Lighting up Leicester

A little diversion from e-learning today…

In the Leicester City Council’s leaflet on attractions for the Autumn and Winter of 2009, the following festivals and events are listed: the festival of Eid to mark the end of Ramadan, Diwali Day, the Hindu festival of lights, “Bonfire” Night (commemorating Guy Fawkes, the bloke who plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in England in 1605), the Christmas lights switch-on, and last but not least, the Hanukkah lights switch-on. A brilliant reflection on the diversity of this little city which is renowned for being the first British city in which all demographic groups are minorities.

The Diwali festival last night marked the beginning of the new year in the Hindu calendar. (It’s 2066, I learned!) The Diwali celebrations in Leicester are known for being the largest outside of India – a crowd of at least 35,000 was predicted. I can’t say how many people were there, but the crowd occupied every square inch of a huge recreation ground near the city centre. And what a mellow, friendly, sober assortment of people they were. Everyone from the tiniest tots to the most senior great-grandparents was there. And every skin colour and cultural background seemed to be represented. There was no pushing or shoving, no drinking, no antisocial behaviour. Everyone whooped and bopped along delightedly to the Bollywood music that was blaring, and clapped encouragingly for the young dancers on the stage. They even sat (or rather stood) patiently through several rather bland speeches by various important members of the community. The only slight disturbance came when the Chair of the Hindu Festivals Committee suffered a rather unfortunate slip of the tongue and announced with gusto that Diwali was all about the triumph of evil over good! The crowd erupted in good-natured mock shock, and he sheepishly attempted to recover by saying he was just testing us to make sure we were listening… at which the crowd emitted a collective condoning groan. Subsequent speakers were at pains to assure us that Diwali was about the triumph of good over evil, just in case there was any doubt!

The programme ended with a spectacular fireworks display, after which everyone proceeded to flow out through the exits in a perfectly orderly manner, the children weaving through the spaces in the crowd with their light sabres ablaze.

Whoever thinks that immigration is a “problem” in England hasn’t seen Leicester during Diwali.

21st century learning – threads in the tapestry

Here is the slide presentation I gave at the NADEOSA (National Association for Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa), on 17 Aug 2009. In it, I described six threads in the ‘tapestry’ of learning and teaching in the 21st century, as I see it, with a focus on how this tapestry is being created in developing countries.

Joining the high-tech bandwagon on low bandwidth

A streaming version of the video is available here:

mms:\\streaming1.le.ac.uk\it\mms\NADEOSAkeynote2009.asf

I was in Leicester, England, and the conference was in Pretoria, South Africa. Colleagues at Leicester helped me record the presentation as a video, which we sent to NADEOSA before the conference. The delegates watched the video presentation, and I waited (on tenterhooks!) in Leicester for the Skype call for the Q&A session afterwards. It wasn’t ideal – it would have been much nicer for me to actually give the presentation live, but we were glad we chose this route in the end, as we lost the Skype connection about three times during the 15 minutes or so of Q&A time. (And Skype had proved to be more stable than Elluminate or Adobe Connect in our practice runs!)

During the Q&A session, I was asked to elaborate on slide 18 – ‘Manage it, don’t drown in it! – which is about managing the rapid flow of information that we have to deal with as educators and learners. I mentioned a great blog post by Nancy White, in which she outlines some strategies for doing this.

In search of the perfect social learning platform

Since my Moodle site is temporarily out of action , I  made it my mission on Saturday to explore alternative learning management platforms. I needed a platform to enable me to produce a ’sample’ social learning site as part of an assignment for my current USQ course on developing educational web sites. I wanted to find a platform that met the following criteria:

1. It had to be free – or at least have a basic option that was free
2. I wanted it to be hosted on the provider’s server (i.e. no need to download anything)
3. It had to be easy to use (both for me and for my students/ group members) – ideally with the look and feel of FaceBook, and…
4. With as much of the functionality of Moodle as possible
5. And of course, it had to be robust and reliable. (Evaluated on the basis of my own experience, or independent reviews by other users who had gone before me.)

