Be3Al2SiO6 :

Back down to earth with a bump

2006-11-09T08:34:00.000Z

An earlier post of mine asked for help decyphering some way out there infographics on the edge of Web 2.0 developments. Like Quantum Mechanics, new theories and ideas regarding the future of the web and learning technologies are emerging day after day, each seemingly more convulated and confusing than the last.

Last night I received some respite from this forward thinking and sat in dulled disbelief through 'The Future of e-Learning', a British Computer Society event held at a local college.
Twelve hours later and my depression has merely deepened.

The event, more correctly titled 'e-Learning 1999 - What is this thing called a VLE? And how can I use it to track usage, upload class notices and invite students to drop off their assignments with this e-maily thing the youngsters are now using'.

I really believed that this debate was over with. The first eLearning movement, characterised by Monolithic VLEs, shovelled courseware materials, and the dogmatic refusal by many educators to engage with technology to support their learning programmes lead to hype, overexpectation and underachievement. It did however produce a sufficently large body of knowledge with Do's and Don'ts, and an understanding of the difference of the web as a medium for learning allowing different models to be employed in teaching and learning - the trends toward a more reflective, constructivist approach based on dialogue, discussion with peers and so on. We're now seeing Wikis, blogs, RSS,podcasting, PDAs and increasing personalisation with respect to technology supported learning efforts. How is it that a BCS event at a local college can teachers, trainers and lecturers be amazed at the functionality of an aged Blackboard installation? How can they, when asked the question - 'Does you find this kind of technology offers you the means to deliver your teaching in different ways, allowing more students to learn in their own preferrred way and thus derive better outcomes for all' - and the response is first a 'Yes, it does' followed by a 'But I prefer to teach without it', claim to be doing their job properly wen they deny themselves and their students the benefits of the greatest free library of stuff we've ever known, the fact that many of the students are very comfortable with the medium and they are not, access is cheap enough to be almost ubiquitous and making connections to other classes, students and institutions around the world is as easy as sending an email.

But it's not really about the technology. Surely, having the ability logon from home and pickup the latest Assignment from a folder should no longer astound teachers, lecturers and trainers. Yet it did. This was revolutionary stuff that was being demonstrated last night.

And this presents me with a real problem. If our educators are so wilfully ignorant of the possibilities and the opportunities offered to them by such facilities where does this leave something as unregulated, new and personal as the Intouch service?

Well, I've thought about this overnight and this morning I'm reassured that the intended audience of students, researchers and practitioners will have no problems. A delegate raised her hand and proudly declared that she did not like eLearning at all, in fact disliked the web as a medium entirely, but she expressed mild surprise that after Moodle was deployed to the classroom and made available to students, the thing that really took off was the Social side - blogs, fora, discusion rooms. The students have apparently embraced this particular piece of functionality and are now quite engaged with each and with the subject in a way they previously were not. Though there was some agreement from others in the room who had observed the same effect in their institutions, but this was not considered eLearning since the staff had nothing to do with it in the sense that they did not lead or facilitate this debates. 'We do this, but we don't do eLearning' was the quote.

Leave it to the learners themselves - they'll find a way. Thankfully, in spite of their teacher's best efforts, it appears they already are.

Timely post : Wikis and education

2006-11-06T13:28:00.000Z

Stewart Mader Wiki Talk at Drexel

Stewart gave a good general talk about wikis followed by a few examples in education. Here is the podcast (mp3). Here is the Flash Screencast . Drexel CoAS E-Learning Lecture Series Time: 11:00 Thursday October 26, 2006 Location: Disque 109 Four Letter Words: How wiki and edit are making the Internet a better learning tool Stewart Mader, Senior Instructional Technologist, Life Sciences and Brown Medical School, Brown University A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person's course materials. I'll show how using the wiki has improved collaboration and data collection in several courses, and transformed a well-known science education website by allowing the teachers who use it to collaboratively author and edit its content. Participants will also learn about the range of wiki tools available, from free, web-based tools to enterprise solutions that can serve an entire digital campus. I'll also discuss my recently released wiki-based book, Using Wiki in Education, which is a compilation of case studies showing how teachers are using the wiki in a variety of environments.

technorati tags:learning, wikis, pedagogy, styles, podcast

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Recent round up of articles.

2006-11-03T10:51:00.000Z

Thanks to Vicky williams for this heads up.

News bits:

‘Common Cartridge’ for e-learning

Providers of learning management software, publishers and technology organizations have agreed on a common, open standard for content across Learning Management Systems (LMS). The agreement by the diverse group of publishers and software companies comprising the IMS Global Working Consortium (http://www.imsglobal.org/commoncartridge.html) is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could expand the array of digital content available to professors and students by making it easy to switch among proprietary learning systems. The LMS market currently spans several course delivery platforms including ANGEL, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai and WebCT. Each uses their own proprietary format for course content and poses an expensive problem for content providers wishing to distribute content across platforms and a conundrum for educators and students who wish to use it. Many smaller or locally-developed systems are limited in their support for these proprietary formats. The Common Cartridge will define a commonly supported content format that can run on any compliant LMS platform and make it possible to move digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems without expensive and time consuming reengineering.

The Common Cartridge is a set of specifications and standards agreed to by the IMS working group. ‘It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it “inside” your local course system, says Ray Henderson, Chief Products Officer at ANGEL, who helped conceive of the idea when he was President of the digital publishing unit at Pearson. Now, all that needs to happen is for The Common Cartridge to become widely adopted in order to all to reap the benefits. For more information see: http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge.

Hot Trends

It’s worth keeping an eye on social networking, the email of the newly young who will be soon ready for scholarly communications.

Half of users of social networking site MySpace are 35 or older, according to comScore Media Metrix's (http://www.comscore.com/) analysis of its US traffic measurements. Only 30 percent are under the age of 25 despite the perception that the site is mostly used by children and young adults. Just a year ago, the under 18’s made up about 25 percent of MySpace. An executive of comScore noted that the analysis confirms that the appeal of social networking sites as becoming far broader. These sites encourage users to stay in touch by offering tools such as message boards, photo sharing and personal profile pages. Members can expand their networks by adding other users as friends and, in turn, connecting with their friends. The study was based on comScore's regular panels for measuring Internet audiences rather than MySpace's registration information, where users may lie about their age. Wall Street analysts estimate that the site could be worth about USD 15 billion within three years. MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for USD 580 million less than a year ago and claims more than 100 million users worldwide. See related story: Google acquires YouTube social networking site. (For more information see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116010659809884678.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news; subscription required; and http://news.com.com/MySpace+may+be+worth+15+billion/2100-1025_3-6120528.html?tag=nl.e496<

Bertelsmann developing social networking site

Bertelsmann AG, parent of Springer Business + Media, has begun plans to develop an entertainment-driven social networking website to compete with MySpace and other similar services. Bertelsmann intends to create a community on the new site for its music and video projects. The creation of a social networking website would represent a new direction in the company’s diverse internet strategy. (For more information see: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=7352.

e-mail is for old people

A 2005 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project called ‘Teens and Technology’ found that teenagers prefer technology like instant messaging or text messaging for communicating with friends, and use e-mail to communicate with ‘old people’. Students interviewed for the Chronicle of Higher Education article (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i07/07a02701.htm reported that they still depend on e-mail to communicate with their professors but many would rather send text messages to friends to reach them wherever they are – since mobile phones are always at hand - than send e-mail messages that might not be seen for hours.

IngentaConnect 2.5 and Google

The latest release of IngentaConnect incorporates a number of features developed from Web 2.0 techniques to improve the user interface in response to user feedback. New functionality for IngentaConnect 2.5 includes:

· Increased support for ‘citation managers’ with additional download formats BibTeX and RDF now being offered alongside previously available EndNote, ProCite and plain text

· New social software interoperability enabling users to bookmark citations to del.icio.us, FURL, CiteULike, Connotea and Bidsonomy with one click

· Ajax-rendered collapsible volume and issue listings to simplify browsing and reduce scrolling on journal homepages – driven by the growing number of publishers now hosting large journal backfiles on IngentaConnect

· New page layouts to standardize display of user-interactive options and to increase visibility of tools at the article-level - the site’s entry point for most users

The new pages display standardized tools/options/functions for a more consistent presentation. These are now offered as expandable menu options with headings of Print, Subscription options; Article access options; Export option; Linking options; Alerting options; Bookmarking options. For more information see: http://allmyeye.blogspot.com/2006/09/refining-article-page.html

In another new development, some pages will now contain advertising, a program implemented to provide IngentaConnect publisher partners with alternative revenue streams for scholarly content.

