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Martin Bean: Looking Ahead: Mission, Values and Opportunity

Martin Bean is the OU’s Vice-Chancellor designate, and will be taking up his post later in the year.  This is his first opportunity to address the OU community, and it’s been wildly popular, with tickets required for the lecture theatre, overspill, and videoconference.  The Communications group are out in force to marshall the loyal troops. I managed to get a ticket and have secreted myself quietly on the back row to take quiet blog notes.

His quote on appointment was very encouraging:

It is an honour to have been selected as the next Vice-Chancellor of The Open University. It is a unique and amazing institution that has changed the lives of millions through its commitment to furthering social justice and to making higher education and educational opportunity accessible to all. I look forward to combining my passion for education and technology to lead The Open University over the coming years, as we continue to provide innovative and high quality distance education solutions to meet the needs of the 21st Century

Social justice right up there, and with his techie management background, he could be just the right person for what is a really challenging time for the OU.

(He walked past me, sat on the corner, shook hands, and invited me to Tweet away!  Helped that I was sitting in the back corner.)

Current VC, Brenda Gourley, introduces him.  Says she can’t wait for him to be VC.  Runs through his CV – a tremendous track record, international connections.  Over to him.

Know it was a big surprise to be working with Mr Bean, nobody is more challenged by that than he is.  At least people don’t forget his name.  People want to meet him, and know why he wants to be a VC.  Answer is more why the OU, than why a VC – it’s because of everything you’ve achieved and stand for.  “I’ve always loved learning, had bad experiences, but OU has given me confidence […]” – OU student feedback about life changing, in airports, train stations, etc, he gets that everywhere now.   Wants to be with us “for the next 40 years”.

(He’s good with an audience, good judge of mood and joking, self-deprecating, compelling speaker. Was better before he went in to Powerpoint stepwise reveal mode.)

Link to UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 26 “right to educaiton, and he equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”.  Universities role is questioning, help people understand – a change agent.  We are special, we are open, we broke the mould. (Now ‘we’ rather than ‘you’.) Have proved don’t have to sacrifice quality for scale.

VC described many of you as missionaries. They said it was never happen, it was mocked, “blithering nonsense”.

The OU has led through acts of imagination, delivering high quality education to people who had problems of access, of all sorts. Let’s get our imaginations working together again. In the 40y ahead we’re going to face a lot of challenges, will take a lot of imaginations.

So easy to make decision to come here.  Close alignment of his personal mission and OU mission:

  • Everyone should have the ability to access high quality HE.
  • HE must become more open and flexible – have done a tremendous amount but much to be done.
  • Innovation happens through research, people, process and environment – technology is just one enabler.
  • HE needs to be relevant, personalised, engaging and student-centred – social:learn, Web2.0, 3.0
  • It’s important to nurture communities of learning
  • Partnerships are essential to maximise results – must open up private, public, employer, government partnerships. Thoughtful, don’t sacrifice mission or quality. But essential
  • Economic prosperity is underpinned by quality education at all levels.

His Values:

  • Belief in people at an individual level – protect rights of individual, start and finish of social justice
  • Open, honest and respectful communication – tell him what you don’t like
  • A never ending positive attitude – this will annoy many of you over the coming years. Says, What can we do, not woe is me.
  • A belief in making a difference.
  • Teamwork makes sense
  • Be inclusive yet decisive – get many data points, but you have to decide and move on – be careful with questions you bring to my desk, you may get an answer
  • Never be shy to ask for help
  • Celebrate success – e.g. wonderful success in RAE, feel good about that

The Future:

  • HE important in light of the crisis
  • HE can’t be produced at the scale needed on the traditional model. – John Denham “unacceptable that eLearning is a sub-quality experience vs traditional” and then gave example of OU moving to new media not sacrificing quality, MB delighted to hear it.
  • Dist ed market will grow rapidly and be increasingly competitive – US has large for-profit DE sectors. Difference between them and us is profit/shareholder value. Our cause more noble.  Need to understand them and stay in front, and never sacrifice our mission and values as we compete with them.
  • Technology will shift from content centric to people centric – very enthusiastic on this.  Our ability to embrace, extend and take OU innovation and quickly mainstream it – is terribly exciting and a business imperative
  • ‘Flat world’ puts skills agenda on Government policy agenda
  • Financial crisis uncertainty, but also unprecedented opportunities for change – will put presure on everyone, who knows for how long.  While everyone else is looking at the downside (which we must), but (his optimistic side) says will put pressure on to address skills gap, help citizens to get employable skills, realise what they want out of their lives.  Will help world sig themselves out.

Cites John Gray, Success and Sustainability: Tertiary Education’s Global Challenge – must be

  • Responsive,
  • Effective,- Quality. Supported Open Learning model – cannot sacrifice the quality. Can’t use quality as an excuse not to innovate and be responsive.
  • Efficient – Pressure. Not a business but sometimes need to act like one, allocate resources right.

Shows OU Futures – declares that we do not need a whole new set of priorities, they’re great.  Evolve, develop nuance, though. The plan we have is the right plan.  More thoughts to come, though.

Getting Started, wants to

  • Get to know you and our students.  Will get out and about very quickly, is stealthy in a cube environment. Not just MK, expect to see a Bean near you very quickly.
  • Get insight in to how University is perceived, without responsibility, so will seize the day. Doing already. Everyone has an opinion of you! Reputaiton is strong.
  • Listen – asks lots of questions, from lots of angles
  • Hit pause – wait before answering every question (mother said to put this in), important not to jump to premature conclusions, and don’t ask him to. Needs to understand the history, is very very important.
  • Give feeedback – take what he learns and communicate back
  • Draw on and make great use of your expertise.

OU student feedback – quote from Kerzy Lando, 84, BA Hons, “Life has taught me several lessons …”

Honour and privilege to stand … on this riser they’ve given me so you can see me.  I am in awe of the opportunity to be part of the community you’ve built.

Q & A

(his phrase for it)

Brigid Heywood – MB “Hello Brigid”. – Value of education should take note of, also climate change. What can we do?

MB: Climate change is going to require every human to get behind.  OU response is multidimensional: what we do with our working practices, and how we deliver our programmes, reduce travel needs.  Contrasted brick and mortar or click and mortar.  Then what we teach.

Lots of questions with same theme (and much polemic): When does the OU intend to go cross-platform?  Non-Windows computers.

MB: What a surprise! Where did that question come from?  Couldn’t be more delighted at the question.  Technology should provide as much freedom of choice as possible.  Firm believer in interoperability.  (Knows what that means.)  Fraser and I are debating but I’m determined to get an iPhone, because it’s fit for purpose, it’s the best device.  Microsoft was just a waypoint in his career in the intersection of technology and education.

Darrell Ince: Tension between university and business requirements, impinge on academics.

MB: We do have to face this, have new entrants in our world, playing with a different playbook. Will require us to be knowledgeable, and adjust to it.  Am never going to sacrifice the mission or quality or how we serve our students.  We’re not a business but we have to act like one – intelligence on trends in the marketplace, shifting student demands, government policy shifts.  Inclusive and decisive – we will need to keep pace.  The DE marketplace worldwide is on fire, 25% to 55% compound average growth rate, don’t join that and stand still.  1. Be open and don’t deny.  2. Compare what’s going on with our mission and value.  Then formulate a competitive response.  Faster than ever before.

Martin Weller: Shortest question of the day. If you could overcome one challenge in your tenure, what would it be.

MB: Being short!  Good question.  Touched on it already: scale, and quality. All must work on that, with technology.  All you missionaries, pack your bags, we’re off again.

Nottingham (in the room): Gordon Lammie – joined in 1970. Been through many different periods. Financial situation. Agre with being a good employer.

MB: Personal belief, nobody should be denied doing what they want to do in life.  (Not a policy answer …. yet.)

Web – Ian Gilmour – OU Wikipedia entry describes BBC’s role in establishing OU, who is our partner for next 40y?

MB: Everybody! Partnerships really important, multi-broadcasting partners.  Unbelievable work with iTunesU.  Multi-casting partners.  Look at all educational content, develop fit for purpose.  Multiple types of course development models, done some, must do more.  Work with other universities – beyond and in UK.  Public sector tremendously important.  Private sector can be important – as employers (to help them meet their needs, and union reps). Make your best analysis of what partners you need based on your priorities. But OU never worked in a vacuum.

Jeff Johnson, MCT: Found presentation inspiring..  How can I tell you what I’m doing?

MB: We need to set up some good fb loops.  In prior roles, f2f, out and about, structured things (e.g. focus groups).  But at MS your life is your inbox.  When gets here, has learned to triage an inbox.  Will run sessions like this too. Without filters.  Use tech tools coupled with what we can do f2f.  In companies, have used web-based collaborative groups, can talk to remote people without having to travel, very time effective, environmental.  Voice of people back to him is very important.

Josie Taylor, IET: Was inspiring. In particular, that is a human right to access education.  The ELQ issue, a problem on financial side, but is also a potential barrier for onward HE.  Are you ready to engage with British political system?

MB: I’m Australian, I love a good fight.  Way to early to comment on the details.  But did due diligence to look at the external environment – ELQ today, but will be something else tomorrow.  Role of VC – active constructive dialogue with legislators – but have courage to respond appropriately and take action to remain healthy.  Real skill is not about ELQ, but about the fight.  Really easy to fight for something he believes in, and he really believes in the OU.

Carmel McMahon (Assoc Dean in OUBS): International opps for OU?

MB: Believes in bringing our offerings to people throughout the world. OU held up as the example of SOL at a distance that got it right.  Academic and policy world knows who you are.  Now need to be deliberate and creative about … country-by-country issue, or states and regions even.  Where to focus our efforts, partners, business models – but must return value to University – either promoting extending mission and values, but also to balance with business agenda.  Don’t do the collegiate thing of sharing all our collective wisdom and give birth to a competitor who forgets where they come from.  Hardest part is showing what your unique value is, you have done that already.

Clare Cortesky, research student: What are we doing wrong?

