All posts for the month October, 2010

The End of the World-Wide-Web-Surf As We Know It?

Apple recently unveiled its new MacBook Air laptops as well as its new operating system, Lion. The combination of the two result in a product many see as part-way between a laptop and the iPad. For example, the MacBook Air, like the iPad, has all-flash storage, meaning that all of its storage space is made of the same technology as your USB memory stick as opposed to the traditional hard drive. It is also designed for long battery life and its new trackpad is meant to emulate the iPad touchscreen.

 
To me the most interesting feature is the new Mac App Store. Of course, computers ran applications in the 1980s. But an iPad app or iPhone/iTouch app is a version of an application or a website function that is specifically engineered for the iPad, iPhone, and iTouch. So the idea is that, just as with the iPhone and iPad, now with the new laptop you can go to the App Store and buy or freely download apps such as the eBay App or Angry Birds.

 

Even though these devices run browsers, often the app gives you a new way to do a browser-based function which is better suited to the small screen and keyboard and touchscreen — and lack of Flash— of the Apple devices. But the new laptops don’t have the size limitations. So why make an app store for laptops?

 
Well, obviously, Apple is a company and sees an interesting new revenue stream. But what does this mean for users?

 
Apps differ from browser-based applications in that they are not cross-platform. The eBay app for the iPhone must be downloaded from Apple, while to obtain the eBay app for the Android phone one must go to the Android Market. The new Windows 7 phone will be accompanied by its own marketplace of apps. But today users of different computer operating systems simply type into a browser the same URL to get to eBay by means of the browser. App proliferation feels like a step backward into separate platform silos.

 
Furthermore, the browser is the single place where we do lots of things. In the realm of e-learning, we search for information, save a reference into Delicious, Netvibes, or Mendeley, post onto a discussion board, watch an embedded video clip and read a document in a VLE (virtual learning environment) — all in the browser. There is also the traditional surf: search, click, read, click, read, search, click, read. Will the proliferation of apps remove us from the browser so that our surfing and other activities will look and feel and act drastically different a few years from now? Perhaps it will be the end of the world-wide-web surf as we know it. And if browsers decline in use, what of the VLE?

 
What do you think app proliferation will mean for the computing and e-learning experience?

 

Terese Bird,
Learning Technologist and Assistant Keeper of the Media Zoo

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by ILI Leicester on October 29, 2010  •  Permalink
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Google, and the mysterious case of the disappearing maze

Google has been in the news recently. When they sent cars around the UK to take photos for the rather handy Street View project, not only did they make a note of everybody’s wireless network, but, it seems, they stored some of the data being sent across the networks as well. Data like passwords and emails.

Yesterday, something unusual happened in our virtual Media Zoo that brought this to mind. Later this year, we will be running our second major study for the SWIFT project. This will see dozens of students use a virtual genetics lab to add to their learning of practical laboratory skills. Recently, I have been creating a self-directed training area where our participants will be able to go to learn the basics of participating in this virtual world – provided in this case by Second Life.

Self-directed training area for SWIFT

Self-directed training area for SWIFT

I wanted some sort of path, to guide visitors through a series of tasks, and ended up buying a garden maze for 25 linden Dollars (about 6p here, or 10 US cents). I set that out with a number of information boards, each one describing a particular skill, such as walking, talking to others, putting on a lab coat etc., the idea being to take the visitor through all the skills they will need to participate in the study. Yesterday, I was putting the finishing touches on this induction area, and needed to move the maze half a pace East.

Except I couldn’t edit the maze. On further inspection, it seemed I no longer owned the maze – it now belonged to some random avatar! How strange. How come?

So I bought another maze and “returned” the original to its new owner, then set about figuring out what went wrong. It seems that the maker of this maze set it up rather strangely. Firstly – and this is normal enough – the maze I bought was copy protected: I could give it away or sell it if I wished, but my one copy would be transferred to the new owner and I would lose it. Secondly – and this is the strange part –my maze had been set to “For Sale” with a price of zero dollars. (Usually, the maker leaves this field blank for the new owner to set if they ever wish to resell it). So, my maze was on sale for free without me knowing it, and it seems that some enterprising avatar had snapped it up!

Well, so, who is to blame? Is it a) the maze-maker for leaving their product set to allow anyone to walk off with it, b) myself for not checking every setting on everything I purchase, or c) the other avatar for taking something that was being given away?

