<!> These are my raw notes taken on my localized MoinMoin? wiki on the eXe laptop, then transferred here. These notes are from the presentations I attended on Day One of Educause, the focus of which was eLearning.
Educause 2005 Conference: Day One - Elearning
Collaboration in the New Academy: New Roles, and Relationships
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Carole Barone, Senior Fellow, EDUCAUSE
technology works in context and changes the context (consequences of changing context?) new roles, rules, and relationships.
environment of higher education (in US) is dynamic, (stressful), transformational change. Australasia has stronger relationships between higher ed and government.
International Initiatives:
OCLC - http://www.oclc.org/index/elearning/
IMS - http://www.imsglobal.org
Sakai - http://www.sakaiproject.org
Merlot - http://www.merlot.org
GLOBE - http://taste.merlot.org/initiatives/globe.htm
Patterns:
- changing of student cognition
- course is not the container (stuctured course is losing it's relevence)
- teaching space is not physical place (6% of learning takes place in official teaching space)
- personal does not mean in person (personal is responsive, convenient, convenience = quality)
- technology decisions are teaching and learning decisions
- students expect technology to be used appropriately (vast majority of helpdesk requests are compaints at faculty use of technology)
- students are driving academic transformation
Technology and Pedagogy
convergence or collision?
Myths of the Decade
- the tool is the solution
- the tool is not the solution
- we are communicating (often lack shared framework)
- this does not apply to my university
- it may apply to my university, but it certainly does not apply to me
- expectations are rational; higher ed should meet expectations
- we can control when and how transfomations effect change
driving technologies
- wireless
- games
- pdas
- social software
| tools & technologies | ||
| Rules | Community |
creates new agents & roles.
New Academy
- blended or Hybrid courses
- learning space design (physical and networked)
- transformative assessment
- instructional design professionals
- socio-technological content
- accepting the impact of "digital natives" (Prensky)
Instructional Support
- poineers are becoming mainstream
- conflicts with embedded processes, budget practices, values and convictions
- dilemma of role expectations (technologists, instructional designers, faculty)
- imperative to collaborate
- instructional design and space
- importance of assessment
- services grounded in principle (deeper learning)
- new values (importance of collab, technology, etc)
- scalable and sustainable services
- new relationships and roles
- new tools and processes
- common solutions/shared services (between universities?)
- EDUCAUSE institute
Powerful, Portable, Personal Computing: is m-Learning an Opportunity in e-Learning?
Angela Bridgland & Patrich Blanchard - Information Division, University of Melbourne
m-learning pilot at Melbourne, sponsored by HP.
what is m-learning?
- nomadic technologies
- suitably formatted content
wireless coverage = always on information spaces. students working in pubs/cafes that are wirelessly hooked up. need format setup for small screens. mentioned eXe project!!!!
students still enjoy social interaction; spaces equipped with wireless, access to 'refreshments', etc.
links to technical experts that are also online. interaction of m-learners with campus facilities. design of wireless networks with wired.
Melbourne Project
Hewlett Packard Applied Mobile Solutions grant. ($240,000 AUS)
use of PDAs in classrooms, for collaboration, peer-to-peer, information seeking. tablet PCs for rural clinical students. tablet pcs and PDAs and new applications: impomptu proposal coordinator. screen size for PDA was a little limiting. students like mobile phone, didn't want to carry both. handwriting recognition problems.
2 scenarios
undergraduate student; uses PDA to propose meeting, chooses to have forwarded when he meets wireless cloud. SMS incoming message (lecture cancelled.) reads notes on PDA on train, listens to music. @ campus - PDA signals that book is available. wireless cloud: downloads lecture notes; wireless clouds become 'subject' specific. in Lecture: opens lecture notes for annotation.
postgraduate student; tablet PC. tablet PC reads notes through car stereo. GPS. accesses database. "augmented reality" - powerful aids to learning. networked overlayed with physical. networked calendaring.
Laptops for A Digital Lifestyles: The Role of Ubiquitous Mobile Technology in Supporting the Needs of Millenial Students
Mark McMahon? & Romana Pospisil - Edith Cowan University
How students use these technologies when give as lifestyle choices?
collaboration with IBM
- ubiquitous wireless infrastructure
- strategic alliance with IBM
- IBM thinkpads as preferred mechanism
- subsidised purchasing scheme
- pilot project 2004 provided loaned machines to selected courses
millenial students
- born after 1982
- characterised by:
- IT mindset
- intolerance for delay
- social and informational connectedness
- group rather than individual work
- multitasking
- laptops as digital lifestyle devices
- personal
- social (like less defined teaching spaces, cafes, etc)
- study & work
rhetoric of trying to define a 'generation'. study took an 'ethnographic' approach - to what extent did the students demonstrate millenial traits as defined in the literature? did technology provided support their needs?
how did they use their laptop?
- email - %100
- downloading - %75
- video & music - %50 *chatting & messaging - %38
- games - %25
3 threads:
- connectedness (primarily as information devices, ability to be connected immediately, easy of access, multiple uses, acknowledged 'oversaturation' of information)
- multitasking (lots of things on the go at once; social use not as strong as expected; laptops used at home, cafes, car, bus, train; removal of boundaries between work, study, pleasure )
- immediacy (strong pressure to succeed; laptop as timesaving device (little tolerance for delays due to administrative, etc); werent' forgiving of staff not competent with technologies; little tolerance for waiting)
Highlights
- used laptops across all classes;
- developed their own softwares, PHP/MySQL
Issues
- need for appropriate spaces
- issues regarding laptop images and wireless infrastructure
Conclusions
- was highly successful
- laptops became integral lifestyle devices for millenial students
- needs to work! connectedness: ubiquitous
- immediacy: rapid support
- students acknowledge a need for balance.
