Fortnightly Mailing

Catching the Learning Wave - Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder

Updated 5 August 2010

Lower down is a 30 May 2010 Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder, Director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield.  Here is Ray's reaction to Google's 4 August 2010 announcement that it would be stopping development of Wave.

This is really disappointing for those of us who have successfully used Wave for class and other collaborations. It is an especially useful tool for education. As a platform for a host of advanced multiple-media tools and with a wiki at its heart, Wave has served many of us in the past months.

Wave is a complex tool. Those who took the necessary time to learn the tool, found it to be especially robust and useful for many situations. Those who could only invest ten minutes in learning Wave were frustrated and confused.

The potential business and commerce applications were never made clear. Certainly, this was factor in the decision.

30 May 2010

Google Wave has been much discussed and speculated about since it was first announced just over one year ago. Many in the business community have wondered how it can be used for marketing and sales. Others have wondered how it will be integrated into daily communication and collaboration. Still others who lack the patience to test a tool with more than a few layers have wondered just what it is. Google developed the product as an answer to the question what would email look like if it were invented today rather than 40 years ago? (Trapani)

For those of us in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, the answer is clear. Google Wave can be described as a wiki-based platform for interactive multi-media (Web 2.0) tools. As with any good tool, Wave is versatile in application and adaptability. As with any good new tool, it is evolving and expanding.

In December of last year, I joined Brian Mulligan and Séan Conlan of the Institute of Technology at Sligo Ireland (IT Sligo) in a trans-Atlantic collaboration using Google Wave. We joined volunteers from our classes – an energy sustainability class at IT Sligo and my Internet in American Life class at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) – in Google Wave.

The results are published in the journal e-Mentor (Schroeder). In brief, the collaboration was successful, though not without a few technical glitches. Students were engaged and enthused. Some real exchanges took place, even with the very early pre-release version of Wave. We identified some twenty Wave tools that seemed to hold significant potential for collaboration and group work in higher education.

In the six months since that very early experiment with Wave, many upgrades have been put in place and Wave has become a much more stable platform for collaboration. Google Wave is now openly available to the world. That’s not to say it was a secret or much of a closed system before (some three million users were signed on prior to the official opening of Wave on 17 May 2010). But now one can join Wave by logging in with any email address. You can add new users who had not previously been in Wave by typing in their email address. The newbies are immediately sent an invitation to create a logon.

It appears that we may be poised for an explosion of testing Google Wave in higher education this fall. Workshops and Webinars on the topic are proliferating. The Sloan Consortium in the U.S. has already offered three introductory Webinars on the topic this spring and a summer workshop is schedule for June. Enthusiasm has run high in those Webinars that I and two colleagues, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles, have hosted. The “Aunt Rosie” automatic language translation bot is among the popular tools supported by Wave. For group projects, the “playback” feature is also very popular, enabling the instructor to view a kind of time lapse version of how a final report was created, showing how and when each revision was made. The scores of other tools, from mind maps to iframes to voice and video recordings are easily accessible in the extensions folder provided to each user. These extensions will, no doubt, continue to expand as more and more third party providers add to this open source tool.

The question remains, how will we in education use this tool? I cannot presume to speak for the broader educational community, but I can share what new abilities are enabled by this technology and what I think are the most exciting prospects for this tool.

We have had wikis for years – and Google has already created a rather evolved form of the wiki in the form of Google Docs. We have an ever-expanding array of Web 2.0 and associated cloud-computing tools that are launched independently and supported individually by a whole host of providers. What is new with Wave is that these are brought together into one robust wiki-type platform that is open source and can be secured.

Rather than separate logons and locations for the array of Web 2.0 tools we may wish to employ in a class, we now have a single platform through which our classes can collaborate and utilize these tools: one logon; one URL. And, we can embed waves into our learning management system.