MB: I do believe you’re doing most things right.  Wrong: amazing innovation in pockets in OU – e.g. technology of the day vs tech of tomorrow, quality and scale rapidly.  Need to do better job letting world know about our innovation, which is not understood, “you’re doing what?”.  Have to speed up appropriately how we unlock innovation.  Can honestly say it’s not a matter of fixing something that’s fundamentally broken, matter of reigniting the imagination to do it all over again, only faster.

What can OU learn from MS, Yahoo! and Google?

MB: Who?  From MS, tenacity.  MS don’t usually get it right initially, but we’ll stick at it until we come up with a way of making it work.  Yahoo – saw power of bringing people together through Internet; not just browser, but vision of transforming how people interact. Google – everybody else was iterating on what already had; Google said what’s the transforming thing people do with Internet, it was simple, it was search, so needed more sophisticated way of retrieving meaningful content. Leapfrogged entire industry, revolutionised software industry, ever-new suite of stuff wrapped round it.

He appreciated the questions, much more enjoys a dialogue than prepared remarks.  “Look forward to working with you!”

Update: I made a Wordle of these notes.

Google Analytics on library websites

OU Library seminar, given by Tony Hirst and Hassan Sheikh. Reprise of talk at ILI given by Hassan last year – draft presentation, PPT. Tracking referrals from course websites and how that affects their behaviour on the OU library site.

Google Analytics allows you to track users across your website during their session – how long they spend, which pages.  Tracking code (Javascript) put in to page templates. Up to 5m page views per month. Eay to set up.

Lets you ask and answer: How well is the home page working? Gives you an overlay of % clicks on each link.  One way of using the data is to change your site design to make things easier for users.  (E.g. to match Fitt’s Law – make the common elements larger and hence easier to acquire.)

Most clicked links: Databases (20%), eJournals (19%), library catalogue (11%).

53% traffic direct, 41% referring sites (i.e. via link), 5% via search engines. List broken down by referrers – so learn.open.ac.uk is 18%, intranet next.

Then look at summary report of behaviour of visitors from a specific referrer site – so intranet.open.ac.uk traffic as an e.g. Show clear work-week peak of traffic. Bounce rate (single page hit): 27%.

Direct traffic much more steady through the week.

Content overview is another headline report – shows you top content, popular pages – / is top, find/journals is, top, then find/databases, etc. (Can map URLs on reports to easier to read names.)

Most popular pages: journals, databases, eResources.  Top traffic sources – shows you where the traffic comes from.

Can tunnel down too.  Interestingly, the databases get about 45% of traffic on site, but drilled down in to the databases themselves, even the top one only captures 5% – distribution much flatter. But we can’t get down to the activity spent on the journals themselves.

Library using GA to generate some performance indicators on page site – e.g. unique visitors, bounce rate, visitor loyalty, average page views, depth of visit, length of visit. Bounce rate is not necessarily bad for the Library site – if they come in and then go to somewhere you’re trying to get them to go, then that’s good.

Can export the data from any of the reports you can get on a single screen in GA – as XML, or CSV – so can plot e.g. avg time on site vs pages/visit, with a dot size for bounce rate, or avg time spent on site per network location – Tony has done quick graphs of this in ManyEyes.

Search traffic – can track search terms used – top were: athens, safari, refworks, referencing.  99.29% visits are without search (good site design?).

These are all averages – but be wary of them.

Next up: exploring OU library website usage, based on course referrals.  Brief look at traffic from Moodle (OU VLE), and also from TU120 (which has Google Analytics on it, so can match them).

Segmentation (breakdown) by Referral URL. Moodle has complex URLs with queries in them (which define the course, etc), but Google Analytics by default throws that away.  But can define a rule in GA to say ‘don’t discard that’. Then can see where traffic comes from (which courses), and then where it goes to on the Library website.  Can look at the originating page too.  So can get inkling of how effective (little bits of) the course pages on the VLE are in terms of where they send people.

Landing pages across VLE referrals – mostly home page, then eResources, then the Library Guide, then specific pages on eResources.

Tracking back, can find e.g. that ‘Article for Question 3’ was a big traffic driver on M882 – “Success Factors for Implementing Global Information Systems”.  (Currently a few technical fiddles required about being hard to distinguish links to separate sections of the same resource – an additional bit of tracking code on each link.)

TU120 2008J presentation – information skills “Beyond Google” – in Relevant Knowledge programme.

Out of 227k visits, TU120 generated 1678 visits. (In this sample – Sep-Dec for a single presentation.)  Can segment down in Google analytics.  Data is not TU120 students, it’s TU120 students visiting the Library.

Profile of visits – big spike at start, another spike in the middle, another towards the end.   Content Performance – tells you what pages were viewed.  Databases and journals are popular.  Look at referrer – and it’s mostly the ECA (week 10, final spike), then Section 3 of the course (multiple pages, week 3, mid-spike).   Can look down at what databases (it was Academic Search Complete, and Nexis UK).

Average 4.6 pages per visit, 14 min. But for the ECA, 28% of visits (overwhelming mode) are 2 pages deep – not normal distribution. But the depth of visit is much flatter in the middle of the week.

