Fortnightly Mailing

A quick plug for an online conference: "VLEs - Pedagogy and Implementation"

Geoff Minshull asked me to give a list minute plug, which I am glad to do, for:

"VLEs: Pedagogy and Implementation, the theory and practice of learning platforms and virtual learning environments

Date: 16 - 19 October, 2006

This four day online conference is aimed at everybody who is responsible for using and implementing learning platforms, including Virtual Learning Environments, in education."

Presenters's abstracts. It costs £68, which is probably a snip.

Trusting the people. An astute piece by Zack Exley.

Via David Weinberger I found An Organizer's Guide to Trusting the People, which is an honest and sharp self-reflection - in part an attack on leftist condescension - by Zack Exley, who worked in the US as a union organiser, was then heavily involved in MoveOn during the 2004 US election campaign, as well as working for the British Labour Party during the 2005 election campaign.

Exley's three main points, which he substantiates at length with examples from his own and others' experience (and which look stark and simplistic in their unsubstantiated state) are:

1. All groups of people - even very small ones - are strong and brilliant. This is not true of all individuals.
2. Leadership is not a role played only by "leaders," but equally by "followers" in the act of temporarily and voluntarily granting to leaders their special role. Also: leadership is ephemeral in individuals and is sometimes expressed by the most unlikely people.
3. Groups will fight for a cause only if (A) it is worth of fighting for and (B) they can see a winning plan.

Learning environments. What do teachers, students and administrators want? By Ali Jafari, Patricia McGee, and Colleen Carmean.

Thanks to Terry Hanson for sending me this perceptive article, from the July-August 2006 Educause Review [500 kB PDF]. Despite its appalling 3 column design, making it impossible to read on screen, the article should be of great interest to managers, teachers, and policy people. It is broadly about the next generation of learning environments, which the authors define as:

"the complete set of technology tools that students and faculty members will need for support of their day-to-day learning, teaching, and research, whether in face-to-face, online, or hybrid courses"

The authors try, and largely manage, to answer the question: "what do faculty, students, and administrators - i.e. the people who actually use and manage these tools - want from the next-generation e-learning environment?",with findings based on interviews done in 2005 with (1) faculty, scientists, and librarians; (2) students (learners); and (3) administrators (CIOs, provosts, and IT managers). I'm not going to attempt a summary of the piece here, partly because that would provide you with a get-out from reading it in full. Things I particularly valued in the article were the personal reflections at the end of it from each of the three authors. I was also taken with the article's coherent line on the importance of motivation in learning, and the need for "next generation environments" to be motivating - rather than tediously prescriptive - for users; and with its emphasis on the need for the environment to work with the grain of the web-based systems that people are increasingly using as part of everyday life. The diagram below, and the narrative surrounding it in the article itself, tries to capture this.

Diagram - the "Jafari Model" - by Ali Jafari

Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical? asks Barry Dahl

Interesting 23/9/2006 long post by Barry Dahl, VP of Technology and Distance Learning at Lake Superior College, Minnesota,  about Turnitin, which is the anti-plagiarism system that sits behind the JISC Plagiarism Detection Service. Excerpt:

"It's with a great deal of interest that I've been following the most recent uproar in the blogoshpere about Turnitin.com and about whether or not higher ed is taking the proverbial low ground in the ethical battles by the increasing use of Turnitin. It is my opinion and always has been that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole process of requiring students to turn in their work to the plagiarism police."

Other related posts of potential interest:

• Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
• When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
• Anonymity online as the default.
• Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
• Privacy and self-disclosure online.

5/10/2006. Added links to other related posts of potential interest.

Steve Ehrmann running ALT roundtable on Open Source software, benchmarking etc. London on 30/10/2006.

ALT (I work half-time for it) has arranged with Steve Ehrmann, Director of the Flashlight Program, and Vice-President of the not-for-profit Teaching, Learning and Technology Group, to run a round table in London on Monday 30 October. I heard him speak once in the US and he's got a reputation for making his audiences think, and then act (effectively).

Topics

• factors affecting the wide adoption of faculty-developed open source software;
• new approaches to surveying, benchmarking and action research made possible by the new Flashlight Online 2.0 system;
• strategies for involving large numbers of instructors in using computers and the Web in improving their courses.

Further details. Online booking form.

"Commons Theory" - workshop in Bonn in May 2007. But you've got to be a scholar. And young.

A reader sent me this link to a May 2007 Commons Theory Workshop "for young scholars" at the Max Planck Institute for Research, in Bonn, Germany, in May 2007. Outline:

"In recent years, the increasing commodification of information production has led to a broad debate in intellectual property, communications, broadcasting, media, contract and privacy law, as well as in Internet governance, about whether self-governed 'commons' are a feasible and desirable alternative institutional arrangement. This debate includes analyses of the open source movement and a fresh interest in calibrating the boundary between intellectual property rights and the public domain. It also focuses on the privatization of Internet governance, network neutrality rules in telecommunications law, the propertization of the radio frequency spectrum as well as on media concentration."

2 billion people own mobile phones. 80% of the population is covered by GSM. W3C workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries.

Picture source: The Economist

Occasionally I've included posts about mobile phones and economic development, pointing to their much greater impact than networked PCs. See for example this 2005 article from the Economist. On 5 and 6 December the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will hold a Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries. Here is the "background" section of the conference call in full:

Using open source tools for performance testing

Picture by Adewale Oshineye, licensed under CC.

Some readers will undoubtedly enjoy this 8/9/2006 hour-long talk by Google's Goranka Bjedov, about performance testing of big ICT systems. In fact one, who runs a large-scale e-learning delivery infrastructure, and to whom I sent the link just after writing this post said:

"Yes, just watched half of it, she hits all my hot spots, such a nice person, very interesting to hear that Google has similar issues to every other organisation regarding performance, capacity and testing. I love some of her stories and I liked her delivery style."

Sloan-C Effective Practices web site. Redesigned as a full-blown Wiki.

The US Sloan Consortium's previously featured Excellent Practices site, which contains numerous thorough case-studies on online learning in an institutional context, has been rebuilt, painstakingly, as a full-blown Wiki. Anyone can create an account and make changes.

For a typical example of the sort of thing it contains, and to access the site, see Using Cohorts to Build an Online Learning Community.

Impressive work by the UK's AoC NILTA on learning platform requirements and on e-portfolios

AoC NILTA describes itself as the "voice of the Further Education sector for ICT and e-learning in the UK". With a new team at the top, including Josie Fraser (from Wyggeston & Queen Elizabeth I sixth-form College), and Sally-Anne Saull (from RM plc), AoC NILTA has altered the way it disseminates its views. Gone are the unweildy and infrequent PDF Newsletters, and the rather bizarre web site. In comes a nice simple web site, with a blog as the main communication vehicle. Most importantly some strong thought has gone into recent AoC NILTA statements. Here are two interesing examples, both issued on 13 September 2006: