Tony Hirst has produced an great movie which presents an edupunk vision for content use. I do find it very seductive, but it is so different from what we are actually experiencing on the MOSAIC project, or is it? I think there has to ways to reconcile these too but I am not yet totally sure how – well I suppose that is what we are researching!
Yearly Archives: 2008
Course Writing Diary
We are still having problems with Sandie’s access to post to this blog, so here is her dairy for the last few months
2 April 2008
Searching for useful Anglo-Saxon and Old English websites to use for the MOSAIC project has been illuminating. As well as the better-known academic sites and databases, I’ve come across a number of sites produced by people not affiliated to an educational institution or publisher or such. Some of these are large, complex, and beautifully illustrated, clearly the work of dedication and devotion. I’m including a number of these in the course, and listing others for further exploration, because the enthusiasm is infectious and I hope that in looking at them participants will see that learning about the Anglo-Saxon world can be a great pleasure, and fun. One site contains photographs of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ villagers going about daily tasks, and includes detailed descriptions of the villagers and their respective occupations. That should be very useful for participants writing the diary’ of Anglo-Saxon life activity I hope to include.
10 April 2008
I’ve amassed a huge collection of possible existing online material on Anglo-Saxon history and Old English literature to use for the MOSAIC project. The problem will be in making a selection so that the course is not dauntingly huge, and the amount of required reading is of a practical length. Also, there is quite a lot of overlap between some sites. I might want to include one section of one site but to leave out others because they contain the same sort of material as another. I hope that when we start to contact the site owners and to clear copyright that they will allow partial as well as complete use of their respective sites.
20 April 2008
The units are coming together and I’ve managed to prune each one so that the required reading and other activities are comparable in amount (words) and duration (i.e. total study and participation time) to the other courses we run at this level. There is a difference between the structure of this course and the other (literature) courses I’ve written. The writing of the literature courses always comes before the production of the live online course, and follows a structure that I am familiar with and a set order. For this course, writing and production are chicken and egg. In the literature courses, participants read course materials I have written, follow links to external materials, and read textbooks. Activities might be reading, discussing, or writing criticism. In this course, there will be no textbook and in a sense all the activities are reading – reading online material. As I don’t know which sites will be embedded in the course so that they follow my introductions and links seamlessly, which will open in new windows, and which will be accessed by participants clicking on links, I don’t know where reading the course ends and reading as an activity begins. Also, of course, I’m still writing under the assumption that we shall be given permission to use the sites I’ve chosen, and that may not be the case. The thing to do will be to stay flexible and regard what I’ve written as a succession of drafts – starting points from which we can work but which will change and develop over time.
1 May 2008
Tact will have to be employed in the negotiations with copyright holders. Some of the websites that I’ve included in the units have minor mistakes of spelling, punctuation and grammar which I’d like to correct before they appear in our course, but I’d hate to give offense. I hope that the copyright holders will regard this as just another stage in production – an extra copy-edit – since we all make mistakes, and typos are hard to spot in one’s own writing.
10 May 2008
I think that the ten units now comprise a coherent course. It moves from introducing the Anglo-Saxon peoples at the points of their various arrivals in the British Isles, to their culture, their language, their literature, their dominance over the country and its establishment as
5 June 2008
Meeting with Marion and Tom in the TALL office.
Initial Impressions from the first Open Habitat Pilot
As the first Open Habitat pilot with Art & Design students draws to a close it’s worth reflecting on how the process has gone before we dive into the formal analysis of interview transcripts, surveys and building work in Second Life.
After 3 weeks of working infrequently in OpenSim and Second Life some of the Art and Design students seem to have got to that self motivating stage at which their creativity and their curiosity combine and the tutor facilitates when needed rather than leads by the nose. The atmosphere in the computer room and in Second Life (3 of the students were working from home) was relaxed and chatty. Not too much sign of the noob paranoia that could have bloomed from the first couple of teaching days.
A few informal impressions that I have come away with are:
1. Maybe ‘collaboration’ in these MUVE environments is more about discussion than construction. When people collaborate in world they are rarely to be found wrestling over the same polygons/prims. It’s more likely that one will be building while the other muses over what direction the build should take. In this way students can use the specific skill they are best at in a larger build (modelling, texturing, scripting etc) not unlike the RL equivalent of the trades.