Can run A/B tests using Google Analytics – so 50% see page A, 50% see page B, see if the patterns are different.  Low risk way of trying A/B testing out for real on course content.  (Or multivariate testing, would be more efficient but more complex.)

Can look at which pages are sending e.g. traffic to the journals page.

Actions: segment onsite/offisite and regional users (IP range filters). Track by course referrals from the VLE. Enhanced OU Library PI reports (Many Eyes?). Improve homepage by keeping eye on site overlays.  Worth tracking changes – useful flag for problems. Keep eye on usage of database.  Reduce long list of databases (?). Use consistent names and URL paths.

Tony posts about Library analytics – eight posts already.

Getting away from screens

After yesterday’s session on multi-touch surfaces, I saw that Rhodri Thomas tweeted:

v interesting demo earlier on use of ‘Surface’-like multitouch table – but are we ever going to get away from interacting with screens?

Which got me thinking about the degree to which we already interact with computers without screens.  I was also reminded of a rather staggering (but believable on exploration) claim I heard on the radio last week from a guy from Intel, who reckoned that more microprocessors would be manufactured in the next year or two than currently exist in the world.  The overwhelming majority of these are not in computers-as-we-know them: they’re buried away in embedded applications.  So this morning I thought I’d try to note all the microprocessors I’d interacted with other than by traditional screens, from getting up to sitting down at my first traditional computer screen to type this.  Some of these are slight cheats since they do have displays (e.g. the central heating timeswitch), but they’re not the sort we usually think of.  (We do need some leeway here because if by display you mean some way in which a processor can make its state known to a human and/or vice versa, it’s by definition impossible for any interaction to occur.) Anyway – a rough quick list:

  • central heating system – the timeswitch programmer to turn it on, and more processors in the boiler itself to run the system
  • bedside clock
  • fridge/freezer (for milk) – thermostatic and frost-free control working away
  • microwave
  • kettle – not certain since older models are purely electro-mechanical, but this one’s brand new and I strongly suspect there’s at least one processor in there managing overheating/boil dry and possibly actively optimising the heating process
  • radio
  • umpteen electronic toys used by the kids
  • electric shower – controlling the flow and heating rates

Then I left home and got in the car:

  • car – engine management system, and possibly other subsystems I don’t really know about, oh, and another radio
  • streetlights – some were still on suggesting they’re individually controlled (time? light?) rather than centrally switched – must have passed hundreds of these or more
  • SID – Speed Indicating Device – measured my speed, flashed it up on a display, then a smiley face to say it was under the limit
  • Pelican crossing with lights
  • level crossing with lights

And then I got to campus and towards my building:

  • More lighting
  • Security barriers
  • CCTV cameras
  • RFID security card entry system
  • automatic doors
  • heating blower behind the door
  • building management system controlling temperature and ventilation – this does have a traditional screen view but I don’t interact with it that way
  • lighting controllers
  • coffee machine

… a pretty large haul, and that’s not taking in to account any of the processors helping deliver utilities I used (gas, electricity, water).  It rather swamps the number of traditional screens I’ll be interacting with today: phone, iPod touch, laptop, desktop.  And of course those themselves rely on a large number of less visible processors running the network and power systems, and the hundreds of computers (or more) I’ll interact with more directly online today.


ERA: Enabling remote geology fieldwork by transient wireless networking

Trevor Collins (KMI) and Mark Gaved (IET)

The Enabling Remote Activity (ERA) project provides opportunities for mobility impaired students to fully participate in fieldwork learning activities. Over the last three years ERA has developed a rapidly deployable, lightweight, battery-powered wireless network that can be used to transmit video, audio, and high resolution still images between a field geologist and a nearby student. This is used on The Open University’s ‘Ancient Mountains’ residential course (SXR339), a one week series of field trips in locations throughout the Scottish Highlands. In this course our students get as close as they can, ideally within sight of the field location, and use the wireless network to work remotely with a field geologist. The technology is used as an enabler to facilitate the inclusion of students in fieldtrips without compromising the learning objectives of the course. In this seminar we will present an overview of the technology, the actions it can support, the use made within the ‘Ancient Mountains’ course, and the feedback received from the students and tutors involved.

Getting out there with real geologists was key – your ideas about what they might want (as an informed technologist) is different to what they actually want to do the teaching. Hazards and difficulties include trees and huge rocks in the way. Lots of different levels of mobility, from no restriction, to walk short distances with stick, to negligible unassisted walking. So vary response as appropriate – if the rocks are right next to the road, may not need to set up the kit; if it’s a hard walk away, more people stay at the car park ‘driving’ a field geologist.

Geology fieldwork is fundamental to the learning experience.

SXR339 Ancient Mountains, residential school in Scottish Highlands. Visits to lots of rocks. Drive for 3h, on the rocks for 5-6h, 30 min at each site; moving around, drive some more, etc.  Also variability of individual students on different days. Jessica Bartlett (Course Manager) asked about alternative learning experience for mobility-impaired students. Previous tech was binoculars  and walkie-talkies – not fantastic.  Geologists want to see things in the large (context and layout of the rock formations), down to the tiny (down with hand lens at the crystal structure of the rocks), and switch between the two. (Scale from individual mineral grains to continents!)

