Author: dougclow

Data scientist, tutxor, project leader, researcher, analyst, teacher, developer, educational technologist, online learning expert, and manager. I particularly enjoy rapidly appraising new-to-me contexts, and mediating between highly technical specialisms and others, from ordinary users to senior management. After 20 years at the OU as an academic, I am now a self-employed consultant, building on my skills and experience in working with people, technology, data science, and artificial intelligence, in a wide range of contexts and industries.

CALRG Conference – day 1

Notes from the 29th Computers And Learning Research Group annual conference. I’m discussant for the first day.

[Added later: This was liveblogging but due to my stupidity with the Save instead of the Publish button it’s 24h later than what one could with entirely reasonably call live..]

Designing Learning activities: processes, tools and research issues (Andrew Brasher, Simon Cross, Grainne Conole)

“We’re now starting to expand”

Shift of focus from content to activity (so I’m producing more content)

How can we design learning activities which make effective use of tools and pedagogy? How can we scaffold and support the design process?

Been going for 1y, funding till Dec 09; focus shifting from developing tools to rolling out and embedding in Faculties from Autumn.

Gathering empirical evidence to understand the design process. Case studies, workshops, interviews, course observation & evaluations.

IMS Learning Design needs you to be able to think like a computer programmer; it produces executable code. LAMS is easier to use but still is executable. But neither support the design development process, or offline activities.

So CompendiumLD – and specialised notation (loose). Generally, time flows downwards (like UML swim lanes but less formal). Actors perform actions making use of tools and resources to reach a specific outcome. Has context-sensitive help – gives you tools based on the label you type (keyword lookup – discuss, organise); also ‘more about instant messaging’ – Google Custom Search Engine.

Schneiderman 2007 – tools to support creativity – functionality that a tool should offer:

Low thresholds, high ceilings and wide walls.

Next developments to tool: time estimates. Also visual mapping of activities to learning outcomes.

Discussion about evaluating learning design. Consensus that it’s really complex, especially separating influences. (Interesting conversation with David Hawkridge about contrast between being didactic and being learner-led – Betty Collis example about oil rig engineers Masters. Students agree the assessment criteria – and perhaps the assessment itself. And curriculum. But tension with defined/fix curricula and hence accreditation, which is Universities’ USP (?).)

Simon’s tall so can’t read notes if they’re on a table, so he brings along a stand for his notes to sit on (a document stand usually used beside a monitor).

Case studies – feedback that it’s difficult to abstract from specific examples – but the converse is also hard.

Evaluation is hard, complex, evidence tricky.

Feedback in formative e-assessment: closing the loop in distance learning (Stylianos Hatzipanagos)

Project mostly at King’s Learning Institute; funded by Centre for Dist Ed of Uni of London. Also includes Bob McCormick. Three ODL environments (King’s, UoL external programmes, OU); investigation of relationship between formative assessment and learning technologies. Models of formative assessment. Technologies work has mostly been about objective tests rather than effective assessment (depending on what you mean by effective, of course!) vs Bob McCormick (2004) saying promotes innovation and deeper thinking.

Research-led institutions focus on examining/summative. UoL external programmes are very diverse. OU emphasis on periodic assessment and systematic provision of feedback.

Some tutors equated ‘formative assessment’ with ‘continuous assessment’.

‘Closing the loop’ formative feedback rarely takes place in courses with emphasis on end of year (summative) assessment.

Cross-fertilisation between distance learning and f2f learning would be good.

Improving spoken English with ICT? ‘English in Action’ in Bangladesh (Adrian Kirkwood)

Light relief break – just a few ramblings (!). Big motivator of break between Pakistan and Bangladesh (independence 1971) was Urdu vs Bangla. So teaching English is an interesting project. “Very flat” – like Norfolk.

DfID funding for 9y (!) from May 2008, launched from Downing St, aims to have impact on 25m people. (Out of 150m population.) Request came from Bangladesh – tool for participation in global economy, empowerment and development.

Partners: BBC World Service Trust, OLSET (South Africa), OU. TV and radio programmes, mobile devices stuff. Builds on experience of OU’s DEEP Project in southern Africa … also TESSA? OU bit focusing on developing teachers.

