Oxford’s IT in Teaching and Learning Awards 2007

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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

Windows vs Ubuntu – why switch?

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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.)

Issue MS Windows Ubuntu
Software management
  • Automatic updates for MS products only, unless you’re running multiple update programs
  • Add/Remove Programs tool works most of the time for some programs.
  • Periodically asks me whether I trust a security certificate.
  • Doesn’t really support adding new programs (get them from CD, or the web.)
  • Usually dumps an icon at the top of the start menu, making it a mess.
  • Central auto-update system for all software I reasonably might use (thousands of programs).
  • Cleanly installs and un-installs programs
  • Digitally signed, automatically authenticated repositories.
  • Places menu items in sensible categories – all from one simple to use program.
  • For the few cases where I want something not available in the system by default, I can usually add a new software source for it – problem solved
Malware scanner
  • Sophos anti-virus regularly brings my PC grinding to a halt.
  • No need for a virus scanner.
  • Maybe one will be needed in future – but not today.
Performance
  • Even with a rather generous 2GB RAM and 8 processor cores, I’m often waiting for simple tasks like a dialogue box to open or directory listing to appear.
  • That really bugs me.
  • Might be network related, rather than WinXP. One way to find out which…
  • My 1.5GM system slows down if I’m loading a multi-GB audio or image file, but that seems fair.
  • Switching between windows can be a bit twitchy if I’m not running Compiz Fusion – the new display acceleration system (which isn’t officially stable in Ubuntu).
Hardware support
  • Generally good.
  • I never managed to get bluetooth working, and getting the PC and my phone to talk through a cable was hassle, trying to find drivers/software.
  • Adding new devices can be rather hit and miss, with the problems of finding the right website->page->download needed.
  • When a device is supported in the kernel it’s usually seamless.
  • When not in the kernel, it can be as much hassle as Windows.
  • I got Bluetooth operational, although it was horribly slow – I suspect that’s just the format.
  • There are still lots of gaps in consumer hardware support (I expect recent moves from Intel and Dell will help close these gaps)
User runs the computer, or the other way around?
  • Do what Microsoft wants you to do – MS is the only producer of MS Windows
  • I get the impression that Windows Vista has lots of problems, heavy hardware requirements, but no compelling reason to use it.
  • In Microsoft’s business model everyone must “upgrade” to Vista – even the homepage for WinXP is covered in material steering you towards Vista.
  • There are many competing distributions of GNU/Linux, all essentially compatible with each other.
  • Differentiation on cost, support, features, architecture.
  • If you don’t like how things are heading on one distribution, you have a choice of others to use.
License costs
  • Software is not gratis.
  • Administrative overhead.
  • Perhaps a bigger issue for servers & CALs.
  • Pay more to run on multi-core/processor CPUs.
  • Software is gratis.
  • Pay for support if you want it.

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…

Writing web pages – the alt attribute is important.

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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…

Social Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying

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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)

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.

Pedagogical Planners of the future

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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.

Web 2.0 Analysis and Statistics

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You may be interested in my report on Web2.0 take-up and usage which I submitted to JISC a few weeks ago. It’s analysis of some data that blogged back in March. I included the responses to the data in the report. It was all very ‘participatory’. The report can be downloaded from here: www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurvey.pdf

Unruly students’ Facebook search

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The BBC has reported on the University proctors using Facebook to track down students involved in “unruly post-exam pranks” as TALL is actually located in one of the Universities two main exam buildings we have more experience than most in what these involve….However for isthmus I think it is a telling example of why students may not want their online social spaces used for learning.

Structure vs Community?

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This post assumes that you agree that collaborative/group work is a good method of online learning and that effective learning takes place when the individuals involved are part of a community. The ideas in this post are as a result of some in depth discussions with members of emerge. This post is not very well put together in it’s use of terms like ‘community’, ‘group’ and ‘collaboration’ but I hope you can see the basic principles I’m trying to work with.

The basic dichotomy?

  • Too much structure = restriction on community formation, groups stay in pre-defined ‘networks’ and do not thrive?
  • Too little structure = lack of direction, lack of coherence, community less likely to form?

We agree that it’s not possible to mandate a community but we understand that a community forms only when certain structures are in place. We are not sure exactly what those structures should be or who should be responsible for putting them in place(?) We are also not sure how much structure should be put in place by the educational institution or tutors and how much space/flexibility should be provided for the students to experiment with.

