you, do they answer usefully? Is it a tool, when used with trusted colleagues, that could help us in our practice?
Jose Roig
Web 2.0 does all of the above… which is kind of a cop-out for an answer. I blogged last week (http://tech-consulting.blogspot.com/) about how some of its functionality has great potential for corporate use. Wiki’s and Blogs are great tools for collaboration and for the publishing/sharing of documentation. Coupled with instant messaging, such tools are transforming the way that geographically dispersed teams work together.
In the public arena, Blogs give everyone a forum for free expression, which carries with it the risk that only the most shocking and confrontational viewpoints get noticed. It also carries the risk of doing nothing but turning up the volume on the noise and clutter. But I believe the potential reward of knowledge sharing is worth the risk.
Marc Aniballi
Web 2.0 connects databases to web interfaces so that you can do custom content generation and personalisation. This includes (obviously) user generated content.
Put any group of 10 people in a room and you’ll get all of your situations above. Online just happens bigger and faster.
David Kernohan
Web 2.0 is a resource like any other, and can be used to facilitate learning based on any theory of pedagogy you fancy. It’s like asking whether a textbook facilitates connectivism, circumvents constructivism…
Just because it is interactive doesn’t mean it is not a learning resource. It’s what you do with it that counts…
Malcolm Murray
I agree with the concept that there isn’t a one to one mapping between any technology and pedagogy - i.e. using Web 2.0 doesn’t make, nor require you to be connectivist.
That said, I think some of the tools really help, if we take connectivism to mean the ability to stay in touch with and lever the collective intelligence of a network of contacts and indeed their network of contacts.
The key issue for me is one of credibility/quality. How does a user know that the information they find is any good. Some of the newer web 2.0 tools (such as this discussion) help by providing information and context about the posters. For other older tools (e.g. wikipedia) although content may be subject to peer review, much of it is not directly (read easily) attributable.
Does this matter? Yes I think it does! Whilst “pollution” may be too strong a term - and I can see the massed ranks of social scientists just waiting to analyse the cultural loading this term implies) the problem for many today can be summed up as “there a shit load of material out there, but loads of it is shit”. To succeed we still need to be selective. That’s where the networking aspect comes in - it gives us help filtering out the dross.
Bruce Mason
I would say that this question veers towards technological determinism. I suspect that a couple of thousand years ago there may have been similar questions about this new-fangled writing business. That’s a somewhat flip response but it gets at the point that these new resources are useful in as much as we make use of them.
I do think that we’re having to acquire competence in web2.0 usage and that also includes those who design SNS sites. For example, I was on the verge of quitting Facebook until, one day, I noticed a little “block this application” link beneath all my notifcations. Now Facebook is positive for me again. Those who run Facebook responded to an emergent phenomenon and the site has been improved.
So, I think what is happening is that we’re acquiring competence in the emergent, communicational affordances of web2.0. Give it a few years and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about…
James Farnhill
I think my natural first response was that you’ve got to understand the terms before you can couch an answer to this at all. Web 2.0 means very different things to very different people and can be more confusing than it is helpful. Having said that, I’d agree with the other posters that if you’re using social networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn (and even stuff like Flickr, that might not seem like an obvious choice) and other Web 2.0 ‘most wanted’ apps such as blogs and wikis sensibly then there is a considerable amount of benefit from them. It’s just that some people are using Web 2.0 because it’s there and because it’s a bandwagon, meaning a large volume of rubbish gets generated that doesn’t help connect people or do anything else; for example, I’m getting to the stage where Twitter and tweets are really annoying me as they’re used as buzz words by Nathan Barley noo media types who only use it because it’s ‘cool’! So, I think for the future we need to have Web 2.0 to generate content but we also need Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as some of the stuff being done with Google maps and AJAX to bring the content together in a meaningful way. We can also use text mining tools and some of the more sophisticated tagging to start getting data about data and get some provenance in there. All that’s doing is what any arts and social sciences student could tell you they’ve been doing for ages, which is quality assuring the data they trust by review, meaning large amounts of seemingly contradictory opinions can be distilled into material that makes sense for you. Hope that hasn’t turned into too much of a ramble…
Tony Linde
To me (and I agree that it means different things to different people) Web 2.0 means three things: 1) the ability for users to add content to a website; 2) the use of AJAX to make pages more dynamic; and 3) the exposure of a site’s content via one or more APIs. All of these things existed before the Web 2.0 term but the explosion of websites with all three features did mark a significant shift in the web experience.
It is primarily #3 above which helps ‘facilitate connectivism’: our own experiences, exposed via #1 above are connected by #3 and by the internal workings of the website. Seeing these connections would, I would have thought, aid constructivism rather than circumvent it, in that only simple connections will be forged by data and software: the user of the sites ought to be able to construct knowledge upon a wider base using the connections supplied (needs research though).
The knowledge stream will only ’seem’ polluted by those students who are not able to critically assess what they see. Critical reasoning ought to be the first skill any student is imbued with, from primary school onwards.
Mark Childs
I’m currently conducting a research project (funded by the wonderful people at JISC actually - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/elp_blups.aspx) looking at how students use web 2 technologies and whether this has any effect on their learning. The answer is that, yes it does. Because students are more connected now, this gives them more opportunities to share ideas, help each other with their learning and (often underestimated in its importance) exchange information about the course and university procedures. This is sometimes due to them setting up specific groups within Facebook, for example, but it’s mainly because they are communicating so much using web 2.0 tools for social reasons, and it’s natural for them to segue from talking about meeting up to go down the pub to talking about the latest assignment.
U&I Showcase: The Web2Rights Project
One of the joys of working as a programme manager at the JISC is working with a group of people that you can bounce ideas off, find gaps and then elicit solutions. Following a series of reports about IPR and Copyright issues around new and emerging technologies, we, (JISC, and the JISC Users and Innovation Programme), commissioned a project in Autumn 2007 to provide some pragmatic advice and guidance. Delivering earlier than expected, with more outputs on the way, the Web2Rights project is a fantastic resource for anyone in the education sector working in this area. Furthermore a series of FAQs is constantly being added to. A good starting point is the IP Toolkit.
For April the team intend to launch an interactive resource which will help users navigate through the advice in a flow diagram. In addition keep an eye on the project blog for interesting developments, one of the editors informs me that they are looking at some terms and conditions of specific commercial products and whether they suit academic practices. The team have now published a great article about whether or not to use Blackboard Scholar- well worth a look.
Finally, the project is also trying to exemplify the practices it advises on. The website provides a clean design, with good RSS feeds, embedded videos, a blog, discussion forum and opportunities for the ‘community’ to contribute. They are also using the tools they are investigating, using for example, a Facebook group, and slideshare (below).
| View | Upload your own
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.
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Lawrie is available through Skype
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