English already major timetabled subject in school; aim to improve communicative skill, rather than written exams which you can pass by learning the grammar rules. (Why not change the assessment? Hard to do.) Problem with low skills level in (communicative) English in the teachers too.

Parallels with situation in Southern Europe (Spain, Greece, Portugal etc) and Japan right now too – very little oral work in English assessment.

Another big project where it’s hard to pick out a big-R Research angle from the general this-is-a-good-thing development one.

Navigate through materials: redesigning a language course with a modular flexible approach (Fernando Rosell-Aquilar)

Issues on existing Level 1 courses feeding in to remake: Poor retention. Too much content, inaccurate timings, repetition, linear/directive structure with little flexibility.

So took ‘learning objects’, modular approach. First on L140, Spanish.

Students approached from different places and all thought they’d started from the ‘right’ place. One found the approach ‘random’. Free to make choices.

Blended tutor support – f2f, Lyceum, telephone, forum, student support.

Have a blog directory of all students – using the Glossary functionality in Moodle! So students can put their own entry in. But can also change your entry when you post to blog so can see who’s updated via Browse by Date function in Glossary.

Chris and Chetz in the Datacapture Suite with wikis, blogs and learning objects (Chris Pegler and Chetz Colwell)

Accessibility in the Web 2.0 environment. Work in context of PROWE (with Leicester) and Stor Curam – now Learning Exchange. Repository projects. Expert accessibility.

Parallel with Web 2.0 with the introduction of Windows, when whole load of new accessibility issues emerged and a lot of catch-up needed.

Big problem with accessibility features being present but not ‘visible’. Classic errors with tab order wrong, labels for textareas wrong, and so on. There are techniques and ways of doing this right but often don’t.

Tagcloud vs JAWS … reads it with ‘link …’ after each word. And no indication of the size of the tag. Information in the popup, also hidden from JAWS (doesn’t read TITLE elements by default – which you want). Could simply include the number in the tag itself, which is probably better than a separate list (and is better for all, too!).

Video records useful for mediating in disputes about what you’ve found. (“The users are using it wrong!”)

Equability and dominance in online forums (Jon Rosewell and Tony Hirst)

Analysis of dominance of forums by small number of posters – only looking at number of posts (for now, because it’s easy). Could lead to dashboard approach to monitor health of forums. (Link to Student Support Review?)

Mostly large, moderated without tutors (peer support). 10pt/10wk courses, 100-800 students. 4 courses, 36 forums, 3000 posters, 27000 posts. Forums with ostensibly different purposes.

Robin Mason rule of thirds – 1/3 post many, 1/3 post few, 1/3 lurk. Bit more subtle. Also do-not-attend at all.

Pattern of posts made by posters – oh wow, it looks like a power law. Small number making a lot of posts, long tail making very little. Jon calls it a J-shaped distribution. Showed neat animation of patterns from loads of course/presentation and they look very, very similar.

Ecological analogy – communities often composed of dominant species plus long tail of rare species – biodiversity indexes. Indexes need to capture both richness (species count) and equitability (relative abundance of species). Shannon’s index widely used.

The distributions in the model go straight when plotted as log … but not for real data in biology (get S-shaped curve). His forum data aren’t straight or sigmoid, it’s a curve.

Diversity vs richness data cluster very closely on a curve. Equitability doesn’t vary with richness (number of participants). Startlingly little variability by different conferences apart from bare number of people.

No. of posters versus number of posts – seems to tail off: as the number of posts increases, the proportion of people prepared to contribute tails off. (Causality direction though.) End up with one person writing 10% of the posts … pretty much all the time, over a certain size of forum.

Patterns of participation seem remarkably consistent – so doesn’t tell us much about what makes for good forums! (Although these are all open, general forums with no direction.)

But the patterns are only in terms of the maths – the experience would be very different in many different forums. Whaddaya know, qual and quant give you different structures.

Link to Clay Shirky’s work on power laws and blogs. And my playing about with the KN – docs by user, downloads by doc – all look the same.

Using computer tools to scaffold argumentation: A case study in a postgraduate science community (Canan Blake and Eileen Scanlon)

InterLoc tool – built by Digital Dialog Games JISC project and many others. Rules and roles for participants: highly structured/reasoned dialogue, based around ‘locution openers’.

