Thinking about student ratings

There are many ways in which student ratings cause controversy

Seldom do those who collect such ratings do not subject their planning, delivery or data analysis to the same rigorous critiques which might be applied to research survey data, yet too often the "findings" are appropriated to measure or manage teachers, or to shape and revise the curriculum.

This area needs a lot if thought, and is worthy of greater, more considered, discussion. As ever our reliable commentator at Tomorrow's Professor, is waiting in the wings to point to some insights.

 

 

SIGCSE 2012 - another outing for the Web Science Curriculum

Web Science (and me) are going to SIGCSE 2012

There is quite a bit of Web Science in the conference this year - although it is hardly taking centre stage.

This blog will be refined over the next couple of days but here we are for starters...

ACM SIGCSE is the Special Interest Croup for Computer Sciecne Education - so as someone who is working in computer science, teaching and researching in computer science and web science, and particularly interested in computer science education and the web science curriculum, you can understand that I would be pitching up to take the pulse of the community.

On top of that, I am able to present the paper which I co-wrote with Michalis Vafopoulos - now of the university of central greece, titled

Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science - the paper is in ECS eprints http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22710/ and will also be in the ACM conference proceedings.

This paper develops further some of the ideas expressed in our highly commended paper presented at the 2011 Web Science Conference in Koblenz last year  Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts which is also available from ECS  sprints  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/ , direct from the Web Science Trust,  http://journal.webscience.org/439/ or via the ACM digital library.

Web Science Perspectives

Pre-conference

Open Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computers and Society (SIGCAS)

This session is hosted by the current char and the immediate past chair of the ACM Computers and Society Special Interest Group. With the interdisciplinary nature of web science it is always interesting to see how different people are talking about changes. I am hoping to have some time catching up with these folks

SIGCAS is the ACM Special Interest Group that addresses the social and ethical consequences of widespread computer usage. SIGCAS' main goals are to raise awareness about the impact that technology has on society, and to support and advance the efforts of those who are involved in this important work.

Our members are computer professionals from both industry and academia, as well as ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and others. We welcome students from a variety of disciplines. Our areas of involvement include computer ethics, universal access to computer technology, security, privacy, and reliability. We collaborate with other ACM bodies that are engaged in related work, such as USACM, SIGITE and SIGCSE.

Ben Schneiderman provides a testimonial for the group on its web site http://www.sigcas.org/ which is also testament in a way that Web Science definitely belongs in the SIGCAS community, since probably the first time that the ACM community go a formal heads up on the emerging importance of web science and its implications for the broader computer science community was in the paper in CACM which Ben published in 2007 titled Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science.

Main Program(me) - a timeline view

 

Thursday:

Plenary Session
Keynote Speaker: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - I have a doctoral student (Jian Shi)  looking at students learning programming - so this is really relevant to his area of study

this presentation took the perspective of designing learning rather than delivering teaching, and there was a lot of emphasis on reframing the learning experience - for example flipping the classroom, and critique approaches.

some time was spent talking about team software engineering projects, and various items of advice on how to run sessions - allocating peer marks from a budget, advertising to get external clients - keeping team sizes at 3,4 and 5 with  preference for 4 team memnberts

recommended book to emerge Peopleware by Decosta - have put it on my Kindle Wishlist! should also put time to read on my wish list ;-)

 

Computer Science Curriculum 2013 – Reviewing the Strawman Report from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force

This is really relevant to the pitch we are making in our paper, so should be interesting.

http://cs2013.org/

presenters of a very useful (and well attended) session were Mehran Sahami (stanford) Steve Roach (U Texas at El Paso, Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas, San Pablo Catholic University, David Reed Creigton University

The Strawman report - http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/CS2013/strawman-draft/cs2013-strawman.pdf

There was an introduction from Sahami, followed by a presentation of the Body of Knowledge by David Reed

The body of knowledge is chapter 5 in the Strawman report

The consultation on this has been widely representative of different sizes and types of institution, but entirely US centric.

this may not be true as far as the external reviewers were concerned.

main points which came up - revision of BOK, there is a move away from programming to principles to software development fundamentals which is independent of paradigm

seeks to broaden thinking away from equating programming fundamental with introductory programming courses

information assurance and security

parallel and districted computing

networking and comms - replaces net-centric

platform based development (elective only)

curriculum organisation

there tiered classification of BOK units

 

 

 

 

 

for each of the content areas, the topics are listed  and there is an expectation of certain learning outcomes classed under three broad categories

 

 

 

 

special note of interest - software developed by  Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas at San Pablo Catholic University for evaluating existing curricula against the recommended curricula

Friday

 

 

Saturday

 

General Perspectives

Other stuff of interest

Teaching Ethics in Computer Science: Active Learning - workshop

 

THINGS TO FOLLOW UP

Kent state uni are running a digital sciences interdisciplinary bachelors which may be of interest

refs

Shneiderman, B. 2007. Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 50 (6), 25-27.

Vafopoulos, M. Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC) Web Science Trust http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html

Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. The Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC). In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S. and Vafopoulos, M.N. 2012. Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science. 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 28th February-3rd March 2012 (Rayleigh, NC, 2012).

