Category: Uncategorized

Keren Mills and Non Scantlebury – Digilab/Library.

About half of the audience have never been in the Digilab.

Launched and opened Nov 2006.  Can’t miss it, it’s painted bright pink.  Professional development of non-academic staff, e.g. designers in LTS.  IET gets a mention for doing staff development.  Digilab to fill gap for hands-on opportunities.  A ‘createive play area to experiment with and explore new ideas and share knowledge’.

Can drop-in for physical stuff.  They have generic Digilab accounts for things like Second Life so you can have a poke around without having to register yourself.  (This is a cool idea, especially where you need to do a bit of running to get started.)  Also running f2f sessions on this stuff.

Lot of people don’t have confidence about what a podcast is or how to create one.  “If asked to create a podcast …” – half would ask for help, 32% would teach themselves, 9% would pass it on, 6% have experience of doing it already.  (And 3% would go on holiday to avoid it!)

Alas, tried to play a video clip from PPT and it failed.  Then tried a canned QT she’d wisely brought along – result.  Comments from Gill Clough and Rebecca Ferguson about how cool the Digilab is for overhearing what people are doing and asking them about what they’re doing.  (Maybe I should sit and play there more often.  Yes!  A proper work-related reason to play Guitar Hero III on work time.  I’ll be contributing to OU staff development, oh yes.)

Geocaching exercise – find your way to a person’s office and interview them.  Then the final treasure was lunch (!).  Got good feedback from the experts that they should offer this more broadly as an approach.  Participants really got a lot out of it.  An aim is to increase people’s confidence in the technology they hear people talking about.  People like Martin and Tony are keen early adopters, but we have a lot of staff who aren’t confident in engaging with them.  Researchers like using it as an informal meeting place; more inspiring place for a PhD supervision than a trad supervisor’s office.

Comment from Chris Pegler that the Digilab has been a great boon to the eLearning Community (the OU internal e-learning self-development community).

… and it got an OU Teaching Award this morning.  Long list of thanks to people, including Rhodri Thomas from Strategy Unit and Andrew Brasher from IET.

Martin – Like bumping in to people, watercooler effect.  Twitter offers this as well – can we combine the two – have screens with OU twitter feeds, really informal way of that going?

Keren – Yeah that would be really good.  And Ideascale too would be really interesting for an online presence for Digilab – and how to bring the Digilab to the regions.  Making one place to find who’s blogging about what.  Liam’s work on that.  Also Cohere from KMi adding to social networking – put up ideas and create links between them – this idea supports/refutes this other idea.

Non – We want to be user-driven, it’s a resource for the OU community.  Equipment loan service – can book out iPods, cameras and other stuff out from the Library to have a play with it.  Loaned out iPod shuffles with some content on them initially.

s/o – is there a web link explaining all this?  Virtual tour?

Keren – Yes, http://www.open.ac.uk/digilab.  Virtual tour would be nice but we don’t have the time.

s/o – Hard to get in regularly; when I went once I was the only one.  Can you stream from there when technologies are actually being used?

Keren – Contributing to Open Insights lecture series, with an activity at-a-distance.

Tim Hunt – Developing in the Moodle open source community: Connections promotes quality.

Has been a developer on the VLE project.  Most of this audience know what open source software and Moodle are.  (That’s a relief.)

Goes through software, free software (Stallman), open source (Raymond).  (After we’ve just established the audience already knows this, ah well.)  Licensing.  Issues with distros and mess and how you manage it. “Open Source projects have incredibly good project management” with a benevolent dictator.

Moodle principles, Martin Dougiamas – Moodle community is a learning community.

Tim – took responsibility for Moodle quiz as module maintainer from May 2006.  He really enjoys it, done a lot of good for OU rep, has given us a degree of control.

Very surprised at the peer review leading to better tools effect – enough eyes principle.  A very potent testing team.  People convinced him that he was wrong on some proposals, “and that’s quite a difficult thing to do”.  30 people who regularly participate in the forums on this, despite the hundreds or thousands of Moodle sites.  Wouldn’t get the feedback at just the OU.

Also get stuff for free – stuff you want but can’t afford to do for yourself – STACK (maths assessment system from Univ of Brum – in tomorrow’s talk!), new question bank, email notification.

But … it takes time away.