Latest version – InterLoc3 – is web-based.

Trial sessions, based around discussions of controversial topics (creationism in schools, DNA database). Does keep tone civil, and collaborative questioning, clarifying and justifying positions takes place.

Have to look at content of the discussion, not mechanical features, to see the value. So content analysis is next step.

The (In)visible WItness project: working with children and young people to explore gendered representations of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Jenni Carr, Liz Whitelegg, Rick Holliman, Eileen Scanlon and Barbara Hodgson)

Research with children & young people, not on. Dave Gauntlett (1996) quote about children being ‘researched on’ rather than ‘worked with’. So conceptualise children as active interpreters of media messages. (Children constructed as incompetent media users, compared to competent adults. Ha! Often the other way round.)

Media literacy very high; good appreciation of broadcasters and audience. And creative, with interactive/multi-platform programming. Expectation of interaction. Had a sense of what’s objectionable, used stereotypes – but complex and nuanced phenomenon. (Also, I’d say use of stereotypical images is very media-savvy – in the sense that that’s what media does.)

They consistently understood difference between presenters and scientists; understood that presenters didn’t really know science.

Alas, the proposed prize of a day out with scientists wasn’t seen as a big enough draw, so they went for Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom instead.

Recent e-learning research and development at the University of Leicester (David Hawkridge)

Vote: who wants PowerPoint, who wants paper, who wants me to talk? (Only one asks for Powerpoint … and gets the USB stick.)

OU gave out 78 gramophone records – on A100! It had music, poetry and some prose. Surveys showed not everyone had the tech to use it. How else to give audio? Oooh, shiny new audiotape technology.

Podcasts … a modern version of deploying audio. Lots of ways of using them.

All of Gilly Salmon’s projects have animal names (IMPALA, MOOSE, WoLF …). Cool naming scheme.

Also stuff on SecondLife (MOOSE) and Pocket PCs (WoLF). Wrong equipment problems; steep learning curve – lot of time needed from very time-poor people.

Issue with 40% of students not wanting work-related podcasts mixed up with their own entertainment/music stuff on their MP3 player. General perceived barrier – also with texts, emails, etc.

Evaluating the Accessibility of a Virtual Learning Environment within ALPE (Chris Douce and Wendy Porch)

Accessible eLearning Platform for Europe: is there a market to support a company providing consultation and resources around the production of accessible e-learning material?

Platform is dotLRN with UNED enhancements for accessibility.

Got participants in to do tasks; struggle to recruit (multiple projects at the same time). Content is SCORM-generated. Hard to locate accessibility technology. (Lunar, Window Eyes, Guide, JAWS … etc. Software is expensive and hard to find, especially at short notice.) Video feed interrupted by OU PC security features.

Lots and lots of very rich data – 20h of video.

‘Virtual learning environment’ not commonly understood. Inconsistent terminology bad. Complexity bad. Inconsistency between content viewing controls and other system not an issue. Time to complete tasks a lot longer for users with disabilities. Users with disabilities are very, very diverse.

Developers put a lot of effort in to custom access keys … and nobody used them. (They often conflict with the other assistive tech.)

Serious games with benefits

Some of my colleagues are part of Law 37, “an alliance of creative folk – game designers, coders, writers – working together to create pro bono, pro-social games.”  Their first project, codenamed Sleeper Cell, is “an interactive, cross-media and massively multiplayer game this summer to raise funding and awareness of the work of Cancer Research UK”.

It sounds really cool to me – fun and social benefit all mixed up.

They need help – live events team, mission creators, PR manager, Flash developers and production assistants.  Interested?  More information and contact details.

OU on iTunes U – education 2.0 business models

The Open University is on iTunes U! As Denise Kirkpatrick, Pro-VC for Teaching and Learning says in the press release,

Making available selected video and audio items from among the University’s highly-rated course materials via iTunes U to audiences worldwide offers a new channel for the University. We can open up free access to educational resources as well as a window for our potential students.

John Naughton says “At last we have a proper global distribution channel for our stuff.”; Martin Weller says “This is for the proper quality stuff, and provides a good outlet for OU material”.

I think they’re right: this is the high-quality stuff that the OU has a well-earned reputation for, and the content up there is good.