 

Web Science Curriculum Development - update

Our paper WSCD: Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts has been accepted for ACM WebSci'11

Abstract

The far-reaching impact of Web on society is widely recognised and acknowledged. The interdisciplinary study of this impact has crystallised in the field of study known as Web Science. However, defining an agreed, shared understanding of what constitutes Web Science requires complex negotiation and translations of understandings across component disciplines, national cultures and educational traditions. Some individual institutions have already established particular curricula, and discussions in the Web Science Curriculum Workshop series have marked the territory to some extent. This paper reports on a process being adopted across a consortium of partners to systematically create a shared understanding of what constitutes Web Science. It records and critiques the processes instantiated to agree a common curriculum, and presents a framework for future discussion and development.

The need to study the Web in its complexity, development and impact led to the creation of Web Science. Web Science is inherently interdisciplinary. Its goal is to:
a) understand the Web growth mechanisms;
b) create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial mechanisms to occur.

Teaching Web Science is a unique experience since the emerging discipline is a combination of two essential features. On one hand, the analysis of microscopic laws extrapolated to the macroscopic realm generates observed behaviour. On the other hand languages and algorithms on the Web are built in order to produce novel desired computer behaviour that should be put in context. Finding a suitable curriculum that is different from the study of language, algorithms, interaction patterns and business processes is thus an important and challenging task for the simple reason that we believe that the future of sociotechnical systems will be in their innovative power (inventing new ways to solve problems), rather than their capacity to optimize current practices.

ACM WebSci'11 is in Koblenz this year - and we are going to present a paper :-)

"Web Science is concerned with the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web. It is based on the
notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organizations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. As such Web Science, and thus this conference, is inherently interdisciplinary and integrates computer and information sciences, sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology".

Following the great news, our extended abstract proposal has been accepted, we are working on the final version of the paper we will present. You can find out abstract in EPrints. Students who are interested in following a PhD in Web Science can do so via our Doctoral Consortium which combines a preparatory Masters Degree with three years of intersdisciplinary study typically  supervised by a small team of academics representing the component fields of study.
Meanwhile, Michalis Vafopoulis, who is also part of our team, and who has been leading the subject categorisation initiative for the web science trust has made the outcomes of that work available via the Web Science Trust pages which was one of the outcomes of previous Web Science Curiculum workshops at the conference.
Along with the fact that Jim Hendler is convening Web Science Curriculum workshop at this year's conference, it looks like it is going to be a pretty good year for folk developing and teaching Web Science as an academic discipline.
....
Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Vafopoulos, M. and White, S. (2011) WSCD: Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In: ACM WebSci '11, 14-17 June 2011, Koblenz, Germany. (Submitted)

ready for a mobile world?

The redoubtable Brian Kelly twittered the outcomes of a quick survey he had done of the Russell Group University's front page

"Are Russell Group Unis ready for the Mobile Web? Findings from the #MobileOK tool: http://bit.ly/eZ47Tv"

So when I cam across this (now old) xcd cartoon, i thought it was appropriate to put the two together

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/server_attention_span.png

"Yesterday I attended Nominet’s launch event for the W3C UK and Ireland Office (and note that tweets containing the #w3cuki hashtag are available on TwapperKeeper). A number of talks covered the Mobile Web including “Mobile web: where diversity is opportunity” by Dr. Rotan Hanrahan, the Chief Innovations Architect of MobileAware.  Dr. Hahrahan informed the audience about that many assumptions about Web sites are based on desktop browser experiences and many of the assumptions are wrong in a mobile context.
This made me wonder whether the assumptions we have regarding the design and structure of institutional Web sites will be valid for mobile access.  The W3C have developed mobileOk which is “a free service by W3C that helps check the level of mobile-friendliness of Web documents, and in particular assert whether a Web document is mobileOK“.
Are the home pages of Russell Group Universities ‘mobileOK’, I wondered, or have they been designed and tested for desktop access only? Yesterday I used the mobileOK checker service to check the home page of the 20 Russell group Universities".

The results are given on Brian's web page.
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/are-russell-group-universities-ready-for-the-mobile-web/

Rich Learning Environments - what do they mean

This post revisits some of the discussions from previous posts which looked at a definition of rich learning environments
I would like to set it in the context of changes which continue to take place as the use of technology in everyday life.

My previous post Rich Learning Environments laid out a basic framework for our emerging understanding of the needs and behaviours of existing students and learners.

What is in the background?

Affordances Perspective

Any discussion of technology for learning to my mind has to start with Gaver and a consideration of what (not necessarily intended) consequences the presence, use and availability

Affordances of Web 2.0 and the Social Web

Another reference point of which we can usefully be aware, was the definition of Web2.0 which O' Reilly initially addressed at conferences, workshops and through blog publications - and which was subsequently published

What is interesting here is that we can think about Rich Learning Environments as realising all of the core features which O'Reilly associates with Web2.0

• the web as a platform

• you control your own data

• services not packaged software

• architecture of participation

• cost-effective scalability

• re-mixable data source and data transformations

• software above the level of a single device

• harnessing collective intelligence

http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html#mememap

A little bit of Education

A recent interesting view which has been developed by school teacher Andrew Church in New Zealand, is an eduationalist's perspective ( termed 'Bloom's Digital Taxonomy' ) which considers the impact or affordances of technology which have recently come into use.

References

GAVER, W. W. (1991) Technology affordances. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Reaching through technology. New Orleans, ACM Press.

