TALL blog

As I collected my daughter from nursery the other day I was struck by how they were using digital photography and the associated easy editing and printing to decorate the classroom.

When I was at school the walls were decorated with our artwork and it was part of what made my classroom feel like a place where I wanted to be. Now my daughter’s nursery not only decorate the walls with the outputs of what they have been doing, but pictures of them doing it. It is no longer only the artwork you can see on the walls, but the class dancing to the drummers who were at the carnival, visiting the theatre – or just pictures of all the kids eating their favorite food.

These images are just colour print outs, the quality is pretty bad, but it is good enough, you can see what is happening and that it is her and her friends doing it. This is their nursery full of the things they have been doing.

We work in adult distance learning so in the end everything we do has to be online (and not pitched at a 3 year old) but I think there are opportunities with these tools in terms of social presence and belonging that we could be exploring.

Important information for privacy advocates and paranoiacs alike in an article over on Wired (based on the EFF‘s freedom of information requests), about the FBI’s Digital Collection System Network:

“the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.”

If we can assume that the system is secure and the authorisation process (via the courts) is reliable, it looks like a really impressive law enforcement tool. However, software is usually buggy – so open to attack, and the courts don’t seem to matter – so the US government can spy on anyone they like.

Between this, free speech zones, detention without charge, and extraordinary rendition, it makes me worry about the state of the US (and the UK’s involvement). It even makes me nervous about the holiday in the New York I have booked.

This autumn we are offering more short courses than ever before, including 7 new courses

10th September

Brontës (NEW)
Learning to Look at the Visual Arts
New Economic Powers
Study Skills

12th September

Jane Austen
Learning to Look at Western Architecture
Philosophy Gym
Political Philosophy

17th September

Exploring Roman Britain
Islamic Art and Architecture (NEW)
Victorian Fiction: an Introduction (NEW)

19th September

Contemporary British Fiction; an Introduction (NEW)
Critical Reading
Durer to Bruegel: Northern Renaissance Art c.1480-1580
Learning to look at Modern Art (NEW)
Philosophy of Religion
Reality, being and existence: An introduction to metaphysics

24th September

Philosophy of Mind
Theory of Knowledge (NEW)
Visual Arts of India

26th September

Playing God: an introduction to Bioethics (NEW)

For more information on these courses or to enrol on a course visit Online courses at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education, email the online courses office or telephone +44 (0)1865 280974.

Andreas Lloyd has made his thesis on the social dynamics of the Ubuntu community available.

I’ve not read it all yet, but an initial look suggests that it relates quite well to the intersection of two strands of endeavour in TALL – online communities (who sometime meet in person – how do they work, are they useful for education?), and computer tech (what tools and services can we use/adapt/create?).

NB: Andreas has, with community spirit, released it under a Creative Commons license, meaning that anyone can redistribute it and add their comments.

Not my title but the title of a recent JISC podcast in which myself and JISC strand manager, Lawrie Phipps, discuss the nature of Web 2.0 and its possible relevance for education. We both take a cautious liberal view that recognises the potential in this new style of communicating and sharing whilst being clear that institutions can’t simply dive-in and appropriate the emerging online culture which seems to be in a permanent state of flux. If you are not sure what Web 2.0 is all about then this may be the non-technical introductory podcast for you.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2007/08/podcast07lawriephippsdavidwhite.aspx

TALL and colleagues were recently runners up in two categories of Oxford’s IT in Teaching and Learning Awards 2007.

Administration, support services or research

Runner-up
Department for Continuing Education website
Matt Street, David Balch, Sean Faughnan, Michael Brooks
http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk

Special award for best Teaching and Learning project created with assistance

Runner-up
TALL – Good practice in citation
This course is an introduction to the issues surrounding plagiarism.
http://www.tall.ox.ac.uk/plagiarism

For further information on the awards go to
http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/groups/oxtalent/itawards/winners2007.html

I want to re-install my work PC – get rid of Windows and install Ubuntu. Here’s why…

Around 5 years ago, after using AmigaOS, MS DOS, and MS Windows (versions 3.1, 95, 98, ME, and NT, 2000) , I started playing with Linux (or GNU/Linux if you prefer). I started with Mandrake (now Mandriva), and Linux From Scratch (compiling and setting up the whole operating system from source code), and I learned a lot about how a Linux system is put together, how software is developed and managed, and how PC hardware is often poorly put together, neglecting industry “standards” in favour of “does it work on Windows?”.

It seemed clear 5 years ago that Linux could do all I want a computer do, do it well, and maybe even gratis. The only problem was that it took a lot of effort to get to the system set up correctly in the first instance. Once it was ready it was great, but getting ready took time, research, and effort – that’s fine for messing around at home, but not so good for getting work done.

I now run Ubuntu Desktop Linux on my home PC, with virtually no effort required to run it – as these things should be.

My work PCs have always run MS Windows. Currently it’s Windows XP, and gives me hassle most days.

I don’t want to write reams of prose about the two platforms, so I’ll just describe the key issues that bother me, comparing Windows to Ubuntu:

(Apologies for the odd table, not suited to this thin theme.)