OU iTunes U

(I note that the OU is taking a sideways look at the world, and placing the Arabian Peninsula at the heart of its activity – visually at least.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this fits in to the emerging ecology of online educational material. There’s been a lot of debate in the last week or so around new business models for education – kicked off by Tony Hirst, then followed on by Stephen Downes, Martin Weller, Gary Lewis, and others. It’s great to have good stuff available for free. But how we make that sustainable – particularly the high-quality stuff that costs a lot to produce – is a profound challenge that we don’t yet have tested answers to.

There was a good post by Mike Masnick on Techdirt yesterday, summing up a really interesting discussion on “The Economics of Free”, and pointing out that

The first thing to understand is that we’re never suggesting people just give away content and then hope and pray that some secondary market will grant them money. Giving stuff away for free needs to be part of a complete business model that recognizes the economic realities

Give-away-and-pray isn’t a business model. I don’t believe education is (or should be) a business, but in a world based on exchange (rather than a gift economy), there are bills, and to be sustainable, there needs to be some way of paying them. Educational resources – once produced – are infinite goods: the marginal costs of reproduction are zero, or very near to it. Mike Masnick points out that the price of such goods will tend towards zero, and suggests that to make a sustainable living in that environment, you need to link the free distribution of those infinite goods to scarce goods, so that the greater availability of the inifinite goods make the scarce ones more valuable. The canonical example is the music industry, with the give-the-music-away, charge-for-the-gig (and other stuff) model. But I think it’s very applicable in education as well.

The infinite goods are obvious. If we’re not already in a world where good-enough zero-cost educational resources are widely available, we’re very close to it. The OU’s offerings on iTunes U are just the latest goodie in a great and growing sack of wonderfulness (!).

The linked finite goods are less well articulated, and I think the discussion about ‘business models’ for education 2.0 could be improved with a focus here. Martin asks whether it’s acceptable to provide free resources and tools, but charge for support and accreditation. I think that’s exactly the sort of model we should be exploring. Learner support, guidance and accreditation are scarce goods: they depend on individual attention. The other thing that’s an obvious scarce good in education is bespoke production of learning materials. As with the open source software community, companies (and even some Universities) are prepared to pay programmers to develop specific bits of software as part of open source projects, to ensure that their particular needs are met. I’m sure this is also true in education. The employer engagement agenda is one aspect of this, and one we should be trying to link in with all this education 2.0/OERs stuff – I suspect that will make us a much more attractive proposition to businesses.

Swinging back to the OU’s offerings on iTunes U, I love our tagline “Warning! Content may transform your life” (as does Martin). It’s a lofty goal, but one well worth striving for. With all this unseemly grubbing around for money, it’s well worth keeping those noble purposes in mind.

Twittering in to the sand?

I’ve been twittering away for nearly a month now, and really enjoying it for the sense of tight community it gives.  Even when I was off work with the flu for a week and only managed sad whiny tweets.

One odd side effect is that it’s dragged me back to Facebook.  I’d more-or-less abandoned Facebook, until I wired my Twitter feed in to Facebook updates.  All of a sudden people who are on Facebook – that I’ve not been in touch with for ages – start responding to me there.

My colleague and noted Twitter enthusiast Martin is worried about Twitter’s ongoing technical issues, which are annoying, and sensibly points out:

there’s nothing really in the design of Twitter over Jaiku, Friendfeed, Pownce, etc that makes me use it – it’s just that it’s where my network is, and I can’t migrate without them. But if they started to go, the infamous tipping point might be reached very quickly.

Andrew Chen observed that Metcalfe’s Law – that the value of a network grows with the square of the number of nodes – can work against you.  He posits a reverse law – Eflactem’s Law,

As you lose users, the value of your network is decreases exponentially (doh!)

Chen has Facebook in his sights.  And I think he’s right, especially given Facebook’s determination to keep the walled garden thing going – in a networked world, that’s only ever going to work as a short or medium term strategy, and ‘short or medium term’ in Internet years can be not very long at all.  But I think Twitter is far more vulnerable.

The big danger – and big win – for Twitter is that their userbase is small (compared to, say, Facebook or MySpace) but highly skewed towards techie opinion-formers.  Those are precisely the sort of people who will find migrating to a new service very little hassle.