%90 students said they would purchase a laptop.
Changing of the Guard - The Impact of 'Global' Learning Object Repositories on Next Generation Learning Delivery Models
Grame Barty - HarvestRoad?
smallest chunks of content, those that capture invidivial moments of understanding...
granularity is about value of reuse.
what is happening globally?
- competition and cooperation
- institutions are poor as managing IP
- restrictions of first generation systems
- increased means of content production and access but not management
- storage costs
- global maintenance
- liability?
- changing skills and cognitive patterns of user
Harvest Road Hive - content off of desktop, course packages (SCORM), bulk ingestion from legacy content; publishing: SCORM packages using integrated RELOAD, published back out to desktop.
Hive creates instances of Hive for discrete communities, who choose to make content available to whomever they like. hyperlinks to objects; manifest files to content.
can incorporate existing repositories. integrated into RELOAD - dragging from Hive, and other repositories into RELOAD for content packaging.
porting to PDAs, iPods, etc...
learner driven learning: learning outcomes... when you think you've met learning outcomes, we'll test you :-)
business institutes and corporates are big into this.
creation of global learning object repositories.
high value of learning objects = granularity.
- metadata standards
- assembly and dissasembly tools
- building a content bridge
- integration to best of breed open standard and open source solutions
- copyright management
"The Contibuting Student": A Blend of Pedagogy and Technology
Betty Colis
Current situation - same pedagogy but handier participation. easier access, scaleable, flexible. ICT not replacing the lecture or the book; extends other familiar resources.
First type of flexibility...
- logistics (easier, just-in-time, archivable)
- organizing
- archiving
- sychronizing
- contacting
- transferring, sharing, reusing
logistic flexibility is supported today by LMSs.
2nd type of flexibility...
- ICT to support new pedagogies: new models of learning: new ways of creating, designing, and co-constructing learning
- why? to function more productively in a knowledge economy
The individual in a knowledge economy
- working in multidisciplinary and global teams
- needing to continuously update skills
- act autonomously in socially heterogenous settings
- using network effectively and efficiently
- handling the mobility of services, information, workforce
pedagogies for a knowledge economy contribution oriented activities.
Student as active contributor (co-producer):
- co-creator of learning materials
- a responsible selector from a variety of real-world resources
- someone who extends rather than only reads the textbook
nb: using wikis for 'co-creation' of content; collaborative production of learning materials that are accessible to everyone in the class.
students collaborate to create a 'product' that can then be used by other students.
contributions. contribution aspect.
Contributing Student involves...
- learning from and with others
- knowing where, when, who and how to acess what is needed;
- bringing the global into the local context
http://users.gw.utwente.nl/collis/
From Re-usable e-learning content to Reusable Learning Designs: Lessons from LAMS
James Dalziel - Macquarie University
making pedagogy as the driver.
eLearning content today
- single learner self-paced content
- often little more than texbooks online
- content-centric
Learning Design
- LD is about sequences of collaborative learning activities. flow is essential to
- elearning systems not very good at flow of tasks
- difficult task is to get a good mixture of collaboration and single learner tasks
- learning designs can be stored, re-used, customised
LAMS illustrates the Learning Design approach.
Of interest to Librarians - brings digital library into flow of pedagogical
Wedesday next week release of LAMS - 14th April.
LAMS Demo
Resources tool in LAMS could be where eXe content comes in. Adds a resource to sequence.
any tool in LAMS can be run in whole class mode or group mode.
Why Content is not enough?
- two fundamental components: content & instructions on what to do.
problem is you need to have the LAMS oven?
Future of Content and Activities
- concept of dual repository one for content, the other for activities/sequences
Teaching Sight Impaired IT Students
Helen Armstrong & Iain Murray - Curtin University of Technology
How important is vision in learning? what problems to blind and visually impaired students face with learning technology
- we use a lot of visual effects such as shading, colour, sequence, rotation, movement.
- require spatial abilities
screen review software (text-to-speech).
vision is the primary sense for learning and development
sight impaired have different conceptualizations of material.
- force-feedback (haptic)
- 3D sound
- tactile methods
- braille and braille scanning
- speech output
developing alternative methods to present technical content
loss of vision is often accompanied by an increase in development of other senses: touch, hearing, memory, intuition. Need to harness these. When site it take away brain uses 'sight section' for other purposes; even in people who are blindfolded.
transcribing symbols into words.
- blind students lack in self-confidence and are afraid to experiment
- practical application and experimentation is vital to their learning
speech output software
- JAWS screen review reader
- Screen Magnification
- Braille
- Tactile Graphics
Open Source software as base: BSD/Linux
- speakup
- Emacsspeak
Virtual Communities of Practice in Eduforge
Ken Udas & Michelle Strand - Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
Eduforge
- founded in 2004
- part of NZOSVLE Project (TEC)
- originally NZ tertiary sector - now international
- 45 projects, 497 users
3 main areas:
- collaborative project management
- repository of OSS
- explorative hands on area for testing tools
pragmatic origins for need to 'host' developer community in development of eCFDF projects.
Communities of Practice Observations
- infrastructure for large projects
- geared towards ongoing projects
- persentation and dynamic publishing
- projects with strong technical drivers
- primarily used across oganisations
- organised and planned projects
Communities of Practice - conjectures
- Eduforge is feature rich
- effective use requires some technological savvy
- there is a learning curve
Future
- usability testing and enhancement
- increased performance for developing countries
- internationalization of governance structure
- enhanced control over features presented for low-tech community needs
- enhanced content in Eduforge public community space
search across projects.
take a look again at the Sandpit in Eduforge.