See Ingenta and Google and see also Atypon introduces ‘collaborative’ technologies for a discussion of a similar type of service.

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Blogging for learning. Slow burner or what?

2006-11-03T08:00:00.000Z

Spending a lot of time developing the Emerald Intouch site recently.
Based on the Elgg learning landscape I'm hoping that this new service will enhance the subscriptions our customers take out, give them more reasons to visit our content.

I think that the main problem will be in demonstrating such personalised sites have value for the learner. I'm still working it out for myself - how will educators, students and managers view it? How will they use it?

Blogs for learning, from a personal point of view, are a slow burner. I've been tentatively adding posts, mostly syndicating contents from others with a 'Yeah,what he said..' most recently and shockingly, I've posted comments to other, more respectable bloggers postings. I'm sure there's some well documented path that I'm on right now, akin to lurking on bulleting boards for a year before actually starting to contribute to the debates, but posting this not as an educator but a technologist I'd love to know in simple terms, in what context does a blog support a learning endevour? I guess for me it's not training, not instruction, not some process but a deeper background kind of learning that builds on a already solid foundation of knowledge and experience.

Knowing this might just help me to figure out who might want to look a bit more closely at Intouch because this blogging as learning is very powerful, in the right context.

Through the use of my blog I've learned a lot about trends, emerging technology, the opinions and thoughts of some first class individuals; and recently (crucially) some of my learning process has been validated, kind of. It's taken me about 8 months to get it, I think. And now I'm enjoying it enormously.

Now, if only I had a simple way of demonstrating the value of this to someone else?

Elearning market growing but prices falling : from Kineo

2006-10-23T09:46:00.000+01:00

It appears that the e-learningmarket is retruning to growth. Earlier posts point to an increasingly healthy sector outlook; this report posted to Kineo from Ambient Insight tends to confirm the trend. Elearning Market prices falling, but market rising.

technorati tags:e-learning, market, prices, industry

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e-Learning Investments giving positive returns

2006-10-18T10:09:00.000+01:00

An Australian account on the increasingly positive impact e-learning technolgy is having on the outcomes of technical and vocational education - E-learning investments.

This is very encouraging. A few weeks ago I noted that in the Sunday Times UK's fastest growing SMEs 3 of the top 13 firms were e-learning firms. Increasingly I believe that teh e-learning industry is maturing, most important is the fact that teachers, trainers and faculty are beginning to understand that the 'net is a new medium altogether and that new pedagogical models are needed to exploit the opportunties offered. Most successful online learning programs included a range of delivery options, not just the ubiquitous online course or VLE/LMS.

To think that this is just the beginning too.

Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems

2006-10-06T13:24:00.000+01:00

This is a very readable paper shaping the scope and application of a Personal Learning Environment. Contrasts with the dominant design of the VLE.

Recommended.

technorati tags:PLE, Elearning, VLE, Web2.0, Personalisation, learning

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eLearning Technology: Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective

2006-08-31T12:12:00.000+01:00

eLearning Technology: Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective

Another great post from Tony Karrer. Useful guide to why and how emerging web 2.0 functionality can help you become a better resercher and a better learner. This is something I'd like to return to, beyonf knowledge worker to the the 'worker as researcher'.

Blackboard patents LMS! (from the Kineo news Digest)

2006-08-22T16:04:00.000+01:00

Extracted from a recent Kineo news digest :

Blackboard has created a controversy over the patent it has recentlybeen awarded on course management systems. Its first action has been tosue another e-learning company for infringing the patent.

The full details of the patent can be found here.The patent is summarised as "A system and methods for implementingeducation online by providing institutions with the means for allowingthe creation of courses to be taken by students online, the coursesincluding assignments, announcements, course materials, chat andwhiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to thestudents over a network such as the Internet."

"Morespecifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods inwhich an educational instructor interacts with one or morenon-collocated students by transmitting course lectures, textbooks,literature, and other course materials, receiving student questions andinput, and conducting participatory class discussions using anelectronic network such as the Internet and World Wide Web. The presentinvention also relates to the provision of an infrastructure thatallows for on-line registration and tuition payment of educationalcourses. "

Thus Blackboard is fairly much claiming to haveinvented the LMS and any form of online collaborative learningenvironment. This claim has been ridiculed by the e-learningcommunity, see Stephen Downs blog for detailed comments. Most of us in the industry know that Blackboard did not invent the LMS.

Of immediate concern is the legal action taken by Blackboard against another e-learning company.

However,the patent doesn't apply in the UK. The British EducationalCommunications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has announced that "hereis currently no restriction on the supply of products within the UnitedKingdom which fall within the scope of the US patent."

Thepatent fight may now widen as it has come to light that SAP have alsofiled for a series of learning management patents, including a 'courseeditor', 'e-learning authoring tool' and 'e-learning system'. Theapplications were filed mostly in 2004 and 2005.

technorati tags:Blackboard, patent

Got Flock!

2006-08-22T15:33:00.000+01:00

Recently installed the Flock browser. How impressed am I!

The BB patent award covering a centralised LMS adminstering the dissemination of content and materials in support of a course seems almost quaint right now. I know Stephen Downs has been urging his own students to adopt Flock as their browser of choice and now I can understand why.

If social networking and the read/write web is where we're headed then Flock, as Stephen has already pointed out, becomes the LMS. I can blog freely with my new browser, whereever and whenever I come across something of interest. I'm an oldie you see and perhaps this has always been possible, but with Flock it's so easy.

I'm very impressed - did I say that already? now looking to discover what else it can do.

BB patent - load of crap, screw 'em and get Flock!

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eLearning Technology: Shift in eLearning from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids

2006-08-22T14:19:00.000+01:00

I've been referencing this article a lot. A very interesting piece on the development of referencewarein support of learning/training objectives.

eLearning Technology: Shift in eLearning from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids

Warning! peer reviewed articles can seriously improve your health

2006-08-22T14:17:00.000+01:00

As a software developer it’s pretty normal for me to turn to google if I have a problem. Before google I used Alta Vista, or even Northern Light (whatever happened to that BTW?) – the point is that whenever I wanted a question answered, or I wanted to know more on a particular subject I turned to the search engines. I don’t think I’m alone in this, particularly amongst software developers. Most of the time if I want something answered there’s a good chance there’s something on the web that will help me along the road and eventually I’ll cobble together something I can work with from various disparate pieces of content.

I now work for a publisher of academic and practitioner Journals and here’s the thing - some of what we publish is actually pretty good. Not only that, much of what other publishers publish is also pretty good. Increasingly, I’m turning to these resources first when I want to know more about a subject domain, for example – “How is e-learning implemented by UK and EU institutions? And what is their experience to date?”. In the past I’m sure I would, and I still could, generate answers to these questions from sources on the web but I now suspect it wouldn’t be the complete picture and it would take more time to build such a picture.

A journal article might include references to other pieces of work that I might useful too and before long I’ve acquired quite a deep knowledge of the problem domain I started investigating. Of course all of this I can do on the web, and questions like – “Security/cross browser design issues for SCORM content” are perhaps still best left to google to sort out for me. The thing is, I now have a very powerful resource in these reviewed journals, from Emerald and many others and I have to ask the question – why have I not known about this before, and why aren’t they routinely included as resources when e-learning programmes and architectures are being designed?

This is very exciting for me. Not unlike discovering a cache of unopened presents late Christmas morning! OK, I exaggerate slightly but you get the point – there’s a whole other world of knowledge, experience and wisdom that for many is completely hidden from view. It’s a valuable resource for e-learning architects and designers and if the models of e-learning delivery are shifting (see Tony Karrer’s blog for a really great article on changing models of delivery) I believe its time might have come around again.

One of the research projects I’m looking at here in Emerald is the development of a toolkit to wrap user-selected peer reviewed article content into SCORM conformant packs for deployment to VLEs/LMSs. My hope is that this will help to get this content out in front of practitioners and academics in new ways, so they too can add another item to their arsenal when they have questions that need answering.

