Mark's Web

Stellar - Meeting of Young Minds

2011-12-06T07:22:00.000-08:00

Last week I spent Monday and Tuesday at the Stellar Meeting of Young Minds in Leuven, Belgium. The point of the meeting was to get twelve leading young thinkers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) together to consider where the research is going and what should be funded through future European Commission funding calls. I was very lucky to be one of those twelve selected.

The instrument used in this meeting to consider what the future of TEL was scenario building. The JRC define a scenario as:

A scenario is a "story" illustrating visions of possible future or aspects of possible future. It is perhaps the most emblematic Foresight or future studies method. Scenarios are not predictions about the future but rather similar to simulations of some possible futures. They are used both as an exploratory method or a tool for decision-making, mainly to highlight the discontinuities from the present and to reveal the choices available and their potential consequences.

You can find more details on scenarios on the JRC website - http://forlearn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/guide/4_methodology/meth_scenario.htm or on the Foresight Horizon Planning Toolkit - http://hsctoolkit.bis.gov.uk/About-15.html.

To begin before even arriving in Leuven we were asked to come up with some trends that we believe are going to have a big impact on TEL and learning in general over the next 10-20 years. In a later post I will give more details on the trends identified. In this post I wanted to just outline my experience in Leuven using the Future Scenarios methodology.

During the future scenario buliding we were split into three groups of four. The group I was in concentrated on the uncertainity of the future and how it is widely held that we are educating young people for jobs that do not even exist yet. What does this mean? We need to essentially equip people now with the skills and knowledge to allow them to adapt and remould themselves in the future. In essence to react to the needs of the world they live in, in a timely fashion. We need to train people to train themselves.

As a group we were transfixed on the backwardness of standardised eduction. We make kids conform to a norm so that we can measure them against their peers. This in essense supresses their individuality and their uniqueness. Granted there are skills that need to be taught to allow an individuals mould themselves to fit with the needs of a changing world but these skills can be taught through a medium that interests and motivates the individual.

We looked at how a more personalised curriculum could be achieved - where people learn about the things that excite in a way that motivates them to want to learn. In this environement a teacher facilitates the student by making sure the student has the right learning resources and experiences they need in a timely fashion. The teacher also facilitates, through technology, matching students with common interests and also matching students with experts in the subject area that motivates them. In this environment students are no longer assessed according to standardised tests, each student is assessed as to the how he or she has developed and the knowledge and skills he or she has mastered in the their chosen domain.

Our group also looked at whether we should still have compulsory subjects - perhaps language wont be an issue in the future, but maybe we should all have a basic grounding in things like history, science, maths, civics and world culture. This would be the responsibility of primary education, whereas secondary education allows the student to explore their own interests in a structure fashion. Secondary education would see students take progressively more ownership of their own education setting their own goals and development plans.

This was a very interesting and thought provoking session that I really enjoyed. Afterwards I was asked what three most relevant trends for the future, after some consideration I came up with:

Training will be personalised to personal interest - you can set what you are interested and work towards your own goals
There will be a need to train people to train themselves
People will need to be skilled in a variety of core skills that will allow them to adapt to the needs of a changing world

We were also asked if we could get the commission to fund one research are what would it be, to which I replied:

Facilitating personalised learning using the abundant information available to people. Also look at how assessment could work if everyone had their own curriculum. I think we will move away from the standardised test to one that celebrates individuality.

I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Rethinking Pedagogy - First four chapters

2011-11-16T05:43:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in a previous post the publishers of the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age have asked me to give suggestions on changes for the second edition. This is the first proper post looking at this.

In this post I am briefly going to look that the first four chapters. So here goes:

Learning and e-learning - The role of theory by Terry Mayes and Sara de Freitas

This chapter looks at the place of learning theory in e-learning. It introduces the reader to three perspectives on learning theory - assocationist, cognitive, situative - which is useful. I think perhaps more on this is warranted as a lot of e-learning researchers find it hard to understand all the various learning theories and how they sit with each other. The authors introduce the idea that each perspective has its place in the learning cycle. It would be great if there could be a diagram included to depict the learning theory perspectives. Also a diagram on the learning cycle would be good in the second edition.

An Approach to Learning Activity Design by Helen Beetham

This chapter considers the design of learning activities. A learning activity can be defined in terms of learning outcomes, learners, digital resources and technology, and interaction with others. This is a good concise chapter that captures the key aspects of a learning activity.

Designing Courses for e-Learning by Rhona Sharpe and Martin Oliver
This chapter takes a macro view of course design whereas the previous chapter takes the micro view looking at learning activity design. The chapter begins with looking at approaches to course design and the problems with using learning outcomes and constructive alignment where 'assessment always defines the curriculum' and learning outcomes become essentially a straight jacket for the learner. The chapter then looks at models for course design. To be honest I would have liked a lot more detail here - each model could be a chapter on its own. This chapter also notes that its not by virtue of any pedagogical affordances that technology is integrated into course design - its by necessity to deal with some of the challenges in the classroom like growing class sizes. The chapter finishes with a brief outline of how to go about course redesign. This chapter is a key one for me and I would like to see a lot more detail in two areas - the models for course design and on the process of course redesign - perhaps new chapters for the second edition?

Practices and Processes of Design for Learning by Liz Masterman and Mira Vogel
This chapter looks at what e-learning designers are actually doing in the field in designing courseware and learning activities. The chapter draws on 3 JISC funded projects one of which is centered around the tool support provided by LAMS. The chapter looks at how learning designs can be represented. The goal of this should be the sharing of good learning design, which the authors look at in one of the final sections. I think if this chapter was more generic, not discussing LAMS so much, it would be much improved.

That's it for the first four chapters. I should have the next four in a week or so.

Meeting of Young Minds - Belgium

2011-11-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

I have been invited to the Meeting of Young Minds in Belgium at the end of the month. The idea behind this meeting is stated on the invitation as follows:

The idea of this meeting is to gather 12 young minds (below 35) to discuss the future of TEL research during two days (Nov. 28-29) in Leuven.
We will then send a white paper to the Commission to help them to shape future call in Technology enhanced learning.

In preparation for this I have been asked for an informal introduction on myself and how I got involved in Technology Enhanced Learning - I decided to share what I wrote for this here:

How I came to be involved in TEL: When I read this statement, “how I came to be involved in TEL”, I really had to think - how did I get here? My interest and involvement in TEL was by no means planned, it was really an accident.

I have always been interested in computers. As far back as I can remember I have been tinkering with (or breaking, depends on who you ask) a computer. After finishing school I did a degree in Software Systems. During my degree I liked to think of myself as a very technical person, only interested in hard-core technology issues. After my degree I wanted to get into more technical web issues and managed to get onto a research project that was investigating semantic web technologies. It just so happened that the domain that this project was looking at was TEL. To be honest, I can remember thinking that perhaps this project wasn’t for me, it was investigating TEL and not really important issues, I was pretty naive wasn’t I?

During this project I tried very hard to stay away from TEL and concentrate on pure semantic web issues but it was no use as soon as I started to contemplate some of the big TEL questions, like ‘will what we are doing really help people learn?’, leading to bigger questions like ‘How do we learn anyway?’, I was hooked. My research in semantic web soon became a means to an end. At the end of this project we received additional funding for a longer term project to look at commercialising the technology we were developing. It was at this point that I considered myself a TEL researcher. I was now looking at how technology could help people to learn and teach. This was what now excited me. It was during this project I also completed my PhD, which looked at using software modelling technologies in designing good courseware.

After completing my PhD. I had two loves TEL and, after working on a commercialisation project, entrepreneurship. I moved to Canada and worked in a start-up e-learning company that was spinning out of the University of Toronto’s Psychology Dept. During this time we were looking at how we could use assessments to test knowledge fluency. We worked with all sorts of people from pilots to ice hockey officials to academics. This was a great time, very exciting and innovative. Unfortunately it was short lived - as the cash dried up and the revenue didn't come in quite fast enough.

After my time in Canada I came back to Ireland and joined a company that specialises in providing professional services for e-learning Open Source Software (OSS) (mainly Moodle). This is were I am now and finding it very interesting work - helping mould OSS around clients e-learning needs. There I am in mainly a consultancy role but do like to get my hands into the code every now and again.

I will of course blog about the meeting.

Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age - Feedback for 2nd Ed.

2011-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

I received an email from the Routledge, the publishers of Beetham and Sharpe's Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age.

We are beginning work on a 2^nd edition of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age and I’m interested in getting your opinion on the need for and ideal scope of such a book. I noticed you had reviewed the 1^st edition on your blog and we wanted to give readers the chance to informally provide feedback on the planned 2^ndedition. Which chapters would you most like to see revised and which do you think should be dropped entirely? What new topics do you feel should be added for a book that needs to be cutting-edge in 2013? Any thoughts you wish to share will be appreciated.

I have to say I applaud Routledge for looking to the readers and asking them what they want. Its been a while since I read the book but hey thats a good reason to revisit it and in doing so maybe I can give some feedback that Beetham and Sharpe can use for the second edition.

To do this I decided to maybe look briefly at each chapter and give my thoughts on that chapter. After reviewing each chapter I will go into what topics should be covered in the next edition that were not covered in the first edition.

The book is quite neatly divided into 16 chapters in two parts - Models of Learning and The practice of design. There is a third part containing resources that can be used by practitioners. Each resource is covered in a chapter. In my whistle-stop review I will cover four chapters in each blog post and then another blog post will go into the cutting edge topics that I think the 2nd edition should look at.

If you have read the book it would be great if you could give your feedback on the appropriate posts I am going to pass on the posts to the publisher along with any comments that the posts receive.

Percolate Project

2011-10-31T09:12:00.001-07:00

Over the past year I have been working on a really interesting research project called Percolate (http://www.percolate.ie). Percolate is a collaboration between various multinational companies in Ireland that develop e-learning solutions, indigenous Irish e-learning companies (including Enovation Solutions) and academic partners, namely Trinity College Dublin (TCD), University College Dublin (UCD), Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) DERI in NUI Galway.

The aim of the percolate project is to examine the very innovative bleeding edge technology that has been developed through research conducted by the academic partners over the last decade and make use of them in a commercial space by the industrial partners. Just to give you an idea of the technologies that have been developed:

Personalised learning engine (APeLs) developed by TCD
Semantic search from DERI
Social search from UCD - check out heystaks.com for the commercial application of UCD's social search
Learning metrics developed by TSSG in WIT

To push these technologies to their limits the industrial partners have come up with various use-cases. It is up to the academic partners to show how these technologies can be used in the various use cases. The use cases include:

K-12 use case - looking at how technology can be used for kids that are struggling at school and also kids that are shooting ahead, keeping them interested.
Third Level use case - Looking at how a Learning Object Repository such as the NDLR (http://www.ndlr.ie) can be used to give Just-In-Time guidance and support to students engaged in Problem Based Learning activities.
Corporate use case - Looking at how tacit knowledge can be more readily externalised and how corporates can make better use of social learning and quantify learner engagement with social learning.

The aim of this post is really to give you a little taster of what is going on in the Percolate project. Over the next few posts I hope to expand on each of the projects and perhaps go into a bit of detail about the technologies that are being exploited as part of this project.

Representing learning designs - chapter review

2011-05-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

"Learning Design" versus "learning design" key distinctions need to be made in chapter 7 and 8 of Beetham and Sharpe's book - " Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age". Learning Design refers to the IMS Learning Design specification which, according to Britain in Chapter 8 of the book, is an interoperability specification, an educational modelling language and a design methodology with associated tools. Learning design on the other hand refers to the instructional design generally.

Chapter 7, representing practioner experiences through learning design and patterns (McAndrew and Goodyear), looks at how we can express instructional design. It looks at the IMS LD specification at first but then looks to abstract on this using educational practice patterns.

Britain's chapter, chapter 8, goes into a bit more detail about the IMS LD specification and looks at the type of tool support it has, which is quite sparse and very much in an embryonic stage. All the tools are basically designed by the research community for the research community. The chapter does mention some more mainstream VLEs and tools will be looking to adopt IMS LD, but I am not sure this is the case - the chapter mentions that IMS LD is on the Moodle development roadmap but I have never seen that and there is no citation for this claim - perhaps someone can point me in the right direction?

This is another chicken and egg scenario in that we wont understand the potential of LD until we have good tool support but tool support for LD wont be built until the potential is understood.

Nice quote to finish the post:

Successful teaching involves a variety of strategies and techniques for engaging, motivating and energizing student over and above merely presenting them with well-designed learning materials. (Britain, 2007)

Describing learning activities

2011-04-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

Chapter six in the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age book is a nice chapter by Grainne Conole on describing learning activities. In this chapter, Grainne looks at how technology can be used to support learning as we move towards a more socially oriented learning paradigm. As outlined in the chapter we are moving away from the easy "here is the content now learn" model to a more complicated, but arguably more effective learning scenario that looks at socially situative learning.

One great thing I took away from the chapter was Littlejohn et. al levels of LO granularity, which are, in increasing levels of complexity:

digital assets - single file
information objects - aggregation of digital assets
learning activities - involves interations with information
learning design - structured sequences of information and activities

Grainne also discusses some of the standards and specifications that have been developed around these levels of LOs, from IEEE LOM to IMS LD.

The chapter goes on to define learning activities. Learning activities are defined using a taxonomy of its components, which are:

The context - when does the activity occur? What is the learning outcome? What type of learning outcome?
The pedagogy - associative, cognitive or situative?
The tasks - types of tasks, interaction, resources. Tasks can be classified as:

assimilative tasks
information handling
adaptive
communicative
productive
experiential

One noted critism of this model is how componentised it is. It deals with each element of a learning activity as an atomic unit when each element will always be used in conjunction with other elements. The combination of components needs to be assessed but this is a lot more complex then dealing with each component individually.

The chapter also looks at other approaches to creating learning activities including; narratives and case studies, lesson plans, templates and wizards, toolkits, models and patterns. Looking at these approaches the question is are we abstracting too much information away from the pedagogical expert that is the course creator? Although these models allow for courses to be created more efficiently using tried and tested learning design we still must make provisions to allow the expert course creator to move away from the prescribed learning designs in these models, perhaps through an "advanced view" of the learning design?

Anyway - great chapter Grainne!

Blogging - Quantity or Quality

2011-04-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Had an interesting discussion with a colleague today about blogs - whether its better to write good, well edited, well thought through posts every so often or whether you should post as often as possible in what ever way you can effectively articulate your thoughts. What do you think?

I suppose if you have read any of this blog you know that its more the "just get it out there" type of blog. I make no apologies for this. It is my blog and I choose to use primarily as a way of expressing what I believe to be true and invite people to correct me if I am wrong. This serves me in two ways - allows for reflective learning and also exposes my thoughts and beliefs for analysis to be contradicted and so I have the opportunity to correct any misconceptions I may have on a subject through a feedback loop.

Today I had a listen to Stephen Downes talk on the role of Open Educational Resources in personal learning - MP3 . Stephen talks about how knowledge can be viewed as a network of nodes and how nodes interact with each other. To that end my "knowledge" must be viewed as a mere node in a bigger network of individuals - for the network to learn I need to expose my thoughts for other nodes to contradict, contribute and concur with my thoughts, reasoning and logic. In turn I leave comments on other people's blogs to do the same. This is essentially how the network as a whole learns and becomes better.

So in conclusion - yes, I admit it, I throw rambling thoughts up on this blog. Why? Well to reflect on them and to invite comment - good, bad or indifferent.

Describing ICT-based learning designs

2011-03-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

Chapter 5 in the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age book looks at describing ICT-based learning designs, by Ron Oliver et al. The authors make the observation that there now appears to be a proliferation of reusable learning resources available but little in terms of guidance or workflows of effective pedagogical practice in using these learning object and it is this that teachers in fact are craving.

These workflows are more generally defined as learning designs. Learning designs have four key elements - learner engagement, acknowledgement of the learning context, learner challenge and provision of practice, as defined by Boud and Prosser.

The chapter attempts to establish a framework for defining learning designs. A learning design topology is defined consisting of four key kinds of learning designs - Rule-based, incident-based, strategy-based and role based. Each of the learning designs are described first generally in terms of a Domain Specific Modelling Language and then shown how this language can be used in an example use case.

I think the ideas here are good - it is very similar to what people like Davina Hernández-Leo have been doing with the IMS LD specification - creating best practice templates for specific pedagogical contexts.

Coming from modelling background I am still trying to figure out how this would fit into a metamodel hierarchy. I suppose it would have been good if the authors based their Domain Specific Modeling Language on some well defined generic language (e.g. MOF or BNF).

What are learners looking at in Moodle?

2011-03-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Today I came across a paper by Gergely Rakoczi from the Vienna University of Technology. The paper investigated what students look at on the Moodle User Interface using eye tracking technology.

First thing to say about the paper is that I found it great that this kind of work is going on. Second thing to say is that the study was quite limited in that it addressed only a vanilla Moodle instance (how many production moodles out there use the vanilla styling?) and the sample was tiny - 10 people. In assessing something as complex and with as much variance as a LMS the sample size would have to be a multiple of this sample size before we would be able to derive any interesting conclusions. Anyway here is some of the key findings:

Hide Functionality

How do students navigate - many participants uses the breadcrumbs and the "my courses" block, but the majority are still going for the trusty browser back button.
How do I logout - A lot of participants had difficulty finding the logout button initially - surprising because its in a pretty standard position - top left. The author equates this difficulty to the fact that the user's name (which links to the profile page) is beside the logout button.
Confusion over the hide functionality - the study found that there is a lot of confusion with new users with regard to the hide topic/week functionality. This is presented as a white box to the user. I have to agree with the authors here. The presentation of this functionality is poor. A lot of people thought the box was for checking off when a topic is done. Well thats kind of what the white box infers. I think we need to rethink this icon.

