Percolate Project

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

"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

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:

1. digital assets - single file
2. information objects - aggregation of digital assets
3. learning activities - involves interations with information
4. 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

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

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?

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

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