Standard geologist tech is cameras and GPS/GIS tools. But we don’t allow photos in field reports, in order to get them to do the sketches which do the abstraction.

Much previous work on virtual field trips. RAFT – remote accessible field trips – similar project from OUNL.

Approach: transient wireless networking. Rapidly deployable, lightweight, battery-powered wireless network. (Contrast with Ambient Wood project which had a lot of infrastructure in it.) Sites are all away from mobile signal, and satellite costs a bomb.  Mark’s background in grassroots community networking (the Pringles cantenna).

Wireless routers (Linksys WRT 54G/GL) because firmware opened up – (freifunk OpenWrt, dd-wrt), plus custom-made batteries (12V 2.8Ah DC lead-acid), external attenae (8/18dB omni, 14dB panel) with telescopic stands. Also Eee PCs at either end. Also 21″ monitor driven by car battery recharger.

Runs in parallel with main student body – student by roadside with dedicated tutor; field geologist reports from locations, with the other students, carrying network, driven by the student in/near the car.  (Needed to use hi-vis jackets to see each other at the distances required.) Extra tech bod (Trevor or Mark) there to help too.

Sense-of-presence video, to contextualise features; detailed stills. Two-way audio to direct field geologist.

Everything lightweight … and then the geologists walk down the hill with 20kg of rock in their rucksack. Issues: very sunny (visibility), very wet.

Web interface, very simple: live remote video, image bank, local video (useful diagnostic tool).

Feedback – one student very focused on the collective student experience, strong group identity, and physical presence was important. Other more about grounded (!) understanding. Side benefit – can take the images away with you. (Other students wanted the pictures too.) The quality of student sketches varied, not really dependent on mobility impairment or not.  But … you’re not actually there (3D, kinaesthetic experience?) and fundamenally it’s a 2D representation of a 3D thing. Hand samples also crucial.  Measurement generally done by the field geologist, not taken off the picture because picture-taking tricky physically. Was slower – takes longer to fix irrelevancies. A lot of communication/prep between the tutors about how to teach the specific outcrops/settings.

Suggestion: stereoscopic camera(s) with eye headset.

Weather a challenge – used drysacks to protect the kit. Fog reduced signal strength but they never lost it entirely.

More/future stuff:

  • ERA fieldwork kit
  • Personal Inquiry project (EPSRC/ESRC TEL, mobile tech to support evidence-based inquiry learning).
  • ‘Portable’ WLANs (JANET / Cumbria mountain rescue – Lancaster University).
  • New OU geology residential course 2010.

It’s low powered, so don’t need a licence to turn it on. Cheap kit is good because easily replaceable, which tends to make it low power.

Sheep Dalton: How to make a multitouch surface for less than £500

IET Tech Coffee Morning: Sheep (Nick) Dalton from Computing Dept.

Change to ubiquitous/pervasive computing: from one computer to thousands of users, through one PC per desk, to thousands of computers per person.

So multi-touch surface allowing many people to interact at the same time. (Which is actually several users to one computer … interesting!)

Biggest ontology to visualise: all human knowledge. Amazon is the modern Library of Alexandria.  So he’s captured Amazon’s taxonomy, can zoom in from top-level categories down to groups of ten books.  Using his nifty surface to zoom with multi-touch.

Nice video demo, using a vertically-mounted multi-touch surface. (Very large.) Jeff Han – some ace demos including TED talk from 2006. Created a homebrew craze of postgrads building their own table (and then running away) – not much software. (Minority Report interface actually based on MIT research, not the other way around.) Fiddling with photos is the ob demo.

Problem of ‘gorilla arms’ if you’re waving your arms around in the air for a long time vertically; easier if you have something to press against; even easier if the table is horizontal. Microsoft have announced Surface, a tabletop machine, but they have technological problems – can’t use it in a room with windows (so Ok to use in our shiny new JLB labs).

Parallel to the homebrew computing craze in the 1980s – people build things and if you’re good you keep building things. Hasn’t been a similar movement in between when people are so excited about building hardware.

Hardware: surface, projector, camera. Want to be able to distinguish touching from hovering finger. Strongest image is what’s projected on the screen, so tech challenge is to remove the projected gubbins. Secret is to look without looking (!). Jeff Han’s big contribution: start with big piece of glass or acrylic. Fire infrared LED down the edge, goes through acrylic – as in fibre optic cables, they do the total internal reflection thing at the glass and bounces back in to the glass/acrylic until absorbed (or emitted out the end). So you get 450 IR LEDs and point them in to the edge. 50 LEDs wasn’t bright enough (in about 1m x 60cm) so they did 500. Just a battery and a bunch of lights. When you touch it with a finger, that interrupts the acrylic/air interface, and … it glows in the IR.

So need 1-200 IR LEDs and a big chunk of acrylic.

You can still see what’s on the projector (when you turn it on), which drenches the IR signal with the optical signal. Get an IR optical filter and stick that over the camera. (Possibly for astronomical use?)  Using a Guppy camera (about £1000) but can use a normal webcam. But can take a piece of exposed film (from trad film camera) – which will do the same sort of job as the £30-50 filter. Most cameras are sensitive in the IR anyway; the ‘night vision’ mode on many consumer cameras simply switches off the filter-out-the-IR tech.

