Disappearing digital resources

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One of the most striking aspects of our JISC funded Open-Educational-Resources Impact study was the extent to which using digital resources has become embedded in teaching practice. Digital resources are ‘disappearing into use’ as they become part of the fabric of higher education.

We interviewed strategists, academics and students to find out how they found and used digital resources. It wasn’t surprising to find that students were Googling for anything they could get their hands on but the extent to which academics are doing this as well was unexpected. The difference between the groups was that staff have the expertise required to critically evaluate what they find while the students are nervous about waiting-time using resources which might prove to be off-topic. They are also uncertain of how to cite non-traditional resources or if they should admit to using them as all. This is a good example of where digital literacy and traditional research skills are both essential.

But what about licensing? Well, those whose practice was highly visible on the web and therefore closely tied to the reputation of their institution were keen to use openly licensed materials. E.g. an online distance elearning team or groups that make modules which are rereleased out onto the web. Those in course or programme teams were less focused on licensing because their practice is largely private – within the VLE, in the lecture theatre etc. In day-to-day teaching the technicalities of reuse come second to the potential of a resource to make the student’s learning experience richer.

The OER Impact project analysed the link between the value of use and its impact in teaching and learning. There is a full research report and a shorter ‘accessible’ report available for download from JISC. Or you can watch the short video below to get an overview of our findings.

The video is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY)

OER Impact project team-

Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning:
Mr David White
Ms Marion Manton

Learning Technologies Group:
Dr Elizabeth Masterman
Ms Joanna Wild

The cost of Residency?

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We like to think of online platforms usurping each other as we move to the latest and greatest of a particular format, leaving the previous version eroding in a Kipple like fashion – the MySpace to Facebook to Google+ narrative. I’m not convinced that this is a useful story and wonder if the web is better thought of as an ever expanding space rather than a migrating community. I suspect that Google+ for example will be inhabited by more than the diaspora from Facebook and Twitter. In fact what interests me about Google+ beyond ‘circles’ is the way in which the platform has expanded the geography of social web so massively in such a short space of time.

Estate agent window smashed

Given this Google’s new platform highlights the impossibility of residing everywhere online, of having a live profile in all of the key places – it’s time-consuming to maintain a meaningful presence in one social media space let alone two or three.  To keep things practical you have to decide where you are going to reside online and have a reasonable idea of what role that residency will play in your life: personal, professional, academic, escapist or a delicate cocktail of the above (and we all know how dangerous cocktails can be). To counter the potential alienation of residing online it is useful to reflect on what your motivation to engage is: maintaining f2f relationships, living-out ‘strong-tie’ relationships, building a professional network, building a personal learning network or just good old fashioned self promotion in the hope of invites to warm places… Time is the non-negotiable cost to Residency and to maintaining fulfilling relationships of any form. The way this precious resource is spent, especially in the context of learning, needs to be better understood by those of us promoting the idea of digital literacy.

We are just coming to the end of the pilot phase of the JISC funded Visitors and Residents project framed round my original idea for understanding individual’s engagement with the web. The project is in partnership with the OCLC and for the pilot phase we interviewed students from the US and the UK in late-stage high school and first-year University. There are many interesting trends emerging from the project and it is the case that some students are more Resident than others. Most of our participants talked about the cost of being Resident online in some form which has led us to include ‘time-wasting’, ‘distraction’ and ‘addiction’ into the code-book we are using to analyse the interviews.

I thought like coming into A levels, I’d need to be able to focus without having Facebook at the back of mind, because at GCSE, you know when you have coursework, I’d always go, okay I’ll go on Facebook, I’m going on MSN, I’d just stay logged in and then I’d do my coursework on the side, but I just ended up staying on Facebook.

UKS6

I live on my email and Facebook also, which I’m not as proud of.  Just because it’s a time vortex.

USS3

I am not that bad with Facebook but I get annoyed sometimes … I find myself being on there for more than 15 minutes or 20 minutes. It is pointless, it is a waste of time and then I think sometimes I get annoyed with how long I can spend on the computer when I could be probably doing something else.