GAVER, W. W. (1996) Situating Action ii: Affordances for interaction: The social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8111-130.

O'REILLY, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. last accessed June 2010


O'REILLY, T. ( 2007) What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Communications & Strategies, 1: First Quarter 2007,17. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839 last accessed June 2010

CETIS Repositories and Open Web Position Paper

Here at Southampton we have been doing 'stuff' with 'stuff' to make it shared for a long while :-) EPrints has become established for archiving, publishing and revealing research collections, and the use of EPrints has been embedded into university processes (particularly those related to promotions and academic progression). It seemed obvious to the researchers in our group ( Learning Societies Lab) that a learning from web 2.0 behaviours and taking resources associated with learning and teaching into the world of public and shared information was a natural progression for contemporary academic practice.

Below is a position paper from the EdShare team which is to be presented at the CETIS repositories and open web group meeting in late April 2010

The EdShare Approach: Web 2.0 from the Ground Up

JISC CETIS Repositories and The Open Web
April 2010

Background


At Southampton University we have been involved in repositories for teaching and learning for many years. Our first repository in 2005 was called CLARe, a simple EPrints installation with a Learning Object schema, deployed for the Language teaching community. Our evaluations of CLARe showed that people were disappointed with the plain repository interface, and described the experience as ‘flat’ (it was hard to navigate and nothing was interlinked) and ‘dead’ (there was no information on how people had used resources, or what they thought of them). It was clear that the Web 2.0 systems that were appearing at the time (such as Flick’r and YouTube) were changing people’s expectations of what a repository should offer.

We ran a follow up project called CLARe Tools (CLAReT) in 2007 that tried to address these issues with a more modern interface. However, in our evaluation workshops we found that while the superficial problems had been addressed, deeper issues emerged. It became clear to us that the problem wasn’t just an interface issue, it concerned long held assumptions about the way in which teachers thought about their digital teaching materials. Web 2.0 features were not sufficient, what was required was a rethink of the whole approach.
In the light of our experience, we turned to popular Web 2.0 sharing sites in order to try and analyse what has made them successful. Why are people keen to upload photos to Flick’r, but not to upload handouts to a teaching repository? The result of our rethinking has been a family of projects and repositories built around a common set of EPrints extensions called EdShare, which between them over the last two years have made thousands of new resources available online.

The EdShare Approach

Going into our projects we were conscious of the predominant practice of all kinds of people across Universities (both teachers and specialist staff), who support learning, for re-using small parts, elements and ideas from their own as well as colleagues’ and other collaborators’ materials. It was clear that there were materials that could be shared.

We wanted to rethink our approach to teaching and learning repositories by learning from successful Web 2.0 sharing sites – not by copying their user interface elements in a facile way, but by re-examining the core purpose and focus of the system itself.

We came to believe that a good way to understand the difference is to look at what services the sites offered their users. Research repositories succeed because the service they offer is one of Archiving, recording research outputs for posterity. The problem is that no one wants to archive their teaching resources.
In comparison, the popular Web 2.0 sites offer a different set of services:

• Hosting: storing digital content online, and making it public via a page with its own URL.

• Organisation: allowing the creation of composite structures (such as channels or albums), which are also available via a page with its own URL.

• Community: creating awareness of the site’s community, through comments, recommendations and explicit profiles that give users their own public page.

This resulted in number of key extensions to EPrints that together transform a static repository into a living community site. Inline previews ensure that resource pages are focused on the resource and not on metadata, collections allow users to gather together useful resources regardless of whether they were the original depositors, comments and usage stats create automatic attention information that helps with quality assessment, reveals activity and motivates user engagement, profile pages foster a sense of authorial identity and community, and remix tools encourage the reuse and reinvention of materials.

Fostering engagement

In on-going JISC-funded initiatives based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, we have worked with our community of teachers and subject specialists to develop a different approach to the organisation, sharing and collaboration of the everyday teaching resources. We have drawn on the success of Web 2.0 applications such as Flick’r and YouTube; we have learned from the observed popularity of placing content to the fore, collaborating with known individuals, small communities; ease for providing comments, preference for low-threshold barriers to adding content, the importance of the search experience, interest in metrics (especially of views) as well as the attractions of personalisation and profile sharing.

We have deployed a number of sites using the EdShare extensions, including EdShare Southampton (www.edshare.soton.ac.uk) our institutional learning and teaching repository; HumBox (www.humbox.ac.uk), a share for use by the HEAcademy Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Subject Centre’s Open Educational Resources Project; LORO (a repository for the Department of Languages at the Open University); and WBLR (a new repository for the University of Worcester).


EdShare Southampton Example


In the first year of operation for EdShare Southampton, we worked with a collaborative, co-design approach, seeking to link with our community both to understand concerns and motivations, as well as to build alliances to maximise our capacity to influence and support sharing and increased collaboration across the institution.

Supporting sharers in adding minimal metadata, we have added as much useful automatically generated metadata as feasible. We know the institutional affiliation of people as well as their name. EdShare Southampton has also been integrated with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) management system of the University from the outset. Everyone who has a University login identity is able to add content to EdShare.

We have found that our work of developing the infrastructure to support sharing educational resources across the University has complemented work to develop a culture for sharing acros the institution.