Can hack it out of an IKEA table but getting the tech labs to do it makes it look much more scientific.

Can use the acrylic alone, but that’s transparent (so projected image not very clear), so use a layer of Rosco grey (makes the back projection better), then a conformal layer. Polish acrylic with Brasso, then , then, then … to brighten the finger points. Or … a squidy layer of latex – which does work – available in any good fetish shop. But a sheet of silicon works well.

The software he uses is called Reactivision. Not designed for multitouch but you can do that, and can respond to any arbitrary touch on the surface (which is cool and allows for interesting appropriations). Reactivision just does the detection and tracking.  Many other technologies, on different surfaces. OpenTouch works really well too. They output open sound control (OSC) which is a UDP packet, which you can then interpret.  Toolkits for the image processing … but then you’re own your own: this is the level the software development is at right now.

Java Swing, MFC, all of the frameworks – all assume a single user at a deep level. Text needs to go in all sorts of directions.  Whole GUI paradigm needs to change.  Oops!

Fiducials – like a barcode for multitouch. Reactivision software can recognise what they are, and (importantly) what orientation they’re in.

Or can do very simple table by just shining LEDs straight up and on to the fiducials and pick them up from the reflection – makes for tangible technologies – using cards with fiducials on the back but everyday pictures on the top. Eva Honiker observed in a museum context: a digital exhibit with a computer and mouse, the kids will play but the adults go to read the paper on the wall; but the multitouch exhibit is more inclusive as an interface.

Need: acrylic, LEDs, cheap webcam, piece of exposed film, computer (assume lying around), video projector – LED-based are nice (can leave on, bulbs don’t blow and they don’t make noise) and only £100. (Need low-intensity projector so as not to blind the users above!)

Table they designed was deliberately too big to reach over – embedded physical affordance – encourages multi-person interaction rather than one person driving.

Reactivision – was originally designed to help Bjork look good at Glastonbury. Can reconfigure sounds during a performance.  OpenTouch – another multitouch project littering the Internet in response to Jeff Han – but is a good one.  Touche on the Mac, a Mac-ised version you don’t need to mess around with XML and so on.  Open Sound Control is the lingua franca, reflecting the wacky sound project history – bit like Electroplankton and so on.

Alternative technology: capacitance-based, project from above. Underneath have weft and warp of wires. When you touch you form a circuit; can detect fingers by capacitance – and can actually tell WHO is touching, which gives you a lot of fun interface possibilities. (I can move my pieces and you can’t; also good for tracking in research times.) Can buy for £10k at the moment, but possibly coming down as it commercialises. Main problem is getting the projection from directly above.

Can get the same sort of effect with multiple mice – less whizzy-looking but does do the job.

Asus have a new Eee Top – £500 with a touch screen, runs Windows touch version, like iPod Touch. Often only have a bounding box interface, looks like bimanual input but it’s faked. Video-projectors-for-schools people are interested too. Challenge for back compatibility versus doing something actually new. (Like command-line lying beneath windowing systems.) Smart are bringing this to schools in less than six months.  Microsoft see it in hotel lobbies, mobile phone shops.  Others see it in getting stakeholders together to negotiate – group in the Netherlands discussing e.g. getting people to agree about relocating a river.

NATS – National Air Traffic Control Service – consultation about rerouting air corridors, with multiple constraints and stakeholders (safety, fuel usage, noise, etc). Yvonne Rogers showed these interfaces are good for picking up people with different levels of skill.

They’re exploring: what situations does this work best in. Good for small groups.  What’s coming in the next five years? “The next Microsoft is sitting in a garage at the moment fiddling with a multitouch surface.”

They used the capacitance-based table to help Computing Dept decide about who sits where in the new building. Small groups of three. The solutions they came out with were fabulous … but were ignored.  Social failure not technological.

What’s the point of it all?

My colleagues Chris Jones and Gráinne Conole are at a learning design workshop hosted by Peter Goodyear, listening to contrasting talks from John Sweller and Roger Saljo.  Chris tweeted that he didn’t like the Information Processing view:

John Sweller argued “the purpose of education is to get information into long-term memory”. I just don’t buy that at all!

but he’s

Much happier with Roger Saljo’s position “the ability to transform and recontextualise in manners that are relevant to local needs”

I think both are right, in some senses, and both are wrong in others.  It’s a question of what you mean by purpose, and what level of description you’re talking about.  I strongly uspect that you need to get information in to long-term memory in order to gain the ability to transofrm and recontextualise in manners that are relevant to local needs.

This problem of levels of description has a long history: Aristotle argued that there were four sorts of causes of any change: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. (It gets a bit confusing since the Greek word Aristotle was using isn’t quite the same as cause.)  The last two are the ones we’d think of as causes: the efficient cause is what makes a change happen, and the final cause is the purpose.

In more modern times, Systems Thinking embodies these distinctions in the notion of a root definition of a system, which goes “A system to do X by means of Y in order to Z”, and implicit in any definition is the possibility of considering a system one level up or down.

