Jing-a-ling

It's the race week madness, and all of Galway has gone to get a bit of jing-a-ling in their pockets from betting on those fair fillies. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I see from Leigh Blackall's blog that Techsmith have a new freeware tool out called Jing. It's pretty neat. I already use Techsmith's SnagIT tool to take screenshots, but Jing sits on the top of the screen as a little yellow orb, just waiting to take a screen grab or video of anything you are working on. And the bonus- it's free (well for the moment at least).

It's worth keeping an eye on all the OSS alternatives out there, such as those Leigh uses, like Camstudio for the screenrecording, ScreenHunter to grab stills out of video for print, Videora or SuperC to compress the video for Internet and Hey!Spread to distribute the video across multiple video hosting services... Leigh is a mine of information on the topic.

For more on Jing, see a pop-up video of Jing in action to see what all the fuss is about.

UCD Library joins Second Life

I just noticed in my UCD Alumni newsletter (eConnections) that the UCD James Joyce library has become the first Irish library in Second Life.

From the UCD news site:
“We’ve had instant messaging and blogs for quite some time now, so we thought that this virtual world might offer another useful compliment to the provision of traditional library services,” says Cathal McCauley from UCD Library Services. McCauley, who is leading the project for UCD Library, explains that Second Life is reminiscent of the internet in the mid-1990s. “We want to investigate the possibilities it might offer.”

See UCD News for the full story.

Maybe we all need a good mash-up?

Now, leaving the mashed potato jokes aside- what I mean is to say is - how about a future of software mash-ups? According to Dion Hinchcliffe we are in for a bumper crop. What a great idea- and a possible solution to those wanting to take those useful features from VLEs, online repositories, e-Porfolios and social software tools... and mash them all up! Is this really possible?

If Dion's pretty diagram is anything to go by, it looks like such a stunningly great concept:

Dion's blog posting outlines 17 mash-up platforms which end-users could use for this purpose. He has lots more ideas for this user-created mash-ups on his own blog.

See also Stephen Downes and Wayne Hodgkins for more on this topic.

Becta report on e-portfolios

A recent British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) report on e-Porfolios describes their use in various educational sectors. The research was conducted by a team of researchers in the Learning Sciences Research Institute at The University of Nottingham led by Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young. Of interest is the eight case study in their report describing the use of e-Porfolios by the NHS Education for Scotland. In this instance, the e-Porfolio was used by 1,600 graduate medical students during their two foundation years’ training. Their e-Porfolio encompassed:

• personal development plans
• supervisors’ reports
• certificate of performance
• multi-source feedback
• workplace assessments
• log entries
• significant event analyses.

The study looked at engagement & motivation, goal setting & reflection, feedback & collaboration, attainment, and generalisability & transferability of the doctors' experience. The initial e-Portfolio was created largely to provide for assessment, but has diversifed to support reflective practice, professional tools and deliver e-learning.

The report states that "E-portfolios benefit learning most effectively when considered as part of a system, rather than as a discrete entity. The system should include online repositories, planning and communication tools, and opportunities for both students and teachers to draw out andpresent e-portfolios at particular times and for particular purposes."

The full research report, which is written for the academic community, is available to download in Word (2.5MB) or PDF (1.8MB).

More References
Becta: e-assessment and e-portfolios : http://becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/documents/e-assessment.pdf
Department for Education and Skills, 2005, Harnessing Technology: Transforming Learning and Children’s Services, London: DfES.http://www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/e-strategy
Hartnell-Young E, 2006, E-Portfolios in Australian Schools: Supporting Learners’ Self-esteem, Multiliteracies and Reflectionon Learning. In Mittermeir R T (ed), ISSEP 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4226, pp279-289, Berlin, Heidelberg:Springer-Verlag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915355_26
JISC: Infonet http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/effective-use-of-VLEs/e-portfolios
QCA, 2004, Blueprint for E-assessment http://www.qca.org.uk/6995.html
Their space: education for a digital generation DEMOS http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theirspace
Oxford Brookes ProjectRoberts, G, 2006, My World: E-portfolios: Activity and Identity, Brookes eJournal of Learning and Teaching, 1 4). http://www.brookes.ac.uk/publications/bejlt/volume1issue4/perspective/roberts.html

Stephen Heppell's keynote

I'm pleased to announce that Stephen Heppell's keynote is now available for viewing. Sorry about the delay, needed a bit of tidying up and conversion before we could pop it on line. Watch and be stimulated!

http://videostream.nuigalway.ie/stheppell

Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is

Having attended the excellent presentations at the conference, given by Bob Clark and Maureen O'Sullivan, on Intellectual Property Rights and Creative Commons, I thought I was getting to grips with the whole issue of copyright (and even copyleft). But I've just read this blog entry from David Wiley, about licensing and restrictions, and I'm more confused than ever.