Then I remembered Google. They took information that was left lying around because the security wasn’t switched on, on people’s wireless networks – like pasting pages from a personal diary on your garden gate for all to see. So, same question. Who’s at fault? Is it a) the manufacturer of the wifi boxes, b) the owner who’s using the box or c) Google for taking something that was being given away?

I shall be bold here and supply an answer. I don’t think you can blame Google or the visiting avatar. It seems reasonable to me that if something is being given away, and there’s no apparent harm to be done in taking it, and it’s not being taken for any malicious purpose, then by all means take it. (Of course, it has to be legal too, and this is where Google may possibly have a problem).

And I don’t think you can blame the owner. When you buy something, you expect it to just work. Safely.

No, I think it’s down to the manufacturer to think about how their customers will use the object and do their best to make it usable. How many people buy something and want anybody to be able to buy it for free? How many people buy a wifi box and want the whole world to use it?

The same principle needs to apply to our virtual genetics lab. As the “manufacturer”, we have made a lot of effort to ensure that the lab is realistic, effective,  and easy to use. November 24th will be the big day, when we let our student volunteers loose in the lab, and find out just how successful we have been.

Paul Rudman, BDRA

 

Try our new training area yourself; download Second Life and follow this link

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by ILI Leicester on October 27, 2010  •  Permalink
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You say goodbye….

My time at Beyond Distance is coming to an end and I felt this was a good time to look back at some achievements during my work with DUCKLING, OTTER and the entire Beyond Distance team that I value most.

  • DUCKLING in an eggshell.   This poster an attempt to crack out of the typical ‘research project-poster’ style and is one of the deliverables of the DUCKLING project.
  • Being an award winning OTTER. I previously blogged about this but winning the virtual poster competition, but the chance to caricature all the OTTER team stands out for me. One team member even used his picture in his Facebook profile picture!
  • Producing 438 credits worth of OERs (with the OTTER team).  The team went above and beyond the call of duty (i.e funder’s requirements) by producing such an impressive amount of credits.  Take a look through our repository and let us know what you think!
  • A new Media Zoo banner and logo.  The Media Zoo website has moved into Plone (our content management system) and with it comes a new banner and logo.  I’m pleased with my attempt at capturing the feel of the physical zoo with the array animals that ‘live’ there.
  • Learning Futures Festival Online 2010.  To be part of an 8 day 24/7 online conference was a huge achievement during a snowy January that brought the UK to a standstill.  What makes this an even greater achievement is that we released over 75% of the keynotes, workshops and paper presentations as OERs.

And one more thing that I’m proud of is the small amount of photos of me that exist during my time here, to which my colleagues can testify!  As someone who does npot enjoy getting their photo taken this is definitely an achievement.

Finally could I take this opportunity to wish everyone at Beyond Distance and other colleagues at the University of Leicester the very best for the future while I (hopefully) say ‘hello’ to new opportunities.

Emma Davies
Learning Technologist

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by ILI Leicester on October 26, 2010  •  Permalink
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What do a TIGER and an OSTRICH have in common?

As mentioned by Ale last week, the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester has received further funding from JISC and the HEA to continue spearheading the creation and release of learning materials as open educational resources (OERs) via the OSTRICH (OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs) project. There is also the TIGER (Transforming Interprofessional Groups through Educational Resources) project – more about that below.

Beyond Distance established a reputation for its work in OERs through the OTTER (Open, Transferable, Technology-enhanced Educational Resources) project from May 2009 to April 2010, in which over 430 credits’ worth of learning materials were published as OERs, in 13 subject areas ranging from Politics through Law to Genetics. (See www.le.ac.uk/oer.) A major outcome of the OTTER project was a workflow and quality framework called CORRE, which includes step-by-step procedures for ensuring that there is no breach of third-party copyright, and transforming and formatting materials to make them reusable and customisable by other academics and students in different contexts. Beyond Distance is now leading the way for other institutions to apply the knowledge gained from piloting CORRE at the University of Leicester during the OTTER project.

In the OSTRICH project, the University of Leicester is supporting the Universities of Bath and Derby in creating and publishing at least 100 credits’ worth of OERs each, in a range of subject areas, following procedures based on the CORRE framework from OTTER. The OSTRICH project is also developing and testing a model for cascading knowledge about OERs and OER processes, enabling other higher education institutions to gain from the knowledge learnt during OTTER. Apart from the OERs themselves, all workflow templates and draft policy guidelines produced in the project will be made available for other institutions to customise to their contexts.