2. Just how much of a motivator is knowing that there is a potential audience for your work in world? Does seeing those little green dots on the map inspire an individual to create or simply make them feel a little lonely? I can’t say that I have ever felt lonely using Adobe Photoshop (no map, no green dots) but as some of the students alluded to it’s an odd feeling knowing that there are people in world who have chosen not to talk to you.
3. If the students that have been inspired can produce work like the example below in three weeks, what could they achieve in three years? It’s the length of a degree after all and it’s worth remembering that even the most experienced Second Lifers (the penal inference here may be apposite) have only been in world for about this length of time.
Part III by Mark O’Brien. Work produced as part of the Open Habitat pilot with Leeds Metropolitan Art and Design students.
So how do we actually re-use content in practice?
Sandie has just submitted her first attempt at pulling together all the content for MOSAIC and has done an amazing job. However it is something to be reckoned with. As a starting point she has included the text from all the sources we want to use, so that a course which would normally be about 100-150 pages long, is 527 pages. It is a lot to review but this is really the only way to move this forward.
Once you have got over the sheer scale factor, you very quickly realise that there are a lot of questions that you have never really properly thought through before.
- For now working on the assumption that we can clear copyright for everything we want…do we actually want to have all of this “in” the course? Some things work best as external websites, yes they might change but for many of the activities we want the students to engage in, dealing with this change is part of the process.
- What do we do in using content that is valuable in the main but with small faults, spelling mistakes or even minor factual errors?
- Or when content is not wrong as such but our author is itching to just slightly rewrite it for style/clarity….?
- How do we decide when to include materials as a quote, as a pop up or as a document?
- If we do include it as a pop up do we keep their page design or try and make it look like our course?
- How do we most elegantly reference this stuff?
- Mash-ups ….do we even want to go here? There is definitely stuff in our course which we could start mixing up – but can we get the right permissions?
Well these are the ones we are grappling with for now, and I am sure there will be more as we progress, I’ll post any more questions and our answers up here as we decide them.
Where are planners now?
Much of the last little while has been spent writing our final documentation for this phase of the Phoebe project. Although report writing is not my favorite task it has been a really valuable experience to take the time to reflect on what we have a achieved with Phoebe specifically and how our understanding of design for learning has progressed over the last few years. It feels like a very long time ago that IMS LD came out and seemed to capture something about e-learning focussed on activities rather than content, making it the first standard to address the real issues….and depending on your interpretation acted as the catalyst for a lot of the work that has come since.
Over the next few weeks, I will try and blog about some of the conclusions we have reached as a result of Phoebe, but as a very good place to start I am going to point to what other people are saying about this area.
I think the first people to mention are the team working on Compendium LD at the OU. Grainne Conole has several presentations on this subject at Slideshare, although perhaps the best place to find out what she is saying is though her blog, and more specifically her posts on learning desgin. Martin Weller, has also blogged a fair bit on this, with lots worth checking out.
There is also a lot of useful information available on the site CETIS created after our planner review day. You can access all the presentations and I would really recommend reading Helen Beethams Breifing paper, an excellent summary of a complicated space.
Lastly a lot of us will be presenting at the European LAMS conference in late June. It is worth noting while a lot of the papers are focusing on LAMS (as you might expect) many explore learning design more widely. Finally there is a whole day on pedagogical planners which if it is anything as good as last year will be a great chance to find out more about state of the art thinking in this space.
Making the transition from the practical to the social.
There were two significant transition points for the Art & Design students involved in the first 2 days of Open Habitat’s first pilot. Take a look at Ian’s post for a description of what happened from a teaching practitioner’s point of view.
Here is my perspective on events with my researcher hat on:
This sequence of events slowly expanded the amount of technical and social options available to the students. They started in a safe, private, stand alone OpenSim environment in which they could learn building skills without getting tangled up with issues of identity and communication. The first transition point came when we paired the students onto OpenSim islands (i.e. each student was on an island with one other student). There was a distinct shift in atmosphere as they experienced the effect of being co-present in world and the real life room suddenly had a buzz in it as the students ‘met’ each other in the virtual world. This was amplified when a game of hide and seek was suggested and avatars started to dash around the screens in XY and Z dimensions (an excellent ‘quest’). The students flicked between real world and in world chat as the games progressed. One pair discovered that they could throw objects around in world and appeared to be attempting to trap each other inside large spheres in what looked like a surrealist version of a fight between two super heroes. This was transition point one, when the activity shifted from simply learning a piece of software to co-habiting the same virtual space with all the attendant social effects.