He talks about permissible restrictions and license incompatibility. It seems that even those of us who are aware of restrictions and try to do the right thing, are probably getting it wrong. How is any person without legal training supposed to understand the intricacies?

Moreover, and given the current role of CELT in upgrading Blackboard at NUI Galway, what is the responsibility (& liability) of the institution, where staff are making resources available to students through the VLE?

'Write Articles not Blog Postings' says Jakob Nielsen

Interesting article posted in the Guardian a couple of days ago:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2007/07/09/write_articles_not_blog_postings_says_jakob_nielsen.html

Great to see the debate between the pro- and anti-Nielsen camps ongoing in the comments section below this article.

Galway to host a BarCamp!

An open, participatory workshop event, called BarCamp, will be coming to Galway, courtsey of Deri on 22nd of September 2007. These BarCamp events typically focus on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, in 2005. Since then, similar events have been held in over 31 cities around the world. Participants gather and informally present and participate as actively as possible- everyone is encouraged to partake. Current topics already posted on the Galway BarCamp wiki include social networking, RSS, RDF, the mobile web, and the metaverse. This looks to be a very collaborative and creative "unconference", with plenty of scope for contribution... roll up those sleeves and get stuck in!

Update on Elgg Community Site @ Brighton

Katie Piatt, from the University of Brighton has set up an area on the Brighton Elgg Community site to continue any discussions about the Elgg event and to ask any follow up questions: Elgg Jam Weblog. There are also some photos from the event on: Elgg Jam Photo Area. Any available powerpoint slides from speakers which are shared are accessible on: Elgg Jam Files

The Learning Technologies Group at the University of Brighton will also be adding the videos from the conference when they’ve had a chance to edit them together.

Elgg Jam at the University of Brighton

The event was impressively organised, as was the Creativity Room at the Mouslecoomb campus of the University of Brighton. Olfactory smells of Peppermint, and other stimulating spices emerged from their newly installed Smell-o-vision (really- this is no joke), and wafted through the event to keep us concentrated on the keynote and case study speakers. Whiteboards, and no less than seven projectors kept our eyes glued to the images being displayed around the curved, white walls of the main room.
The enthusiasm of Stan Stanier and Katie Piatt from the University of Brighton was infectious, as delegates began gushing about Elgg as a tool for student motivation & engagement, from their own experiences. There was less talk of faculty driven participation, and several of the case studies spoke about the use of the software in non-structured context, on a voluntary basis (or ‘natural uptake’) by students for socialising and communication that transcended the module or course structure. Another interesting application was the use of Elgg in work contexts, in which a publisher's employees used it to share comments and edits of submitted work.

Graham Attwell in his talk raised some of the troubling issues surrounding the use of social software such as:

• Who provides the e-portfolio ? (i.e. the institution, a commercial provider or the government)- by which he means a personal learning portfolio, as opposed to an assessment, presentation or PDP portfolio


• Should it be open or closed (an how to keep ones duty of care, and a space for reflection)?


• What should it contain (i.e. formal, institutionally determined content, or personal content that transcends the institutional contexts)?

George Roberts work on the Emerge project was facinating how how they integrated Moodle, PhpBB and Wikis into Elgg and configuring these components, as required by the community.

Some questions that I have in relation to the use of Elgg in universities, remain outstanding. These include:

• Authorship: Intellectual property implications (who owns the mashed-up content?) and the impact of social networks on plagiarism (does it lead to increased plagiarism?)


• Social rules: Dealing with bullying or lack of social contacts (can you also lack friends in a university social network?). Should this "educational" social network be seperate from other social networks, such as Bebo, and Facebook, etc.? (I would imagine it should be- but does this mean it is a sterile environment?)


