Category Archives: Mosaic

Really reusing and learning design

Posted on by

Although we are only really halfway through the Mosaic project it is providing some real food for thought about how reuse actually works in practice and what it means for a lot of the assumptions underpinning other work we are part of through projects such as the LDSE and Phoebe in the area of learning design.

There is no question that engaging in reuse in earnest has clarified my thinking about the ways it really happens – we have always reused content up to a point but a commitment to producing a course which is made up of over 85% existing materials really focuses the mind.

Obviously at his stage  if the project all our findings about reuse are only from one course, but from what we have experienced so far I really believe that really reusing involves:

  1. Using content found through Google overwhelmingly more than that found in repositories
  2. Using anything that might enhance teaching, text, images, videos, databases, simulations, learning designs and very occasionally “learning objects”
  3. Using things that  may be large- a course, or small- an image, but the larger they are, the more likely they will be changed.
  4. Getting the materials into your course which ever way makes your life easiest, linking to the things you want to use or if you are really cutting edge bringing them into your space through mashups etc
  5. Working alone or collaboratively but more often in ad hoc rather than formal ways

I am sure none of this seems particularly radical, especially in the blogosphere, but what it does do is undercut certain assumptions which are in play in a lot of educational technology research and development projects.

  • Learning content is exceptional
  • It lives in repositories
  • It requires specialized metadata
  • It will be delivered to students through a course in a VLE

I think it can be all to easy to design tools for how you think the world should work, rather than how it is. It is too late to make learning content work this way – and thinking about how our field has changed in the last decade would you even want to?

Where are we up to with Mosaic

Posted on by

I have just sent the interim report for the Mosaic project to JISC, which has provided a good chance to think about where we have got to so far. The main news is we have decided to delay the launch of the course “Voices from the Past: The Earliest English Literature” until January 2009. This is due to several different factors, but the main one is the fact that it is going to take us a while to clear all the copyright – the first spreadsheet is complete and currently contains 206 items, a daunting number.

The process of copyright clearance is still the big unknown for this project, as really we are just at the start of what is probably going to be a long slow process. However, what is gratifying has been discovering that the content was out there in the first place, if not in the repositories or as learning objects, and that there was enough to make a coherent academically rigorous course.

I think it is worth noting that the success of the project thus far is substantially down to the efforts of Sandie Byrne our main “author” or in this case “compiler” or “linker”? There is no doubt that working in this way uses skills that many academics do not have and even for those that do, there is definitely a need to think more deeply about the cost benefit of reuse as opposed to creation, stepping away from the theoretical stance that it ought to be more efficient and examining the reality.

Visions of reuse

Posted on by

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!

Course Writing Diary

Posted on by

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 England, and finally the loss of that dominance. I would have liked to have set the scene more, with information about post-Roman Britain and the Romano-British, but there isn’t space. I have included some resources on the Vikings and Normans, and I hope that participants will be inspired to work both backwards and forwards from the period covered by the course. The other thing I must do is make sure that my introductory and linking text has some good illustrations, copyright permitting. Working with lavishly illustrated websites, it’s easy to forget that some will open separately, and I don’t want my words to look like the boring grey bits that people will skip!

5 June 2008

Meeting with Marion and Tom in the TALL office. Marion has brilliant ideas for the design of the course and the different ways in which the external materials will work. Most can be incorporated or open in new windows, and we shall be asking for permission to set up some mirror sites. It will be important to have the larger database-type sites (lexicons, dictionaries, lists) available to participants but not fixed in position so that they have to be navigated before the participant can move on, so those will open out of the introductory and link material. Tom is working on obtaining permissions, and has already produced a list of my suggested external sources and their respective owners. It’s huge!

So how do we actually re-use content in practice?

Posted on by

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.

Learning designs, representation and reuse (2)

Posted on by

In the Mosaic project we are moving on from looking at the course as a whole, to writing specific screens of content, and it is providing a good way of unpicking our assumptions about what Phoebe means for planning at the activity level in the context of a specific course. In our earliest thinking about Phoebe we always intended to have a “mind map” interface. We never did manage to implement this as we had enough other fundamental issues to address, but for me there is no doubt that it is at the more granular levels of learning where these sorts of representation have the most to offer.

