Implications of "Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World"

10.30 - 11.00 - Richard Hill, Sheffield Hallam, Culture, Critical-thinking and Computing

The presentation will illustrate one approach to tackling cultural challenges in the teaching of Postgraduate computing students. Using a combination of commonly available 'web 2.0' type tools and curriculum changes, some of the difficulties of addressing critical-thinking in a multi-cultural environment are explored.

11.00 - 11.30 Mike Leigh & Lucy Mathers, De Montfort University, A tool for developing information evaluation skills in a Web2.0 environment:

Presentation of the results of a project that created an information evaluation tool that enhances students' understanding of how to select materials for academic work; and also provides a 'quick and easy' method facilitating comparison of diverse source materials.

11.30 - 12.00 Su White, University of Southampton Share Collaborate and Exchange, reshaping education through technology: the EdShare experience.

Our presentation would be able to look at one institutions experience of the current web 2.0 world particularly in the context of our use of departmental infrastructure and our teaching and learning repository in computer science education. The presentation will then conclude by situating our current 2.0 context/experience in terms of emerging trends towards more pervasive use and experience of linked data

12.00 - 12.30 John Traxler, Wolverhampton University Web2.0 - the University Challenge & the Changing, Moving World

The ideology and technology of web2.0, the ideology and technology that transforms us all from readers to writers, has significant consequences for the institutions of higher education. It is accompanied and accelerated by increasing, almost universal, mobility and connectedness and contrasted by the fixity or perhaps sluggishness of many aspects of institutions of higher education. This presentation will focus on these contrasts, explore whether these fundamental or superficial and ask about the responses that could come from the institutions.

12.30 - 1.15 Lunch

1.15 - 1.45 Stylianos Hatzipanagos - the impact and relevance of Web 2.0 to the culture of Higher Education;

How and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - how and where advancements in technology are altering traditional pedagogical practices; - new literacies in relation to digital media and digital cultures; - theories and technologies of change in education and future directions.

1.45 - 2.15 Mark Childs The challenges that using immersive virtual worlds present to educators.

These include institutional (who controls the technologies educators are allowed to use?), cultural (what opposition do students and institutions have to learning that is virtual? fantastic? fun? and what responses are appropriate), ethical (can we make the use of technologies compulsory if they are difficult, novel, transgressive?).

2.15 - 2.45 Jamie Wood Social Bookmarking and inquiry-based learning:

Experiences and possibilities - this presentation will report on my experiences as a practitioner, using social bookmarking in History seminars with first year students and will then reflect on the possibilities for the use of social bookmarking (and Web2.0) more broadly in teaching and learning.

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)

Education and Web2.0

Working with EdShare and OneShare building resource collections for use in education brings up a whole variety of discussion topics about the nature of Web2.0, the social web, and the role of sharing and repositories in UK Higher Education.

Our project ran a very interesting workshop on this topic early in November 2009. Below is a collection of notes and observations, plus a few photos, which capture something of the day.

we made lots of time for group discussions, folk here are considering issues around metadata ( or does it matter data as I like to think of it).

As you might imagine there is space for a variety of views between the hard line, information scientist formal categorisation

and the more pragmatic what can be generate automatically,

and do we need that information anyway, lets just get it tagged by users, kind of approach.

Ali Dickens from the subject centre for Language, Linguistics and Ares Studies (LASS) is involved in Language Box (for Linguists), and Humbox (for humanities).

She is planning to run a full day session on copyright on December 14 2009. At our workshop she led a session where she asked folk to do a risk analysis on issues around copyright.

Its a topic which attracts a lot of interest, and we like to call our interactions with the lawyers on this one poking the dragon. You can see from the flipcharts what we might poke the dragon for.

the final session of the day was another practical task, using post it notes to look at our favourite web2.0 applications, and think about the technology affordances within those categorisations.

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

Back To School

Its always good for a teacher to go back to school. This year, in anticipation of setting up a sabbatical at a French University, I decided to go back to school and brush up my French. I was fortunate, in that I was going to be in Paris for a conference in any case for a conference.

Maybe its my personal preference, but I found a couple of weeks intensive study an excellent option. It gave me a chance to focus and refine my understanding, and once again I found myself musing on ways we could take an intensive approach in our regular courses at University.

So what was their recipe for success?

• small classes with expert tuition
• highly motivated learners
• intensive, highly focussed topic area