Some of these problems could be decried as “standard industry practice”, but I see Free software changing the standard practice for the better.

So, if I want to use Ubuntu at work, what will I have to do? I’ve started listing up key Windows-Linux interoperability issues that will need to be solved – and their solutions – but that’ll have to wait for another post…

There’s a nice article about writing for the web on A List Apart, with this anecdote about including alt attributes to provide content for visually impaired users:

“If a user is blind,” I reasoned, “what does he care that I have a photograph of the university tower on my website?”

My fellow designer shrugged. “Well, I guess if you don’t really care about what the image says,” she said slowly, “you really don’t need it in the first place.”

I’m generally pretty good at including useful alt text, but this is a great way of saying why we should do it…

What can the massively multiplayer game ‘World of Warcraft’ teach us about how to facilitate learning communities? Below is a video of the talk I gave at the Games Learning and Society conference in Madison Wisconsin. (Running time 26 minutes)

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If you want more details before watching here is the abstract…

This presentation is an evaluation of ethnographic field work conducted in and around the World of Warcraft MMO. The study focuses on the motivation of guild members to construct communities of practice both to learn and to socialize. This suggests that the guilds can act as useful models for understanding how online social networks function and how they could influence the ideology of next generation e-learning services.

Successful collaborative learning can only be sustained if the individuals involved feel part of a group or community in which they can trust. The most robust communities tend to be those that form via a collective aim or interest; their formation has a social underpinning and is not totally utilitarian.

If an aspiration of e-learning is to move away from simply providing online programs of study, demarcated by subject, to increasingly fluid spaces in which students can build social networks, then we need to understand how contemporary collaborative and participatory environments encourage the formation of these types of groupings.

Some of the most sophisticated examples of online community creation and management take place in and around MMO environments. The current apex of this field is the ‘guild’ system which suffuses the World of Warcraft MMO. Guilds are effectively goal-oriented clubs or societies, many of which utilize the latest Web 2.0 technologies out-of-game and multi-channel text chat and VOIP systems in-game both to organize and to socialize.

This paper is based on data collected over a period of six months from an ongoing ethnographic study comprising self-reflexive observation and semi-structured interviews conducted in World of Warcraft and face-to-face with guild members. This extends into a study of the social software used out-of-game by community members that acts as a communication base for the guilds.

The data is evaluated using Wenger’s notion of communities of practice, which highlights the interweaving of goal-orientated learning and the immersion of those participating in trusted social networks. This has the effect of generating and communicating what Bourdieu calls cultural capital, the lack of which often makes online learning a poor second to traditional face-to-face learning.

The challenge here is how to abstract underpinning principles and practice that will be of value to e-learning away from the immediate goals or ideology of a particular MMO. This is not to suggest that killing dragons in collaborative groups is the future of e-learning. Instead it proposes that much can be gained from reflecting on the success of MMOs in motivating the formation of vibrant online communities and the ways in which these communities interweave socializing and learning.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a very interesting meeting in London organised by James Dalziel of LAMS fame. Bringing together people working on Pedagogic Planners from all over the world it included Phoebe, the project we’re working on, the London Planner, Compendium at the OU, LAMS Lite, Remath, among others.

What was fascinating was both how different the planners and the problems that they were trying to solve were, but also how much common ground there was.

We have been working on the Phoebe pedagogic planner for 18 months now and in that time it feels like the amount of people looking at this space has grown immeasurably. There is no question that there is something very attractive about the idea of a tool that can help people design effective learning experiences (whether supported by technology or not) but what this should be is still the million dollar question.

I am more convinced than ever before that there is never going to be one tool that solves everybody’s problems – if only because we already know that everybody does not want the same thing from a tool operating in this space, and that people will only use a tool that does what THEY want it to do. However as existing projects address different parts of this continuum what is clear is that we need to find a common language to allow these tools to join up. Perhaps this is IMS LD but I think at the moment it is far from clear that this really addresses the issues at hand.

Interesting themes coming out in initial discussion are:

• The levels tools operate at: Organisational > Course/Unit/Module > Session/Week/Lesson > Activity/Learning Object/Simulation

• The types of support they provide: Ranging from “smart” systems that provide guidance based on your input to those that allow the practitioner more freedom and access to information but may not be supportive enough.
• The examples they point to: where are the good learning designs and who judges what is good?
• The role of theory: can this be made really useful to practitioners?

A final output of the meeting was an attempt at some sort of domain map with the various projects we knew about placed onto it. This posited

Information and advice > Reflect and decide > Automated implementation

fed into by various conceptual frameworks (including pedagogy and attitude change as well as LD structures)

I think the 3 broad areas simplify what is in reality some very complicated processes and these may need to be broken down further to be in any way meaningful, but not sure I am yet ready to suggest how.

Incidentally in the categories above, Phoebe deals with the Session/Week/Lesson > Activity/Learning Object/Simulation level of design, is more free than smart and supports the information and advice and reflect and decide stages of the continuum above.