Jonathan Fine – What’s the secret strategy for convincing you that you’re wrong?

TIm – Oh, you have to be right.  And make a good argument.

s/o – Emergent leadership role – are there examples of Open Source communities where that doesn’t happen?

Tim – Hundreds of thousands of projects on SourceForge going nowhere – if you don’t have that then nothing happens.  Martin is an okay software developer but an excellent leader.

s/o – It’s open to the community – if it’s good and dropped, can take on a life of its own and someone else can pick it up.

Linda – In terms of quality tools – is this a good model for us?

Tim – Yes.  Choices – buy commercial, build our own, do open source.  The commercial stuff was no good.  Some think we should have done our own.  Moodle avoids us having the arguments about how it should work since it already does work, incorporates a lot of best practice, which is almost more valuable than the code itself.

Ekkehard Thumm, Jamie Daniels, Esther Snelson (MPM for T189 Digital Photography). Stephen Peake, CTC for T189 here too.

(Linda Price chairing)

Ekkehard – Photography traditionally thought unsuitable for distance teaching … but it is now.  Less about the course but more about the process and the software.  (If you are interested in T189, there’s a talk tomorrow morning about it.)

Jamie demos the tool – it’s pretty cool – a lot like Flickr (!) only with OU stuff and organisation  (Just remembered link to OpenStudio from Biodiversity Observatory – it is very relevant and we want to do it.) Does autoconversion for you to a web-based format, and thumbnail and so on.  Comment interface, arrangement in to small group – and week by week.  Very very tightly integrated to how T189 works at the moment – including assignments and so on. Has flag for possibly-offensive stuff to alert Course Team – only used twice and in each instance didn’t need taking up.  Also has way in profile to say “here’s my other photo site (e.g. Flickr)”.

Has a bit in a profile to indicate participation level – photos posted, comments made, comments received, photos made favourites by others.  Some permutation of those gives a final judgement that gives you e.g. a smiley face.

Students plot themselves on a skills graph – visual awareness on one axis, technical knowledge and skill on the other.  Then visualised on a graph showing X for each students – can click on Xs to find individuals to contact for help – to give or to get!

Esther – collaboration with course team has been very good.  Has created a real community.  Looked at student forums to see what they were saying about it, and took that on board for further developments.

Stephen – Course Team Chair – it was a co-design process, like an agile programming team, work together on a daily basis.  Originally said ‘let’s just use Flickr’ – why reinvent the wheel?  Started like that but kept hitting barriers – especially about rights, keeping outside world out of the digital classroom, and so on.  Corporately you just can’t deal with them – our lawyers just couldn’t get a reply.  So eventually said ‘Oh let’s just do it’.  Can now be used for all sorts of applications – not just applications.
Martin – Congratulations, it looks decent unlike other things we’ve done.  Still don’t understand why not Flickr.  Can’t we just go Creative Commons, and isn’t it better to just be open? We try to bring too much.

Esther – At the point of negotiation , Flickr were getting taken over.

Jamie – creating logins, getting groups together, managing IDs

Stephen – sense of trust, it’s all moderated; they all migrate to Flickr anyway

Martin – we’re teaching them to be part of that broader photography network

s/o – Didn’t get to end of course.  Application in other areas – expand?  Looks like can only do one thing.

Stephen – Holy Grail of Design is collaborative design, in teams, so could adapt this for a team design project.  Second area – coming of spring plants and animals, biodiversity projects, for monitoring seasons and so on – in science, geology (could this be Biodiversity Observatory? we may not be picking it all up)

Esther – also a computer animation game course, upload those & other AV media

Guy Carberry has done some good stuff about using text messages on OU courses – we should be doing this stuff at scale already!  But we’re getting there.

Bill Tait – AL in MCT, COLMSCT Associate Teaching Fellow: Towards a Quality Framework for E-learning

Project to make it easy for tutors to write learning objects.  Wrote extensible learning objects and get tutors to apply their own ideas about pedagogy.  But big gap in technological expertise, even among Computing ALs.

Aim: a framework to help practitioners evaluate and design LOs in a more consistent way.  Should apply to e-learning formats and traditional techs.