So to come back to education, it could be a system to get information in to long-term memory by means of (something we need to work out) in order to gain the ability to transform and recontextualise in manners that are relevant to local needs.

For me, though, the top-level purpose,  goal, or point of education is to make people better people.

This might well – at several levels of description down – require changes in the bonding between molecules in synapses in their brains, but that’s not (yet) a level of description that’ll help you much as an educator. And focusing on that level of description as your goal could easily distract you from better ways of achieving your aims.  So, for instance, the purpose of a carved wooden table is not chipping away at a block of wood with a chisel.

The focus on making people better people is an important one. It makes it clear that education is a social, political and fundamentally moral enterprise.

Appropriation and the real function of artefacts

What’s the educational use of an iPod?

Al Briggs points to an article in the Independent about the Teaching Awards last month.  (Incidentally, these were an idea of Lord Puttnam’s, who’s now the OU’s Chancellor.) Shawlands Academy in Glasgow won an award for a scheme where the kids got iPods.  Al comments:

On seeing the headline I thought this would be an education related story but the iPod prizes are used as an incentive for the students to eat more healthily.

The overall story is one that we already know – iPods are extremely attractive to students.

I am left with the thought – wouldn’t it be great if they were being used not just to encourage healthy eating but to encourage and increase engagement in education.

I’ve even heard that you can put educational materials on them!

It reminds me of that old barometer anecdote (dissected here by Snopes and Wikipedia) where a mythical physics student is asked how they would determine the height of a tall building using a skyscraper barometer.  The student dodges the ‘obvious’ answer (measuring air pressure at top and bottom) by reeling off a list of imaginitive ways it could be done (throwing it over the side and timing its descent, various trigonometric shenanigans, use it as a pendulum bob top and bottom, etc), before they finally suggest going up to the building’s caretaker and saying “I’ll give you this shiny new barometer if you’ll tell me how tall your building is.”

The ‘obvious’ answer is not always the best one.  The obvious use of an iPod to promote learning is to put educational podcasts on it.  That’s not a wrong answer by any means: I’m a huge fan of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time podcast and of course our own OU presence on iTunesU – as plugged by my colleague Peter Scott in the Guardian recently.  But a significant revealed social function of an iPod is (and always has been) to be a desirable consumer good.  Harnessing that function rather than the MP3-playing one may be a better option sometimes.   “I’ll give you this shiny new iPod if you show me how much you’ve learned.”

Though there is, of course, the danger of hamfisted attempts at extrinsic motivation undermining learners’ intrinsic motivation.

Learning and working environments

Sitting in Tony Hirst’s mashup talk today, I was thinking about the tension between two fundamental approaches to creating a (computery) working – and learning – environment for yourself.

The first approach – the on-the-edge option, in Danny O’Brien’s terms – is to customise an individual machine: cosmetic things like changing the wallpaper, usability tweaks like arranging icons and elements to suit the way your mind works; and installing the software tools you use a lot.

The second approach – the in-the-cloud option – is to use online services you can get to from any machine that has a browser.  This way, you make do with the not-quite-rightness of any individual machine but can get to your stuff ‘in the cloud’, from anywhere.

These are in tension, and what you can do with both options changes both ways.  Web Bookmarks/Favourites is a good example – originally, you could only get at yours from your particular machine.  Then along came Delicious and you could get at them from any machine, with a bit of fuss.  And now browsers like Firefox understand such services and you can get the best of both worlds: bookmarks you can get at from anywhere but are neatly integrated in to your particular browser.  Or the worst of both worlds: bookmarks that live on someone else’s server (they have control, you might not always be able to get at them), and you still have to fiddle to make each machine you use work properly.

Richard Stallman is very suspicious of the cloud and would counsel you to keep your data where you control it – meaning a machine of yours (running a free – not just open source – operating system).  But the in-the-cloud option seems to save so much time and fuss: I don’t have to worry about all that setting up and customisation.  Perhaps that’s just the price of freedom and I’m not paying it.

Mashing up the PLE (Tony Hirst)

Notes from a seminar (slides) by Tony Hirst.

PLE=Personal Learning Environments.

Gilbert Ryle – notion of category mistakes (in The Concept of Mind); happens when people talk about PLEs as things – they’re not, they’re environments: you can’t point at them.  Also figure/ground illusion (vase/faces) – edges are the key.

Contrast to VLE – which is a thing (e.g. Moodle).  A PLE is not (just!) the personal version of one – but there’s a figure/ground thing, the VLE could be part of it.  A PLE is the students’ bag of stuff: literal stuff (laptop, phone, bits).

PLE is open, controllable, public; VLE is closed, private, you-can’t-edit.  [But: control/privacy to enable experimentation for learning – safe to get it wrong.]

Edges between VLEs and PLEs. OpenLearn has made a big effort to make the content portable.  Materials are stuff in a learning environment, and have alternative formats: print (single HTML file); XML; RSS feed; OU XML; IMS Content Package; IMS Common Cartridge; plain ZIP of all the html files and media assets; Moodle Backup. This export bit is the edge – can do the figure/ground swap here.