On the other hand, I think Twitter is likely to be robust over small, short outages compared to a lot of online services.  The great thing (for my money) about Twitter versus one great big IM clusterparty or IRC (does anybody use IRC these days?) is that you feel quite safe ignoring it
for a while if you want to do something else.  So if you feel like Tweeting, but can’t, it’s no big deal to get on with Actual Work instead.

It’s all a bit fluid, and who knows what will happen?  As Martin concludes, “that’s the fun of it – we get to see the new paradigms being created”.

Laptops and internet bans

After the (very mild and minor) fuss about me using a laptop at last week’s Making Connections, I said we have a mountain to climb in embedding technological change across the university.  It’s reassuring in some ways to see that our mountain is not, perhaps, quite as huge and daunting as some other people’s.  The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most classrooms, and some professors even ban laptops.  According to the Dean, Saul Levmore, the problem is that students

may overestimate their ability to multi-task during class and that some students have expressed distraction due to their peers’ use of computers during class time

The latter is a very reasonable concern, and I think it can and should be addressed through policies about acceptable usage of computers during f2f teaching sessions (which is apparently what Stanford have done).  But the former is more contentious. Levmore sums it up by saying the question is “How do you best learn? That’s for the faculty to decide.”

Prawfsblog spots a certain amount of paternalism in the announcement, and urges them:

Be honest, and admit that you’re banning wireless access because the plugged-in student is usually a disengaged one and has sucked the fun out of the classroom experience.   Students are more likely to accept a top-down policy change if it’s justified based on faculty morale than student learning.

B2fxx goes a bit further (and links back to me, spurring this post) and says:

Banning laptops in class is a bit like the education sector’s equivalent of the entertainment industry wishing the Web had never happened.

That’s more what I’m thinking. It does seem like a panicky over-reaction to an irreversible technological change, which will harm both the legislators and the punters.

I do buy Levmore’s argument that the question is “How best do you learn?”.  I completely reject the idea that the faculty (or teachers or whatever) know the best answer.  Particularly if they think the answer is traditional lectures, which we’ve known since 1972 (Donald Bligh’s What’s The Use Of Lectures) are no better than other methods for information transmission, and almost entirely useless for getting learners to think.

Almost any teacher can help a student learn more effectively than the student can alone, and a good teacher will help the learner understand and improve their own learning processes.  But the idea that the teacher knows how best their learners learn is … wrong.  How can you possibly know that?  You can have a lot of good ideas about how your learners might learn, and if you teach the same topic over and over again, you can accrete a comprehensive toolbox of ways of helping learners learn those particular subjects and a lot of experience in judging which are likely to help which learners with which aspects.  But that’s a very long way from what Levmore is saying.  And all of that presupposes that what you’re teaching (or should be teaching) hasn’t changed profoundly as a result of new technologies – and there are few if any courses where that’s true.

Stephen Heppell has long lamented that most (British) kids have great access to some of the most extraordinarily powerful learning tools (e.g. mobile phones, word processors), but are banned from using them in (many parts of) the formal school system.  It’s a bit depressing if (parts of) higher education are heading down that same “Teacher knows best” route.  At just the time when teacher is freed from having to know best!

Opening up

My organisation – the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University – has recently been reviewed.  I think our response to the review should be to become radically more open about what we do.

We had a meeting about the review with the Vice Chancellor and our immediate boss, Denise Kirkpatrick (Pro-Vice-Chancellor Learning and Teaching).  I asked if it was Ok to blog about the review, and the VC said it was the first time anyone had asked (!) – but said fine so long as it’s circumspect.

In a circumspect nutshell, the review said that the staff in IET were “talented” but identified a serious problem in perceived value delivered to the University.  The proposal of the reviewers was to split IET in two.

We’re now in to a discussion phase where we explore how we might respond to the review.  To stick to the diplomatic and circumspect line, splitting precisely as proposed is proving a major challenge to operationalise.  My colleagues have already kicked the ball rolling with the discussion about what we could actually do.  Martin talks about how organisational structures are less important now:

with new ways of connecting, it’s not that the reorg should be more prevalent, but rather that organisational structures, which are often physical organisational structures, are increasingly irrelevant. My OU network is as much to do with my OU Twitter network as it is to do with my ‘formal’ placement in a group

There’s a lot of potential to improve things, as Will suggests:

overall this represents a catalyst for change which has been long overdue in our unit 

And Patrick linked that back with the theme of new ways of working and said

However if we can do something more about changes in ways of working, picking up on knowing what we are doing and why, building on the latest tools so that structure and boundaries matter rather less then I think the review and the push for change could do us some good. 