TIGER is a collaborative project between the University of Northampton, De Montfort University (DMU) and the University of Leicester, and will release teaching resources amounting to at least 360 credits into Jorum Open, the main repository for UK Higher Education, and TIGER’s own repository. The three institutions will collect, develop and share OERs designed for Interprofessional Education (IPE) in Health and Social Care. IPE is an emerging field within Health and Social Care curricula, in which students learn about each others’ professional practice to enable more effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. The TIGER project aims to dramatically benefit IPE in Health and Social Care and to solve ongoing challenges in cross-professional collaboration. TIGER OERs will address topic areas for which there is a great and ongoing need, and will be easily accessible to clinical teams in their workplaces via the Web. The OERs will ultimately benefit patients, because they focus on improving the quality of care delivery.

Beyond Distance is proud to be one of the institutions at the forefront of the OER movement in the UK, raising the profile of not only the University of Leicester but also of UK Higher Education in general, in the international Higher Education market.

Gabi Witthaus and Ming Nie, 25 Oct 2010

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by ILI Leicester on October 25, 2010  •  Permalink
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The Professors Profess… The Future of British HE in 2020

As everyone is uneasily waiting for the nearly £4 billion cuts to the budget for higher education in the 2010 Spending Review to be announced today, EducationGuardian pre-emptively published the predictions of UK academics about the impact of the funding cuts for the next ten years. Below is a selection of what they thought was coming.

The rise of the “black arts” of enrolment management
Prof. Claire Callender from the Institute of Education in London thinks that universities will be at the core of a quickly developing industry of enrolment management, calculating the number of students that can be recruited at different price rates, rates of discounts for different groups of students, etc. If Tesco can do it, why not universities? Buy one degree in chemistry, get one free in history, anyone?

Socrates in the local chippy
Prof. Gillian Evans from the University of Cambridge was concerned with the recommendation of the Browne’s report to end public funding for all subjects not considered priority, i.e., courses other than science, technology or courses not deemed to be providing “significant social returns.” In her scenario subjects such as palaeography or philosophy will have to vacate the publicly funded buildings and go back to the Aristotelian peripatetic method in the streets.


RyanAir Universities
Roger Brown from the Centre of Higher Education Research Development forecasts the emergence of a tiered system like the one in the USA. At the top there will be a small group of elite institutions which will be charging the highest fees. Then there will be the vast majority of “no-frills” universities, teaching mainly applied courses.

What I found surprising in the scenarios discussed by the Guardian was the lack of mention of learning technologies as a factor which will play a crucial role in helping universities pull through what without a doubt will be a very difficult shake up. A scenario by the BBC did foresee an increase in the provision of online courses, describing the mobile learning experiences of fictional students of the future.

Disturbingly, however, instead of drawing upon the advances in innovative learning and teaching for distance learners for which there are numerous examples amongst British universities (the University of Leicester for example has more than 8000 distance learners, the Open University would be another excellent example), the report seemed to promote the work of a private, for-profit, non-university provider, which “is positioning itself in this market and has already made the content of some courses wholly accessible via mobile phone.”

I think in the climate to come it will be more important than ever for institutions to be able and willing to share their experiences in using learning technologies to offer no-cost or low-cost solutions for learners and teachers, especially those that have been peer-reviewed.

20/10/2010 Sandra Romenska
Creating Academic Learning Futures (CALF) project
BDRA

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by ILI Leicester on October 20, 2010  •  Permalink
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Learners as learning designers at the workplace

Prof. Betty Collis, a noted consultant in technology for strategy, learning and change in corporate learning and higher education at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, gave a great keynote address at last week’s JISC programme meeting. She ended with the following ‘provocative  thought’:

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the orientation that ‘Design for learning refers to the complex processes by which practitioners devise, structure and realise learning for others’. That does not sound to me like the way that learning is going on in organisations.

This ‘provocative thought’ was borne out by many examples  in Betty’s presentation of the way in which employees at Shell used technology – especially wikis – for knowledge sharing and informal learning. She commented on a trend from formal, structured training towards more informal, networked learning within the corporation: over time, employees preferred learning from information shared by their colleagues in a giant, company-wide wiki, than from formal, instructor-led training courses.