The most exciting uses of Wave, I believe, are the ones that break down classroom walls and institutional barriers. Just as we showed in joining classes between IT Sligo and UIS, there are no international or institutional boundaries with Wave. The collaboration potential is as broad as the Web itself. It is both a synchronous and asynchronous tool with live video, chat and language translation capabilities. As with all wikis, a history is kept of all activities for asynchronous review. With these capabilities, I see the opportunity to easily:

1. Join classes within an institution. For example, a biology class could meet with an ethics class. The students could conduct a case study related to bio-ethics, merging the classical ethics approach with the high-tech aspects of cutting edge science. The faculty members could encourage the discussion and probing of issues that arise in the ethical pursuit of science.
2. Join classes across institutional boundaries. For example, a 19th century American history class at one institution could join with a US Civil War history class at another institution for a couple of weeks to interact on the topic of the Lincoln presidency. The faculty members could encourage their students to engage with students in the other class to gain a breadth and depth of perspectives on the topic that would not normally be part of either class.
3. Join foreign language classes. An English class in China could meet with a Chinese class in the UK. Cultural as well as language learning could take place.

The opportunities are endless. For the first time, the technology is in place to easily accomplish this kind of collaboration at the instructor and individual class level. In many institutions, creating a brief collaborative module can be done by the instructor without time-consuming proposals, governance reviews, and inhibiting technological issues. It is no more complex than arranging for a guest speaker to address your class. But, in this case, you are reaching out anywhere on the globe (or the campus) to create a planned (or spontaneous) collaboration that add depth and richness to the learning in your class.

schroeder.ray[AT]uis.edu or rayschroeder[AT]googlewave.com

References

Schroeder, R, Mulligan, B, & Conlan, S. (2010). Waving the google flag for inter-institutional class collaborations. e-Mentor, 7(1), ISSN 1731-6758. Also available online: http://www.e-mentor.edu.pl/33,723,Waving_the_Google_Flag_forInter-institutional_Class_Collaborations.html
Trapani, G. (2010). The Complete guide to google wave [First Edition]. Retrieved from http://completewaveguide.com/guide/The_Complete_Guide_to_Google_Wave

THE-QS World University Ranking - a US perspective that takes account of country size: Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

When the 2009 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings of the world’s universities were published 8 October, Editor of the THE-QS rankings, Phil Baty wrote: “America's superpower status is slipping as other countries' efforts to join the global elite begin to pay dividends.” And he could have written the U.K. universities continue to improve their rankings.

More on self-organised learning

David Jennings has written a second instalment on self-organised learning in part responding my reservations. Dougald Hine comments (I mostly agree with him) that workplaces usually (often?) provide better vocational learning environments than institutional ones. When and if time permits I want to link this discussion with some points made by David Price


David Price - Co-founder of Debategraph: Thinking deeply together (click on thumbnail to run 28 minute video). Other ALT-C 2009 videos.

at the ALT conference (drawing on Clay Shirky) about the "cognitive surplus" in the heads of learners, and the scope there ought to draw value from it - thereby reducing the net cost of provision - by basing learning activities on finding real world solutions to problems.

Macintosh OS X on a netbook for £400 - Guest Contribution by George Roberts

OK, I don't think you can call it a "Mac netbook" but this is how I got Mac OS X 10.5.6 to run on a Dell mini 9. It was easier than I thought.

A quick review of Google Chrome. Guest Contribution by Dick Moore.

Minor revisions 5/9/2008

First glances are promising: the integrated search and address bar works well as do the visual representation of most common visited sites, and bookmarks as thumbnails.

When Chrome encounters a poorly written website (or one that it is unable to cope with) then it is the tab that crashes and not the browser, though in testing I have not been able to cause a crash (a good sign in itself). Chrome’s privacy mode, called "incognito" will be of benefit to anyone wishing to browse on a shared computer: it ensures that no history or cookies are kept locally. (Internet Explorer 8 also has this feature called "inPrivate Browsing".)

Chrome’s interface is quite stark but its ability to go full screen and minimal would suggest that its intended use is as a means to access web based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.

In a very rough test, Chrome was significantly faster than both Internet Explorer 7 and an "un-tuned" installation of Firefox.

Chrome is Open Source, which will surely mean that, as with Firefox, a wide range of plug-ins get developed.

Download and installation were very quick and easy, with bookmarks and tabs picked up from Firefox. As yet there are no Mac or Linux versions, but these will surely come.