So what is to be done?

I think  – and this is very much the direction we as a unit have been moving for a long time – the main idea has to be increased openness about what we’re doing.  Web 2.0 management!

One entirely-fun question – which I’m pleased that I’ve managed to hold off on, since it’s not what we need to focus on quite yet – is what technologies to use to support this.  But suggestions welcome!

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Freesat (not from Sky)

Today’s news in the UK media landscape is that Freesat has launched.  Not to be confused with the very-similar proposition Freesat from Sky (launched in 2004).

Both are free-to-air digital satellite services with no ongoing subscription.  You need a satellite dish and a set-top box (or box built-in to your TV).  Freesat from Sky costs £150 all-in, for dish, box and installation.  Freesat (from the BBC) costs about £50 for a basic box, and about £80 for a dish and installation, depending on all sorts of things.  Or you can get an HD box for about £150 (HD services are the only big difference in channels I can see).  It’s all very rough and a bit confusing as an offering.

It’ll be very interesting to see what happens with Freesat.  At a glance, it seems the wrong offering (it’s more expensive than Freeview, and more confusing than Freeview or Freesat from Sky) at the wrong time (Freeview has such a huge market share) in the wrong market (consisting solely of those who want digital TV but can’t get Freeview and for some reason don’t want Freesat from Sky).  An odd thing for the BBC to be backing.

But we shall see.  Maybe the HD thing is the key: free-to-air HD (BBC HD and ITV HD) is the one significant thing that Freesat has that Sky and Freeview don’t, and it’s also the thing that Sky are complaining about.  Hold on, there’s another thing it has – Freesat also has the imprimatur of the BBC and ITV, which shouldn’t be lightly dismissed – I’m sure the UK take up of DAB and Freeview are largely down to the extensive advertising campaigns mounted by the BBC.

(Other perspectives welcome: It’s hard for me to judge this sort of stuff on “what appeals to me” because – like Clay Shirky and John Naughton – I watch hardly any TV.  And the TV I do watch is often lower res than plain old TV since it’s via the BBC iPlayer.)

OU Conf: user-generated content etc

Darrel Ince – Let the students do it

Big idea: The student generated course.

e-Learning course – students learn about e-learning (20 weeks), then develop a course (12 weeks), use that as assignment. Select the best on TMA mark and rework them into a course.

We define the structure – the main chunks – for the students to develop. Give them the learning outcomes. “We don’t want anarchy” but may encourage it later. 15h chunk, done in collaboration with another student. A process for assigning topics.

The course is generic. Could get used very widely, incl beyond the OU.

Final draft May, Oct 2009 first presentation. Topic is Web 2.0.

Also got funding to get 120 students to write a book for us on computer music; partnership with OUP and local print-on-demand shop.

IPR issue – all Creative Commons?

John Woodthorpe, Jill Shaw, Mirjam Hauck and Tita Beaven –
User-generated course content: its application in ICT and language courses

John blames Tony for this.

fOUndit – Open Source CMS – collect, share and rate online resources. Basically links to relevant URLs that live beyond the course – social bookmarking – very very similar to Digg.

Pilot with T175 and L314 Spanish and L315 German. Languages students picking it up much more than T175 people. Interested in potential for gathering user-generated course content. Library involved too.

Karma system for rewarding/recognising valuable contributions. Important thing is not the quality of the resource you find, but the quality of your analysis.

Login credentials is interesting – don’t know if people really are OU students. OpenID might be the solution – Alex Little has openid.open.ac.uk working – an OU OpenID server, login with your OUCU – needs people to use it or it’ll fade away and die.
Terry di Paolo – U122 Recognising acheivement

Audience – little to no post-compulsory educ, paid and voluntary work.

APEL – need to be clear about what we want them to do and what past learning is.

30 pts, MCT host, 25 wks, 1st pres Nov 2007, 12 students and 2 tutors, 3 eTMAs + ECA. All online.

