#PLE_BCN

What an excellent, and interesting event, the immaculate planning, brilliant setting, and dedication to designing an event which made real communication happen was a refreshing change from the usual conference fare of dutiful presentations by inexperienced postgrads and academic posturing from over-inflated egos. Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ A massive thank you to all the organizing committee, but especially to

Plenty of discussion and time for though with a conference which worked to challenge the standard format integrating components of bar camps and unconferences. This makes for some work for the participants (which is good), and does not necessarily result in the super smooth corporate commodified conference, but something which participants take with them afterwards because they joined in at the time.


Opening (un)keynote was a joint effort from Alec Couras and Graham Atwell @courosa and @grahamattwell. It included a whole load of contributed slides, and was structured around eight questions. There were a few tech issues, the usual stuff about computers not talking to the av system and computer and projection screen resolution challenges, but it was well aligned with (my) observation that (real) learning is messy!

The second unkeynote from Jordi Adell and Ismael Peña-López @ictologist and @jordi was crafted to ensure maximal participation, literally getting attendees to vote with their feet and express their views

The hash tag for the event was #PLE_BCN, and the twitter back stream peaked 5000 well before the close of play. You can take a look at the twitter stream (as we did during the conference) by using the visualiser tool http://visibletweets.com/ . Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ .

Session chairs were asked to be innovative in their approaches, you can see Graham Atwell's blog http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/07/how-we-share-our-ideas-ple_bcn/ It provides details from session chairs about how they will run their session - mine was rather tame by comparison, asking presenters to provide tag cloud style summaries prior to their short formal presentation, and trying to link the perspectives on the two items during an extended joint discussion slot!

Thoughts

Emerging definition - well when Hugh and I discussed it we decided to take part of O'Reilly's definition of what is Web2.0, and extend it...the web as a platform (for learning)


things I found/the conference used

Visible Tweets

Cirip

http://www.cirip.ro/grup/plebcn/cloud?limit=200&nr=30&cols=4&us&lg=en

Scribble Pad
http://moourl.com/ple1


things that made me seasick

google wave

prezi

People who also presented in our session which was about PLEs and Institutions

TOWARDS AN ELEARNING 2.0 PROVISIONING STRATEGY FOR UNIVERSITIES Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesus Romo, Manuel Benito

MAKING IT RICH AND PERSONAL: MEETING INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES FROM NEXT GENERATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Su White, Hugh Davis, Pete Hancock, Debra Morris

FULL IMMERSION LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ON-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY COURSES Bradley Bowers (did not attend/present)

ANAGRAMMING PLE: EMPOWERING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING THROUGH MICROBLOGGING Gabriela Grosseck, Carmen Holotescu

People in the session I chaired


AN APPROACH TO INTER-WIDGET COMMUNICATION SPECIFICATION Tobias Nelkner, André Kemena

PERSONAL DASHBOARDS FOR AWARENESS IN SOCIAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Wolfgang Reinhardt, Sebastian Nuhn could not attend

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATOR FEDERATED WITH PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE ENVIRONMENTS
David White


participant blogs

http://ibuchem.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/ple_bcn-conference-day-1/

remote viewers blogs/comments

http://www.masmithers.com/2010/07/08/the-ple-as-a-tool-and-institutional-lock-in/

A few of the new Twitter folk I met/followed from the conference - there were a lot!

@pgsimoes Paulo Simões

@samscam Sam Easterby-Smith

@ocasquero - Oskar Casquero interesting paper which complemented our paper on Rich Learning Environments by laying the ground with working definitions of the environment labs doing work implementing sytems which are in our Rich Learning Environment

@ggrosseck Gabriela Grosseck

http://pleconference.crowdvine.com/


http://visibletweets.com/

there were a number of presentations which looked at mobile platforms and discussed widget frameworks - sort of stuff I want to follow up

Work Related to the Southampton Learning Environment - which we put in a framework of a Rich Learning Environment

Sappo Campus - Portugal

Work in the Basque Country from Oskar Casquero et al

there were also various presentations on widget use and frameworks which could be usefully followed up - more when I have refined this blog

How linked data will benefit higher education

I have been having a bit of fun preparing for a presentation to the ALPSP for a day long event titled Ready for Web 3.0.