USU1

Essentially if your normal mode of operation is mainly Resident then it’s difficult to go online and get on with activities that require a Visitor approach without checking-in to all your Resident spaces and risking distraction. The participants in our study are well aware of this and one even put her Facebook account on ice so that she could pursue her learning more effectively. It’s a tough decision though as much homework is discussed and possibly collaborated on (participants are always wary of this idea as it is unclear where collaboration merges into plagiarism) in Facebook IM. If your friends aren’t logged into Facebook at that moment then a text message goes round asking them to get online so that work can be tackled.

People do post a Facebook thing so and saying something like, “Everybody in my Biology class, what was it we were supposed to be doing?”

UKS8

Like usually with homework I usually can do it myself.  But like, like sometimes I will just like IM my friend on Facebook and will be like, “Hey do you know how to do this?”

USS6

Facebook messaging has really replaced email in the lives of students.  So that’s – if it’s more something that we’re trying to structure and actually build upon over some time, it would be a Facebook message…

UKU5

When the Visitors and Residents idea is discussed it is often with the implication that becoming more Resident or facilitating that process is going to be of value. In my video discussing V&R I make the point that a Visitor approach to formal education is more likely to be successful than a Resident one given that all students are likely to end-up isolated at a desk in an exam room at the end of their courses – i.e. the education system assesses our ability to be Visitors not Residents.

We also have to consider which mode of engagement is most appropriate for the world of work and perhaps more importantly which mode best supports individuals as citizens or as members of a range of communities? Thinking in terms of mode-of-engagement is one way of framing our approaches to digital literary– the definition of this as taken by the JISC strand of digital literacy projects being appropriately broad:

“..digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society..”

Characterising digital literacy as a  simple drive towards Residency would be dangerous; digital literacies are required and acquired as much at the Visitor end of the continuum as they are at the Resident. If we are attempting to support students and equip them with relevant digital literacies we need to be more precise about the value of ‘just-visiting’ or ‘moving into’ particular online spaces. Our project is mapping motivations-to-engage and evaluating a wide range of approaches.  I’m hopeful that we will be able to develop methods by which individuals and groups can plan their travels through the ever expanding online landscape.

 

Image credit:  CC – Some rights reserved http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigsonthewing/3241588102/

Maths in the City website re-launches with new features

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As a prelude to announcing the competition winners, Maths in the City is happy to announce the launch of an updated website.

Visit the interactive map on our homepage and go on a mathematical tour of cities around the world. Join the adventure today and shine a mathematical spotlight on your city.

Amongst the top new features we’ve added are:

  • New homepage: find maths in your city and around the globe using the interactive map
  • Maths in the City competition entries: these sites are now visible. If you entered our competition, find yours and send the link to your friends and family
  • Snapshots: this is a new kind entry that you can add to the map, see this page for details
  • Rate Sites and Snapshots: you can now rate Sites and Snapshots using our new five star rating feature – log in to start rating your favourites
  • “Recommended” content: gold icons indicate a Site or Snapshot that has been approved by a Mathemagician because of its high quality, see this page for details
  • Improved image uploader: it is now easier to upload images into your Site or Snapshot
  • Improved equation display: if you’re including mathematical equations in your Site or Snapshot, they will display better. For those of you who like knowing this kind of stuff, we’re using MathJax to support LaTeX

New courses: lose yourself in the 19th century and find the great american novel

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NapoleonIt is that time of year again and we are in the middle of our online course launches for another term.  We are offering  40 courses this term including our new courses in Nineteenth Century European Literature,  Age of Revolution and  The Modern American Novel: an introduction.

Developing the first two in parallel was a wonderful experience and I would recommend anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the era to study them together.  When the novels you are reading are written by people living the history you are studying it gives a whole extra dimension to each.  The 19th century French society that Madame Bovary inhabits is shaped by the revolutions that had gone before – radical or otherwise.