First four units – think about past learning and what we mean (4wks). Last three units (20 wks) analysing, looking across learning experiences, plan next steps. Record work in MyStuff. Experiences verified by manager/supervisor as a true representation.

Students like it. Desirable to employers, workers don’t want a degree/diploma; stepping stone to HE. Unions supporting. Accreditation of prior learning – not what the course is doing, it’s more using prior learning as material for a course, the credit is for the analysis.

Credit Transfer Centre – interesting links and issues.

Could be a very open offering? Tutors mainly do assessment – vital bit of course. Tutors also important in clarifying what is meant by a learning experience. So not entirely decoupleable.

Could be really interesting to accredit the actual learning experiences too, to give credit at multiple levels.

OU Conf: Tony Hirst – Facebook apps

Back to liveblogging temporarily – if you can’t liveblog Tony Hirst’s presentation what can you do?

Vicky Smith chairing

Tony offers to do his talk from a seat at the back of the meeting room via a video link from his laptop to the presentation machine – only partly in jest.

Tony Hirst, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes, Martin Weller – Two unauthOUrised Facebook Apps

Presentation off-brand so trying to be on brand by wearing a pink OU T shirt.

Student peers are faceless – some chances in tutorials but hard. Lots of students inhabit Facebook – 6500 OU users in our network at last count with OU email addresses; lots of groups for courses.

Facebook growing – 4th biggest in terms of time spent – but traffic levelling off.  Over 50% of users go in once a day.

Why Facebook vs FirstClass? More informal, social first, say students.  Students use OU courses as conversation basis – in forums, in sigs, and so on.

First app – Sept last year – informal project with Liam and Stuart – Course Profile – not built on authenticated access or student records, it’s volunteered info from students.  Only OU stuff is the database of course codes and titles – rival app from a student doing similar mapping not as popular.

When add a course, appears on your minifeed, and messages from friends on your Wall.  With prompt to add app yourself.

Have had a handful of registrations from the app! For each course, shows OpenLearn, Comment Wall, Friends studying it, Recommend, find a study buddy. Now about 4500 users, probably saturated now unless big growth in OU users of Facebook.

Nice analytics on users, including study journeys through courses to programme/quals.

Courses Profile is not regular visit, came up with My OU Story – reason to visit regularly.  Student gives regular updates and moods – with graphs over time.
Can leave feedback to others, encourage mutual support.  Not promoted much yet, not much takeup.

Course Profiles and My OU Story

Questions: Contact from students and expectations need to be managed.  Have many privacy options.

How can you make this viral to get to people who aren’t already OU people? Hard. But could be decoupled and rolled out to students through the VLE or other social networks.

OUSA President – responsibility on FirstClass social side; jump through hoops to meet requirements e.g. looking out for bullying.  They need agreement from Course Team to create a conference, so if CT says no they can’t do it. These FB apps look like official groups even though they’re not.  Where’s the boundary?  Creators are not declared members of OU.  OU can’t control what’s happening here – students can just do it.  Use of brand without policing.  Behaviour can be reported through FB procedures, so it doesn’t need to be us.

We have a mountain to climb

Three separate people complained about me liveblogging the OU Conference today.  They had found my typing very distracting from the presentations.  One was indirect, although it seems obvious to me that I was the problem, but two were direct to my face immediately afterwards.  This was from three separate sessions.  Most British people wouldn’t dream of complaining like that even if they were bothered, so I think it’s a very safe assumption that many more people were silently fuming but didn’t like to say anything.  It has been made unequivocally clear to me that I was breaking a social rule.  For the direct ones, I apologised profusely; with one I started trying to explain what I was doing but tailed off in the face of a withering stare.  I am genuinely sorry to have disrupted people’s conference experience.  But on reflection I think it shows up a big problem for the OU that I’ve been thinking about for ages.

Now, for me, I found it hugely useful to do.  My handwriting is awful – it makes my hand hurt and I can’t read what I’ve written.  By typing, I have excellent notes on what was said, that I can refer to and even search.  (Much better than even the best physical filing system!)  Even better, by having another browser window open and doing some fast flipping, I was able to pursue some of the references that interested me then and there and put in proper links to them for later. (Or read those if the presentation wasn’t very interesting – which didn’t happen often, I should stress.)  Even better better, by blogging it, I’ve made those notes and links available to the local OU community and beyond.  And also been part of the future of academic practice – as the VC was saying we must do in her keynote.