The author goes into detail on how to create eye-catching material. These guidelines are pretty general and I am not sure how it relates to the findings in the paper.

The paper was a nice light read - I look forward to the next installment with a much larger sample size and some statistical analysis - please!

Jay Cross - Working Smarter

2011-03-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

I came across Jay Cross's new Working Smarter iniative today - http://www.internettime.com/2011/02/working-smarter/. Jay is setting up a new service that will bring together posts that around the working smarter theme. So what is working smarter, well Jay outlines it as:

Working smarter begins with a holistic view of performance. The bottom line is getting more done and doing it faster.

Working smarter involves trusting individuals to do what’s right and giving them the latitude to do it. Empowering people to take action rests on clearing obstacles out of the way and incorporating next practices into workflow. Motivation, respect, and aspirations play a role. It’s about cultivating a healthy learning ecology.

Nice post Jay - I left you a comment:

I have a similar problem – I subscribe to nearly 100 feeds on google reader and some of those are aggregations of feeds that google reader is all ready capturing. When I have time to read whats in my google reader account I generally spend my time filtering out what I want to read later (later rarely comes) from the hundreds of items captured each day. I have known for a long time this isn’t sustainable but just when I think about deleting a feed, a gem appears in that feed and I change my mind.
I am not sure what is the correct way to go here – perhaps some sort of service that knows what is important and not important to me would be good. Thats not here yet, so in the meantime perhaps I should just use aggregator services – Working Smarter, OLDaily, Elearning learning (top rated items) etc.
I look forward to your new service Jay

Designing courses for e-learning

2011-03-09T01:47:00.000-08:00

Chapter three in the Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age book, Rhona Sharpe and Martin Oliver take a look at the fundamentals in designing a course for e-learning.

Sharpe and Oliver firstly look at where you are going to start when you are faced with the mountain that is course development. Typically all that lands on your desk are the learning outcomes for the new course. Okay its not all that bad - learning outcomes do have a lot of information squeezed into them. Information can range from the topics to be covered, the type and level of knowledge and can also specify how students demonstrate competency.

Armed with learning outcomes we can start to think about designing our course. For this Sharpe and Oliver outline Bigg's term constructive alignment as a way to align outcomes to learning activities and assessment tasks. Another important note made regarding the course development is that students will only learn what is being assessed, they are exam driven. Ramsden notes 'from our students' point of view, assessment always defines the actual curriculum'. If you have ever lecturered you will know the most common question is "will this be on the exam?", answer no and no matter how well you dress the "interesting" topic up you will see student brains switching off.

Models guiding course design are examined, Salmon's five-stage model recieves particular attention:

Assess and motivation
Online socialisation
Information exchange
Knowledge construction
Development

More details can be found at http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ijc4/etutoring/week%203/Gilly%20Salmon%20model.doc

One aspect noted in the chapter regarding course design is the amount written about how a course designer should create a course and very little on how it is actually done. They note in looking at design decisions by actual practioners that decisions are generally made based on pragmatics (e.g. class size has got too big for one on one tutorials - technology is used to provide some teaching support).

Sharpe and Oliver look in detail at the a typical scenario when creating an e-learning or blended learning course - this is typically a redesign of a course which include:

what was a success on the current course?
Analysing how to integrate face-to-face with online
Course design should make explicit their underlying principles
Course design is an iterative process

This was an interesting chapter - with a lot of good links. It is very much an overview of the literature on designing a course but a good starting point to learn more about designing e-learning courses.

Designing Learning Activities

2011-03-06T04:50:00.000-08:00

I am doing well - I read the second chapter of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age last night and I am all ready blogging about it. Lets see if I can keep this up.

This chapter is by Helen Beetham (also an editor of the book) and looks at designing learning activities around how people learn, which was a central theme of all the perspectives of learning looked at in the previous chapter.

Beetham identifies issues in Activity design that must be considered when considering the activity to suit a learning context include: authenticity of the activity, formality and structure, retention/reproduction versus reflextion/internalization, role and importance of other people and who is in control of the learning event - is the instructor directing learning or can the learner go on a voyage of self-discovery.

The chapter mentions an interesting learning activity classification defined by Jonassen that fits in with the learning perspectives discussed in the previous chapter - rule-based (help learners recall rules), incident-based (constructivism - devise own rules for dealing with incident), strategy-based (also suits constructivism) and role-based (situative).

Typically learning activities will be designed for learning outcomes and (in an ideal world) designed for needs of learners. A learning outcome will typically define the kind of activity that the learner must be able to undertake. Designing for learners looks to design the activity around the learner and their differences. A challenge here is knowing which differences affect learning and should be considered when designing learning activities.

One aspect of the chapter I did really like was the that Beetham looks at the question around we should design learning activities that adapt to facilitate the learners or should we challenge the learners to use different learning methods. Personally I think we should facilitate the learner as much as possible at the beginning of the learning process and if the learner is having difficulty. As the learner becomes more of an expert in the subject material the scaffolding should drop away challenging the learner more and more with diverse types of learning activities developing their meta-learning skills. One might challenge this saying - is it important how a surgeon learned how to do a procedure or is it just important that he has learned it the best possible way he or she could have to do that procedure. If I want the surgeon to learn a procedure in the most effective and efficient way I should provide the learning activity that best suits the surgeon's learning needs ensuring the most efficient and arguably the most effective learning. This might be true, but the medical profession makes technological and methodological advances all the time. What happens when a new procedure is developed and learning it is only provided through one medium - a medium that doesn't suit the surgeon. As the surgeon has such limited experience learning using this alien medium it may lead to ineffective and inefficient learning. I would consider this a problem if I was the surgeons first patient.

The chapter believes in thinking of the learning activity outside of the medium for delivering it first. Then looking at how technology can facilitate the activity - this may indeed involve using technology in a way that was not envisioned by the designer.

A nice follow on from the first chapter - now on to chapter number three.

Learning and e-learning - Mayes & DeFreitas

2011-03-05T04:59:00.000-08:00

Bad blogger, bad blogger. I have been a bad blogger of late, not posting anything in many months. I have been pretty busy with work and life in general. I needed something to kick start my blogging again - I think I have found it.

Last week I got a delivery from amazon, in it was two books that I really was looking forward to reading - the first one is Jay Cross's Informal Learning and the second is Rethinking Pedagogy in for a Digital Age by Beetham and Sharpe. In reading these books I thought - I really should practice what I preach and engage in a bit of reflection - so I turn to my trusty blog and I want to tell you all about the first chapter in the Beetham and Sharpe book - Learning and e-learning - the role of theory, written by Mayes and De Freitas.

The fundamental question asked at the start of the chapter is; 'are there really e-learning models or is the e of e-learning just a enhancement of traditional learning much like paper and pen was in the end of the nineteenth century?' e-Learning does bring some value to the learning process, providing for learning opportunities that would otherwise be impossible but is the actual way we learn different than say how we learned twenty years ago? Mayes and DeFreitas argue what we see with e-learning is a new model of education rather than a new model of learning.

One of the central messages of the chapter is that although there are a variety of learning theories out there, they are essentially complimentary. The authors nicely categorise the theories into the following perspectives:

Associationist Perspective - learning through the gradual building of patterns of associations and skill components. This perspective encompasses associationism, behaviourism and connectionism. It is this perspective that Gagne's task hierarchy fits nicely into - tasks get increasingly complex and build on others. In the task hierarchy a learner doesn't move on from one level until that component is understood.
Cognitive Perspective - This perspective sees knowledge acquisition as moving knowledge from a declarative form to a procedural form. As a learner becomes an expert the component skills become automatised - conscious attention is no longer needed to monitor low-level aspects of performance. Key activities here are interactions with material systems and concepts, and discussion with peers to develop understanding and competence. This perspective highlights that new knowledge must be built on something the learner all ready knows - educators cannot simply get the learners to memorise expert knowledge. Building knowledge structures from solid foundations must be done using problem-solving activity and feedback.
Situative Perspective - This perspective embraces social learning and the fact that learning must be personally meaningful.

The authors see these perspectives as complementary but a different perspective needs to be applied to a given e-learning context. Each perspective addresses a different learning need as the learner looks to gain mastery in a given topic. e-Learning technology can support the pedagogical approach.

Okay so that is chapter one down. Hope to get a few more chapters done over the next week. Comments most welcome.

Learning/Academic Analytics - Some more reading

2011-01-15T03:00:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally got around to reading some of the reading material for the Learning and Knowledge Analytics course that I am doing. The papers - Academic Analytics (Goldstein) and Learning Analytics (Elias).

