ECEL 2009

Thought I'd highlight the 8th European Conference on e-Learning (ECEL 2009) to be held in Bari, Italy, next year. Papers on the read/write web (or Web 2.0 if you must) are especially welcomed, after an excellent conference mini-track last November.

There is also a Twitter hash-tag: #ECEL09, and I'll be tweeting some more @ http://twitter.com/HallyMk1

Institutional maturity and exit strategies

So I really enjoyed the SOLSTICE conference today and my preso on institutional collaboration went really well. I really liked thinking about institutional spaces and whether we are trying to force new, web-based tools into old spaces and pedagogic approaches, without changing our curriculum design and delivery. e.g. Wondering why a blog or social network does not work when it is disconnected from the learning and assessment processes, so that we maintain a traditional studio or lecture plus essay/project approach, rather than a social networking/problem-based and patchwork assessment approach.

We are moving towards a position where e-learning professionals are confident enough to push progressive pedagogies - we need to accept that students are learning and developing literacies and self-efficacy and agency in new environments and networks. Moreover, there is a risk that the spaces and tasks that we use to develop academic literacies are disconnected from our students social spaces and networks and literacies. In delivering these types of connections we need to rethink pedagogic paradigms to focus meaningfully upon participation and user-centred pedagogies, in order to connect problems to actions and tools, and to connect networks or collaborative efficacies and concepts to individual outcomes and attainment.

The other points that struck me were the role of structured play in learning and teaching - how to make the use of technologies and the interactions they promote as "fun" [as noted in our e-learning strategy]. There is something to be said here for the themes and principles promoted by the EYFS and how they impact on our understanding of technology-enhanced learning. More will follow on that.

Finally, my good friend LP argued that my preso, which argued for the spreading of a social networking approach and culture across an HEI involving broad academic and academic-related teams working, sharing and collaborating through Web 2.0 tools, demonstrated that we were preparing an exit strategy from the institutional VLE. I argued that we were working on upskilling staff and especially programme teams to collaborate to make better decisions about the tools that they use in the curriculum. These may be Blackboard-based or Web 2.0 tools. This means that we have an institutional maturity, based upon acceptance, experience of and engagement with e-learning tools, that allows us to migrate technologies if we have to. Moreover, those staff are better able to make informed, devolved, empowered decisions now because of the spread of tools and people to advise on their use.

A move towards participation and local engagement means that I might become redundant!!

Learning Technologies part deux

The second part of the Learning Technologies was held this week. It is now rebranded as the Learning and Skills Group conference. There were very few academic institutions represented there, but there were a number of government, military and businesses that were heavily into e-learning. The overall feel of the conference was also better than the previous one with a much more relaxed, sharing environment being created. There was no keynote speaker and a mixture of sessions that included group meetings where like people/organisations could interact with each other and share good practice. I attended cafe sessions on creating and designing e-learning which gave us 7 principles of learning design, which were:
1.Design experiences not content (no one learns anything from content!).
2. Design top down and bottom up
3. Juggle constraints consciously (be realistic and honest with all involved).
4. Template comprehensively ensuring that it is based on sound theories of learning.
5.Evaluate(demonstrate value but not too much) and educate (sponsors and subject experts).
6. Build multi role, multi functional teams (This would be nice but often its the individual in our case! This also applies to pint 5 above as others have sepearte designers to do the work).
7. Make users drive your design
During the design process use users when practical where possible as it can shorten the development time. See flowinteractive.com for some evidence of this.
Where we are dealing with external providers we should ask "what theories they base learning on" as there have been changes in the last 15 years.
The cafe style workd in some ways as the session sparked conversation and sharing although possibly the numbers were too high in some sessions.
I also attended a number of practical sessions on Web 2.0 technologies and everyone should visit Centre for learning and performance tecnologies www.caltp.co.uk/25Tools/Tools/about.html (if they havent already). I liked Polldaddy, slideshare and moodle! I am also pleased to see drupal in their list of 100 tools as we like it in the library and it was used by the conference to demo sessions! These were small group sessions ans were collaborative allowing real sharing and learning in a practical session. There were some hiccoughs with the practical sessions to do with availability of software and versions but overall it was OK.
Finally my faviurite session was the hands on PSP session where we were able to play with psps that had been pre-loaded with sample training materials. This could be a really interesting way of delivery if we were to try this and is less restrictive than an ipod and cheaper!!

Next Generation Environments Conference

So I am at this conference discussing issues arising from the Users and Innovation programme. The headlines for me so far surround Eric Hamilton's keynote on future learning environments. He was talking about enabling learners to begin to model systems rather than remember facts. His 8 principles for learning design really struck a chord.