Hugh Davis,
Seb Francois,
Yvonne Howard,
Patrick McSweeney,
Dave Millard,
Debra Morris,
Marcus Ramsden,
and
Su White

Rich Learning Environments - Education 2.0 or 3.0?

I have been working on various applications of technologies for learning for many years now. Along the way, I've been developing an idea of what I mean by a rich learning environment.

Rich learning environments are dynamic spaces which bring together personalised information and perspectives across a core of resources which can support the learner in addressing their educational needs. Rich learning spaces exploit the technology affordances of their component parts, but provide added value by simplifying and customising the interface to a set of complex and diverse resources based on a learners context and education needs.

These needs might be categorised into four broad areas personal space; institutional space; support space; and 'good for learning' space

Personal Space:
A learner will already make use of their own preferred tools and applications which may be used either in addressing the demands of formal learning (for example using google docs to create a word processed document) or informal learning (using delicious to store and find information and resources on topics related to study). Each learner will have (most likely) their own machine(s) (laptop, desktop, mobile (?) and within that operating system will have selected and be familiar with a set of tools. Some parts of this (e.g. Skype, text messaging) may not be clearly linked or associated with learning tasks, but none the less may be of great importance to the student.

Institutional Space.
The institution which the learning is studying in, or at which the learner proposes to study, will have 'spaces' which have a role in informal or formal learning and learning support. It is possible that the set of spaces will change during the learners route through education with the institution.]sites/sources will be of verying importance at different times.
At southampton you may have a number of discrete spaces - e.g. UOS web, ECS web, ECS web behind the firewall, Sussed, blackboard challenges some of these are password protected, vpn protected etc

Support Space
dependi8ng on the context of the student, there will be external spaces which mught be of use/relevant to formal and informal learning - e.g. In Southampton the SUSU.org web site provides additional information and support, for international students it may be that their home country embassy site, or some home office sites may be of importance

'Good for learning'
Students may benefit from information and resources which are located outside their current personal space, and outside the institutional space. For example the National Union of Students offers support and advice related to study and examinations. There are other sources of information (appoaches to leawrning inventories, second language study).

Social Space
underpinning the environment there is an integrating layer provided by social space. This incorporates email, messaging, and social software. It acts as the glue for the environment.

If we consider student whose topic of study is technology based, it may be that we could identify a set of sources/resources which could enrich the users perspective, but which are not obvious;y initially related to learning. E.G. In computer science/web technologies, maybe Zdnet, Slashdot, british computer society, ACM digital library, IEEE digital library it may be that a set of resources could be identified which are relevant and helpful to the rich learning environment user, which could usefully be integrated into a customised environment.

Challenges

Creating a rich learning environment presents a number of challenges

Integrating a set of resources to become an apparent coherent whole.

Offering personalisation and customisation of an environment so that it enables the user to retain use of their preferred tools, but also that it perform and educational function of supporting the learning

Providiung innovative and user friendly methods of accessing and overseeing (and perhaps organising/re-organising) complex information sources.

There is a challenge of how to customise the environment (at first use, during the course of use)

International Dimensions of Graduate Employability

Notes and thoughts on an the international dimension of graduate employability following a workshop at Oxford Brookes

little, global perspectives

interesting question
what percentage of our students have had experience of employment
track across the years
survey year 1 (jumpstart)
survey year 1 (info 1010)
survey year 2 (info2009)
? survey year 3 on exit
survey masters on admission
?? is it a condition of their visa that they cannot work?

question, was the decline of placement rates over time response to Quality agendas (difficulty of managing quality, and cost of supporting students out of institituion, plus cost of

definition

a blend of understanding, skilful practices, efficacy beliefs (or legitimate self-confidence) and reflectiveness' Knight and Yorke 2003

presentation slides will be available on HEA centre website and also project website

Shiel, leadership foudation fellowship, elearning

overview of the internationalisation
?? putting the world into world class education
perspecives


Take home messages

People
Benda Little, CHERI. Principal Policy Analyst, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information Open University,

Chris Sheil, Chris Shiel, Director of the Centre for Global Perspectives, Bournemouth University

Notes
The event was run by the FDTL project
http://www.enhancingemployability.org.uk
http://www.reflexproject.org - report to the European Commission.
HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation

HE academiuy website - document on Internationalisation (difficult to find - a case for a repository?? repositories rather than content managemnts

thoughts
handouts all available at the

Semantic Technologies for Education at ALT-C

We are hoping to get folk to sign up for our workshop on semantic technologies for education which will be held at this year's ALT-C in Manchester in the UK. I'm just preparing the materials and about to send out a mailing, so this blog in a placeholder in the meantime. You may have read the original proposal for the workshop in a previous posting on this blog ALT-09 Semanitic Technologies for Education.

The workshop is numbered 0255 scheduled to take place on Tuesday 8th September at 13.40-15.00 in room 4.204.

Biographies
Sheila MacNeill, Educational Content SIG Cooordinator (University of Strathclyde) Sheila MacNeill is the Educational Content (EC) SIG Cooordinator. Sheila joined CETIS in July 2004 and is currently seconded 3 days a week to CETIS, based at the University of Strathclyde. When not at CETIS, Sheila is a Learning Technologist with LT Scotland, where she is involved in the development of a range of online learning resources for schools and colleges. She is actively involved in the development of resources which utilise interoperability standards

Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, Director of eLearning and Head of the ECS, Learning Societies Lab.

Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab, Thanassis is the principal investigator for the JISC SemTech project.

Su White, University of Southampton, ECS Learning Societies Lab is a project team member with SemTech.

Working jointly with Sheila MacNeill from JISC CETIS, colleagues from The Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, plan to use the workshop to stimulate the debate on Semantic Technologies for Education. The ALT-C community represent a significant cohort of educational users who are likely to be working with students and using semantic technologies in the near future, so are a key target audience for disseminating the findings of our survey of semantic technologies for education which was conducted earlier in 2009.

If you want a sneak preview, the survey is online at http://semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. Researchers reviewed thirty-six tools and services. Most of the tools identified were not purpose-built for education but are valuable to education by virtue of their use and deployment of well-formed metadata or data interoperability and integration.

The survey identified four essential types of application area:

(i) collaborative authoring and annotation
(ii) searching and matching
(iii) repositories, VLEs and authoring tools
(iv) infrastructural technologies for linked data and semantic enrichment.

The use and uptake of related tools and services by UK HE institutions was also investigated, you can find further information online at http://wiki.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Seminar on iTunesU

The debate ranged from whether iTunesU was a tool for education as well as marketing, to issues about committing to a platform which can be seen to exclude some users. ITuneU isof  particular  interest for two  the ECS research groups (IAM and LSL).  ECS-TV was spawned in IAM (Intelligence Agents and Multimedia) and current projects include work to find effective ways of capturing and accessing video resources in our EdShare institutional learning and teaching repository.  EdShare is hosted in LSL (Learning Societies Lab) and we are working hard to extend and develop its functionality in a way that suits the working lives of academics and students at University.

Lawrence Stephenson from Apple's iTunesU came down to Southampton today to give us a seminar covering recent development from Apple, and the logistics and details of how - a man who is passionate about education :-) Lawrence is driving the iTunesU initiative in the UK

Lawrence gave us an overview of the Universities who have so far committed to appearing on iTunesU, to date there are 10 UK universities already on iTunesU, with more than a hundred institutions lined up to be online via the portal in the near future.

Discussions which arose from the presentation included

• User generated content
  
• Populating the site
  
• Relationship between EdShare and any future initiative
  
• The role of ECS-TV in as a role model
  
• New modes of teaching and interactions 

Unfortunately, because of intellectual property constraints we were not able to record this seminar, so if you want to hear what Lawrence was saying you will have to invite him to a seminar of your own!

sign up process:
there are a series of steps/requirements to be met in order to have a presence on iTunesU these include:

• High level of institutional commitment
  
• Looking for 200 pieces of digital content
  
• Process of populating the digital content (Ultimately the institution is responsible for its own content)
  
• Formal agreement
  
• Launch on a TUESDAY
  

NOTE: the quickest it has been done is three months

Notes and Links:

Apple's overview of iTunesU
Open University's evaluation of impact
Current UK presence include
University of Oxford, Open University, Warwick, UCL

ALT-09 Manchester - why I will be there

The thing about conferences is that you get out of them what you put in. ALT-C 2009 is in Manchester this year, and I will be attending. We have an proposal for an exciting workshop on semantic technologies in the last stages of submission (details further down this post). I don't attend every year but I do think that ALT-C is a really interesting conference which reflects the whole range of activities fostered by the learning technologies communities across the UK. I found the Fringe events last year particularly rewarding, never mind the rest of the programme.

It's useful in many different ways. The various permutations of 'this what I did in my teaching' presentations serve to remind us of the breadth and wealth of different educational activities which are undertaken in classrooms across the world. Respect too the fact that many delegates are in relatively junior roles, without any significant budget, and the only way they are going to get a place at a conference is if the are actually presenting either a paper or poster. The best way to understand a tradition, I think, is to engage in a debate which discusses that tradition. Newcomers need to be welcomed and helped understand the existing discourse.

Admittedly ALT-C is UK centric, but it does attract a growing list of international delegates many of whom go on to be regulars. Plus there is no shame in it UK focus, since it soon becomes clear that there is much happening here which is world leading. The combined impact of educational drivers and supportive funding from bodies including the JISC, the Funding Councils, and the HEA mean that much work at the leading edge is taking place right here in our backyard - UK HE plc. Never mind additional input from a host of different institutional innovation grants, and even the odd bit of funding from the likes of the ESRC and EPSRC.

Now sufficiently established to have generated its own fringe F-ALT, the event in Manchester this year it titled "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence, and change" and promises to be the usual interesting and eclectic mix. You will find me at the fringe, catchup up with old chums, and (hopefully) running this rather interesting workshop of semantic technolgies in education. If this revision is accepted you can expect us to be putting out a call for participation, we are looking for expert discussants, and workshop attendees who feel they want to join in this important new development, so if semantic technolgies for education is in your sights, read on....

Research Teaching Linkages

Thinking about the relationship between research and teaching

The linkages between research and teahcing a something which I have been working on for some time. I have had a few publications in the area already, have been conducting some surveys, and I am presenting a paper on the topic at this summers ACM ITiCSE to be held in Paris in July 2009. In addition I am part of the CPHC Learning Development Group, and its a special interest for them too. We are planning a workshop for later in the year (September/October).

This blog is prompted by a Workshop at Dundee University which was looking at Research Teaching Linkages.