Generic model: there is a ‘content object’ that is the subject content to be learned, and ‘learning activity’ which is the process in which the content is learned.  “Just like programming objects”  Abstraction – require entry and exit conditions to be met.  Encapsulation means it can have no links with the internal content of other units.  Implementation is how subject content is actually delivered so this is where pedagogy and technology come in. (!)

(Not sure I’m convinced this is a really helpful model of what is going on or should be.)

“Pedagogy is a strategy for implementing learning theory” – learning theories use terminology that may be beyond reach of many practitioners, and implemented using technology which is beyond them too.

So has broken down pedagogy in to Information, Experience, Consolidation, Discussion, Assessment.

Martin LeVoi – ran a project years ago on evaluation of web-based LOs for learning stats.  Fair bit of theory about evaluation, have you looked at those?

Bill Tait – They’ve come and gone.  Recent publications have a lot of advice for helping practitioners.  People are still uncertain about this (?).

Marion Hall, Lecturer in Faculty of Health and Social Care..

Library of resources for use across HSC courses – SORRS project – Shared Online Resources Repository System.

Went live on 16 Jan 2008, HSC resource bank as standard Moodle course website – http://learn.open.ac.uk/site/HSCRB

Can be accessed by: all HSC students, ALs, and OU staff via autoregistration at http://learn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4443

It’s a meta course so permissions feed in automatically from all HSC courses.  Wanted to use ECM but that’s not available, so the database lives somewhere else as a workaround, so can’t genericise it until it’s available.  Could use it in other Faculties but would need to do your own workaround.

Metadata attached – especially ‘nation’ – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland – especially for legislation in H&SC contexts.  And keywords from a restricted taxonomy!  Thirty keywords – to help with students putting in mis-spellings, or the synonyms problem.  (Hmm – I think there are cleaner ways of doing this.)

Resources lifted from existing courses, genercised, converted for web.  About 300 resources (pages) at now; another 375 in Phase 2 in Sept 2008, mostly new resources from Jan 2009 from courses in production.

Another component – ‘Milestones’ – significant events in history of H&SC from 1869; each event is an individual resource, course teams can add events (e.g. when doing new course) – can produce search results as a timeline graphic.  (Fun timeline technologies from Tony – e.g. Simile timeline, also BBC have done some nice ones.)

Resources available via programme website; allows for systematic skills development within a named award.

Me – any feedback/evaluation?Marion – Main formal evaluation is to come after stage three. Some small tentative evaluation which gave us some info about study time for these resources.

s/o – What about the generic resources on S Svcs website and getting them to do the extra work>

Marion – Yes, we’ll use those where available, but our students need a lot of handholding compared to the Computing Guide – liaising with Student Services

s/o – Wanted a guide to using Word drawing tool, got the students to produce it, very successful.

Lin Smith – Regional Manager from East Midlands – “Online e-moderating – a quality approach”

Dean Taylor chairing.

Staff development for OUBS, got OU Teaching Award this morning for whole team, more than were named on award.  Five years programme.  Identified that tutors needed help in becoming good e-moderators on tutor group forums.

ALs did a lot of the work, done online – integrated.

Trying to set up as a Community of Practice.  Courses lasted only two weeks but they became real CoPs, brought in examples from web and own practice.  Of course, was based heavily on Gilly Salmon’s 5 stages but went beyond – got tutors working on knowledge development very quickly.  Also engaging course teams – on d10 and d13, course teams come in, observe, and answer questions – to specific queries about their courses.  Some specific to e-moderating, some general.  Caused a lot of admin work, and is different to e-moderating offered through Janet Macdonald which is available through TutorHome.

Started with Certificate ALs and students, then fed through to more wide audiences (whole BA Business Studies and Law) – based on constructivist ideas of learning.

Principles of excellence – from EQFM – people, processes, results/learn/feedback.  Paid staff to do it.  They did 70% of the exercise and did a PDP afterwards.  85% said they got a lot out of it.

Web monitors (special tutors) – give positive fb that have been changes in behaviour (of tutors) – a pool of tutors who are ‘super tutors’ who can do stuff like Alternative Learning Experiences (online instead of residential schools) and BZX (online versions of ordinary courses).  Tutors demanded a certificate, now ask for it as part of recruitment and selection.

National Director of Education, Training and Development for NHS Connecting for Health.  “Scholarship and the Rise of Knowledge Work?”