1. Enable contexts with clear sightlines between tutor and learners, and learners and tasks/content.
2. Enable learners to model systems.
3. Enable connectedness - open pathways up.
4. Enable personalisation, to avoid alienation.
5. Enable generative and creative thinking and acting. Is this play?
6. Enable self-regulating, individual competency.
7. Enable fluid learning contexts, that allow learners to switch environments, to switch between solitude and association, to switch between virtual and real, where they n examine and become objects of enquiry.
8. Enable interactional bandwidth, where there is an increased capacity and capability for interaction.

In this the role of the tutor and the role of information in shaping learning tasks critical. Moreover, we see played out issues of power, relationships and the development of a cyborg-self. Ethical choices, self-efficacy, agency, agile learning, collaborative modelling and "group flow" are also matters arising.

Some of these issues were again raised by Dave White from the OpenHabitat project. In discussing the use of MMPOGs, VR and SecondLife, he made me think about environments that are structured for tasks and task-oriented play. The nature of informal, social interaction, immersion and frameworks/tasks that legtimise action-as-play or play-as-action needs more evaluation. As does its impact on self-efficacy and critical literacies.

Plymouth e-Learning conference

I had a really nice time last Friday, at the Plymouth e-Learning conference. Okay, it helped that the weather was great and that I was by the seaside, and that I love the train journey past the Cotswolds, through Bristol and along the coast beyond Exeter. However, the setting for the day, in the Roland Levinsky building, was excellent - an impressive use of building materials fused with a dynamic shape in the heart of the city. Plus, I met some really nice people - lots of smiling (I wonder if it's the sea air), and took away a few ideas.

1. the University of Staffordshire, have just validated a Technology-Supported Learning strategy. I'm not sure that we are yet at the position where institutional maturity for embedding e-Learning (and I mean across the institution, not just in the heads of our e-Learning Co-ordinators and champions) is a position where we can ditch the term "e-Learning".
2. Mark Stiles from Staffordshire also pointed us to their resources on communities of practice, which might be worth further investigation.
3. Mark's keynote focused upon how we embed e-Learning without moving to a process of regulation. My take on this is that mature and devolved quality assurance processes, enable programme seems to innovate, within a structure whereby local faculty mechanisms help those teams enhance their work. I think Mark is right, however, to flag the need for joined-up policies in estates, information services, learning and teaching, library services, etc, in particular, where lifelong learning, employer engagement, flexible working, work-based learning and foundation degrees impact upon our perception of the "University".
4. I was taken with Neil Witt's presentation about Plymouth's HELP CETL. in particular, I like what they have called USPACE - their iGoogle aggregator, which acts as a personal learning environment to support transitions into higher education and work-based learning. There is lots to learn from this implementation about the development and implementation of PLEs, to form a context for learning within which students are comfortable. I liked Neil's argument that this is a sustainable solution, precisely because Google is a sustainable solution, with guaranteed services. What also struck me about his presentation, in the mix of technologies including eLGG, del.icio.us, googledocs and Ning presented via iGoogle, was his commitment to rapid prototyping. This is based on quick, clear, user focused evaluation. Within this approach engaging the staff, and developing their capability, strikes me as critical.
   
5. Mark Lyndon and Graeme Horton presented a really interesting lunchtime session on building an interactive whiteboard for under £40, simply using a Nintendo Wii remote, hooked up both to a laptop (using a Bluetooth driver and whiteboard open source software) and a data projector, with a home and made infrared pointing and drawing device. They based their work on that of Johnny Chung Lee, and showed us how to utilise the whiteboard in under five minutes. The home-made infrared pointing and drawing device is a wonder of modern technology, consisting of an LED, switch and AAA battery, fitted inside a whiteboard marker pen (with nib and cartridge removed). What I loved about this demonstration was the fact that as a user I got some instructions for engineering my own pointing device, and that they developed a mobile, wireless, classroom solution. As the guys from Plymouth noted the critical development would be how it was used in the classroom, or how it freed-up staff and students to do work in a variety of contexts.
6. I was a bit disappointed to miss Steve Wheeler's presentation on social anxiety, given my interest in issues around agency and participation in on-line environments. There is a tendency to look at Web 2.0 and other e-Learning tools as a panacea for participation, and I think this type of research is a much needed balance. I'll be hunting Steve down for a copy of his presentation, and I hope to do some more work in this area.
7. Oh, and I thought my presentation on "the impact of the read/write web on learner agency" went pretty well. I seem to have the central tenets of this paper pretty well mapped out, in terms of theories around deliberative democracy, association and decision-making, and the practical impact of the read/write web upon our students' perceptions of on-line access and participation, decision-making, environmental control and critical literacy.
   