As a part of the research the initiative has produced a report which includes a list of graduate attributes, a set of case studies, recommendations for changes in the curriculum which can cultivate stronger links between research and teaching.

Method
reporting on the work which has been done researching the relationionship between teaching and research in Scottish Universities. This work has been supported by the Scottish QAA
Activities included:

• literature survey
• desk survey
• workshop
• staff questionnaire
• student questionnaire
• interview

web site
has case studies, learning through research, learning about research, and both. The case studies cover maths and computing.

The workshop included presentations of some of the case studies, which gave further insight into the motivations and context of the ways in which colleagues integrate research and teaching. The examples were drawn from Computing and Maths.

Later year options in Computer Science investigated the activity of research projects

Mathematics - using mathematical modelling in cancer research, and fungal growth. Modelling is fundamental to mathematical research in Mathematical biology. The presented then spoke about the mathematical biology BSc, a range of modules were highlighted which build the research teaching links - in the early years the students learn the processes of research (predominantly) in the later units they learn and use the processes of research and learn to apply them. As they expressed it, both the context and content of research.
There are the following suggested students gains from linking research and teaching

• enthusiasm and insight
• knowing the state of the art
• knowing the main players
• being the main players
• seminars, visitors conferences
• phds and postdocs
• interactions with industry

Observations from some of the the academics presented included beliefs that linking research and teaching,

• enriches the curriculum through an up to date curriculum,
• provides a meaningful link to pg studies,
• and a meaningful link to employment.

Bootstrapping the culture of sharing: refining our understanding of learning objects

or oooer as I like to think about it....

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources, Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2009) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies . (In Press)

We have been working on a paper for the IEEE Trans on Learning Technologies on some of the cultural change aspects of our experiences of working with repositories. Its about our experience of developing EdShare, but also reflects a rather richer back catalogue of experiences of establishing and using repositories, plus a few insights into the heady world of technology enhanded learning.

We are really proud of the progress we are making with the EdShare repository of educational resources, and its kid sib language learning repository called Faroes.

Thanks to shed loads of hard work on scholarly repositories led by Stevan Harnad and Les Carr from right here in ECS at the University of Southampton, we have built ourselves a real track record in that very important area.



EPrints is an open source repository which has blossomed thanks to the the hard working EPrints team with support from JISC. Our paper is not concerned with the technical aspects of the software, but more importantly about the organisational learning which we have derived from our intense usage of EPrints respoitories - probably most importantly because, compared to other well know repositories, we observe that EPrints users not only install their repository, they actually populate it.

Here at Southampton we have EPrints repositories for academic publications in ECS, and across the whole institution (University of Southampton). We are also using EPrints to drive our eTheses repository, and our EdShare repository of resources used educationally for teaching and the support of learning.

We not only have ground level experience of installing and running the repositories, but we are also getting increasingly sophisticated in our understanding of the most effective organisational drivers which can not only get the repository established but also get it used.

Many different colleagues have identified advantages from using the repositories, each individual will have a personal priority list. Findability figures big on the list. People like to be able to find their own stuff irrespective of moving on to new machines, or new institutions. We also like the fact that items in the repository are findable - classic search engines index the repository, and even if the paper is not world visible, will provide a pointer to its existence, often resulting in individual approaches for further information - thereby enhancing and enriching the scholarly knowledge network.

well that's enough of me blowing our trumpet, take a look at the paper if you want a little more information, oh and why don't you take a look at EPrints....

Potential users can find out more about the system and set in train further contactvia the software site hosted at eprints.org

Reflection, learning , careers and employability

The problem
Put stuff to do with careers and employability on the curriculum and you are guaranteed to have the students in revolt before you can blink your eyes. I have already been working on ways of making the educational side of this process better for the students, This year I have an opportunity to try to make some innovations which impact on assessment and feedback.

Introduction: My Situation
This week those two agendas have bubbled to the surface in an interestingly counterposed manner

1) I am tasked with 'teaching' students to complete reflective portfolios which I will later mark

This is a task and a subject area which they often hate with a passion;
think is a waste of time and would generally dump in preference for getting on with some meaty topic which they perceive as being relevant to their chosen degrees.

2) I am tasked with working with colleagues to develop our employability agenda across and within the curriculum

Things which are easy to do may be totally ineffectual as far as the students who need assistance are concerned.
Many of our students are highly employable, and willingly develop their own employability skills out of class, we have good general employment rates.
Those students who have difficulties may be self consious, odd, shy, lacking in self confidence, confused, or generally struggling. Such students may not respond to additional structured activities, and we are to be advised to design any such activities with great care

Portfolios

The portfolios the students will create are structured to help them with their learning ( a practical task) but are also seen to be relevant to the careers and employability agenda. I am shuddering at the whiff of the letters PDP, and of course the students have a lot of baggage in that area as well. School portfolios and skills classes mean this is a very difficult area of the curriculum. I am having to work hard to help the students understand what might be in it for them, beyond a few marks for a fairly simple task, which gets them a little closer to the end of their degree. I think the processes have great value, I am not however convinced about the outputs. Let me expand...

Some ethical considerations

I have a few ethical concerns which are in the area of the process of reflective logs and portfolios generally. Different people will reflect in different ways. Students need a great deal of self confidence plus the sense of personal safety to be able to reveal their inner thoughts on their successes and failures in writing.