Stupid Windows
So I’m working away on Windows XP, and suddenly everything starts shutting down. Hitting “Cancel” on a save/don’t save/cancel dialog doesn’t cancel, but closes the application. Without any warning, I’m logged out. What the?..
It turns out that the other Dave in the office has mistakenly logged into my PC via remote desktop, rather than the department “Terminal Sever” – and Windows just kicked me out with no warning or explanation, and then locked me out!
I’m not happy – asides from losing the work from that save/don’t save/cancel dialog, it was so rude. It warned Dave that he was going to log me out, but didn’t give me the same courtesy…
In brighter news, the new Ubuntu release (Hardy Heron) apparently has some support for incorporating Ubuntu desktops as members of a Windows domain (i.e. logging in using Active Directory), using a program called Likewise. If I can get that working, I’ll definitely try using Ubuntu as my primary desktop.
TV is too passive.
Nice article by Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus discussing the similar social roles of gin and TV, and how we’re at the start of a big social change from passive to active:
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Linux driver status
Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted a status update on the Linux Driver Project, which is an effort to help hardware manufacturers support Linux – even write the drivers for them – hopefully alleviating the hardware support problems I mentioned in a previous post.
Greg states:
Linux supports more different types of devices than any other operating system ever has in the history of computing.
…which I believe. However, there are a few factors which I think are key to the perception of poor driver support:
- The kernels included in distributions naturally lag behind the current kernel release. The change to regular 2-3 month releases must have improved this, but it is still a problem compared to the competition. Most hardware for Windows and Mac comes with a disk of drivers you can install, so it doesn’t matter how old your OS is (within reason) – you can get your new hardware running on it. The Linux approach prefers drivers to be part of the kernel release, for reason
- Lagging support for highly visible hardware. Things like wireless network adapters and video capture devices are increasingly common and (it seems slightly redundant to say this) hard to do without if you particularly wanted them.
- Support for printers is not a kernel driver issue, Greg notes, but is often perceived as such, because on competing platforms it appears to be a driver issue. Users don’t typically care about this distinction, they just want it to work.
All in all I think that the situation looks good, with some significant improvements (e.g. in wireless) in recent kernels to be included in distributions soon…
Learning from the Games Designers
The designers of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games face a significant educational challenge. They need to efficiently and subtly teach new players how to use their game. This involves teaching players about the environment and the interface whist keeping them motivated and drawing them into the challenges of the game itself. This is situated learning in which the games designer is the ‘master’ and the player is the ‘apprentice’.
This educational challenge is similar to the one faced by those intending to teach in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE’s) such as Second Life. There are a significant amount of basic skills that need to be mastered before students can successfully engage in meaningful collaborative activity. The traditional ‘orientation’ process in Second Life is didactic and generic, teaching skills in an abstract technical manner. This has come about because unlike an MMO, Second Life has no shared goal, its possible uses are many and varied. However, a teacher who wishes to use Second Life should have a defined set of goals or learning outcomes they wish to achieve. They should be able to define task orientated activities which are relevant to the students motivations, for example, Art and Design students can be asked to compete to build the tallest monolith as a focus for learning building skills in Second Life rather than being given general instructions on how to create, scale and texture objects. In teaching terms this seems like an obvious approach but often when faced with a complex new platform teaching practitioners will often fall back on a basic instructivst style which may not align well with the approach generally taken at HE level for that discipline.
This is where we can learn from the MMO designers who are careful not to fall into this trap as it is likely to make a players initial engagement in a game seem like a chore. For subscription based MMOS such as World of Warcraft this would mean a high drop out rate and a massive loss of revenue, something that the HE sector can emphathise with.
The JISC funded Habitat project intends to learn from the game designers by capturing the processes in World of Warcraft in its initial stages and mapping the styles and types of task to the learning outcomes they fulfil. The data will be captured using pre and post activity questionnaires and video screen capture synchronised with video of the player at the computer. This data will then be used in the process of designing appropriate orientation sessions for pilots in Second Life with students from two disciplines: Art and Design & Philosophy. The Habitat project recognises that some of the most sophisticated collaborative learning spaces online at the moment are MMOs and that the design of these games can be a relevant model for the pedagogical structures that we put in place for the educational use of MUVEs such as Second Life.
Keep watching http://www.openhabitat.org to see how we get on.