NLab Social Networks Conference

If you don’t know already, registration is now open for the NLab Social Networks Conference, 19-20 June 2008 at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

In 2008 NLab is exploring the power of social networks in business and there’s an impressive line up of presenters on many aspects of networking

Speakers include
Andrea Saveri, Institute for the Future, Palo Alto and Steve Clayton, Microsoft UK plus David Asch, De Montfort University - Jim Benson, Modus Cooperandi - Roland Harwood, NESTA - Shani Lee, NLab - Chris Meade, Institute for the Future of the Book - Toby Moores, Sleepydog - Vijay Riyait, iQubed - Sue Thomas, De Montfort University - Ken Thompson, and more to be announced...

Also see the range of subsidies (including for DMU students and staff) and some bursaries available for Businesses in the East Midlands.

E-Learning Conference-University of Ulster

Richard has already mentioned here some key points which I raised in my main report on the Pathfinder wiki in relation to Web 2.0 technologies and teaching and learning at DMU.

This was my preamble to that report about what was an informative and inspirational conference.

I attended The University of Ulster’s sixth annual all-Ireland e-learning conference which was held held at the Jordanstown campus on Thursday 17th January 2008.

The aim of the conference was to raise awareness of the benefits of using on-line technologies in teaching, learning and assessment. The conference addressed themes associated with the creation, support and development of an e-learning community, with particular emphasis on the impact of e-learning.

This conference was a pleasure to intend. Most of the delegates were from Irish universities and the atmosphere was friendly and the sessions most accessible for the non technically-minded, like me! Speakers were most happy to share ideas and point us towards useful web-links, some of which I am sharing here. I realised that I actually understood virtually all the terminology, even ‘mash-up’, (thanks, Richard!). Also that DMU, unlike quite a few other places, is lucky that it does not bar its staff and students from social-networking sites. Some people reported an arduous process of having to beg access for individual sites; multiply that by goodness knows how many and you get a good idea of how time-consuming a process that must be.

If and when I get access to the slides from this conference, I'll let you know!

University of Ulster: Enhancement and Impact

Pam posted some really useful notes from the UU 2008 conference on e-learning to our Pathfinder wiki. I have appended her implications for teaching and learning at DMU herewith...

• If ‘knowledge navigation’ becomes an important ‘new’ skill to be learnt-and taught-will this take precedence over the creating/assimilation/application of of new knowledge.
• What expectations do students come bring to HE regarding mobile learning?
• If we presume that all our students have mobile-phones, how might these be usefully engaged for pedagogic reasons-or should they be?
• It seems to me that we are investigating these tools as a matter of course and that that our Pathfinder Project has helped crystallize debate and opportunities internally.
• We ignore ‘where our students are at’ at our peril.
• To investigate the pedagogical soundness of these tools as we would any other method as regards group, prior experience, context, overall learning aims etc; also as regards resources related to time and environment.
• What tools can support mentoring between international PG students and UK UGs (or PGs if available) for friendship, proof-reading etc.. What role is there for external tools like Facebook? What are thecultural implications of this? (e.g. glaringly in China).

Learning Technologies Conference 2008

Jon Tyler and I have just been handed our delegate badge and were sipping coffee and water awaiting the opening session for "Europe's Leading Learning Technology Conference". I had promised that I'll be live blogging from each session using my wireless laptop to keep people up-to-date periodically, however the wireless internet connection is dismal; taking up to a minute to load a single page, and so I'm left typing this on a steel cased workstation kiosk, with a matching STEEL keyboard! Folks, it has taken me 15 minutes to write up until here and my hands hurt pressing these keys. How the organisers missed out decent Internet connection in this day and age beats me. I'll stay optimistic and hope that the connection improves.



For now it's time we head off to the first session.



BTW Jon says Hi!

Conference presentations

I thought I would give a brief update of accepted conference presentations, relating to our Pathfinder project.

1. Malcolm Andrew will be presenting "Podcasts to augment the teaching of Pharmaceutical Microbiology" at the Mobile Learning 2008 conference, in April.
2. Richard Hall will be presenting "The impact of the read/right web on learner agency", at the The London SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) 7th International Conference, in May.
3. Richard Hall will be presenting "The impact of the read/right web on learner agency", at the Northampton Creating Contemporary Student Learning Environments, in May.
   
4. Richard Hall will be leading a mini-track on Web 2.0 tools and assessment, at the 7th European Conference on e-Learning, in October.