Paul Coyne

Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.
60/62 Toller Lane
Bradford BD8 9BY
United Kingdom

Tel +44 (0) 1274 785099
Fax +44 (0) 1274 785200

www.emeraldinsight.com

http://elearningandthedigitallibrary.blogspot.com/

http://public.xdi.org/=Paul.Coyne

Elgg, SCORM and workflow learning models

2006-08-02T16:59:00.000+01:00

Attended an interesting presentation from Graham Atwell last week (Wales Wide Web). He flew in to give his talk at the knowledgeBase offices in York.

And though much of what Graham talks about I believe, I have a nagging feeling it's not the whole story.

The recent development and the phenomenal uptake of social networking tools are allowing new models of workplace learning to develop - actually not new at all, let me rephrase that. It appears that long hypothesised models of learning style - Communities of Practice, proximal learning and the like have been posited as better models of learning than the Instructor - Student model for a long time, though only now are those models allowed to flourish with the advent of the internet and social collaborative tools like MySpace, Wikis, RSS.

This is great and I can speak to the value of them. As a software developer I'm constantly googling for ways and means to accomplish design and development tasks. However, in order to do this I need to first know how to frame my question, and recognise a valid answer when I see it. This requires me to have certain level of knowledge already and I can't see how anyone can get to that level without the assistance of a Teacher-like individual earlier in their life/career.

One of the projects I'm about to kick off here involves the Elgg platform. Elgg is an open source, under development PLE type application supporting the kind of constructivist models that Graham, and many others, would like to see rolled out to support individuals in the work place. I agree with all of that. I'm also keen to see Elgg develop a more 'traditional' dimension; a dimension that allows students to share and interact with SCORM conformant Learning Objects (I feel like a heretic for even suggesting it!). Surely such an extension to Elgg would help to support the many learners for whom open discourse, engagement and reflection is not their style of choice?

The project starts very soon and I hope the Elgg developer community don't alienate me for this!

More soon

VLEs, Digital publishing and pedagogy

2006-07-22T10:43:00.000+01:00

This morning I had the pleasure of taking part in a breeze session arranged by Athony ‘Skip’ Basiel of Middlesex University

Skip arranged this after a colleague, Jim Bowden, and he met a recent VLE/Digital publishing workshop to do with the VLE and its; role for publishers – scholarly and otherwise.

I hope that this is the start of a beautiful friendship! Skip did a great job facilitating the event and for a kick-off session I thought we covered some good ground. The notion of the VLE as as a means of supporting the open or distance learning model was discussed, (and as a technologist rather than a pedagogue I always find that the distinction useful and worth mentioning) and we tried to define who the audience is? Which markets are we serving? These were good points and ones that I hope will clarify my position with respect to developing tools and services that support VLE installations (or not) over the coming months.

I think there was a consensus that the trend is towards greater personalisation of the online or technology based learning experience, and also that the move towards Opensource installations – Moodle, Boddington et al is as inexorable. What kind of a response will that elicit from Blackboard/WebCT? Personally I suspect that a convergence of some sort will take place and the two models will meet each other partway.

Again, as a technologist who believes that ICTs can genuinely improve the outcomes, options and performance of individuals and businesses ( but who lacks the knowledge of pedagogical theories and models), I believe meetings like this are wonderfully inventive and refreshing.

I do hope that other publishers will take part in the next session, perhaps it would make sense to include Library Management vendors such as TALIS too?

Be3Al2SiO6 has moved to Blogger dot com

2006-07-18T17:15:00.000+01:00

Be3Al2SiO6 has moved!

Well here we are at a new address at blogger.com. I've enjoyed my time at bloglines but I'm not sure I was able to really ever express what I wanted to express. That and of course the whole blogging thing is still a fairly new experience. I hope that with this new home Be3Al2SiO6 (pronounced Emerald of course, for those with an interest in things chemical).

Be3Al2SiO6 at bloglines began as experiment, started at work, to explore the use of emerging social technologies and how they might support the notion of e-learning, digital publishing and the digital library. I'm pleased that the experiment has gone down very well, and as a consequence a new R&D unit is in the process of being setup to help us as a business and as individuals to explore the opportunities that might be on offer.

More later