OK, a tall order, I know. I was basically after learning platform nirvana, but why not? This is the age of Web 2.0 after all, where anything is possible, right? Well, I’ll cut a long story short and summarise my findings:

• I started with Ninehub, since they offer free hosting of Moodle sites. I was able to create a course very quickly, but felt insecure because it didn’t look as though anyone from Ninehub had updated anything on the site since 2007 (although I found examples of some perfectly functional sites that had been created by members of the public on Ninehub quite recently). My unease increased when I realised that some of the links on the site’s home page led to error messages, and I began to wonder whether Ninehub’s Moodle platform had also been hacked, so I decided to look further…
• Then I tried Elgg. This very clean looking platform gets good press from a lot of higher education institutions, and has a great social learning community hosted by Jane Hart. The platform was a bit unwieldy for me though – probably because I didn’t have the expertise to customise it to my needs. For example, when I experimented with setting up a ‘group’ (i.e. a community site), I couldn’t create a series of pages under different tabs: all my content had to be accessible from the start screen. It is possible to create several levels of sub-pages, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the overall navigation visible from the start screen, and I wondered whether users might miss important content simply because they couldn’t see it.  And so I moved on to…
• Ecto learning – they claim to be THE best platform for social learning, but like Ninehub, I couldn’t find evidence of anything happening on the site in the last two years. (Again, I might have missed something, but I think ‘currency’ or up-to-dateness is the kind of thing that web owners should signal in very obvious ways if they want to be seen as credible.) Moving on again…
• Edu20 – this platform seemed to have good features, but felt too ’schoolish’ (in their layout, their language, and their assumptions about users’ needs), and so I decided to look a little further, and found…
• Haiku – a site with a very handsome looking interface that advertises itself as a LMS, but is actually just a content repository. (One of their lines is: ‘Content is everything.’) Pity, because they certainly had the edge in the ‘look and feel’ department.
• Then I stumbled upon Solution Grove, which offers platforms based on a combination of Moodle, Elgg and LAMS (the Learning Activity Management System, developed at Macquarie University in Australia). This sounded very exciting but required much more time to review than I had available, so I put it aside for a rainy day. (Now that I’m living in England, I have plenty of those

Finally, beginning to feel desperate by this stage, I remembered my old favourite, Ning, where I am already a member of three groups (Maggie Verster’s colourful and lively Learn Web 2.0 with Maggie, Jay Cross’s interesting and diverse Corporate Trends and Innovation, as well as my old school network). After studying the architecture of these Ning-based sites (thanks Maggie and Jay!) and experimenting a bit, I discovered that Ning offered me enough functionality and customisability for me to develop a very workable social learning site quite quickly. One big plus was that I was able to entirely embed the content-based website that I had already developed (using Weebly) in a tab, which makes the whole course feel nicely self-contained, and means I don’t have to duplicate content. I also think the ease of use of Ning for end users (due to its FaceBook-like look and feel – see no. 3 above!) will reduce the learning curve for students/ group members who are new to learning online.

Post Script – a comment on my review process:

My methodology for doing these reviews was very goal-driven, and I tended to give up on a site fairly quickly if I couldn’t figure out how to achieve my goals. I would love to get feedback from others who are more familiar with these (or other) platforms.

Moodle site hacked

Today I discovered that my Moodle site had been hacked. I tried to create a new course and when I clicked to save changes to the course settings, I was taken to a completely white screen with two little boxes in the top left hand corner and ‘Authenticate’ underneath them. I typed in my user ID and password, which took me to an Error 404 page…

Apparently I am not the only one – the Moodle discussion forum has loads of messages – here’s just one of the threads. The solution, it seems, is to upgrade to version 1.9.3+.

My top ten tools

Jane Hart is compiling a list of  top ten favourite tools ‘for creating learning for others, for your own professional practice or personal productivity’ at http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/top10tools.html.