Privacy considerations

For the more paranoid, the combined search and address bar suggests that every address we type will be recorded by Google, thereby enabling Google to collect even more data on which sites users visit, and thus Google better to target advertising at individual users. The privacy options give you some control over the "pass-back" of usage information to Google ; and the fact that Chrome is Open Source should allow the more technically capable to confirm that these privacy options work.

Overall, if you interested in a lightweight web browser, Chrome is well worth a look; and it is bound to get better. I will be comparing Chrome with Firefox over the next few months. For the moment I am not planning to take Firefox, with its invaluable range of plug-ins, off my PCs.

You can download chrome at google chrome download. Meanwhile there are lots of YouTube demos sprouting up. Personally I quite liked the comic strip that Google uses to describe the engineering thinking behind Chrome. This is at Read about the Technology

Dick Moore is Director of Technology at Ufi learndirect

Bologna: are European entrepreneurs now leading the US on the development of Higher Education student record software? Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer.

On Wednesday 21 May the Institute of Higher Education Policy released a report “The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction.” One week later, 28 May 2008, two young European entrepreneurs, Manuel Dietz and Stéphane Velay, of the German company unisolution GmbH, described the collaborative work of 13 European software and service providers to automate administrative services supporting the emerging Bologna Process.

The report's author Clifford Adelman wrote:

What has transpired since 1999 cannot be but lightly acknowledged in the United States. While still a work in progress, parts of the Bologna Process have already been imitated in Latin America, North Africa, and Australia. The core features of the Bologna Process have sufficient momentum to become the dominant global higher education model [emphasis added] within the next two decades. We had better listen up.

Debategraph: the debate processor. Guest Contribution by David Price.

Question: What do you get if you cross a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging, and social bookmarking with an argument map?

Answer: Debategraph.org

I started to collaborate on Debategraph with, my co-founder, Peter Baldwin in 2005. It’s one of those delightfully unlikely collaborations that the Internet makes possible: I’m based in Somerset in the UK and Peter is based in the Blue Mountains in Australia. We discovered each other, across the net, because we had two things in common: a shared perception of a problem and a shared idea for a solution.

Microsoft certified Moodle – Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

A "Microsoft certified" version of Moodle can be downloaded now from SpikeSource, a venture capital backed US company that aims to make Open Source software "business ready". Available since February 27, 2008,  neither Microsoft or SpikeSource announced the certified version. A representative for SpikeSource said this was a routine extension of the company’s certifications for Microsoft.

JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Half way through the phase 2 research - Guest Contribution from Ellen Lessner

The second phase of the research into the learner experience of e-learning is one year old, with most projects due to finish in March 2009.  Phase 2 of this programme is made up of 7 research projects, with a "Support and Synthesis" project running in parallel.  On the public area of the project wiki you can get a good idea of the work that’s been done so far.  While the 7 projects are doing their individual research, the Support and Synthesis project has run 4 support workshops which have enabled the project teams to work together while focusing on the issues surrounding data collection, methodology and dissemination outputs.

You may have seen the publication from the first phase of the research - In Their Own Words available from the JISC website, and you may have seen coverage of LEX here in Fortnightly Mailing. There continues to be considerable interest in the many aspects of this phase of the project; not only the possible findings but the different types of data collection (video and audio), the methodologies used by the range of projects and the model of support used by the Support and Synthesis project.  We’re now at the stage where a variety of themes are just beginning to emerge.

Evaluating what learners are doing with technology is obviously important and there are a number of UK projects, mainly HE centred, focusing on this theme.  For example, the Higher Education Academy has funded a project, running from January to July 2008, called the Experiences of E-Learning Special Interest Group (ELISIG), for those involved in investigations and evaluations of learners' experiences of e-learning.  An initial ELISIG workshop held in March 2008 was attended by over 40 people.   

For more information on the Learner Experience Projects,   contact Ellen Lessner, Project Manager, Support and Synthesis Project or Sarah Knight, JISC Programme Manager.

OLPC: Good, Bad or Ugly? Hands-on report by Geoff Stead and the Tribal m-learning team

After all our enthusiasm for the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC) it was amazing to be able to spend the last two weeks testing one out for real (thanks Seb!).

So what is it really like?

