All posts for the month February, 2010

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

The Good

It’s been one of those weeks where I have initially despaired of being able to find the open source software that ticks all the boxes of what I am trying to do.  I’ve been looking for free, easy to use video editing software that allows you to overlay either an image or another video.  Naively I thought this would be easy to find.  Turns out there is a lot of great free photo editing software out there (GIMP anyone?), but video editing software is thin on the ground. Finally I found the answer in VideoSpin, which is free open source video editing software from Pinnacle.  Pinnacle are part of the Avid family and I’ve seen their programs used in professional video editing suites so felt that VideoSpin could be a little gem of a program.  It is incredibly good as it makes editing video a lot easier but also means that with the videos from LFF10 we can overlay new images to block out any that infringe copyright or, if necessary, block out entire frames of video. 

The Bad

While editing these videos has become an enjoyable challenge (thanks to the discovery of VideoSpin, and honestly I’m not working on commission), there is the matter that an hour’s worth of video means a large file size.  Not necessary a problem if you are planning on keeping these files to yourself but when trying to place these files in an OER repository it can become a not-so-enjoyable challenge and one that we are still working on.  While using a friendly file format (MP4) and a smaller screen size (320 x 288) helps reduce the amount of megabytes in the video files we are still looking at 40-60MB worth of footage. But the finished video files are well worth a watch and will help us extend the impact of LFF10 so file size and storage remain high on my (and the other learning technologists) to-do list.

The Ugly?

I was going to use this heading to make unnecessary jokes at the Zookeeper’s Skoda, but since I’ve driven this beast myself I do have a new found respect for it. So I have decided to pick up on a news item that has been around for a while: broadband connection speeds.  The BBC has a couple of current news stories about this:

With the amount of photos, audio and video that are uploaded, downloaded and shared on the Internet, the need or want for everything to be faster to keep up to date with all the new developments in browser-based technologies, e.g. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, could become a real problem.  The first news story highlights some innovative ways of getting broadband, but it looks like maintaining and improving these speeds and connecting the entire UK could be tricky.  Perhaps this is an ‘ugly’ future?

Emma Davies
Learning Technologist

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by ILI Leicester on February 28, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by ILI Leicester on February 28, 2010

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OTTERing knowledge round the world

BDRA’s OTTER (Open, Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources) project enables the production and release of high-quality open educational resources (OERs) drawn from teaching materials delivered at the University of Leicester. You can already use OERs from 12 different subject areas. This very successful project is soon to end, though there’s some chance of similar research being funded at BDRA in the near future.

OTTER – funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy – enables, pilots and evaluates systems and processes designed to enable individuals, teams and departments to release high-quality OERs for free access, reuse and repurposing by others under an appropriate open licence, in perpetuity.

International interest in self-funding OERs

There’s international interest in OERs. I’ve just come across Justin Johansen’s US study. Here’s the abstract (unfortunately I couldn’t access the whole document):

Since MIT launched the first OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in 2002, responses from the academic community have ranged from exuberance to angst. Some institutions have been reluctant to adopt a program of open publishing because of concerns about long-term funding and possible adverse effects on paid enrollment. Money is an issue, forcing some organizations that initially created OCW programs to furlough them due to funding challenges. This study examined the cost of converting online distance learning courses to OCW, the impact of opening these courses on paid enrollments, and the long-term sustainability of OCW through the generation of new paid enrollments. As part of this study, At Brigham Young University the Independent Study Program (BYU IS) converted three university and three high school courses to OCW. BYU IS provided an option for OCW users to pay regular tuition and enroll in the online course for credit. The average ongoing cost to convert BYU IS courses to OCW was $284.12 per university course and $1,172.71 per high school course. The six opened courses generated 13,795 visits and 445 total paid enrollments in four months. The profit margin on the paid enrollments OCW generated was calculated to be 3.81%, sufficient for open publishing to be financially self-sustaining at BYU IS.

Can students create OERs?

OTTER is working with academics to produce OERs, but can learners successfully produce their own? Ari-Matti Auvinen’s paper, ‘The challenge of quality in peer-produced eLearning content’, describes some production principles and proposes validation through peer review. Learners are creators of the content, no longer purely consumers but they participating in learning therefore influencing it. Peer production can empower a wide variety of professionals to generate learning content but is the quality good enough? This article introduces QualityScape, a method developed by the European Quality Management in Peer Production (QMPP) project for assuring the quality of peer-produced eLearning content. QMPP found that quality is the result of the interplay between peer production of digital content and peer validation processes of digital content.

Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments

Meantime, I couldn’t resist having a look at a new journal I hadn’t spotted before: The International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE). Like me, you may be interested in the review of what is claimed to be the first book in its field: Judith Molka-Danielson & Mats Deutschmann’s Learning and Teaching in the Virtual World of Second Life. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2009. It’s about a state- funded Scandinavian project on using Second Life in adult education.

David Hawkridge

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by ILI Leicester on February 26, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by ILI Leicester on February 26, 2010

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Universities and the Pioneering of the Internet

A brief discussion amongst Beyond Distance colleagues regarding the BBC television programme “The Virtual Revolution,” raised the question of what role was played by education in the pioneering of the internet. “The Virtual Revolution” made only a very brief mention that it was four universities, linked together as ARPANET, which comprised the forerunner of the internet. In fact, universities, research and education were the shaping, driving force behind the entire development of the internet.

J. C. R. Licklider, whilst working as a Professor of  Psychology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, published a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in which he wrote, “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

Licklider, J.C.R., “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. Eprint

In 1962, Licklider wrote memos detailing his idea of a “Galactic Network,” a globally-connected set of nodes through which users could access documents and data from any other node. Later that year, when he was appointed head of computer research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he managed to convince his teammates and successors of the value of the idea of the computer network. It was DARPA which realised Licklider’s vision, bringing ARPANET online with the four universities in late 1969. The idea was for researchers to be able to share data and information with each other, regardless of location.

Other internet developments occurred at research institutions and universities. Packet switching was developed by both Donald Davies of the UK National Physical Laboratory and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT; the Domain Name System (DNS) at University of Wisconsin, Mosaic (the predecessor to the Netscape browser) at University of Illinois. And of course, Sir Tim Berners Lee first proposed the idea of hypertext whilst working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Not only has research and learning shaped the internet, but consequently the impact of the internet on research and learning cannot be overstated. Distance learning, in the past only carried out on paper and by snail mail, has been revolutionised by e-tivities and multimedia material delivered via the internet. Distance and on-campus students alike benefit from podcasts and other materials organised and offered 24/7 to anywhere by means of virtual and personal learning environments. Here at Beyond Distance in January 2010, while snow paralysed much of the UK, we were able to virtually gather dozens of participants from every continent except Antarctica to study and discuss learning futures through our completely-online Learning Futures Festival. Even if television misses this side of the story, we will continue to develop the education side of the internet story.

Terese Bird

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by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2010

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Latest: the future of learning’s coming along (CALF)

BDRA’s Creating Academic Learning Futures (CALF) project, in collaboration with the University of Falmouth, is looking at the future of learning. If you’d like to know more, there’s a blog for the project, videos and a wiki.

Last December Sandra Romenska blogged about CALF at Online Educa in Berlin. She mentioned Lord Puttnam (Chancellor of the Open University), one of those behind an initiative to change how we think about education. There’s a We Are the People We’ve Been Waiting For website. There’s also a 77-minute documentary. I watched it recently: it’s thought provoking but has too many of the great and good, as well as five children who speak up well about what they haven’t had.

For contrast, you may like to look at George Siemens’ 9-minute video, asking is it possible to de-school society? Across the water, Stephen Downes says that according to the New York Times, “an American kid drops out of high school at an average rate of one every 26 seconds. In some large urban districts, only half of the students ever graduate. Of the kids who manage to get through high school, only about a third are ready to move on to a four-year college.”

Efforts to use IT to upgrade education still fail catastrophically sometimes: in South Korea the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology thought it saw the future and spent about US$250 million to install 65-inch electronic blackboards in 256 middle and high school classrooms across the country, only to find they are little used. For 2010, Lev Gonick considers IT in Higher Education.

Maybe Harvard has a better idea for influencing the future of learning. Stephen Downes notes that to create a new generation of educational leaders, Harvard is launching a three year, tuition-free doctorate which will include a final year field placement. It will initially offer places on the Ed.L.D to just 25 candidates.

Have a look  at the Educause Magazine for January-February Innovation: Rethinking the Future of Higher Education.

The best news is that BDRA is aiming to launch an MSc in Innovative Education and Training (Learning Futures). More details soon.

David Hawkridge

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by ILI Leicester on February 18, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by ILI Leicester on February 18, 2010

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Vicariously virtual

At the LLAS (Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies) E-learning Symposium on Friday 29 January 2010, Ming Nie and I, together with our avatars Ming Cham and Daffodil Moonwall, presented on our recent Second Life (SL) project with distance students on the Online MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. The presentation is described in the DUCKLING blog. Here I want to reflect on the combination of technologies used in the presentation.