Some basic questions?
Where should the structure come from to encourage a successful community?

  • How much should come from the facilitators within the community?
  • How much should come from the members of that community?
  • How much should come from the nature of the tools used by that community?

What is the difference between a facilitator and a member? Can one become the other? In a community are we always both?

The rise of web2.0 and immersive environments brings the above questions to the fore. I think that it has only recently become practical for elearning to be relatively unstructured online as social networking etc has become more main-stream. We can see the emergence of online communities and the significance this has for learning but we don’t know precisely how to encourage the formation of communities (It may in fact be more of a craft skill than a science). We can see how engaged, motivated individuals are keen to communicate collaborate and participate, thereby forming communities (emerge is a good example) but we aren’t sure how to encourage/lead a bunch of slightly alienated first years to act in a communal manner.

I would argue that innovative work/research in elearning needs to find answers to the questions posed above. ‘Next generation’ elearning will increasing be about managing and facilitating collaboration and communities, about encouraging cohorts of students to move from being an institutional defined network of individuals to members of learning communities that reach beyond traditional institutional boundaries.

So, what would an attempt to answer these questions look like as a ‘project’? Well here is my first, very sketchy attempt to outline one possible route.

The focus would be on Second Life in this particular case but with the understanding that any educational activity in SL will probably actually be overseen by associated 2D systems (Moodle, FaceBook etc) As I mentioned in an earlier post I think that most healthy communities exist in more than one tool or environment. i.e Emerge uses Elgg, Elluminate Skype Email etc. The community has the same relationship to a single tool as a virus has to a single host. If the tool creates the right environment then the community will grow stronger. It will have stronger bonds and will potentially expand in numbers. As the community evolves it will move hosts/tools or at least shift its emphasis within a group of tools. For example moving from a Blog focus to a Skype focus and back again as ideas circulate.

Clearly it would be a good idea to look at other successful online communities to try and discover what kind of structures they have put in place. It would also be useful to gather together examples of current good/successful practice of teaching/group work in Second Life.

Next we would plan a series of group/collaborative activities that range from the highly structured (eg step-by-step with a tutor) through to the open (eg form your own group and build a demonstration of a scientific principle of your choice). We would then put a range of students through these activities to discover which combination of students and activities fostered community like activity.

The main outcome would be guidance on how to encourage online community and how best to run collaborative activities in an immersive environment. An ideal result would be a series of activity models that gradually move from the structured to the unstructured and draw a cohort of students through to a point where they are a relatively self-supporting community. We could learn from the gaming community in this respect. Below is a chart that shows the amount of time it takes to reach each ‘level’ in World of Warcraft.

Leveling_TimeFrom ‘Alone Together?’ Ducheneaut et al. 2006

As you can see the time/effort needed rises fairly steadily from level to level. This is good game design, could it be good course design? The game has the advantage over a traditional course in that there are explicit rewards every other level (spells, amour etc) is there an educational equivalent?

The higher the level the more likely you will need to be in a group to successful tackle and quest (activity). The groups need to be larger as you reach the ‘end’ of the game with groups of 20 or more some of the quests above level 50. The forming of these groups is organised by the players themselves and is the main reason that guilds (communities) form. So you start the game doing structured activates alone and could end the game collaborating as part of a community inventing methods and tactics. Sounds like a good educational model to me…

Scott Wilson: Using student-owned technologies in educational ict

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Here’s an interesting article on PLEs from Scott Wilson. As you would expect from someone who was a core member of the CETIS team that looked into PLEs for JISC, and the person who originated the ubiquitous future VLE, it contains a lot of the ideas that have informed our thinking on Isthmus. However the comment that intrigued me, which I have not seen so explicitly elsewhere was

“On a more basic level, the use of commercial third-party services has risks, such as a change in charging, or even services disappearing completely, and so there could be a role for universities in offering a free secure archiving service to that students would never lose access to things they have published. It is also increasingly on the agenda of universities to make access to basic administrative processes and information available through multiple channels and devices, such as using mobile phones, iPod, and RSS feeds.”

These are all things we are looking into for Isthmus – we’re drafting the survey at the moment so it will be interesting to see what our (admittedly non-standard) students make of these sorts of ideas.