Denise Kirkpatrick welcomes everyone back. Much fewer people here – possibly because the programme is a bit unclear about what’s a keynote and what’s the parallel sessions, or possibly because not half so many ALs here. NHS Connecting for Health is largest civilian ICT project in the world (after Chinese Red Army comms group presumably).  He has four UG degrees, two PG degrees.  (Another ELQ failure then.)  Distinctive, evidence-based approach to adult learning in health and social care.

After an introduction like that, even I’ll be interested to hear what I’m going to say.

Slides will be available … afterwards.  Presentation dense.

Linus’s Law (Peanuts, not Pauling or Torvalds) – “There is no heavier burden than a great potential” – true a lot for the OU.

The Boyer ‘four scholarships’ idea – clearly has a lot of traction in his crowd.

“The work of the academy must be directed toward larger, more human ends” – Boyer summing up his ‘Scholarship of Engagement’ paper (J Pub Srv and Outreach)

Standardish overview of pressures on HE. Scholarship, research, teaching, admin – orthogonal skills.  Commitment to the collegium: Self-governing community of scholars. Boyer – Scholarship REconsidered – good book.

Boyer’s Four Scholarships: Teaching, Discovery (Research), Application (consultancy … or community service), Integration. Teaching and Application is sharing out, Discovery and Integration is drawing in. Theme is making connections between all four parts – it’s artificial, banal – to separate out.  And wrong to assign people to single boxes.

(The fun stuff now – for me? – is Application and Integration.  But the other two are good too.)

Scholarship of Teaching: barriers to it – massification, diversity of students, credentialism, ICT, difficulties in attracting full time faculty, user-pays more demanding ‘clients’, managerialism; good things – outreach to unserved populations, recognition of other forms of learning, new/empowering learning opps, adjunct faculty, true learner-centredness

“Nobody talks about getting release *for* teaching.”

Scholarship of Discovery: globalisation/loss of local relevance, money/getting grants, subversion of the ‘invisible college’ through greater availability of information (?!), shift away from peer-review (Mode 1 knowledge production); global collaboration (e.g. HGP), partnership with industry/interest in research and its applications, career opps for new researches, Mode II knoweldge prductions [GIbbons, Novotny and Limoges 1994]

Scholarship of Application: loss of independence, money-grubbing ‘consultancy’, telling clients what they want to hear, distraction from ‘real’ academic work, worth measured only in terms of commercial goals; real world as a site for practice, career progression in and out of academe, real world problems create ‘natural lab’, opps to create discretionary income streams to do good stuff (!)

Scholarship of Integration: breakdown of disciplinary purity, compromise in language or paradigms, loss of rigour/nobody to hold you to account (Image and Logic book – some physics domain which aren’t theoretical or experimental fields, but sit in intersection between the three, is a trading zone not colonised), difficulty in being judged fairly in one’s specialist field, dilution of scholarly communities; but breakdown of disciplinary purity is a good thing too, truly innovative insights from serendipity, unexpected breakthroughs, enhanced rigour since interdisc, systematic synthesis

Boyer and ‘seasons’ – don’t lock in to one of four as a career trajectory – but an academic is likely to move around and across these during their career.  (As Peter Knight advised me to argue about my profile.  Ho hum.)  Boyer reaffirms trad values in HE – some of them.  John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid – university in the digital age (Xerox Parc) [PDF!}

Knowledge-based occupations: professions, traditional knowledge-intensive jobs – e.g. insurance, publishing; new professions – consulting, info systems; changes in workplaces with more ICT.

Characteristics: never the same, creative, special skills, social distribution of knowledge (Learning in and out of school paper – deconstruct the skills and knowledge required to dock a large naval warship), communication with non-specialists, reflective.  In search of the knowledge worker (Paton, 2005) [PDF] – three axes: theoretical knowledge, contextual knowledge, intellective skills.

So need graduates who can do all this stuff.  And the various aspects require all four scholarships to achieve.  Hooray.  Candy et al 1994 Developing lifelong learners through undergraduate education.

List of what you can tweak in order to produce graduates for the information society.  Teaching is about all four scholarships.

Concept of ‘engaged college’ – H G Wells – universities “floating over the general disorder of mankind like a beautiful sunset over a battlefield” – from a piece called “World Brain: The idea of a permanent world encyclopaedia” – 1937 fascinating article worth another look, seems to be predicting Wikipedia :-).