These papers were basic introductions into the area and the use of analytics in academia. The Goldstein paper was from 2005, but gives a nice snapshot of where analytics where and possibly still now. The most important part of the paper was the introduction to the 5 stages of academic analytics (which was also covered in John Fritz's talk on Tuesday):

Stage 1 - Extraction and reporting
Stage 2 - Analysis and monitoring of operational performance
Stage 3 - What-if Decision Support
Stage 4 - Predictive modelling and simulation
Stage 5 - Automatic triggers

Most organisation cluster around stages 1-3 and from John Fritz's poll during his presentation I think that most organisations are still at these stages.

Elias asks some good questions about the technology we are using. A question about the data captured on a LMS was brought up - is it good enough or should we consider a redesigned for learning analytics. This is probably going to become even more an issue and a challenge as a learners data gets more distributed with Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). How can we capture all this data and co-relate it together for the purposes of learning analytics (this was also a question brought up by George Siemens during John Fritz's presentation).

Two tools that I now need to go and have a look at from reading these papers is to look up CourseVis - a visualisation of web log data generated by WebCT and the Purdue University's Signals Project which gives real-time course progress in an intuitive format.

Okay with that done - I now need to start looking at what's going on in the forums!

So whats going on in Educational Data Mining

2011-01-12T13:28:00.000-08:00

To start my Learning and Knowledge Analytics (LAK11) course I have just read through "The State of Educational Data Mining in 2009: A review and Future Visions" by Ryan Baker. The paper begins with the obvious question looking at what exactly is Educational Data Mining is. The definition describes it as an emerging discipline examining data generated from an educational setting to better understand students and the settings that they learn in.

Obviously Educational Data Mining (EDM) has a lot in common with with main stream data mining looking at prediction, clustering and relationship mining. Two items that may not be seen in main stream data mining literture is the distillation of data for human judgement and discovery with model and discovery with models. I am still not sure what this is really about but I believe it is using models such as ontologies to drive the mining strategy.

The paper outlines the key application areas of EDM:

Improvement of student models - differences in students, how people are learning , who is gaming the system, who is bored or frustrated
Improve domains knowledge structure
Used to validate pedagogical support - what pedagogy works and in what circumstances - get a best fit

The paper also discussed public data collections that can now be used to test EDM methods and technologies.

The most popular papers in the area look at relationship mining but in recent years this has not been as popular. The research in vogue in EDM at the moment is prediction - representing 42% of EDM2008 papers.

This paper is a good introduction to the area. It gives good pointers to important papers in the area. It is not particularly thought provoking but I suppose its not meant to be. The next step is to start looking at some of the more important citations make n the paper.

Getting started with Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2010 #LAK11

2011-01-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

Finally got started on the my new course LAK11 (Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2011) tonight. This is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) run by some of my favourite e-learning researchers.

This is the first time I have decided to commit myself to a MOOC, in the past I have done a bit of lurking around Connectivism and Connective Knowledge CCK, run by Stephen Downes and George Siemens (who also one of the main guys who runs LAK11) but never really committed to it. Tonight I read the first of, I think, five readings (which I will blog about later). I found this paper interesting but I couldn't believe how easy it was to get distracted from it. When you know there is no exam, no incentive except your own will power, your will power can easily dessert you! I think I need to get more involved in the social element of the course to keep me interested and involved.

We all know that e-learning courses have a problem with retention - this is largely due to the lack of community and comadre felt by students in an e-learning course, but this is the first time I have experienced this first hand - its a lonely place. I know I need to reach out to my fellow students but where to start? I will keep you posted.

New Year - New Start

2011-01-01T05:39:00.000-08:00

Its January 1st 2011 - a brand new year. This is a time to think about the year that has just gone by and the new year ahead.

So what about 2010. For many 2010 was a terrible year with natural disasters in Haiti and Pakistan and a European banking crisis. Although there was plenty of doom and gloom, especially here in Ireland where 2010 left the country effectively bankrupt, there was glimmers of hope and of human spirit conquering all. I think above all else this was found in the rescue of the Chillean miners, what a great good news story that was, one that was sorely needed by the world.

For myself, this year was a real year of change. I started the year working in a start-up company in Toronto. Unfortunately the company hit cash-flow problems and I ended the year back in Ireland. In saying that I think all things happen for a reason. I got back to Ireland and found two great jobs - one working as a analyst in an open source elearning company and the other lecturing in the National College of Ireland. I learned so much in Canada and now back in Ireland I hope to use what I have learned.

I am very hopeful for 2011 - it can only get better for Ireland economically. I think we must have hit rock bottom at this stage and now its time for us to build the country up again. Personally I have lots of goals, but thats for another post.

Just to finish up by wishing you a very Happy New Year, here's hoping for a good one!

Area9 and LearnSmart

2010-08-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a bit of consultancy work over the past few days and during this work I have been looking at e-learning and competency management tools. Much of these tools are not really what my client is looking for but I just wanted to share two of the tools I came across that might be useful to somebody.

Area9
http://www.area9learning.com/
Area9 are a Danish company specialising in simulation based e-learning. There are two domains it primarily works in - sales/customer services and device skills. These areas allow Area9 to demonstrate two completely different types of simulation learning. The sales/customer service where you must use soft-skills such as inter-personal and decision-making skills to sell or satisfy a customer need and the device analytical and operational skills where you must solve a simulated problem using device embedded software. The tools also claim to have some advance learner diagnostic tools that report on the competency level of learners. Learner diagnostics is then use to identify where and when remediation is needed for learners.

McGrawHill - LearnSmart
http://www.mhhe.com/learnsmart/index.html
LearnSmart is McGrawHill's adaptive learning platform. The system is built on three principle functions; assessment of learners knowledge, adaptation of assessments based on the learner's perceived strengths and weaknesses and personalisation of curriculum based on student knowledge and learning styles.

LearnSmart was built in co-operation with Area9. One thing I like about LearnSmart is that it allows the learner to give a confidence value (no idea, unsure, think I got it, easy!) for his or her answers which can then be used to calculate the learners competency in a given knowledge area.

What to do with all my time

2010-08-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

So I seem to have all this extra time on my hands while I am "between jobs" (I hope). So I need a project to do. I have been trying to think what to do with myself while I wait for a job. So far I have come up with the following:

1)Learn iPhone development and I have been doing this, but I need to think up a good iPhone app to develop to keep my interest and so far I have come up with very little. Anyone out there got any ideas?

2)Learn Spanish - okay this seems like a good idea but I need money for classes, but I could get a start on learning Spanish using one of those tape set things - some of them are meant to be pretty good. So I headed over to my local library and I find 3 beginner Spanish kits - but they all are missing CD1 so no good - might try other libraries in my area, but seriously if you borrow that kind of stuff don't lose the first CD - the its useless for everyone else! Although I did find the site livemocha.com, which might be good as it connects you with native Spanish speakers and helps you learn that way.

3)Refresh my statistics knowledge - I have been working through Hank Ibser lecture videos on iTunes. I now realise the amount of stats I have forgotten - its a good opportunity to refresh these principles in my mind - stats is one of those subjects that its always good to have fresh in your mind, I think.

4)Drupal - It might be good to learn drupal due to its growing popularity - if I have time.

5) Java - my Java skills have gone downhill due to my lack of practice - maybe I should do a refresher course, or maybe I should take on another language, perhaps python?

There are loads of other things that I could do - but it would be good to think up a project that incorporates all of the above hmmmm. I have a habit of trying to do too many things at once. Perhaps I should concentrate on one? What would you do?

Unemployment takes another jump

2010-08-05T11:17:00.001-07:00

Bad bad news today - unemployment in Ireland took another jump. Another 8,500 signed on to the live register (including yours truly) last month. Whats even more shocking is that the biggest group to sign on is the "professional class".

This government really needs to get there act together. Unemployment is more than a mere symptom of economic woes. Unemployment causes stress, depression and breaks up families. It has huge social effects - especially when it goes above the 10% mark (we are now at 13.7%).

I also noted yesterday that the Irish Times carried an article to highlight a campaign by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) about educated Irish people emigrating to Canada, Oz and New Zealand. An estimated 200,000 educated Irish people are expected to leave in the next five years. Without these people there is not much hope of attaining and keeping "high-value" jobs.

Come on Mr. Cowen get your act together or get out!

Getting Things Done - David Allen

2010-07-25T05:19:00.001-07:00

During my holidays I managed to read David Allens book, "Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity". An interesting workshop type book that gives a practical framework to managing life's constantly overflowing inbox.

The book introduces a simple framework whereby all the "stuff" you have to deal with go into your inbox, you figure out what the next action for each item in the inbox is and based this simple, yet (according to the book) powerful decision the item is done, delegated or deferred. Sounds pretty simple and to be honest it is! I am trying to implement the system in my own work/life and so fair I have noticed a clearer head when trying to concentrate on a particular task. I don't have regular reminders in my head saying "don't forget this" or "remember to ..." and that is a great start - a clearer head allows me to be content in the actions I have choosen to do and not worry about all the things I have choosen not to do. I suppose thats the main benefit of the system, as Allen puts it you "feel fine about what you're not doing".