Mine are:

1. Gmail – definitely number 1. I love the way it collates messages into a single thread.
2. iGoogle - to organise everything, and…
3. Diigo – to bookmark, annotate, highlight and share. (For a description of how I use these two together for getting things done, see my blog posting, ‘GTD in my PLE‘)
4. Zotero – I’ve built up a fantastic reference library using Zotero and the Firefox add-on, which enables one to save detailed referencing info from journal databases, Amazon and other sources with a single click. The bibliography function also takes the headaches out of writing reference lists.
5. Weebly – The best wysiwyg software for creating websites I’ve ever found… It’s free but I’ve taken out a subscription for $27 that enables me to password-protect some pages of my sites. For an example, see the site I developed with and for the South African Institute for Distance Education using Weebly at www.saide.weebly.com. (Work in progress.)
6. Gliffy – great, free tool for producing diagrams. All the diagrams in my blog were done using this.
7. Elluminate – Still the best webconferencing tool I know of. I love Elluminate’s free vroom (virtual meeting room for three) – it’s a great alternative to Skype if you need to bypass office firewalls.
8. Greenshot - Dead easy tool for capturing screenshots. And it’s free.
9. Moodle – For managing learning communities. (I’m checking out Ning and Elgg though – wondering if they’re more user-friendly for both administrators and participants, even though probably less powerful.)
10. Filemail – I saved the best for last. This is without question the best application for sending large files. All the others that I tried were so incredibly s-l-o-w that I gave up on them. (I read somewhere that they artificially slow down the upload/download speeds for customers who choose the free service… Filemail happily does not seem to subscribe to this practice.)

The 4 quadrants and the 5 stages

The 4 quadrants and Salmon's 5 stages

Further thoughts on approaches to learning and teaching, this time integrated into Salmon’s five-stage model for e-learning.

Open Courseware 2.0?

Thanks to David Wiley for his blog entry, ‘The Future of OCW and “OCW 2.0″ - it offers another model for the support of OERs to add to my earlier list (although this one is somewhere in the grey zone between informal and formal learning).

Here’s an extract:

A new generation of OpenCourseWare projects are built around sustainability plans. These second generation projects are integrated with distance education offerings, where the public can use and reuse course materials for free (just like first generation OCWs) with the added option of paying to take the courses online for credit (there is no way to earn credit from the first generation OCWs). The Open Universities of the UK and the Netherlands, UC Irvine, and the small pilot program at BYU Independent Study are built on this model. These second generation OCWs are simultaneously a powerful public good and effective marketing tools that generate revenue and can likely sustain themselves financially. (We’re studying this sustainability model in a truly fascinating dissertation study at BYU right now.) Schools with first generation OCWs that also offer distance education courses (like USU) could transform themselves into OCW 2.0 programs if they wanted to.

Yes to the TED commandments!

Thanks to Tim Longhurst (The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know) courtesy of Garr Reynolds, for this great advice to speakers. I think all these points (apart from no. 9, but including no. 10, if you read the word ‘follow’ with its other meaning) apply to writers too…

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

My burning question: how to provide support for OERs

The other day I mentioned to a colleague at work that my burning question is: How do we provide support for people using Open Educational Resources? His reply was: Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Not an unsurprising response, I suppose, since the point of OERs is that they are open, and therefore, by implication, it is up to the user how s/he chooses to use them.

But making learning materials available and open does not necessarily lead to learning, no matter how good the resources are. Many people need support in accessing, making sense of, and applying the knowledge that is available to them. I’ve been told that many institutions in South Africa (and presumably elsewhere in the world too) have lost credibility for putting out ‘open’ materials and then charging fees for students to enrol and take an exam. When the student fails, the provider says ‘Never mind. You can re-enrol and try again next year.’ For an additional fee, of course.

So I’m looking for models of good support for open learning. Models of open courses or communities, where the learning process is as open as the OERs that they draw from. It’s been surprisingly difficult to find such models, but below is a smattering of what I’ve found so far.