This was a truly mixed-mode presentation, with a number of ways in which audience members could participate. For starters, there were approximately 30 people in the lecture theatre at the University of Southampton where I was presenting. They got to see me in real life, as well as Daffodil and Ming Cham on the big screen in SL. Meanwhile, Ming Nie was joined in real life in Leicester by a colleague from the MA course team, who had accepted our invitation to vicariously experience the virtual presentation. A few other colleagues joined Daffodil and Ming Cham in SL via their avatars. Finally, the event was also live streamed via video for anyone who wanted to see what was happening in the lecture theatre in Southampton from a distance. (Here I must apologise to my mum for sms-ing her the wrong URL – I misspelt “tinyurl” as “tinurl”, which had the effect of sending her off to an array of porn sites, thereby confirming her lack of faith in all things Web.)

For anyone who missed the live session and would like to see the recording, it is available, along with recordings of the other sessions from the symposium, at www.tinyurl.com/LLAS-livestream.

From a technical point of view, everything went very smoothly. Ming and I had our PowerPoint slides embedded in Second Life, and our avatars stood on either side of the virtual screen. I had two microphones – a lapel mike for the live streaming, and a headset mike for SL. We connected to SL without a hitch, and with the help of technical gurus on both sides (thanks Graham, Dean, Terese, Simon and Paul!) we managed to get excellent sound quality in both venues.

Despite the technical success, I am curious to know what value SL really added to the presentation. Yes, it allowed Ming to co-present with me from a distance. And yes, it gave a feel for the environment in which our study had taken place, which made it appropriate for the occasion. However, I wonder how exciting it was for members of the audience to watch two rather stationary avatars standing at the front of a virtual lecture theatre, and speaking to PowerPoint slides with disembodied voices…

Perhaps both Daffodil and Ming Cham need to learn the art of moving unobtrusively and gesturing while speaking? (Not as easy it sounds though, because as soon as you move your avatar, you also lose your view of the presentation screen at least momentarily, which could be very disorientating for any audience members watching the screen from the presenters’ point of view.) Perhaps we could have tried lip-synching, so that it was clear which avatar was speaking? Perhaps we could have hovered over the screen rather than standing next to it? Perhaps we could have used a more visually attractive presentation format such as Prezi, rather than PowerPoint? Perhaps… we could get some creative ideas from blog readers for the next time we try something like this?

Gabi Witthaus, 1 Feb 2010

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by ILI Leicester on February 2, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by ILI Leicester on February 2, 2010

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An Initial Reaction to the iPad

Steve Jobs’ 27 January unveiling of the Apple iPad has drawn reactions running the gamut from adoration to ridicule.  Most comments in the latter category take aim at the device’s name. Other negative opinions focus on the iPad’s inability to multitask, lack of a camera, or the fact that it isn’t more like a netbook.

I for one agree with Jobs’ quip in his keynote: “The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything.” He goes on to show how the iPad is designed to do chosen tasks better — the chosen tasks being email, displaying photos, watching videos, playing music, browsing the web, playing games, and, yes, reading e-books. In addition, one can create Keynote presentations, spreadsheets, and word-processed documents using iPad versions of these apps, features which look quite impressive and set the iPad notably ahead of both the iPhone and arguably netbooks.

Those who have test-run the iPad testify to its clever usability and speed, courtesy of the new custom-silicon A4 chip. The iPad’s price tag is very reasonable, and its 3G data plan with AT&T is surprisingly low-priced and flexible, with no contract to sign. This alone well positions the iPad for all kinds of users — businesspeople, artists, students, academics, everyone. And since, in many parts of the developing world, 3G is the most common method of internet access, the iPad is in this respect well-positioned for new inroads into international markets.

For me, the most interesting, even revolutionary, news about the iPad was not only that e-books would now be available for purchase through Apple just as music and films have been, but also that Apple has been negotiating with textbook publishers to this end. In the UK we have had Sony e-readers and Waterstones, while the e-books scene in the States has been dominated by the Kindle and Amazon, but neither Waterstones nor Amazon has been offering very much in the way of textbooks for e-readers. We at Beyond Distance have been evaluating the use of e-readers by masters-level distance students as part of our DUCKLING project. As a part of this project, publishers Routledge made a special deal to allow us to include their textbook on the e-readers supplied to students, and we will be sharing with Routledge the results of our research. Now that Apple has taken the major step of promising textbooks on iPads, we should begin to see textbook publishers not only provide their materials for e-readers but hopefully benefit from Apple’s consistent “cool factor” with students.

Vive la revolution!

Terese Bird

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by ILI Leicester on February 1, 2010  •  Permalink
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