The presentation I made ties in with our work on the Southampton Learning Environment and my personal take on Rich Learning Environments. You can take a look at the slides and check out the main refs below :-)

Abstract:

The potential impact of widespread use of linked-data in Higher Education is immense. Everyday understandings of the power derived by placing raw data in the public domain is growing. It promises to transform education, interconnecting administrative data, enriching and embellishing teaching resources while providing tools and resources for learners and researchers alike.

Ready for Web 3.0: How will Linked Data benefit Higher Education?

View more presentations from Su White.

Refs

you might like to read what Tim Berners Lee has to say on some of the Design Issues

Tim Berners Lee - Design Issues: Linked Data http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

Tim Berners Lee on the Next Web A TED talk from tbl (2009) - the "Raw Data Now" talk

From WC3 - a quick introduction to linked data Linked Data intro from WC3 on Slideshare

Interlinking with DBPedia http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Interlinking



Tiropanis, T., Davis, H., Millard, D., Weal, M., White, S. and Wills, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/projects/semantictechnologies.aspx


Paul Miller (2010) Linked Data Horizon Scan – JISC report
http://linkeddata.jiscpress.org/

Paul Miller's Blog http://cloudofdata.com/

XCRI project http://www.xcri.org/Welcome.html

RDFa

MySociety http://www.mysociety.org/

data.gov http://data.gov.uk/apps

The Semantic Squirrel http://www.ploscompbiol.org/doi/pcbi.1000361

Tiropanis Thanassis , Davis, H., Millard, D., Weal, M., White, S. and Wills, G. (2009) Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching (SemTech) - JISC Report

http://semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

White, S., Davis, H. C., Morris, D. and Hancock, P. (2010) Making it rich and personal: meeting institutional challenges from next generation learning environments. In: The PLE conference 2010, 8-9 July 2010

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21327/

visual thinking - maps and clouds

Given the overheads of putting all the images in one post, I am creating sub posts.
This one is maps and clouds

What is emerging is a continuum of visualisations from static through to dynamic, and from models through to metaphors ( sounds like a target for a magic quadrant visualization ;-)

the map below is a visualisation which incorporates real information - the colours and interconnections both explain relationships which exist with the data.

Its a map which is quite often come across - a visualisation of the Links of Data (LOD) as a cloud. The image owes its source to Christian Bizer from Berlin. The date on this diagram is July 2009. May be worth visiting the original source to check out any updates.




Also here is a further visualisation of web trends, another hybrid visualisation which is towards the model end of the spectrum.

Visual Thinking continued - graphic facilitation and recording

I come across the idea of graphic facilitation or graphic recording following up the work on Learning Maps which appears on the periodic table of visualisations.


















The learning map featured on the periodic table is Pepsi's The Revolution on Beverage Street (left) - which was developed to represent the supply chain activities for that company.

It seemed to me that representing the dynamics of emerging discussions, conclusions and thinking might sometimes be more usefully represented visually rather than in the usual textual report and proceedings format - or at least the two methods might complement each other.

I am a keen proponent of mindmaps for my own use, and can use them to record information, but I am really not much of an artist, and so looking at the work of specialist graphic designers and artists in this respect in interesting. Hope to have some (almost) first hand experience of graphic recording very soon, meanwhile why not take a look at some of the links?

Other intersting folk in the area include - Thinking Visually http://www.thinkingvisually.com/graphic.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkingvisually

They are sort of related to the analytical work you find from Davis McCandless http://www.davidmccandless.com/ who writes for the Guardian Datablog.

Information is Beautiful


David hosts the Information is Beautiful website which arose from the book of the same name http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )

He works with ( and praises) Steanie Posavec (who is with Norcot) http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie-posave.php .

Her work with Jack Kerouacs on the Road - analysis and visualisations is something to behold, and might even be of interest to hypertext buffs.

Companies who do graphical recording/facilitation













Graphic Change is a UK company who do graphic facilitation. You can use graphic facilitators to come along to your meeting and act as visual scribes.I am full of admiration for the skill they must apply. Its interesting to consider how they evolve/emerge their images.