As we have looked into how people design learning, both the the earlier LD Tools project that was done at OUCS, and our evaluations for Phoebe, it is clear that unless mandated externally, preferences in terms of representation are extremely diverse. A significant number of people do really want spacial map like plans, but an equal number would never plan that way, and prefer liner or tabular representations – all of which ignores those who use PowerPoint, paper, the back of a napkin….and the whole area of when designs move from just design into something you can instantiate.

So while we are working towards a tool that can cope with all the things outlined above….one day…. what does any of this mean in the shorter term? One thing that has served us well as Phoebe has progressed is acknowledging complexity, but trying to find simple solutions to the aspects of this space that can be tackled here and now.

Then chipping away at the larger more complex issues as we go….

So to take a simplifying step sideways when it comes to designing activities, in the sort of distance learning context we are designing for in Mosaic, this basically means writing instructions for students about undertaking activities that link to the tools they will need to use to accomplish them. Most of the time all you need to describe an activity is some words. So for Phoebe, just a box to write them in?

Although in the Phoebe team, we are resistant when people suggest that Phoebe is all about the guidance, I am starting to think that until we can really unpick the representation issues the most value to be found in Phoebe at the activity level is all about the right guidance. We also know that this guidance is the most powerful when it is very precisely targeted.  Coming back to the reuse observations I made at a course level, our authors definitely write better activities when they start with examples of similar activities used in other course, and they write the best activities when those examples are from courses in their own discipline.

So, ok this works  fine in a relatively small department such as ours –  look at the other courses we have built, get some ideas – but how do you scale this for national contexts, how do you find these “just right” examples? OK now we’re back at the more complex issues  – but certainly something that the wider D4L strand and other work at JISC and elsewhere has things to say about.

But blog posts shoudn’t be too long should they, and it is a Friday.

Writing a sample unit

Posted on by

I’ve produced a draft of the first unit. The problem was the sheer amount of information I wanted to include, and the number of websites on the subject. I want to make available to users as much as possible, and to help users to be aware of the length of Anglo-Saxon history, the diversity of Anglo-Saxon peoples, and the richness of Anglo-Saxon culture, but not to overwhelm them or so drown them in choices that they don’t choose any. I have selected sites to include on the basis that: they are informative; they are accurate (usually moderated in some way); they are accessible (don’t require existing knowledge, or translations; have a readable style which suggests an infectious enthusiasm); they are well designed and illustrated; they don’t repeat material used elsewhere in the unit; they have good links to other resources. I’m keeping a list of sites which cover the same material, though, in case any of those I have chosen reject our advances.

 

Marion Manton has talked to me about the ways in which we can organise the site; how we can incorporate such a wide range of different kinds of material, and maintain a narrative thread that will lead users through it. I need to make sure that I produce the units as a kind of marked-up script for TALL, distinguishing between the different sources of material, and identifying copyright holders, and indicating such things as where pop-ups might be needed to define terms, and which text goes with which illustration (and vice-versa). I’m using different fonts and indents, making editorial comments and recommendations in square brackets, and studding the pages with yellow highlighting. I hope it make sense!

Finding more content for Mosaic

Posted on by

I’ve been organising my Anglo-Saxon and Old English ‘finds’ into groups broadly corresponding to the unit divisions I plan to have on the course site. There will be some overlap, of course, but it’s helpful at this stage to have an idea of how whether there are roughly equal numbers of resources for the history, archaeology, language, literature, and other aspects of the subject. There are some excellent sites from which I want to use a lot of material. I hope we can get permission. Peter Barker has produced a great user-friendly online introductory textbook, Stuart Lee has introductory lectures as podcasts, and a virtual tour of British Museum holdings, and there are three very well illustrated ‘Anglo-Saxon’ daily life sites which would really help people to imagine what it felt to live in that period. The only resource I have not been able to find is the Hwaet! Anglo-Saxon/Old English site produced by Professor Catherine Ball, It used to be hosted by Georgetown University, but though it is referenced on practically all Old English portals, it no longer seems to exist, and Professor Ball no longer seems to be at Georgetown. It was such a good, wide, scholarly but accessible, and fun site that I would be very sorry not to be able to resurrect it in some way. The wonderful wizards of TALL are going to help me to look for it.