The book contains loads of examples of how to get the system working for you.

I am going to try and subscribe to Allen's framework religiously to see if it actually works. I even bought an inbox!

To get an idea of Allen's "Getting Things Done" framework check out - mindz.com

The book can be found on amazon at - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280061560&sr=8-2

Back from Travels

2010-07-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

Haven't been around for a while been doing a bit of travelling. Got to bits of SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. I will try and do a few blog posts about my travels and put up a few pics over the next week or so.

So today I am just committing myself back to posting AT LEAST one blog post a week. So hopefully post something this week on the book I read over my holidays - "Getting things done" by David Allen - http://tinyurl.com/3ym9jsx

e-Learning - How do we get paid?

2010-05-04T06:15:00.001-07:00

One of the biggest challenges for e-learning companies today is establishing perceived value for the products they supply. When the customer buys e-learning from an e-learning provider license agreements can be so restrictive and content so dry that the client is left wondering did I get bang for my buck. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that there is plenty of free e-learning resources on the web, some of extremely high standard, so why pay for it? The web has forwarded the freemium model to such an extent that there is really no turning back and industry really needs to acknowledge this and look at other avenues for revenue. This leaves companies supplying e-learning with a dilemma. How do we establish a revenue stream when clients don't expect to pay for it?

So how do we get paid?

The main way of getting paid in this market I believe is two-fold - look for non-direct revenue channels and differentiation. Non-direct revenue channels would include just charging for support. Differentiating would be to find a niche (personalisation, educational data mining, learner modelling) in the e-learning market and charge for it as a service, perhaps to some of the main stream e-learning providers.

In terms of the freemium model I think that this could be a great fit for e-learning. The freemium model could be used to give a sampler to learners and use the data build up through the sampler to provide for a learning experience that the learner is willing to pay for. The price point is key here and I suppose would depend on the number of users and the anticipated number that would choose to pay for the premium version.

I would be very interested in hearing other points of view on this.

National Business and Technology Conference

2010-03-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of attending the National Business and Technology Conference on Friday. This conference is run by Nspire which is a student organisation in the University of Toronto. It may of been a conference run by students but it was one of the most professional conferences I have ever been to. The conference brings together students who are entrepreneurial in nature with leading Canadian entrepreneurs to help nurture the students entrepreneurial nature and learn from those that have made it. A brilliant idea - its little wonder that a lot of the students there have all ready set up businesses.

The opening keynote was by Anthony Lacavera, CEO and chairman of Globalive - a company who are just rolling out a company called Wind - Canada's newest cell phone provider. Lacavera spoke openly about how his business came into being and then took a lot of questions from the audience.

There was also a Entrepreneurship Competition with a top prize of $25,000. Students pitched their budding businesses to a panel of very distinguished judges. The prize money gives you a sense of the sort of sponsorship the conference brings in.

A great way to spend a Friday afternoon. Perhaps this is something Irish students should be doing?

Getting started with RESTful Service

2010-03-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

This week was web services week. I got down and dirty with RESTful web services. To do this I had a look at some of the tutorials on the web. I found a lot of them really over complicated the matter. Then I came across Apache Wink - http://incubator.apache.org/wink/. Wink seemed to have a very simple approach to the development of REST services. Any servlet container can provide for a REST service with Wink all that is required is a few java annotations specifying the URI of the service and the methods to call with each, GET, POST, DELETE and UPDATE event over HTTP. I also found this very simple tutorial from IBM that gets you up and running with Wink and REST services in no time - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-apachewink1/?ca=drs-.

Apache for Static, Tomcat for Dynamic

2010-03-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Following on from my previous post what I wanted to do next was allow for the apache web server to handle all the static content on my web app and Tomcat to only handle the dynamic content. Again I found Linux Journal to be a fantastic resource. The article - "Separate the Static from the Dynamic with Tomcat and Apache" gave me basically what I needed to do this plus much more. This article can be found here.

Essentially all that was required was to tell apache where to find the static content in the virtual host definition in the httpd.conf file. To do this all that was required was set up an alias for static content as follows:

Alias /staticContent/ /var/www/staticContent/

In my JSP now when I put the apache server serves up the static content rather than Tomcat. This means that image1.jpg or any static content such as javascript can be changed and redeployed without restarting any server.

Connecting Apache's Web Server to Multiple Instances of Tomcat

2010-02-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

I was tasked today with connecting an apache web server to multiple instances of Tomcat. In my search for resources to do this I found this, an excellent article in the Linux Journal by Daniel McCarthy on how to do just what I was looking to do. The only problem was that it was slightly outdated. McCarthy assumes the following setup:
* J2sdk1.4.2_09
* Tomcat 5.0.28
* Apache 2.0.54
* mod_jk 1.2.14

Whereas I had the following setup
- java1.6.0_0
- Tomcat5.5.27
- Apache 2.2.12
- mod_jk1.2.14
- Ubuntu9.10

I did note that there were some differences in the set up and also try to cover some issues I was unsure about when following the tutorial. This is not meant to be a tutorial - it is merely a few pointers if you have the same setup as me (and also to ensure I remember how to do this in future). If you are trying to connect apache to multiple tomcats firstly consult the tutorial in Linux Journal and if you are having trouble then consult this post - maybe you are having one or two of the same problems...

The first part of the article outlines how to install mod_jk1. This involved downloading and compiling it from source and then loading the module. I found that this was not necessary as I was able to use apt-get to install mod_jk1 using the following command:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-jk

I am aware in some cases you may not want to use apt-get to install this module into apache and install it manually. If so I would like to point out that the command is incorrect in the original Linux Journal article - should be:

#Load the mod_jk connector
LoadModule jk_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_jk.so

In the original article a tomcat startup script is defined. I could not get this to work. Firstly at the start of the script it tries to import /etc/init.d/functions - but in my version of ubuntu functions did not exist in this directory. The script also tried to start the tomcat server with the following call:

/bin/su tomcat $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

When I used this I got an error that the id tomcat was not recognised. - unknown id: tomcat. To fix this I edited the script and removed the import of the functions directory and also simplified the startup script as follows:


#!/bin/bash
# tomcat        
# chkconfig: 
# description:  Start up the Tomcat servlet engine.
# Source function library.
#. /etc/init.d/functions

RETVAL=$?
export CATALINA_BASE="/opt/tomcat_instance1"
export CATALINA_HOME="/opt/tomcat_instance1"
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk"

case "$1" in
 start)
        if [ -f $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh ];
          then
            echo $"Starting Tomcat"
             $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh
        fi
        ;;
 stop)
        if [ -f $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh ];
          then
            echo $"Stopping Tomcat"
             $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh
        fi
        ;;
 *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
        exit 1
        ;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

Now on to the single item that took me a VERY long time to figure out. The original article outlines how you should set up workers so that apache can redirect some requests to other servers. This is all defined in a workers.properties file. The article also tells you that you need to tell apache about the workers.properties file and this is done by adding the following to apache's httpd.conf file:

JkWorkersFile "/etc/httpd/conf/workers.properties"
JkLogFile "/var/logs/www/mod_jk.log"
JkLogLevel info
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "
JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"

I did this and then restarted the apache server. It failed. It wouldnt start and whats more I got absolutely no error. At this point the obvious thing to think is that Jk_mod isn't installed properly on Apache - so I checked and rechecked and reinstalled - no joy. Eventually, as those of you that are more observant than me have figured out, I saw that the log file was pointing to /var/logs - which doesnt exist on the version of ubuntu I am running. I changed this to /var/log/www/mod_jk.log and all was good in the world again.

Leaning Stats on iTunesU

2010-01-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

Over the past week I have been following an intro statistics course from UC Berkley, taught by Prof. Hank Ibsner. I find his teaching style very refreshing. He is committed to ensuring that his students understand why you do what you do in stats before showing how you do it. This teaching style really resonates with me.

When Prof. Ibsner is covering a new concept, for example standard deviation (SD) he does not give the formula first and then explain the concept. Rather he explains the concept to such a point that the formula becomes obvious. This is a good approach for me anyway and I have found that many people feel that they a stats concept once they know the formula, but do they know why something is calculated a particular way or what each variable means?

Relearning through iTunesU - Class starts today

2010-01-21T19:41:00.000-08:00

At the start of most years I always like to try to learn new things. This year I decided to do something a bit different, I am going to relearn things that I learned a long time ago - I am going to do refresher courses. I have decided to do all this using iTunesU. This is really a great resource, my only problem about it is that it is in Apple propriety software - you need iTunes to access.