I assume that graphic facilitators have a particularly rich visual vocabulary which combined with an understanding of the language of pictures enables them to construct visuals in this way

readings: technology enhanced learning

If you are looking to understand where some of my current ideas on TEL and Rich Learning Environments are coming from you might like to look at the following foundational texts and papers. Mostly they are not especially recent, but they do provide a framework for understanding.
The important thing is to look at the beginnings and then consider how these ideas and approaches have been developed in the future. It may also be worth looking at the most recent edition of any work and finding out from the introductions how and why the revisions have been made.


ANDERSON, L. W., KRATHWOHL, D. R., AIRASIAN, P. W. & CRUIKSHANK, K. A. (Eds.) (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York : Longman
BEETHAM, H. & SHARPE, R. (Eds) (2007) Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age. Oxford: Routledge, Falmer
BIGGS, J. (2003) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Maidenhead, Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press.

BLOOM, B. S. (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives; the classification of educational goals, New York, Longmans.

BLOOM, B. S. (1984) The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 133-16.

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.

JONASSON, D. H., MAYES, J. T. & MCALEESE, R. (1993) A manifesto for a constructivist approach to uses of technology in higher education. IN DUFFY, T. M., LOWYCK, J. & JONASSEN, D. H. (Eds.) Designing Environments for Constructivist Learning. Berlin, Springer Verlag.

LAURILLARD, D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: a Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology, London, Routledge.
this work spawned a wide range of approaches to TEL which incorporated or developed the conversational model of learning
LAVÉ, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge University Press
this was first published in 1990 as a report from the Institute for Research on Learning report 90-0013
MARTON, F. & SÄLJÖ, R. (1894) Approaches to learning. IN MARTON, F., HOUNSELL, D. & ENTWISTLE, N. (Eds.) The experience of learning. Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press.

MAYES, J. T. (1995) Learning Technology and Groundhog Day. IN STRANG, W., SIMPSON, V. & SLATER, D. (Eds.) Hypermedia at Work: Practice and Theory in Higher Education. University of Kent at Canterbury, University of Kent at Canterbury.

MAYES, T. & de FREITAS, S.  (2006) Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study. Bristol, JISC.

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.

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.

readings: Modified Delphi Technique

Delphi technique goes back to the Rand Corporation in the US just post 1939-1945 war, although I guess the reference to the original delpi (the ancient greek oracle) is indicative of the roots of this approach.

There is an intersting paper which exemplifies an early(ish) application of the modified delphi in the context of higher education.

Alfred R Hecht, A Modified Delphi Technique for Obtaining Consensus on Institutional Research Priorities. Research Brief. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the North Central Region AERA Special Interest Group on Community College Research, July, 1977
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED140912

The paper is rather old, but reads quite well and is clear. Additionally its quite instructive to read a 1977 paper and see what it looks like! personally, I love the way that people like ERIC and ACM Digital Library are making digitisations of older papers available as PDF images.

As a more recent  (tho' still fairly old) paper which is relevant to modern day applications
Custer et all 1999 is useful JVTE v15n2: The Modified Delphi Technique - A Rotational Modification

The wikipedia ref is OK but probably not helpful to the typical undergrad working on a project.

Linstone and Turrof’s book is online (for which some of the chapters may be useful, but which is probably a bit too much for you to read http://www.is.njit.edu/pubs/delphibook/

Why use the modified Delphi?

• Basically focus groups can be problematic
• Members can skew the responses by influencing group dynamics

Delphi and modified delphi is also sometimes knows as quick consultancy

A useful brief account of the technique can be found in A Handbook of Techniques for Formative Evaluation By Judith W. George, John Cowan

• It is possible to run it in either entirely remotely with deadlines on the voting and responses
• Or to run it partly electronically and partly face to face, where you do the setup electronically, but then go through the consultation in a group in a fairly short time. 
• Its a very efficient approach to get a good volume of evaluation data

Also worth considering - Nominal Group Technique - see wikipedia entry as a starting point

I plan to put some more info on my blog elaborating ways to use the approach, which will include a growing set of refs. You may also want to look at the TELUSS project

I would be interested in a student project to develop a tool to manage all the stages of the process of a modified delphi technique

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