During the period that Betty was Leader of Shell-University of Twente Collaborative Project (2001-2005), a strong culture of knowledge sharing was generated in the organisation, with every employee understanding that they had something to teach others. Learning (and teaching) at the workplace became inseparable from getting things done (i.e. working).

This resonates well with the comment made by Jay Cross, Jane Hart et al in a recent article in eLearn magazine:

The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete. Nonetheless, we never use the word “learning” with a senior executive…

Companies don’t want learning—they want things done….

That’s why we talk about “working smarter.” More than knowing how to get things done, working smarter involves actually doing them.

It strikes me that the way assessment is carried out can have a powerful impact on the nature of learning, especially for work-based learners. One of Betty’s very practical recommendations for enhancing higher education courses was to gear  assessment tasks towards getting students to produce something that could be used as a learning resource by other students. One could take this idea one step further, by focusing assessment tasks on getting learners to generate something that is useful for their colleagues – this could involve sharing information, proposing a solution to a problem at the workplace, or carrying out an experiment to try to enhance workplace processes or outputs.

Those programmes that provide learners with the skills to apply their learning in innovative ways that add value to their own workplace contexts are likely to be the ones that survive the lean times ahead.

Gabi Witthaus, 20 Oct 2010

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by ILI Leicester on October 20, 2010  •  Permalink
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Flying ostriches

OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs (OSTRICH)

After the successful completion of the OTTER project at Leicester, which released 430 credits’ worth of Open Educational Resources (OERs) during the pilot phase of the OER programme, the JISC and HE Academy-funded OSTRICH project (UKOER Phase 2, cascade strand), got off to a flying start. The Leicester project team (Gabi Witthaus, Tania Rowlett and myself) visited our counterparts at the University of Bath last week, where meetings and workshops took place. In addition to extensive and valuable discussions with Andy Ramsden, Vic Jenkins and Julian Prior, we had the opportunity to discuss a range of IPR and copyright issues with Bath’s Library colleagues and their legal advisors. Drawing on the experience of OTTER and its sister projects, we also ran a workshop that attracted many of the project’s Bath-based OER contributors and a few potentially new ones.

We agreed that the CORRE framework (one of OTTER’s deliverables) may need to be refined to accommodate Bath’s requirements and context. For example, it would need to include a form of learner validation right at the start of the process. It would also need to reflect a devolved transformation process that does not depend on a central team – the new version could be called D-CORRE and it could be one of OSTRICH’s key deliverables.

Ostriches don’t usually fly. These ones do. The cascade process has begun.

Alejandro Armellini
Beyond Distance Research Alliance
18 October 2010

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by ILI Leicester on October 18, 2010  •  Permalink
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DUCKLING: The Great Exhibition

Last Tuesday, October 12 2010, Gilly, Ale and I attended JISC’s curriculum design and curriculum deliver joint programme meeting at Nottingham. The theme of the meeting was Delivering the benefits: from project to institutional enhancement.

In the afternoon, there was a one-hour demonstration session called The Great Exhibition: Enhancing Curriculum Delivery through Technology. In this session, the curriculum delivery projects had the opportunity to showcase how they have helped to transform and enhance some aspects of curriculum delivery through technology. The idea behind the exhibition was to ‘sell’ project benefits to a wider audience. As one of the curriculum delivery projects, DUCKLING presented a poster and a leaflet, both called DUCKLING in an eggshell, and highlighted key outputs and deliverables of the project. See the DUCKLING poster below:

 

DUCKLING also showcased other key outputs and findings in a variety of formats, including:

  1. Key findings of student experience of using DUCKLING technologies
  2. A video produced by Dr Ray Randall, showing staff experience
  3. A summary of benefits to key stakeholders
  4. The Teaching Fellow model
  5. A  guide for converting Word documents into ePub format

DUCKLING exhibition was well received by the audience. People were really interested in DUCKLING’s technology-enhanced solutions. Four projects won the exhibition award. SpringboardTV, an internet TV station, at the College of West Anglia, won first place. The Integrate project at the University of Exeter was second. Congratulations!