But clearly, those benefits came at a cost to the people around me.  Having someone banging away on a laptop (I did churn out over 9,000 words today – well over 10k if you include this rant too) in a conference was obviously a strange and new experience for them.  Just to stress, it wasn’t a particularly noisy keyboard – my current laptop is pretty quiet, certainly in comparison to a full desktop job.

Part of this is unfamiliarity, but part of it I think is a lack of engagement with technology bordering on technophobia.  I’m often struck by the deep lack of basic technical skill around – even among people who you’d expect to know this stuff.  I encountered today people who seemed almost proud of their inability to work a projector/laptop combo, or their lack of knowledge about what Twitter was, despite the fact that their jobs involve them teaching other people about technologies like that. (I won’t identify them.)

Technophobia seems a good word for it: as with homophobia, among polite middle-class people you can almost imagine that nobody’s bothered about it, but from time to time someone will come up to you and make it quite clear that decent people don’t like what you’re doing and wish you would stop, or at least go and do it elsewhere so they don’t have to see you doing it.  So you know that lots of people think that way, and you’ve no way of telling them from people who are genuinely supportive – or at least supportively indifferent – and so you end up changing your behaviour to pass as something you’re not out of fear.  (I’m not saying it’s the exactly the same phenomenon, but there are parallels.)

I’ve wondered and experimented in the past about using a laptop more to take notes in meetings – it really makes things much better for me.  But I’ve fallen back on a paper notebook for all but a handful.  (At least those can include meetings with my boss – Patrick is a very good boss.)  The laptop kept getting in the way of the social interaction, and that’s what meetings are for in my book, so the laptop went.  Until now I hadn’t realised that the ‘getting in the way’ bit was quite possibly a result of a deeply held technophobia.

The contrast with – say – the Open Learn conference I went to back in October is profound.  I foolishly didn’t take my own laptop there out of habit … and so now I want to refer back, I have no access to the paper notes I made (they’re in the office and I’m at home), and it’d take me ages to find the right page and decipher my handwriting even if I did.  But every session was stuffed full of people hammering away on their laptops – between 25%-50% I’d say, more in some particular ones.  Some of those were liveblogging, some were making some small notes for themselves … and some were off doing other useful tasks when the particular presentation wasn’t capturing all of their attention.  Nobody minded, or even noticed particularly.

I really think the VC gets it: in her keynote (see what I was able to do there that I couldn’t with the other conference?) she quoted Ernest Boyer and Clay Shirky – top-notch scholarship and top-notch new technology.  She argued that “Scholarship in this university, in this century, has to be irrevocably tied to the technology and knowledge media.”  I agree!  That’s what I want to be part of, that’s what I’m good at.  That has to be the only future for the OU.

But my, oh my, how far we have to travel to get there.   Remember, this techno-hostile audience was a self-selecting group of those particularly interested in innovation.  One of the VC’s recurrent themes recently (including at the conference today) is how difficult but vital it is to get excellent innovation out of the individual pockets where it happens and spread out across the OU’s provision.  (I have some ideas about that but that’s for another post.)  Why’s it so difficult?  It’s not that people aren’t sold on the OU’s mission – in fact OU staff have a sense of ownership and deep commitment to the mission that most senior managers couldn’t imagine in their wettest dreams.  That profound and widespread technophobia is, I think, a big part of the answer.  Nearly every good innovation in OU teaching relies to a greater or lesser extent on new technology.  And the overwhelming majority of people who need to pick up that innovation don’t know or like new technology.

I don’t quite subscribe to the Private Frazer view of the situation (“We’re doomed!  Doomed I tell ye!”), nor the Sir Richard Mottram one (“We’re all f***ed.  I’m f***ed.  You’re f***ed. The whole department is f***ed.  It’s the biggest cock-up ever, and we’re all completely f***ed”), but we do have a serious problem.

We have a mountain to climb.  I’m not sure how to get there, or even what the next steps are.  Alas, I do know that my own next step is backwards: I’m not taking my laptop to the conference tomorrow.