So what am I going to relearn. After much debate with myself I decided to refresh my technical skills a bit and get to grips data structures and algorithms, computing paradigms (python programming) and statistics again. I also decided to throw in iPhone development from Stanford, just for kicks. I will let you know how I get on..

Seneca Aviation Project

2010-01-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

Busy day today! I spent the first half of the day up at Buttonville Airport just North of Toronto. This is where Seneca College has its School of Aviation. I was there to kick off the start of our work on a NSERC funded research project that will look to improve pilot training in Canada. Our part of the project looks at how on-line learning can be a part of that. More information can on the project can be found here.

At the moment we are focusing on Inter-Rater Reliability (IRR) of instructors and how this can be improved. This involved a lot of filming today of various different flying scenarios in very cool flight simulators - really interesting stuff!

The second half of the day continued on the IRR theme but this time I went up to Air Canada to have a chat with there training co-ordinator on how they calibrate their examiners. This was a really useful insight into how this industry maintains a high level of excellence in pilots through constant learning and development.

The whole day left me buzzing with ideas on how to improve IRR. I now need to solidify those ideas, as I get to test them out at the first IRR session on Wednesday. Time is tight!

Automatically identifying learning styles

2010-01-11T13:35:00.000-08:00

Graf et al.(2009) Supporting Teachers in Identifying Students' Learning Styles in Learning Management Systems: An Automatic Student Modelling Approach, Journal of Educational Technology and Society 12(4)

Interesting paper that looks at automatically identifying a learner's learning style by their behaviour in a LMS. A behaviour is associated with each part of a LMS such as visiting a forum, or posing to the forum this is then mapped to a particular learning style. The authors use the Felder-Silverman learning style index. Each behaviour enforces or contradicts a Felder-Silverman learning preference.

The work is evaluated by comparing the results with using the traditional approach to identifying a Felder-Silverman learning style in learners - the ILS questionnaire. Results ranged from a precision of 73.33% to 79.33% - indicating a pretty decent accuracy.

Mapping Learning Styles to Teaching Strategies and Electronic Media

2010-01-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

Franzoni and Assar, (2009) Student Learning Styles Adaptation Method Based on Teaching Strategies and Electronic Media, Journal of Educational Technology and Society 12(4)

In this paper Franzoni & Assar looked to map teaching styles to learning styles and differnty types of electronic media to learning styles. The learning style theory used in the paper was Felder and Silverman's'. The work does not focus on e-learning and describes classroom-oriented strategies to satisfy each learner's learning style in a given class. As far as I can see the mappings described are based on intuition. There is no proof that applying a particular teaching style/electronic media to teaching for a particular learning style increases student performance.

Emerging Web Tech in HE - Saeed, Yang & Sinnappan

2010-01-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

Saeed et. al - Emerging Web Technologies in Higher Education: A Case of Incorporating Blogs, Podcasts and Social Bookmarks in a Web Programming Course based on Students’ Learning Styles and Technology Preferences, Educational Technology and Society 12(4), 2010

Very interesting light read, nice one to have in the coffee shop. Looks at two main things; 1) Is there a co-relation between learner's learning styles and their preferred web technology and 2) Is academic performance positively influenced by the use of appropriate instructional technology as determined in 1.

Tentative co-relations were found between Felder & Solomon learning style scales, between different technologies and between learning styles and technology preferences. Although the researchers did manage to establish a relationship between learning styles and technology preference they did not go far enough to say if this whole exercise was worth it. Does a learner who used their preferred technology perform better? You would be inclined to believe it to be so but as the researchers did not create a control group or analysis these results with previous classes we don't really know.

Paper can be found at:
http://www.ifets.info/download_pdf.php?j_id=45&a_id=986

New Year - New Post

2010-01-07T12:45:00.001-08:00

Ok ok, this is the year, this is the start of my REAL blogging year. I am going to make a real concerted effort to blog at least once a week. Lets see how I do...

Setting Learning Objectives

2009-10-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

Just read a great post from http://www.bottomlineperformance.com/lolblog/?p=1093 talking about learning objectives. As mentioned in the post as an instructional designer you have been drilled with Gagne's nine events of instruction of which number 2 is to inform the learner of the learning objectives. How is this done - well generally in a very boring, non-engaging way... After finishing this topic you will know: and then the bullet list.

Why not be more creative about learning objectives. Set the scene so the learner can see why these learning objectives are important and how they relate to the REAL WORLD. One of the comments even suggests getting the learner to set the learning objectives - what a great idea.

Pointers form the post:

Begin an upfront discussion with learners that involves a series of questions about what they know/do currently.

Paint a scenario for learners that depicts a “real world” situation where specific knowledge/skill is required.

Identify challenges related to the course topic and have learners use/share their own experiences.

MySQL Workbench

2009-10-10T10:10:00.001-07:00

Trying to get MySQL Workbench working this weekend - to no avail. It kept complaining that I didnt have the right library files. As far as I could see in /usr/lib and /usr/lib/mysql all the necessary library files were there.

A fix was found on the MYSQL bug site:

[23 Sep 10:06] Ignat Alexeyenko

I fixed this in following way in Ubuntu 9.04 (Just created a symlink in /usr/lib
directory)

cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libmysqlclient_r.so.15 libmysqlclient_r.so

and presto it worked!

Disrupting Class

2009-07-06T20:32:00.001-07:00

I have just finished reading Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson and just wanted to do a quick post about the book.

Christensen is a famed professor at Harvard Business School and the author of The Innovator's Dilemma. In The Innovator's Dilemma, Christensen describes disruption theory and its effect on the business world, innovation and entrepreneurship. In Disrupting Class Christensen et al. outline how disruption theory can be applied to the US K-12 educational system.

To summarize the book: Christensen puts forward a compelling case on how Technology Enhanced Learning is a disruptive technology which will completely change how we think of education - for the better, allowing for student-centric learning. For more information on disruptive technology or innovation see the wikipedia article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

Although the potential power of technology in education is not new for anyone working in the area, how technology can be integrated into education to have maximum effect is something which we have struggled with for many year. Christensen believes the answer to this is where education technology sneaks up on the traditional educational sector as a disruptive technology.

The book starts by looking at how everyone is different and how all students learn in different ways. This is demonstrating through very clear and relevant examples. The book stops short of defining the different ways people learn, but just states everyone learns in a different way. The book uses Harvard Psychologist, Howard Gardner, classification of knowledge. Christensen advocates that education must be aligned to a persons brain "wiring" for learning to be effective. Also, within each knowledge type a person will learn better when a particular learning style is used. In order to cater for all students, every course would have to be customised along these dimensions (not to mention lesson pace). This is expensive, and a barrier to student-centric learning.

Christensen also outlines the characteristics of a disruptive pattern and what that means to the educational system. According to disruptive theory, if Christensen is right, by 2019 50% of all high school courses will be delivered using e-learning technologies. Christensen also believes we are just about to witness major uptake in e-learning in the educational sector. All of these conclusions are based on his disruption theory.

The book also looks at the outer limits of the educational system to see what else needs to be considered when looking at e-learning and how to maximize its effect on education. In chapter six the book looks at the astounding effect a child's first 24 months of life have on the rest of its intellectual life. Chapter seven looks at educational research and why it wont satisfy to allow for an acceptable predictability of the effects of an instructional approach given a specific educational scenario.

In chapter eight the book goes on to look at how change can happen. To do this the degree of agreement among people in an organisation must be plotted on two axis 1) The extent to which people agree on what they want and 2) the extent to which people agree on cause and effect. Where an organisation lies in relation to these two axis determines the best tools to use to invoke change in an organisation. The following chapter then looks at how the schools should be structured to allow for change. Examples are drawn from industry, for example the change required in Toyota to build a hybrid car.

A very good book, well written and thought-provoking. It outlines a feasible methodology that could allow for technology to empower human teachers become facilitator and coaches in the class room, where learning will be student-centric. I would have liked to see a bit more on the role of teachers in this new environment. The book concentrates on high school and primary school education, I would like to see a book for higher education and beyond.

The book is available from amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Class-Disruptive-Innovation-Change/dp/0071592067/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246980066&sr=8-1

Apple Education Leadership Summit

2009-05-01T17:01:00.001-07:00

Julie Lindsey provides a brilliant overview of the Apple Education Leadership Summit which she attended in Hong Kong. There were a few infulential speakers at the event, such as Stephen Heppell, Tom Kelley and Marco Torres. The conference highlighted Apples approach to learning - challenge-based learning. Julie also posts a video summary of the summit.
http://123elearning.blogspot.com/2009/04/apple-education-leadership-summit-what.html

Nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank

2009-01-19T06:14:00.001-08:00

Well the inevitable finally happened last week, the "zoombie bank" of Ireland, Anglo Irish, finally got nationalised by the Irish government exposing the irish people to a massive risk. Investors in Anglo Irish have seen their share go from 18 euro two year ago to 22 cent. One notable loosers is Sean Quinn the CEO of the Quinn group.