Learning designs, representation and reuse (1)

Posted on by

As part of the Phoebe project we have been doing a lot of thinking about how to represent learning designs, and certainly the outputs of the Mod4L project in the D4L programme, did a lot to unpack how complicated this can be. There is no question to that we are a lot clearer about the challenges in this area than we were before the D4L work started, and some interesting ways of thinking about the problem have emerged. In particular the distinction between designs for inspiration versus designs for implementation, or anything else, which seems obvious now, certainly helped me think about this all a lot more clearly. Also I think we are better able to articulate the levels of granularity at which design operates and are starting to explore what is the same and what is different when thinking about design at the level of a course, module, unit, or activity.

Taking a step back from considering this in theory I am also interested in this on a more practical note for the Mosaic project. The main requirement for this project is to reuse as much as possible to create a course. As a committed D4L alumni I really want to see if we can reuse learning designs as well as content, but what does this really mean in practice?

Ignoring for now the possibility of reusing external designs I want to try and work out how we can reuse what we have internally. We now have about 50 online courses and 8 in English literature alone – clearly in all of this there are some learning designs that we could reuse, but how to get at them? All our courses have specifications which act as one sort of learning design at the course level – and there is no question that our authors look at existing specs and get inspiration for their course, I don’t think this is perfect but at this level I think reuse at an inspirational level is working quite well. However there are also other levels where this sort of design inspiration would be valuable, where the way forward is a lot less straight forward. In our case I think design has a part to play most importantly at unit level (1 weeks online study) and activity level.

In the case of unit level design along the way we have actually developed a very clear model across all our English literature courses – much more so here than in any of the other disciplines. However this is not encapsulated anywhere in an easy digestible format – essentially each new author has looked at previous courses and thought, hmm I think I’ll do my course a bit like that. This works up to a point but is actually becoming less scalable the more courses we have.

To take a step sideways I have tried to put the structure with the content stripped out in a word document – perhaps with the idea of using it as a unit template for authors, but I am not sure that it makes sense anymore – partly because it is too abstract but also perhaps because as soon as you start to think of it as a template for a unit you want to start thinking about the next level of design mentioned above, the activities – and that is a whole additional level of multiplying possibilities.

And of course if we have done our job right with Phoebe, anything I am trying here should be possible to model in Phoebe. I have done this with the course spec level already, and there is a sharable template for anyone who is interested (note you will need a login to Phoebe for this link to work). I think I am going to have to think harder before coming up with a unit level template, but it should be do-able. At an activity level I am not sure we if we are entering the place where Phoebe stops being the right tool for the job – although in theory it could work?

Well that is where I have got to today. Clearly I need to explore this more but I am going to put this out there anyway as if I don’t do this now it will remain in my drafts folder for ever more.

So more thinking to be done – better representation for unit level design – how to capture activity level design and how to do any of this in tools like Phoebe.

Finding reusable content

Posted on by

I have been looking at online resources on the pedagogy of online distance learning, and portals to accessible, free educational material. Some of them are a little disappointing. Many lead to broken links, or to chains of other lists of links, many of which turn out to be dead ends. Online resources for Anglo-Saxon culture and history, and Old English texts, however, have proliferated, and many are very good indeed. Catherine Ball’s website, formerly hosted by Georgetown, which I hoped to suggest that we incorporate, has gone, but Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English has a range of resources ideal for our purposes, and Dr Stuart Lee, of Oxford University Computing Services, has produced a wonderful and accessible online Old English coursepack , and has posted a lecture series as webcasts. There are also readings of Old English texts and a good selection of translations for comparing and contrasting, and some stunning photographs of artefacts and archaeological sites. The difficulty (aside from obtaining copyright permissions)will be in choosing between them. I hope that the authors of the sites I ask to include will see the value of bringing the information and teaching together, and making it freely available.