The lunch-on-the-move quick read version

We, the Tribal m-learning team think the OLPC X0-1:

• is inspirational, embedding good educational ideas and collaboration;
• solves several big technology challenges;
• is great fun, but pretty slow;
• is full of first-generation quirks;
• has an amazingly rich seam of support info on the OLPC wiki;
• leads the field in several key directions, but might be superceded quite quickly?

One quirk worth mentioning is that almost everyone who tried to open it first time ... couldn't! To avoid this, and other basic blunders we have made a bluffers guide to the OLPC  to be released shortly ...

The sit-down-and-eat longer read version

There are so many competing views and agendas around this little green machine that we felt the best way to review it would be collaboratively. We got the entire Tribal learning technologies team in on the act, including animators, UI designers, teachers, academics and programmers. We also enlisted the real experts: our kids! (aged 6, 9 and 11).

The good:

• The XO is all about sharing. It has a great visual representation of available local networks, and of the people in your group. This is all about kids doing stuff - and building stuff - together, the collaboration is hard-wired into the system.
• Seymour Papert lives on. The XO includes great tools (like pippy and turtleart) to help everyone develop basic programming - and from that problem solving skills.
• The interface is interestingly different, without being counterintuitive ... even for those of us wedded to the Windows / Mac metaphors.
• The XO includes inspirational technology solutions to many 3rd world equipment problems that until now were ignored by the mainstream, but that we can all benefit from. Things like:
  • good protection from the elements (especially dust and spillage), as well be being very robust;
  • fantastic screens that can even be used in direct sunlight;
  • flexible power use and generation (very low power use, and you can plug it in just about anywhere or even generate your own power by sun or friction);
  • mesh networking: a combination of powerful wireless connections (can travel over 1km!) and ad-hoc networking help get many users sharing a single Internet connection;
  • no license fees, and endless scope to customise the software (thanks to a cut down Linux OS and open source apps);
  • good extensibility, with plug-and-play for standard USB peripherals (useful for an extra mouse and keyboard if you have got grown-up fingers - the keys are tiny!).
• Useful fold-back screen and mouse / tab controls on the screen casing. What it really cries out for in this mode is a touch screen, though.
• This device, more than any other we have seen, is all about kids. All about sharing. All about communicating and problem solving - in fact all about learning. OLPC should be a wake-up call for the first world as well ... why aren't we giving our kids the same tools?

The bad:

Slow and Unresponsive. This may sound ungrateful for such a cheap device, but bad responsiveness very quickly becomes a barrier. You can load multiple apps, but with two or three running at the same time the delays between mouse-movements and on-screen responses get so slow that many apps become unusable. Even drawing a single line in Paint results in a series of disconnected bits.

The ugly:

The interface (both software and hardware) suffers from many small irritants that you would hope get resolved in later releases. Individually they are just "quirks", but together they do start to make the "collaborative" nature of the OLPC development more visible. Some of our pet peeves are:

• The mouse pad: it looks like there are 3 mouse-pads, but only the central one works. You finger has no cue that you have moved onto one of the not-working pads so you keep "loosing your mouse". The pads need raised lines to separate them.
• The mouse buttons: need to stand out a little more. They are sunk-in, so tricky to use.
• Integrating with Sugar: the Linux interface being used (called Sugar) lets you access the main menu by moving your mouse to the 4 corners of the screen. A great idea, but several of the bundled apps also use the corners of the screen for menus and icons, which means the menu pops up by mistake when you want to use them!
• Webcam is off to the side of the screen, so the only way to get your face in shot is to lean over sideways! (Why not put it on top?)
• Even our veteran Linux developers struggled to find out how to upgrade what. It needs a single application to display all the technical information. For example: hardware version, software version, flash player version, security settings etc. Without this it is very fiddly to upgrade.

Overall we loved the X0 - but want more:

We love the fact it has had so much philanthropic energy put into it, and the bold, exploratory and collaborative ideals it encompasses. But we were frustrated enough with the speed and some of the interface quirks to give it the thumbs down until the next version gets released. If those get sorted, and it gets a touch-screen added, it will be one amazing device!

Review by Geoff Stead and the team at www.m-learning.org. Their blog is at moblearn.blogspot.com.