Impressions Scholarcast

Martin Weller continues to remind us of the immense impact of the super-abundance of searchable information on the web is having on learning and teaching. Martin calls this the pedagogy of abundance (see the latest Slideshare slidecast) and the characteristics, taken from one of Martin’s slides, are summarised as:

These changes are now with to a greater or lesser extent and we should be expecting our educational technology and tools to be keeping pace.

Sadly this is not the case with the rapidly aging learning management systems (LMS) that are in widespread use. Another strong adherent of the new pedagogy is George Siemens and in a recent post on his Connectivism blog he asks a very relevant question ‘Future of learning: LMS or SNS?’. The second argument that George puts forward really resonated with me:

The wild card in education today is abundance. We simply have too much information and we can’t make sense of it all. It changes too quickly. Many universities rely on a “design today, use for three years” course design model. It worked great in 1950. 2009 – not so much. Greater adaptivity of content is required. Learning resources should be tagged with a “best before date” so we’re not teaching information that is no longer accurate. LMS’ perpetuate the course model. And that is their greatest flaw.

I only have to look at my subject sites from last year on my institution’s LMS (ilearn.bond.edu.au) to see that these ideas are very close to the mark. I am strongly in favour of taking social network systems (SNS) and moulding them into the new online systems to support learning and teaching.

Being at a social time, 11 am on a Saturday, I joined the latest online social media seminar from George Siemens and Dave Cormier who talked about the theme of nowism, which is essentially various forms of the realtime web. A paper on the nowism trend contains this exercise scenario that took my fancy:

The seminar audience topped out at about 85 from all over the world in many different time zones. The seminar series Ning site gives more details and links to the recordings of these seminars. Detailed notes are also available for this particular seminar via a public Google Docs link.

Of course Google Wave figured prominently but many in the audience had not yet experienced it. A good example given by George on how invaluable Wave might be is the development of a new curriculum for a course over, say, 3 months with a small team of 5 or so. Imagine how many emails would be needed over that timescale, probably over a hundred. Instead a single, shared Wave document would exist, no doubt highly threaded. Using the Play button the actual development of the document through time would be visible showing exactly how each part of the curriculum was derived. Wave is so much better provided we all learn to use it sensibly.

Other examples of realtime web and synchronised collaboration were discussed briefly. Google Social Search (see notes) also rated a mention. Mercifully mention of Second Life was short, with the consensus being that current virtual-worlds-without-a-purpose had been tried and found wanting in large part because of the huge up-front preparation time and effort that is needed.

All in all it was a most enjoyable hour with lots of electronic resources to follow up which are of use in the general education 2.0 space.

I have been meaning to report on the outcomes of a question I set in the final theory exam of our CORE subject Information Technology 1 in our May 2009 semester. This subject is taken by virtually all students enrolled in my university at some stage in their degrees. The short answer question was:

There appears to be a trend for printed text books to be replaced by electronic books that must be read on digital devices. Indicate whether or not you are in favour of this trend. Give several reasons for your choice.

I was about 150 scripts into marking the total of 372 scripts and I happened to tweet my impression of the answers to that point:

This sparked a positive response from Peta who discussed it with her fellow librarians. Because of this interest a proper count of the students’ answers was in order to confirm if my first impressions were accurate. I decided to put each answer into 5 categories:

• For: answer and reasons given were wholly in favour of ebooks replacing printed books
• For-but: in favour overall but recognised some disadvantages that were described in the answer
• Neutral: neither for or against with reasons given on each side
• Against-but: not in favour but recognised some advantages to ebooks
• Against: answer and reasons given were wholly against the use of ebooks

In the end, my first impressions proved incorrect although the result was close. Combining both ‘for’ categories and both ‘against’ categories the numbers are 50% in favour and 44% against with 6% in the neutral category.

The more detailed results show that 17% of students recognised that the choice was not entirely clear cut and there were both advantages and disadvantages with ebooks.

So as far as this particular class of students is concerned ebooks are favoured by a small majority. Hopefully our librarians can take something useful from this result. For the record I place myself in the ‘For but’ category.

Postscript: I tried to use Twitter search on this day (27 October 2009) to find my original tweet to no avail – it turns out that 19 August 2009 is too far in the past for Twitter! Fortunately our institutional Yammer service was quickly able to find my tweet text (use of the #yam hashtag), but did not provide the unique link to the Twitter tweet. Using Google search with a phrase from the tweet returned a single result from dipity.com (maybe the recently heralded Google Social Search would have helped me). This dipity service keeps a timeline of chosen social network activity. I had all but forgotten about them except they emailed me about updated features this week. Going back to 19 August in my dipity timeline shows the tweet in all it glory together with the Twitter status link. Well done dipity.