The Modern American novel takes you from Gatsby to Beloved and American Pastoral  – a completely different world but just as fascinating.

So if you would enjoy exploring these worlds over the next couple of months or are interested in Archaeology, Art History, English literature, Creative Writing, Economics, History, Local history or Philosophy do take a look at what is available.

Image: napoleon / Sarah / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Maths in the City competition is open today

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Join Marcus du Sautoy on a mathematical adventure in the city. Enter our competition and you could win great prizes including a subscription to Nature and even naming a mathematical object.

Open to all ages, competition entries need to show:
•    an interesting example of maths in the urban environment, or
•    a clear explanation of some maths you see in your city, or
•    a great way of demonstrating your mathematical idea on the streets.

Entries will become part of a virtual mathscape of cities around the world.  And finalists will be invited showcase their entry at an event in Oxford and meet Marcus du Sautoy.

Anyone is welcome to enter the competition, you can either enter individually or in a group, and the stories can come from any city in the world.

Tell us your favourite stories of maths in the city by visiting www.mathsinthecity.com.

The competition runs until noon 3 May 2011.

Marcus du Sautoy points up and mathematicians look up

Marcus du Sautoy and his mathemagicians

The Learning Design Support Environment and Curriculum Design

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I am doing a presentation on the LDSE for the JISC curriculum design strand which is also open to others if they are interested.  So if you are, here are the details and how to sign up.

The Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) Project is working with practising teachers to research, and co-construct, an interactive Learning Design Support Environment (LDSE) to scaffold teachers’ decision-making from basic planning to creative TEL design.  The LDSE captures and represents a user’s learning design (at module and session level), structuring the user input so that it is amenable to analysis (in terms of learning experience and teaching time), and can also be adopted and adapted by others. Key areas the LDSE is investigating include:

  • Forms of representation of learning designs
  • An ontology for learning design
  • Designing at Module and Session levels
  • Importing and adapting an existing design
  • Selecting from existing teaching-learning activities
  • Editing the properties of TLAs
  • Extensive advice and guidance
  • Analysis of teaching costs and learning benefits
  • Sharing specific and generic patterns
  • Exporting a design to an institutional format

This session will provide a tour of the latest version of the LDSE highlighting the features italicised above, and allow time for discussion around the many areas where the interest of the LDSE and the Curriculum design projects  align.  In particular:

1.       How we model principles in educational design – What important principles do you use to support the learning design process?

2.       Guidelines and toolkits for staff – Could the LDSE tools support or work alongside tools being developed by projects?

3.       Joining up systems – Can our inputs and outputs work together? How do we join up institution-level business processes with learning-level design?

4.       Taking things forward – How can LDSE support and inform the work of the CDD programme? And vice versa?

 

Further information about the LDSE project: www.ldse.org.uk

Recording now available at:

https://sas.elluminate.com/mr.jnlp?suid=M.0E76AD7901018C376B4022FB9F6273&sid=2009077

OER Workshop

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reuse

Last week we ran our first workshop exploring OER use with 9 academics across a variety of institutions.  They were chosen to be practitioners with  little previous exposure to OER – reflecting the starting position for the majority of HE.  This was a very hands on session where we asked participants to look for OER with a particular teaching session in mind (although without precluding the discovery of things they might want to use elsewhere), hoping to understand processes at least somewhat close to actual practice.

It is obviously too soon to draw any firm conclusions at this point, but a few themes that emerged were:

  • Everyone reuses all the time, but not necessarily OER.
  • All aware of issues around copyright – but not always how best to manage them.
  • There is simultaneous more and less out there than you might expect – VERY dependant on what you are looking for.
  • Similarly contradictory evidence around where best to search, for somethings Google is best, others found specialist sources a revelation “why didn’t I know about JORUM before?”
  • The form of OER is vital to how it is reused,  wholesale reuse most likely with video and multimedia you cannot make yourself, textual resources are often used more for inspiration than anything else.
So at the moment just impressions from the day.  We are running our second workshop on the 4th which should provide more data to explore. Image: Reuse / / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Education should make us anxious

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This is my #500words for the Purpos/ed project:

Firstly I’d like to make it clear that I think the education system in the UK is excellent.