Minister Lenihan says that this was a necessary step, he better be right, if this goes wrong - it will go wrong of icelandic proportions.

David McWilliams got it right again, I read in one of the papers, in a column he wrote over Christmas that the bank will be nationalised before Feb. Well done David, this is not the first time you got it right. Mr. McWilliams states that he knows whats going to happen because he has a basic understanding of economics, something sorely lacking in the government. He also notes that all the bad assets in the Irish banks should be taken over by anglo irish - sort of a toxic waste ground. Minister Lenihan disagrees. So who do we believe the solicitor who's party's policies have got us in this mess or the economist who keeps predicting it right?

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T15:01:00.001-08:00

So its out with a horrible 2008 which sent Ireland spiralling into economic peril and in with 2009 which promises to be a whole lot worse?!?

So just to cheer you up I though I would give some links on interesting things to look forward to in 2009 - as the curse goes - may you live in interesting times...

Whats going to be hot in Java
http://joshuajava.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/10-java-technology-resolution-for-2009/

Some elearning predictions
http://boora.ca/blog/?p=2149

If you have some opinions on the future of learning communities and technology perhaps you could contribute to the upcoming research symposium in Hong Kong
http://www.ectel07.org/cfps/callforpapers.2008-12-29.4914555958
The symposium is not until March, in the meantime you can post your opinion as a response to this months big question on learning circuits
http://learningcircuits.blogspot.com/2009/01/challenges-plans-and-predictions-for.html

http://joshuajava.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/10-java-technology-resolution-for-2009/

Programming for Eclipse

2008-11-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

I am finally getting my hands a bit dirty and messing around the the SWT stuff in eclipse. Its very powerful stuff, but also very verbose. Trying to get a combo box work at the moment in one of the projects custom views. This involves a lot of work with selection providers and listeners. I found this of use:
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-WorkbenchSelections/article.html

Half-Marathon Day!

2008-09-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Today was the half marathon, where 4500 people took to the phoenix park in Dublin to pound 13.6 miles, and it was tough! The weather was perfect, perfect if you werent running. It was sunny and warm. I managed to make it in a time of 2:08:40, not too bad - next time i will want to break the 2 hour mark.

If today told me anything it was that I am not doing the full marathon this year, perhaps next year. I dont think I have the fitness. I will keep the running up and do 10 mile races, as I think that was the one I enjoy the most and got my best time in. Anyway we will see what happens, I am rambling now cause I am so tired - better go to sleep.

Yanky's Presentation Workshop

2008-09-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Ireland ICT Show Case on the 6th of October, outlining the MIKAEL courseware authoring tool. My main aim there will be to bring an eLearning company on board with us to bring the tool to fruition

Today, in preparation for that I attended a workshop on presentation skills given by Yanky Fachler - http://www.yankyfachler.com/home.html. The workshop was attended by all those who will be presenting at the show case. We had a chance to present our work in a safe environment and then have everyone critque it. It was very informative, not only when you were getting feedback on your own talk but also when you were watching other people speak with your audience hat on - as Yanky put it.

It was a whirlwind experience, and I think I have learnt a lot regarding presentation skills, but not just about the skill and art of presenting but also how to apply it to me personally. Today demonstrated to me the power of collaborative learning.

Now I have a lot of work to do before the 6th.

Prof. Randy Pausch

2008-08-12T03:05:00.000-07:00

I learnt yesterday that Prof. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University lost his fight with cancer and passed away last month. He will be a big loss to CMU and to the computing world.

If you are looking for some inspiration, I recommend watching his last lecture - click here

Java 1.6, Eclipse and my new mac

2008-08-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

Wow, I had an interesting time trying to get my eclipse plugin, developed in linux using Java 1.6 to work on my OS/X JVM which is a 64 bit JVM. I was getting all sort of problem to do with the SWT libraries java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Cannot load 32-bit SWT libraries on 64-bit JVM. I found a few work-arounds for this using google, but seemed very complicated and as I am a mac newbie - i thought i better not.

So I decided to change the plugin to 1.5 - so I set the runtime environment to use a 1.5 version JVM, but then I was gettng problems with the version number of the compiled classes"bad version number in .class file". So I changed the build environment to a 1.5 JVM. I thought this would fix it - but no. So then i done a search and found a way to rebuild the project (project -> clean..). But still no joy. So then I removed the classes files manually - thinking the newly build files with the JVM 1.5 werent getting written because the 1.6 version were still there, but no. So after about an hour I figured out what was going wrong - there was still something in my project set to 1.6 - the java compiler settings for the project!!!?!

My 10 mile race

2008-08-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

So I will be running a 10 mile race on Saturday week, as part of the adidas Dublin Race Series 2008 . I done a 5 mile there a few weeks ago and done it in 45 mins, which wasnt too bad for a first go. I am going to really challenge myself and try and do the 10 mile under 1hr 25mins, which will be pretty tough! After that is the half marthon, and after that is the marathon - I am not sure about doing the marathon, the time committment in terms of training might be just that too much, particuarly as I finish my PhD.

Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Hypermedia (A3H) Workshop

2008-08-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

Attended and presented at the A3H workshop in Hannover last week, have been meaning to outline the talks that were there so here goes:

First of all the link for the workshop is here

The first talk was by Fawaz Ghali, and the work he has been doing in Warwick trying to connect the social web in the form of folksonomies with the semantic web in particular ontologies. Advantages of this would include semantic relations between folksonomy tags, enabling of reasoning on the social web and augmenting the authoring process of adaptive hypermedia by providing rich free heirarchically structured data. Ghali process consists of three main phases, firstly mispelt tags are filtered, tags are grouped according to co-occourance value, and finally the groups are mapped to matching elements of ontologies.

Maurice Hendrix then presented his paper which outlines how a meta level can be added to the LAG language which allows for a fuzziness of values in the LAG rules. This solves the following limitations identified by Hendrix:
-adaptation is on a per concept basis
- adaptation engine does not allow for non-instansiated variables
- cant combine multiple strategies.
I understood how you could combine multiple strategies with this approach, as you dont have to strictly specify a leaners model value so beg_engineers and beg_cs can be treated as beg students, but didnt really get how the other limitation are solved

Sergio Gutierrez looked at the formalization of exercises, which reminded of the work we did on the ontaware project looking at the same thing which we published at SWEL workshop at AIED05. This work is based on a parameter approach and is interesting, as it shows how many questions can be asked of the same root question.

The work of Ortigosa et al. looked at what was the least amount of questions you need to ask in order to understand the learner enough to provide adaptation

Another paper from Warwick looked at the use of collaborative authoring in the development of AEH for the MOT tool. To do this the CAF was extended to include collaborative elements, such as tags and opinions. This allowed for feedback on material in AEH - which could then be used in the adaptive process.

Eric Ras presented a really interesting paper which outlined the use of semantic wikis to capture knowledge, which are then used as the basis of the creation of learning spaces.

After the papers were presented there was a discussion panel, where interesting points were raised about the lowering of the barriers for authoring in developing AH. Most people agreed that the cost-benefit ration has to be addressed, in that we must outline how beneficial it is for an author to create AH and how we can lower the cost by providing better authoring tools. This discussion made me think that the application of AEH in the academic scenerio (the most common test bed) perhaps doesnt make sense anymore. Academics do not have the time to spend on authoring and do not see much in the way of recognition when they do develop good AEH. I think perhaps the focus of the AEH community should be on the corporate sector as this sector spends a massive amount of money in getting employees up to speed at the start of their career and also during their career with a particular company. This represents not just a massive cost in terms of the salaries paid to the employee and to the trainer, but also in terms of opportunity cost, lost while the employee is training. Anything to cut the time employees spend training will represent a massive cost saving for business. This is where we should be aiming our AEH apps as the cost - benefit ratio is significantly more in our favour here. Then when we have matured our authoring tools here, perhaps then we could start to look at the academic scenerio which will be much harder to break into.

Overall a great workshop, where real debate took place about the future of authoring in this area.

My new Macbook

2008-07-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

Well I have made the change, i got my first mac there, I have always used a PC up to now, normally with some flavour of linux or windows on it, so there was always going to be a bit of a learning curve. Well i was pleasently surprised with how little of a learning curve there actually was. Within a few hours i was able to find my way around the various menus of OS/X. I am still by no means an expert but getting to a stage where i am comfortable with the OS.

The biggest aspect of the mac to get used to is the difference in keyboards on my new macbook. the buttons appear to be in a slightly different position, and sometimes typing the letter doesnt appear. I think this might be something to do with some setting, perhaps.

Another slightly annoying aspect is the jagged edges of the computer - this makes it look good but does nothing for your wrists - cuts the arm off you.

Anyway, that is mac week one down - now for some serrious work on it, as i have a conference in Hannover.