PPS Update: Google just announced general availability of experimental Social Search

Peta shared a post by iLibrarian which commented on the Wired Campus article by long-time elearning commentator Jeff Young about the possibility of Google Wave taking over the role of learning management systems (LMS):

by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document sharing into one seamless communication interface

Having used Wave for a few weeks this functionality and more is there to be exploited for some roles of an LMS. However these thoughts reignited similar dormant ideas of my own from a few years ago about the hidden gem of SharePoint taking over from LMS of the day reported in a chapter with Charles Herring entitled ‘Building an LMS with Ubiquitous Software’. From this chapter I highlighted that being a generic, powerful content management system SharePoint supported all LMS features save one of the most important – the assessment/grade management module.

The same comments hold true for Wave, although one can hope that the ease of development of Wave extensions and gadgets may lead to suitable assessment modules being added in the future. However, SharePoint is still a dark horse and a look at the SharePoint in Education blog by Mike Herrity will show the extensive efforts of the education community to embrace SharePoint for learning and teaching.

I look forward to experimenting with Wave for educational and many other purposes, but expect Wave to be only a valuable adjunct to an LMS for quick and immediate information sharing and class feedback.

I posted earlier in the year about the main Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium and its predictions about technology in education. Now we have the Horizon Report – 2009 Australia and New Zealand edition. Its 36 pages are worth a read. As usual in this report series 6 technologies predicted to have a significant impact on education over varying timeframes are identified. They are:

1. Mobile Internet Devices that include phones, netbooks, personal wireless hubs and e-book readers: one year or less
2. Private Cloud Services: one year or less
3. Open Content – reusing and sharing course materials: 2 to 3 years
4. Virtual, Augmented, and Alternate Realities: 2 to 3 years
5. Location-Based Learning: 4 to 5 years
6. Smart Objects and Devices: 4 to 5 years

I am glad to see netbooks included in technology 1 since mobile phones seem to hold sway in this space. In my experience to date the content quality of the message content sent from mobile phones is not worth the screen real estate it is displayed upon. Mistakes abound primarily because editing and proof reading is so difficult.

Private clouds in this context just refer to general cloud services where the data centres guarantee the data stays within the institution or the country from where the cloud services are accessed. This reduces legal concerns about data jurisdiction. I hearedly concur with this selection as I am a great believer in the benefits of cloud services. However my experience to date suggests private clouds are often far too restrictive in terms of access and prevent the use of a host of useful sharing and analysis tools on the general Internet which of course rely on public access.

Again I fully agree with the move to open content described in the report.

The rising costs of education and the chronic shortage of time felt by most teachers are beginning to open the door to a broader acceptance of open content. Open content for education includes any freely available course materials — everything from worksheets to lectures to study aids to entire courses — offered online for teachers or learners to access, download, use, and in many cases, modify.

My only other comment here is that the 2 to 3 year timeframe is somewhat optimistic judged on the reactions of most of my teaching colleagues.

As things stand with the primitive, processor and bandwidth intensive virtual world clients available like Second Life I can’t see significant educational benefit. The huge cost to produce simulations of use in education will still remain for years to come. I personally completely discount this technology for the next 5 year timeframe.

Location-based learning sounds really appealing but even over the longer timeframe predicted I fail to see the allure. Set against this idea is the current thinking that physical learning spaces, even redesigned for the age of hyper connectedness, are diminishing. Instead various forms of virtual learning spaces (definitely not virtual worlds) will come to the fore. Location-based content is another matter:

There is a considerable amount of work that must be done in this area before it becomes mainstream for teaching and learning, but the potential advantages are great: from basic uses such as guided historical tours to more complex applications for mapping, fieldwork, and immersive activities, location-based learning holds promise for just in-time learning tied to a student’s physical location.

I have some sympathy with the smart objects and sensor technology also referred to as the Internet of Things. RFID chips and QR codes are useful identification technologies. All we need is an educational software infrastructure to build on these technologies – a big ask.

So I would rate this report a 4.5 out of 6 but welcome it wholeheartedly as a vehicle for productive debate about educational technologies.

To my delight today I received confirmation of my award of an Australian Teaching and Learning Council citation for 2009. My citation which is limited to 25 words is:

For developing advanced, innovative virtualisation technology and teaching
processes to allow information technology students to gain industrial-level
experience with advanced software, servers and operating systems.

This stemmed from leading a project to create a Virtual IT Teaching Laboratory (VITTL) to allow my colleagues and myself to teach advanced IT subjects using industrial-strength software for their assignments. Rather a complicated and highly restricted setup on our workstations in the teaching lab, VITTL is able to allocate students one or more virtual machines for which they have administrator privileges. On their virtual machines they can install and run the actual software to be found in the computing industry. Check out some slides for the recent 2009 Queensland Computing Education Conventicle.

In helping me put together the nomination I have to say a huge thank you to Assoc Prof Rozz Albon or our Teaching and Learning Services who worked tirelessly with me. She provided the inspiration and the subtle and not so subtle pressure to meet the deadlines.

The complete list of citation award winners is available.