We hold education to be so important that we’ve made it a legal requirement to engage with it and to a large extent any failings in the system are a reflection of larger societal challenges. Education as a system is woven into these challenges but cannot solve them directly. After all we don’t appear to become less greedy and self-serving the more educated we get…

Much of the recent concerns around the sanctity of education are centred on Higher Education, a level so luxurious by global standards that our complaints look like the whining of the over-privileged.  It is a pity that it’s only when the cash stops flowing that we are suddenly keen to discuss what values we stand for. Ironically our debate in this sense has been economically driven.

My view is that education should make us anxious: anxious to discover new ways of understanding and influencing the world.  It should challenge our ways of seeing and force us to question our identities and our positions. Education should disrupt as much as it builds, ultimately teaching how to learn not what to learn. Individuals leaving formal education should be agile in their thinking and equipped with intellectual tools which broaden their choices. They should retain that anxiety and have an understanding of their incompleteness in a less than perfect world.

Ok, it’s easy for me to spout ideological niceties in a blog post so I will step down from my white-collar-Guardian-reading-degree-educated soap box for a moment and ground my thoughts.

Unfinished

http://is.gd/hlbZQQ CC - Piano Piano!

Clearly if anyone is to survive the form of education I have described they will need a helping hand and a nurturing environment. What students want from the education system is generally structured, organised and goal orientated, in essence, ‘formal’.  And yet we understand that today’s students need to be agile, not relying solely on traditional institutional structures.  That sets an interesting challenge for institutional education. How do we provide rigorous structures, those protected ‘spaces’,  whilst equipping our students with the ability live-out the on-going process of being and becoming in a world of constant change ?

 

This is not a problem to solve but a tension that can be successfully negotiated given a shared understanding of purpose.  The shift towards a market place model of Higher Education has woken us from our stupor and forced us to reassess what we value. Both those who bring structure and those who seek to disrupt can have a common purpose in a system which rightly contains many opposing elements and, much like ourselves as learners, will never be complete.

 

Enter our competition and join Marcus du Sautoy on a mathematical adventure of the city

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Our cities are filled with buildings, roads, cars, buses, trains, bikes, parks and gardens. They are crisscrossed with power, water, sewage and transport systems. They are built by engineers, architects, planners, doctors, designers and artists.

Our cities are shaped by our environment, our society and our culture. And each and every part is built on mathematics. To reveal the maths hiding in our urban surroundings we have just launched a new project: ‘Maths in the City’. The project is led by Marcus du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Marcus and a team of volunteer mathematicians from Oxford will develop walking tours of Oxford and London taking the public on a mathematical adventure of the city.

Marcus du Sautoy and mathematicians looking at the Bridge of Sighs, Oxford
Bridge over troubled mathematicians

But we need everyone’s help! In April we are running a competition, open to all, asking people to share their mathematical stories of the city. It might be a piece of interesting architecture, mathematical sculpture or the maths behind something more mundane, such as traffic lights. We’re looking for:

• interesting examples of maths in the urban environment,
• clear explanations of some maths you see in your city,
• great demonstrations of your mathematical ideas on the street.

 

 

Winning entries will become part of our virtual mathscape of cities around the world and will help Marcus and his team develop their walking tours. And, of course, you can win great prizes! Including:
• a subscription to Nature, kindly provided by Nature Publishing Group,
• best-selling popular science books, including the ‘Last Word’ series kindly donated by New Scientist,
• having a mathematical object named after you,
• and showcasing your entry with other finalists at an event in Oxford in June with Marcus and his team.

Anyone is welcome to enter the competition — young, old, students, teachers, researchers, member of the public, journalists…— and the stories can come from any city across the UK or around the world. The competition is open for entries from 4 April to 3 May 2011 – you can find out all the details, including some ideas to get you started at http://www.mathsinthecity.com