ICALT - Day 3

2008-07-05T09:28:00.000-07:00

Today I was principally concerned with the workshop I was to present at - Crafting didactic materials based on IMS LD: From Requirements to Evaluation. There were to be six presentations in this workshop, but thanks to the one of the organisers I was able to give a quick outline of my phd work at the end.

Shelia MacNeill from CETIS outlined interoperability between LD and the rest of the course development scene. She also outlined four levels of granularity that must be addressed - LOs, ??, Activity and Course. Then work on the sucessor to Reload, Recourse was outlined by David Griffiths from the University of Bolton. It is interesting to note that that team has now moved to use GMF a technology we use extensively in our project. He also mentioned services in LD and how badly they are defined. David showed how widgets could be used as learning services, from a central widget server.

Davinia Hernández-Leo outlined a way of raising the level of abraction when using complicated specifications such as LD, using educational patterns. I am not very sure how this works exactly, but will have to look into this in more detail as the idea facinates me. Carmen Padron then outlined how evaluation cycles can be done on LD courseware and how this can be specified on the courseware using the runtime adaptation approach developed by Telmo Zarraonandía, the co-author of the workshop paper. This lead nicely on to Abelardo Pardo' s paper on how he has devised a way for the manipulation of LD design during delivery time by manipulating property values. He states he is uncomfortable with the theatre analogy used in LD, as a script does not allow for the reactionary changes needed in courseware. If you originally design your courseware to consider the manipulation of property values at delivery time this is a very powerful tool. Finally Jekaterina Bule from the Latvia outlined the evaluation of eLearning in Riga.

After the workshop I attended an interesting session entitled "Content Authoring Technologies III". Two speakers particularly took my attention due to my PhD work on modeling courseware, firstly by Ivan Martinez-Ortiz, who described the work he is dong in developing an EML authoring notation. He discussed Flow oriented authoring notation, there was some discussion afterwards about the suitability of this type of concrete notation due to the variability in courseware at delivery time. Other concerns were that this notation was too geared towards computer scientists, but Ivan is looking at testing his notation with non-computer science users, and I think his results from this will be very interesting.

Dirk Frosch-Wilke then presented his paper entitled, "Evolutionary Design of Collaborative Learning Processes through Reflective Petri Nets". This paper showed an approach based on coloured petrinets could be used to provide a snapshot of a learning process. To do this there was two levels a metalevel PN and a base level PN - sort of similar to metamodeling I think. Petri Nets mean verification can be carried out on the courseware, I asked does this mean a sort of model checking approach to the courseware but I was wrong here. This approach is used a lot in business process analysis, I think the use of petri nets and how they are used by Dirk and his team is something I want to get my head around - very interesting work.

ICALT - Day Two

2008-07-05T04:29:00.000-07:00

For day two of the conference there was a big change to the weather - it was like a bad day in Dublin, with temp of about 14 degrees and rainy.

The highlight of today was the panel session, which discussed a competency approach to elearning - it looked at what a competency was and how we could use competencies as the primary focus of learning. This talk made me think of competency and how I defined this word, as I had always thought that competencies and knowledge are very similar, but this lead me to believe that a competency is the capacity of a person to demonstrate some skill to some level. Where knowledge does not necessarily mean there is a skill involved. A competency is been able to assess if someone can do a job.

One interesting point by a UK collegue was that there needs to be some sort of comparable framework for eLearning systems. He basically has enough of all these technologies been thrown out at conferences without the mentioning of the underlying paradigm, framework and model - and why the system was designed the way it was. I found this very interesting and intend to contact this person for further discussion

ICALT - Day One

2008-07-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

I have been at the ICALT conference over the past couple days over the next few blog posts I will summarize some of the interesting talks I have been to. The conference is been held in Santander in Northern Spain, a beautiful Spanish port city.

During day one I went to a few very interesting talks:

Firstly was a keynote by Prof. John M. Carroll from Penn State University. Prof. Carroll discussed the use of case-studies in learning, and their pedagogical value. One interesting thoughts I had from this was that a collaborative activity must have collaborative properties, it is not enough to give a learning activity to a group of learners, at best the learners will use a divide and conquer strategy to divide up the work and then glue it together for your benefit. Collaborative learning activities must be designed with collaborative attributes. I thought this was interesting and not something people consider when they say they use collaborative learning - just because you have a chat, message board or group work does not mean collaborative learning is taking place.

The next talk I went to was given by Iyad AlAgha, he discussed his tool which allows for the supplementing of learning material with material found on the web. Basically the idea is that the tool will get supplementary material for the primary learning material so that you the learner do not have to go look for it. To do this the tool uses a SKOS ontology working in the background. The name of the tool is SWLinker, and has two parts the webdictonary and the learner guide, which provides learning material on some concept which features in the primary material. I would be very interested in seeing how this tool worked with random sample of material and ontologies sourced from third parties. I also thought it would be really interesting to combine this technology with the personalisation effort in AEH.

I then saw Sergio Martin talk about about he problems the UNED are having in managing the multitude of communication channels into the college and matching queries on those channels with knowledge which also feature on multiple sources.

I also saw an interesting panel discussion on "Why technology innovations are still a cottage industry in education?", the panel included Dragan Gasevic, who outlined three key enablers which he thought needed to be addressed - ID Management, Knowledge Management and Services. Jon Drom who though that the cottage like industry was where the value in elearning lay, and Vive Kumar - who thought that the critical mass is needed and outlined shareability as the key to move to a more industrialised place.

Ireland says No to Nice

2008-06-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Well we have gone and done the unthinkable, we as a nation have gone on to reject the Nice treaty. The treaty designed to bring the EU into the 21st century. Polls not more than a month ago had indicated that things were going well for Nice, with the majority of those who had decided what way they were voting were voting Yes to Nice, although a large majority of people were undecided.

Where did it all go wrong, well the No campaign ran a brilliant campaign of misinformation, filling the Irish hearts and minds of fear, by indicating that issues such as abortion, corporate tax rates, neutrality, sovereignty, would be defined by Brussels rather than by the Irish Parliament in Dublin. Although none of this was true, the fact that the treaty itself is incomprehensible and growing disillusion with politics in Ireland lead to a No vote being pretty inevitable I suppose. Another key factor, was the feeling of being bullied, our government, the EU president, the French president just to name a few all "warned" us about rejecting this treaty, how stupid can you get - we Irish have always had a bit of a rebellious steak in us, if you tell us we have to do something or face the dire consequences, as Sarkozy put it, a lot of people decided there and then to show them and vote No.

I hope the political leaders can find a way past Lisbon, and I hope Ireland is apart of that, but I have a funny feeling we are drifting westward away from Europe, away from the decision-making in Brussels.

EduPunk

2008-06-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Edupunk - refers to the "new" phenomon, where teachers and learners are using a DIY attitude to teaching and learning and not conforming to traditional tools and methodologies. Using such things as social software to aid education. This has really taken off over the last month (the term I am talking about here) - may be here to stay. For more information, Stephen Downes outlines it better than I ever could at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=44760, or you could even check out the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edupunk

Erik Duval Interview

2008-06-10T07:40:00.001-07:00

Erik is a professor at KUL in Belgium, he is a well respected academic in the area of metadata and Technology Enhanced Learning. An interview with him is available at http://fm.ea-tel.eu/fm/55ae84-13543, which is well worth a listen. Here he describes his famed "Snowflake Effect" among other things.

Courseware Engineering

2008-05-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

I always new this term came from somewhere, but didn't know where until I found http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1028525 - this paper gives a great overview of what courseware engineering is all about. Essentially it is the use of software engineering methodologies in the development of courseware. The paper also gives a nice definition for courseware. A paper which predates this paper is a paper which was presented at IWALT 2000 by Uden, which presents a Courseware Engineering Methodology. This is interesting as it outlines the use of different models in the "engineering" of courseware.

A new blog is born

2008-05-27T15:43:00.001-07:00

So here it is my blog for blogger.com, I have been using eduspaces http://eduspaces.net/markmelia which is pretty neat, so why the change to blogger ( I want to say proposed change because I am still not completely convinced whether I want to continue using eduspaces or blogger) . Well the change is basically due to a URL being available - markmelia.blogspot.com - tonight I got a lesson in how important it is to some people to have their name registered as a domain name - for example - markmelia.com, I never thought of this as really important, not unless I was going to use it, but today people seem to associate their domain name on the web with their sense of individual. I am Mark Melia in the real world, and markmelia.com in the web world.

So what does this mean - we will all be associated with domain names to uniquely id each other in the future - nope, well at least not in the future - think of your email address, this has long since happened. The next stage is a URL, or a URI Universal Resource Indicator - if you are interested in this - possibly you will be interested in some of the more philosophical arguments surrounding the semantic web, which looks to uniquely id every resource in the real world so that it can have a presence in the web and wont be confused with other resources.

So there you go - I got this blog just so I could uniquely identify it as my own because I could use syntax which is the same as my name in the real world - I like to have the virtual world and real world close together.