Faced with the prospect of answering/interpreting a series of short questions to put into a document to be potentially ripped apart by the critical eye of an academic, many of them take an opt out of this activity and rather than offering reflections, offer bland statements which distance themselves from the process, and protect themselves from any harm.

My Dilemma
I am not sure it is easy to award a fair mark for such a personal activity. Students rely on clear assessment criteria to assist them in objective tasks, but clearly reflection and creating a reflective portfolio is highly subjective.

This puts me in a difficult position. What am I to do? How should I mark these portfolios? Should I mark the portfolios? Surely the fact that they are marked will change their purpose?

Last year I read each portfolio, constucted an individual mark which was based on what I understood to be the level of engagement based on the content with which I was presented. I was not sure when I marked each portfolio, from what base each student was starting.

I constructed some generic feedback, and sent this to all the students. Each portfolio had some individual comments, I was wary of being hurtful to the individuals, bit I tried to provide constructive feedback and criticisms.

So.... this year we are asking another cohort to produce portfolios. For the marking I will be:

1. meeting with each student individually for 10 minutes to discuss their portfolio
   .... for some reason I was suddenly reminded of a recent rather unsatisfactory appraisal meeting....
2. The meetings will be videod for moderation purposes and quality assurance.
   
3. I am thinking of making an audio recording of each session which I mail to the student at the close of the discussion, so that they have their own record of the proceedings.
4. I will produce a generic feedback document for this cohort

Discussion points
It will be interesting to see how I can streamline the process, from the point of view of producing the audio and video, making sure it is indexed and analysing what the students' perception of the process compared to their previous experiences - quite a few methodological challenges in that little bit, never mind the technology.

I hope that my personal awareness will serve the students well. I suddenly have another memory, this time of a comment from a one-time vice chancellor at another university. "We deal with student's life chances, we don't have the right to fuck them up"!

It may be that the already self confident fill in such forms with ease and as a result get a good mark, but I do not believe that their ease with the task will help the employability of the whole cohort. We are working with engineering students. We have a high level of dislexia across our student cohort. I had a student close to tears today because of some comments he had received on a previously submitted portfolio.

The good bit
I suppose because I am sensitive to the possible shortcomings, and I do care about how the students benefit, I will bring these considerations to bear in our school planning and discussions.

L-TAGS

Learners and Technology Affordances Group
I really like the perspective of technology affordances and always go back to Gaver’s paper to remind myself where the technology part of the affordances discussion originally came from.

So wayback I was involved in a project which produced some guidance of students using technolgy in learning. What I am trying to do is revisit that work and look at it with modern eyes.

Amongst the ideas which emerged then were an activity gradient - looking at different styles of interactions. I visited each area of the gradient and came up with lots of examples for each stage in the gradient. Not sure where it is now, but I do know that I don’t throw stuff away....

Also Hugh Davis and I produced a (rather clunky) slide show which looked at a day in a life of a student - and showed a few scenarios.

What I want to do now is to make a start on re-populating the stages in the gradient and add in the applications which have emerged since the work we originally did. I am planning to start by populating it myself, but then putting it up onto a wiki and getting people in workshops to elaborate it with me.

Since then too, I have got very much into the ideas of disciplinary differences and have been looking at how teaching and student learning varies across disciplines - and given my home area, of course I have quite a lot of stuff on Computer Science, engineering, technology and cognated disciplines.

These ideas link to work which we are doing on student experience following on from our campus benchmarking exercise in 2007-08. I took these ideas to COOP 2008 and they also link in to the proposal I have just put forward to the ALT2009 Programme Committee to run a student YouTube competition for short videos on the theme of their perceptions of learning.

I guess part of the idea for a YouTube competition came from the Guardian who are running something on this theme with a deadline for December 2008. Its also inspired by some of the whacky videos which our own students via the Student Union at Southampton have produced recently.

Maybe we could put a video-booth on campus which students could use, maybe we should involve the students union who ran the freshers TV stuff. Dave Tarrant is our ECS TV PhD person who may be worth talking to, Jason Allen is an undergrad in ECS who has done Freshers TV.

Not sure how this would work, but if could be an adjunct to the student voices work we are just getting off the ground.

Back in the loop - rant

OK
back in the blogosphere, but not sure for how long
desperately grappling with my online identities
am I a runner?
am I an academic?
am I just plain eccentric?

what I do know is that I have not posted since September partly because I have been doing other things, but also partly because each time I tried to post, the text appeared in Hindi! this was not my intention, but its taken til now to spot the transliteration button at the bottom on the config page and work out that I needed to change it - not that I spent a great deal of time on it you understand, but still it was a barrier

• And that is what I am interested in from a research point of view.
• I came back to this blog because I have been editing my home page, and then thinking it would be better to do this via the blog.
• And then that added another item on the todo list ( which I am currently ignoring) which is that I probably need to separate my online identities.
• And then that made me think about the fact that I maybe want to register a few more domain names
• And that reminded me that each domain will need a visual identity
• and that made me think about a life online, and the fact that I only live it a bit, because I also have a life offline....

phew...
and did I mention the really good pages from British Columbia on digital tatoos?
But coming back to the life online, there are a few ideas....

If we are talking about using technology for education, we might need to think about the realities of people's lives.