Ming Nie              18 October 2010

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Redevelopment of the Media Zoo Island in Second Life

In line with the launch of the new Media Zoo website, now with a great new banner designed by Emma, I have started work on redeveloping the Media Zoo Island in Second Life – with help from Paul, of course.

The island was built originally to serve as a place to showcase all the projects of Beyond Distance, as well as specifically to run the Second Life MOOSE project. As we move into 2011, and especially because of the requirements of SWIFT, the time has come to move the island into what I’ve called Phase II of its existence.

Part of the DUCKLING project, the oil rig has proved an popular artefact and simulation, and will be part of the 2010 JISC online conference. It is the main feature in the lagoon and, because it wasn’t needed for Phase II, we removed the boat house. The pier has been kept, and the motor launches used to ferry visitors and students to the rig will moored along it.

boat house

Selecting and removing the boat house

Another significant change in the lagoon has been to move and reshape the beach that formed such an important part of our 2010 Learning Futures Festival. The beach now forms part of the penininsula that contains the Saami tent.

beach

The new beach

The main work, however, will come with readapting what were the Safari Park and Breeding Area domes. One will be used to  showcase the projects from all four quadrants of the Media Zoo while the other – at the moment – is likely to become an auditorium/lecture hall/gathering place.

Phase II, which builds upon the success of Phase I, is partly about adapting the island to current needs, but also preparing it for future work and projects.

Join us on Media Zoo Island at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Media%20Zoo/171/102/25.

Simon Kear

Keeper of the Media Zoo

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by ILI Leicester on October 18, 2010  •  Permalink
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The importance of backups

Once upon a time, I worked as a programmer in the R&D department of a large computer company. There was an expensive air-conditioned computer room with people whose job it was to look after the (then) cutting edge hardware. One day, we arrived for work to find that the equivalent of the main file server was down, and a number of engineers from the hardware company ware scurrying around the fancy computer room looking flustered. Of course, being a business environment, we were soon found some work to fill the time (filing papers or something) until after lunch when we were told the system was back.

Well, “back” is the word – back a whole week, in fact. The IT department took regular backups (monthly rotating copies – lost data may not be noticed for a while – off-site – in case of fire, etc. – daily incremental – changes since the last complete backup – and so forth) but it seems the contractors hadn’t been so careful. They had managed to wipe the main disc (or maybe it had crashed already) along with a week’s worth of backups. This was three days before the customer delivery deadline. Being a commercial organisation of course, they didn’t want to delay delivery, so it was down to the programmers to redo a week’s worth of programming and finish the project in the remaining three days (well, five in fact, as there was a weekend attached). It was, actually, a valuable lesson in the importance of backing up one’s work.

Zipping forward in time, to University of Leicester’s SWIFT project in 2010.

We have created two virtual laboratories in the virtual world of Second Life (SL) – not a small task. Now as before, we are trusting a third party to make suitable backups of that work (Linden Labs in fact, who run the Second life system). Now for all I know, they may have a backup regime to rival NASA. It’s just that, well, past experience has taught me to always make my own backups as well.

So I was very happy this week to find just how easy  SL backups can be. I used the independent (of SL) viewer “Imprudence” and simply selected ”Export” from the pie menu. You can’t backup textures and scripts, or other people’s objects, but since we created everything we now have a directory from which we could restore the main parts of our virtual genetics lab should we ever need to.

But it gets better! I was investigating Imprudence because I was recommended a web page giving easy  instructions for installing Opensim (Opensim provides a free open-source virtual environment, largely compatible with SL).  In less than a couple of hours I recreated our virtual lab in our own Opensim environment – our own, private SWIFT.

There’s more . . . as my colleague Simon Kear pointed out, it should be possible to create a distributable single-user virtual world for anyone to use – a complete OER (Open Educational Resource), the virtual world and its project such as SWIFT, for download to a memory stick to run anywhere, no Second Life or even internet connection required.

Currently, we like to distribute “regular” OERs in several formats, such as DOC, PDF and e-book formats, so as to ensure they can be used by as many people as possible. That’s why it’s exciting to find we could distribute virtual world artefacts in a new way that anyone with a fairly new computer could take and use. Our OTTER project was very successful in setting up a streamlined mechanism for distributing OERs. As more is built in virtual worlds, maybe it’s time for “virtual-OTTER” – a project to incorporate virtual worlds into the OER fold.

OERs – the ultimate off-site backup!

Paul Rudman, BDRA

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