• Pedagogy: How useful is a social network in a formal HE learning context, and what type of pedagogies is it amenable or supportive of? Are there groups of users for whom it is more suitable (i.e. postgraduates, undergraduates or learners in a work-based context)? How can it be tightly coupled with course work, or should it be?


• Control: Should participation be voluntary or if this is used in formal structured contexts, how would it become subverted or perceived (i.e. the importance of decentralised control)


• Ownership: What happens to this profile when the student leaves the institution? Are there any other issues around making profiles public? Should non-university staff or students be also allowed to have profiles created on a particular institutions platform? Should the government provide this as a service for all citizens? The provision and ownership of the service are unresolved issues for me.
  

Michael Orey's Wiki Book

Michael Orey, from the Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia has put together a rather different text book on educational theory and technologies. The book is entitled "Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching, and Technology." Michael started this book in 2001 with a core group of doctoral students. The initial version included 12 chapters with no animations and very few images. Each semester, Michael asks his current students who are using this book as their required text in his class to improve on the book by either making animations, recorded presentations, graphics, editing, or various other contributions (there is no such thing as a completely free book!). It has been in HTML until May 2007 when they converted it to this Wiki.

It has expanded to include over 32 chapters, along with images, animations, videos, narrated presentations, and Powerpoint games as part of the text. Michael is working towards having this book included in the Global Text Project (http://globaltext.org/ ). He is currently inviting contributions to review any of the chapters. Editing of the chapters is controlled- you can only do this through the discussion pages, or by emailing him directly. I'm not sure why, as this does eliminate some of the wiki benefits, but presumably this is due to IP considerations? Still, it's nice to see such a collective initiative.

Podcasting: A Teaching with Technology Whitepaper

The Office of Technology for Education and Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University's Ashley Deal shares a recent white paper on Podcasting.

Some findings, I found particularly interesting from this 15 page report (in their review of the literature) include the following:

1. the availability of podcasts have no effect on lecture attendance


2. students report listening to lecture podcasts at home or on a computer, rather than in a mobile environment with a portable device


3. students see podcasts as helpful reviews..


4. the RSS feed is critical for convenience of subscription and download


5. if podcasts are thoughtfully approached, designed with clear educational goals in mind, and produced specifically to take advantage of the podcast format, the more beneficial they are reported to be. The medium itself is not intrinsically a value-add to students learning.

I think that concern over whether using podcasts might decrease lecture attendance is frequently voiced. However, this review suggests that "...studies have shown little or no impact on attendance when lecture recordings are no impact on attendance when lecture recordings are made available on a class by- class basis...". Not to suggest that all podcasts are merely lecture recordings, they also point out possible uses of these audio recordings as advance organisers, as assignments, as supplementary material, along with as review of lectures.

The second point is the most facinating: whereby students are listening to these audio recordings on a computer, rather than a mobile device. Many people looking to leverage the benefits of this medium do so in the belief that students will be listening to these recordings "on the go". Therefore, it is astounding to read that this report finds that studies consistently report that people are listening to these podcasts in a home, or desktop computing environment.

Finally, the last three points indicate that these podcasts have no inherent value, but their value lies in how they are used. Making them easy to access, and be subscribed to, and designing them to be used to help the instructor and students reach their educational goals.

Plenty of food for thought here...

Download Whitepaper Itself:

CMU_Podcasting_Jun07.pdf (1.03 MB)

Additional Reading cited in the whitepaper:

Brabazon T (2006) “Socrates in Earpods?: The Ipodification of Education.” Fast Capitalism, 2(1). http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/brabazon.htm

Barrett MJ, Lacey CS, Sekara AE, Linden EA, Gracely EJ (2004) “Mastering Cardiac Murmurs:
The Power of Repetition.” Chest 126, 470–475. http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/abstract/126/2/470

Summary of the CELT conference by Jacek Jankowski of DERI

This blog posting by Jacek Jankowski of the eLite project in the Digital Enterprise Research Cluster (DERI) provides an insight into an observer's viewpoint of the CELT conference, in June. Jacek also publishes the abstract of the paper he presented at the conference, along with his colleagues, Jarosław Dobrzański and Filip Czaja.Their paper was entitled "Adapting informal sources of knowledge to e-Learning", and they presented during one of the sessions on the Friday morning of the CELT Conference. Jaroslaw provides a useful map of how the work of several of the e-learning cluster of projects in DERI relate to each other. These include Didaskon (an on-demand composition of semantic-enabled learning objects and services), S3B (the social semantic search and browsing framework), the Informal Knowledge Harvester (IKAR), and the Notitio.us service.