An interesting thing is that most of them are, to some extent, self-referential – they all (apart from the action research one) involve participants using the Web to learn about the Web, or to learn about learning on the Web. Anyway, here they are:

The fishbowl model – the CC08 course by Stephen Downes & George Siemens
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/02/access2oer-cck08-solution.html

This course had 20 signed-up members who participated actively, did assignments and received accreditation from the University of Manitoba for their efforts. In addition, there were approximately 2,200 peripheral participants who ‘lurked’, observed, joined in the discussion forums and Elluminate sessions, and made random blog postings inspired by CCK08. (I was one.) This course was not based around specially designed OERs – instead students drew on the huge volume of literature available on the Web, and in true constructivist style, created a lot of the knowledge artefacts as they went along.

The discussion forum model – Open University’s LearningSpace
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

The Open University doesn’t just throw its OERs out into the world – it also sets up discussion forums to support people using them. A quick glance through the Education forum though, shows that very few of the discussion threads have more than one posting – in other words, there is not much actual discussion going on in there. This must be one of the issues that Grainne Conole and her team are addressing with their creation of Olnet - here’s a link to a draft book chapter (‘A new approach to supporting the design and use of OER: harnessing the power of Web 2.0′) they’ve written and are asking for feedback on: http://olnet.org/node/25. I’ll be watching this space with interest.

The social networking model (1) – Learn Web 2.0 with Maggie
http://learnwithmaggie.ning.com/

Maggie Verster, a prolific writer and extremely enthusiastic Web user, has created a social networking site on Ning, where she runs occasional free workshops (as part of a research project for the South African Dept of Education, it seems), offers advice and leads a discussion forum. It’s mainly aimed at school teachers in South Africa, although access is open to anyone. I can’t see any major activity on the site since December 2008, but it looks like a it has been great support service for many. (Updated 24 May: I missed this – it seems there was a spontaneous online blogging seminar last Thursday, arranged via Twitter – a great example of what Twitter does well.)

The social networking model (2) – Jane Hart’s social learning network on Elgg
http://www.c4lpt.net/

Not sure how this works yet, but I’ve just sent Jane Hart a request to join the network. There are three groups – How to use Elgg for Social Learning, Social Media in the Workplace, and Social Media in Education. Jane is promoting Elgg as the best platform for social learning, so I’ll be interested to find out what is behind this assertion.

The social networking model (3) – Corporate Learning Trends & Innovation on Ning, by Jay Cross
http://learntrends.ning.com/

This site has a relatively active, ongoing discussion forum covering a wide range of topics related to learning in the corporate sector. They have also run some webinars and conferences – a recent one was a 24-hour ‘marathon’ session of online presentations and discussions, to cater, presumably, for people in all time zones.

Open courses – Action Research by Southern Cross University
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/areol/areolhome.html

This fantastic site is a treasure chest of resources on action research – well structured, cleary written and easy to follow. It makes action research come alive and gives loads of examples of different ways of doing it. All the materials were produced by Bob Dick of SCU. The site includes a course outline for  a 14-week public course based on the materials.

OERs focusing on guidelines for using OERs
http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/FacilitatingOnline

One of the funder’s (JISC) requirements for our OTTER project at Beyond Distance is that we include guidelines for users on how to either teach or learn from the materials. This seems sensible to me. An excellent example comes from Tony Carr and colleagues at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Educational Technology: a course on how to facilitate online, in the format of a PDF.

I’ll be exploring these models further in an assignment I’m writing for USQ over the next few days, so no doubt will be adding more thoughts as I go along.

Approaches to learning and teaching – a model

This is work in progress. I’m thinking every learning activity could be described in terms of where it fits on these two axes – from individual to shared, and from ‘controlled’ to open. I’m not sure about the terminology yet. Developing it further in my work for SAIDE – a web resource for distance educators on supporting learners in developing countries. (Also work in progress – can be viewed here.)

This diagram was done with Gliffy – click here for a better resolution version.