The quesiton is not just “What does your machine produce” but also “How does your garden grow?” – Pace CR (1971) Thoughts on Evaluation in Higher Education.

Q&A

Unison Northern Ireland – Individuals needs vs NHS needs?

Candy – inspirational leadership (!) – contented cows produce more milk.

Clare Spencer – AL from Wales – reconceptualise self as a day labourer of the mind.  Skepticism about teaching-only universities – is there a place for teaching-only staff?

Candy – No.  Maybe a period of their career where they are teaching-only, can’t do all four at equal standard all the time, but should test out other options.

SL from OUBS – Profile of knowledge worker versus what our students expect from us.  Geoff Peters course feedback, online Masters expects students to do stuff for themselves “We had to download papers for ourselves, read them … think for ourselves […] Where was the learning?” (Good quote but I missed it all.)

Candy – issue with reframing the language to match.

Josie Taylor – The elephant in the room – don’t disagree, discussion of Boyer is great, should embed it more. But there is a problem with the RAE (and successor).  Good management is good for everyone, especially younger members of community deployed badly and not in a position to recognise it.  Role of very effective and sympathetic management is important – realities of daily life is very tough.

Candy – Luxury of being out of full-time HE.  In NHS – some great managers, manage budgets, chair meetings etc, but still have respect for world of ideas (engage with papers etc) so it can be done.  In Oz – development of shadow admin structure – head of school has a business manager, internationalisation, fundraising, budgeting, HR – take away from academic leaders the things they’re not so good at, but means must be a partnership.

Wendy Chalmers and Jill Gravestock.

New library launched Oct 2007 – it’s THE library for OU students.  As a digital library but also links to others.

Big change to content-managed site, dramatic drop in number of pages.

New technologies – Google Scholar and SFX; online collections by subject; and one-stop search for articles and more

Online collections by subject – students wanted subject-based browse.  Subject librarians pick out collections specifically.

SFX – open URL resolver – link from an abstract to the full text via a db maintained by the library holding our eJournal subscriptions.  So if visit Web of Science, there’s a ‘Find it at OU’ buttons – takes you seamlessly through to the full text.  (This is very very good – saw it before in a Library presentation but it’s a great thing.)  Also can access via Google Scholar.  Go to ‘Preferences’, ‘Find in a library’, search for Open University – if you enable it, sets a cookie on your browser, so next time you find something in Google Scholar, you get a ‘Find it at OU’ button that transfers you to the full text.

One-stop search – federated search – this is another way cool thing.  Searches something like 80% of our eJournals via a single interface.  Divided by OU subject areas, doesn’t include legal databases (tech issue); can select subset of databases to search.  (This presentation isn’t doing much justice to how cool this is IMO – going through all the options at length, but hasn’t actually shown the cool thing: a one-stop search over the majority of the Library’s eJournal.)

(The combo of these two is absolutely wonderful – if you want to search eJournals, have a single place to do it, and can link straight through to the full text.  And usually without having to do any user/password gubbins beyond logging in to an OU machine. It’s like the journal search service you’d dream of – only issue is it doesn’t cover everything we hold, but almost-there gets you the vast majority of the benefit.)

Example from K214 Extending Professional Practice – frontline support workers in health and social care.  Course section takes through finding relevant info using electronic information sources.  Alas!  Tech issues mean they can’t do the demo.  That’s a real shame because it blew my socks off.

Can export refs to all sorts of things, including RefWorks.

s/o – an AL – just got broadband – the techie issue is their whole experience. Need to consider how robust it needs to be for people working in isolation. Most useful feature is ask a librarian.

Wendy – have tested on dialup, bit slower but does work.

Chris Pegler – has been OU student in past, used normal libraries – the frustrations of this don’t come close to those of a normal library up against time-pressure deadlines.  Librarians On Call extremely useful if you get stuck, very human face of the library.

Patrick – Earning 2.0 title by linking out to systems outside in the world – is the aim to use systems outside like Google Scholar>

Other presenter – trying to embed the library in other services.

Patrick – What’s phase 2 going to offer?  E.g. see what other people are engaging with – make library users’ actions available?  (Like Amazon-style stuff?)

Presenter – yes would like to but system not avialable, but national stuff on the way.