If this all seems like double dutch to you, there is an overview of the work of the eLearning Cluster at Deri available on youtube, where Bill McDaniel talks with Ina O'Murchu sharing his thoughts on elearning, and the work of this Cluster in general (see below).

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources

Alejandra has just pointed out this recently published report, by the OECD on Open Educational Resources. It is a 153 page document discusses the prevelance of individuals and organisations who are making their digital learning resources available for free.

"The report offers an overview of the rapidly changing phenomenon of Open Educational Resources and the challenges it poses for higher education. It examines reasons for individuals and institutions to share resources for free, and looks at copyright issues, sustainability and business models as well as policy implications.

This topic of Open Content follows on on from the CELT conference session on Creative Commons, Copyright, and the NDLR, where talks by Bob Clarke (UCD), Catherine Bruen (Trinity), and Maureen O’Sullivan, (NUIG) illuminated some of the issues involved. As such is it a useful supplemental reading.

The group behind the report consisted of Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu, UK, Susan D’Antoni from UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, Knud Erik Hilding-Hamann from the Danish Technological Institute, Francis Muguet from ENSTA, France, Sally Johnstone from University of Winona, United States, and James Dalziel from Macquaire University, Australia, amongst others. During the study the Secretariat has co-operated extensively with UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, but also with the European Schoolnet and the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), a project funded by the European Commission.

Download the full report at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf

Full Source: http://www.oecd.org/document/41/0,3343,en_2649_37455_38659497_1_1_1_37455,00.html

Design-Based Research EPSS

A link to a video collection on Design Based Research was just posted on the ITForum's mailing list by Thomas Reeves.
It points to a series of short interviews, conducted at AERA International Convention in 2006, put together by PhD students at the University of Georgia. The collection provides some specific insights from some notable researchers in the field of Design-based Research. It is a really useful resource to understand why this methodology is so helpful to those working towards understanding technology, and it's role in the learning process.

Watch a sample interview from the collection, such as the interview with Dr. Sasha Barab, (pictured right) from Indiana University, where he explains how he started in traditional research and why he felt unsatisfied with what it provided. He talks about how he moved to Design Based Research as an alternative methodology to explore the role of the student, the technology, the teacher and the learning activity.

Philosophy of Technology

Last Wednesday and Thursday, Roisin Lally and Aengus Daly, of NUI Galway organised an amazing two day conference on the Philosophy of Technology.

Don Ihde spoke as one of the keynotes at the event, and echoed some of the themes Stephen Heppell touched upon at the Learning Technologies conference. These related to ideas around sensory modalities, and how technology mediates the world for us in so many ways.

Some fascinating examples that Don Ihde drew upon included a recording from an artist/physicist by the name of Felix Hess. Hess has recorded the fluctuations of air currents (which generate sound in the inaudible infrasound end of the sonic spectrum) at 360 times the original speed, thus bringing these sounds up to audible levels. The noise of the Hess's recording that Don Ihde played during his talk sounded like a soft rain (and we know a thing or two about those in Galway, this summer). A deep droning hum that occasionally was heard was apparently the amplification of waves from storms in the distant North Atlantic, and the increased density of sounds heard about every 4 minutes was attributed to an urban population waking up and starting its day.

Don Ihde asked the question: “What if we were more scientifically multi-sensory?” In particular, he suggested that it is merely a cultural anomaly that we rely on visualisations to translate data for us, and we may have just as easily ended up using sound as our primary mechanism to interpret data. He referred to how his wife, and English language teacher used an oscilloscope to teach accents to non-native speakers- for them to see the sound, where they could not ‘hear’ differences. He made the point that you get richer knowledge by using multiple variations. Even more radically, he proposed that without technology there would be no science, as we would not have any instruments to mediate our experience (e.g. imaging technologies, telescopes, microscopes, etc.), and that science has always followed technological trajectories.

I wonder what conclusions Don Ihde would draw from NUI, Galway students’ uses of technology as part of their university ‘lifeworld’?