Mashups – using Glue Logic (not actual glue).  Live demo of sucking content from OpenLearn – leaving a trail of bookmarks as he goes on Delicious, tagged ‘elcple’. Copy RSS link from OpenLearn course/module.  Use in places like PageFlakes, Netvibes, iGoogle. 

Uncourses blog – trying to do in real time as a blogged course: ten weeks to study, so ten weeks to write. All done on WordPress at Digital Worlds. Category and tag feeds so it’s “self-disaggregating”. Link structure is emergent (in the sense that he didn’t plan it in advance).  Categories and tags are … basically confusing on WordPress.  Module coming to deliver posts (RSS items) as a drip-feed over time, starting when you want it.

(Flock and Firefox tip: can right-click on any search box on any site and ‘Add a keyword’ for that search.)

Mashups are not production systems, they’re flaky.  (Pageflakey.) – in response to having Yahoo Pipes problems in his PageFlakes setup.

“Box.net is like MyStuff that works” – can share files, make them droppable, clicking in a browser will ‘just work’.

Grazr as an RSS reader on turbo – can wrap RSS feeds together in to OPML files.

Glue Logic – lives here http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/xmltools/dwCommentFeedsOPML.php (aka http://tinyurl.com/4vq4nt) – takes parameters and produces OPML feeds out of, say, all comments on posts with a particular tag. “It’s easy to use” [But not documented anywhere?]

Microsoft Live Search – you can add search results as a feed by adding &format=rss to the search URL.  E.g. orange smarties.

Autodiscoverable feeds – your browser can subscribe to it.

Tony’s OPML dashboard as a way of messing around with RSS/OPML files.

StringLE – a String-and-Glue Learning Environment.  The sample site sort-of works but is suffering from linkrot somewhat.

Pipework – Yahoo Pipes.  Live demo of taking Wikipedia data on city populations and putting them via a Googledocs spreadsheet on to a map.

Questions from Scholarship in the digital age

Someone – Use Viewlet builder – do internal training with it.

Tony Nixon, MCT – Retain boundaries in University? Case for?

VC – Much more interdisciplinarity in calls for research funding, so breaking down boundaries is happening and matches the real world. Systems thinking is key; we have the best systems thinking group in the country.

Eileen Scanlon, IET – Conflict between move to Research Excellence Framework, citations framework – versus more open view.

VC – Not sure there is a conflict. Traditional measures take a long time to change. Want OU to be at the forefront of how we do measure those things.  Have philosophy (??!) blogger getting a lot of attention and reputation. Some academics deciding not to publish in print but just go to the web: academics are pushing at it.  More traditional measures are going to see enormous changes.

Brigid Heywood, Pro-VC Research – The REF is going to use very traditional measures – publish, citation. Academics should disseminate freely – but capture peer review and impact on the disciplines as well.  That’s the ground where we can lead.  In 2010 it’ll be classic measures, but we have a part to play in the new space.  All media to be used, but show peer review and academic impact too.

Web question – Martin Weller – via Twitter – Recognise in promotions criteria?  VC – yes of course.

Josie Taylor – move to Web 2.0 as scholars isn’t just learning to use the tools, it’s a culture shift.  Many of our colleagues need to recognise the demands on them – to rethink research and course development.  Very demanding!  VC agrees.

Anne deRoeck – Sustainability questions.  Web 2.0 turns everyone in to a publisher, but not in to a reader. Lots of stuff written but not read.  And environmental impact of technology.  Technologies are very new; has to be managed to make it sustainable.  How?

VC – Technology can help – e.g. collaborate online rather than drive or fly.  

Council member – how to get employer engagement, commercial ventures etc – how can OU lead on that area?

VC – People underestimate how much employer engagement we already do. But not shrinking from expanding it. A real grip on all this will make us more reputable and desirable to employers. Our stuff will show in the workplace.  Engage over what skills they want employees/graduates to have – and ability to work with the technology, and teamwork – are big there.  Management of teams learned via games.

Steve Swinthenby – Inclusion. Scholarship of inclusion?

VC – No favours by telling students you’re too poor or socially deprived to be engaged with technology.  Was pleased with Gordon Brown about giving broadband assistance to families – will help us greatly.  Access to Learning fund will include computers, we help in the costs of broadband for students.  And they think it’s fun and they enjoy it.  We have a problem with young men falling out of education – and they love the technology.

Pro-Chancellor (Lord Haskins) – Consumer power – e.g. reading bits from a newspaper.  A dangerous trend, narrows horizons – consumers are not guided through by an editor.  The same could happen in learning: students could set the agenda.  Consumer power has gone too far in some instances.  Academics will be running after the students, instead of helping students wider [their horizons].

VC – You won’t find that – academics aren’t engaging with the technology.  Still academics’ role to do assessment, curriculum design, students want the accreditation that comes out of that, and that’s a very powerful position so it’s not going out of the window.  Need to engage people more in learning. Participatory thing is good.

Conclusion – Pro-Chancellor (Lord Haskins) – VC has been a world leader in this, people listen to her wherever she goes.