Academic researchers who live online have a world view which is shaped by their experience, but it aint the world view of joe and joanna public.

I have a list of considerations:
remember:

1. your students do not have the same priorities as you do
2. it might be dangerous to base our models of how students prefer to learn of the leisure habits of an indeterminate number and proportion of young people
3. early adopters and early majority have a different experience/perspective to the late majority
4. educators need to take charge of how they go about educating
5. the bandwidth of face to face communications can be incredibly high
6. its a good idea to remove the barriers to learning
7. learning can only be done a bit at a time
8. the magic number seven plus or minus one was a good paper, but we might be happier with even less complexity
9. the map is not the teritory
10. academic evangelists do not have the same perspective as neophyte learner

Now of course, the technogazers have a valid argument that you should not focus on the implementation problems, but think about the big picture, however, if we are dealing with education here and now, then the human issues actually do matter. So as a future gazer I can say, discount the problems, but as a teacher using the technology I need to understand the problems in order to overcome them. That means, logically that the problems need to be categorised accoding to their impact - half life - will it go away in time if so, how does that change things? does the exisitence of the problem give us insight into something which is important - ie and insight into the learning process?

When I was going through my dilemma of am I a runner/academic/eccentric I was also thinking that its important that I am all of these things.

Talking to my running sisters reminds me that there are lots of people who are not online all the time, do not have routine access, and who have rather clunky models of how inter-webby thing might work. We could think of them affectionately as the world wide plebs
Plebs - definition from the free dictionary
common people, folk, folks - people in general (often used in the plural); "they're just country folk"; "folks around here drink moonshine"; "the common people determine the group character and preserve its customs from one generation to the next"

so here we are back in the life online
some of us have one, some of us don't... some of us who do, are not there all the time

and I am coming back to some old ideas - technology affordances, barriers to learning hmmm...

COOP-08

Attended really interesting workshop at COOP-08. My presentation is titled "Scanning the Horizon: Towards a Theory of Education 2.0

All a bit reflexive because its about academic 2.0, and I have been trying to immerse myself in the digital world in the spirit of a latter day Margaret Mead - coming of age in the ether ;-)

My twitter feed has been going full tilt, and I am trying to get to grips with Plaxo. I am using del.icio.us, blogger, emailing from my mobile phone (and browsing) but that's so expensive I won't be doing that long term.

I signed up for a blog to post from my mobile, and I have read that I can post to blogger from my mobile. Its practical for sharing pictures, but not sure about anything more than stubs.

I have a NetVibes account, will be running a workshop using CrowdVine, think that SimpleSpark to keep track of the growth of 2.0 applications. I have a picassa account (but have not put much on it yet), and a Flickr account although I am pissed off that I had to get (yet another) Yahoo Mail a/c because they lost my old one :-(

When I get into the office I find that my university has just established a ning group called sotoneducators (the title of which I keep misreading).

For quality assurance purposes we have a shared university repository for QA evidence and documents (no 2.0 aspects yet). For research outputs, we mandate that academics use a repository, and continue to add further Web 2.0 functionality with each revision.

In my free time I run with Southampton Running Sisters, and we use Google Groups and Facebook to keep in touch with each other. I use Fetch Everyone intermittently.

We have a project called EdShare which is based around tagging educational materials. Our project funders expect us to blog as well as write reports, our research group has its own set of blogs for external and internal purposes, and I find myself beginning to wonder when we will be able to do anything aside from writing.

My school has a media wiki for the students, uses a knowledge base for FAQs, and a repository for important and shared documentation which sits alongside our intranet where we have many pages which allow dynamic editing.

In writing this account I become aware that the term/perspective I prefer to 2.0 is "a life online"; the account of the role of 2.0 in any users' experience, I think, has to encompass all aspects of technology interactions (justification also for the seamless integration of my mobile experiences into this account)

So now I am realising that some of the tagging which takes place is actually just in my mind, and that the rest of the sharing and publishing is much more visible! So it must be for the rest of humanity - most of what people think is not on the web, it is in an ether, but its another ether!

I have been reading The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. Rivers who worked with many 'shell shocked' soldiers from the 1914-1918 war, had been an anthropologist in Melanasia.

The accounts of the Ghosts in the book, and the differences in perspectives between the various societies (south sea, western european, upper class, working class, milatarist, pacifist, soldier, civilian....) seem to be relevant to some insights on knowledge and understanding, and therefore, inevitably what we understand about 2.0 - what it means for the web, and what it means for academia.

COOP is a well established european CSCW community, this workshop has attracted a significantly wide range of participants which reminds me of the inevitability of inter-disciplinary approaches.

the act of writing makes me realise that my own processes of reaching conclusions is somewhat chaotic (but not to say that the perspectives which emerge are not valid)

Tech to do:

This is meant to track my journey, not sure what margaret would call it!

Get onto last FM

Get to grips with Plaxo

Get rss feeds into my web page

Put up the recent web page which I revised ages ago, but have not got round to doing

Tech gripes, notes (as above)

Been trying to paste material into the page, but it does not seem to work - hey ho, what do I know??

Internet is good here, but the recurrent issue is down to maintaining power - all grist to the mill of the current argument about how 2.0 technologies impact on academic and higher education. Another part of the ethnographic perspective. I observe that via twitter, some people are online big-time, and others are intermittent. Motivations will vary with time.