Fortnightly Mailing

A varied crop of articles in the October 2010 ALT News Online

Here is a list of authors, titles and links from the current issue of ALT News Online. I think that Sean Duffy's piece about the design principles behind his excellent Excel Everest teach yourself Excel programme is particularly interesting, as is the Stuart Sutherland's and Ray Irving's article about CancerNursing.Org.

Sirin Soyoz - Identifying learning technologists – The key roles, activities and values of an emerging group.

John Stone - Technology revolution is the way for education to deliver through the cuts. 

Marion Walton - Deep thoughts or deep prejudices? 

Kevin McLaughlin -  When using technology makes a difference. 

Adam Blackwood - GPS:  What is the learning value of knowing where you are? 

Ray Irving and Stuart Sutherland - CancerNursing.org – A case study in international open educational resources. 

Sean Duffy - Make them struggle but keep them smiling – A set of design principles for interactive learning tools.

Bob Harrison - iStanford.

Bryony Taylor -  A Twitter experiment.

Meic Watkins and Liz Bennett - I don’t want any help!! - A survey of attitudes to help packages. 

Tom Browne, Roger Hewitt, Martin Jenkins, Julie Voce, Richard Walker and Hennie Yip - Key Findings from 2010 technology enhanced learning survey.

Adrian Perry - Instinct or reason – How education policy is made and how we might make it better.

 

The impact of technology on classroom practice

The Impact of Technology: Value-added classroom practice [1.3 MB PDF, 95 pages], by Charles Crook, Colin Harrison, Lee Farrington-Flint, Carmen Tomás, and Jean Underwood was published recently on the Becta web site. The report is one of those useful and interesting attempts to get behind the normal generalisations, and to examine what teachers do, what works, and why.

Here is an excerpt from the executive summary.

The study reports an analysis of 85 lesson logs, in which teachers recorded their use of space, digital technology and student outcomes in relation to student engagement and learning. The teachers who filled in the logs, as well as their schools’ senior managers, were interviewed as part of a ‘deep audit’ of ICT provision conducted over two days. One-hour follow-up interviews with the teachers were carried out after the teachers’ log activity. The aim of this was to obtain a broader contextualisation of their teaching. The learning practices that we identified as mediating ICT for learning are presented as a taxonomy. This taxonomy is used to classify the lesson activity reported in the logs. We argue that ICT has reconfigured classroom practice in the project schools in important ways. Among these, we would highlight the following consequences:

• ICT makes possible new forms of classroom practice. This is apparent in three particular respects: (1) the reconfiguration of space such that new patterns of mobility, flexible working and activity management can occur, (2) new ways in which class activities can be triggered, orchestrated and monitored, (3) new experiences associated with the virtualisation of established and routine practices – such as using multiple documents in parallel or manipulating spatial representations.
• ICT creates the possibility of a wide variety of learning practices. Overarching this variety are three central activities which are significantly enriched by the increasingly ubiquitous availability of technologies: (1) exposition which is animated by the opportunity to invoke rich shared images, video and plans, (2) independent research which is extended by the availability of internet search opportunities, and (3) construction which is made possible by ready-to-hand ICT-based tools.

Critical success factors: CPD for teachers in using technologies for teaching and learning

Another first-rate post from Graham Attewell, this time reporting on research he has been doing with Jenny Hughes into models and practices in CPD for teachers in using technologies for teaching and learning. Areas covered:

• Peer learning / skill sharing
• Small group learning
• Informal learning more important than formal courses
• Clear links between CPD and practice
• A sound pedagogic base and reflexivity
• Leadership
• Working with newly qualified and trainee teachers
• Ownership of equipment
• Time useage a.k.a no time wasting
• Involvement of non-teaching staff
• Use of mentors or learning coaches
• Observation of practice
• Networks and communities of practice
• The use of E-portfolios as a tool in ICT CPD

Comment: in many respects this list could be applied to many workplace learning needs, and to many different roles.

Foundations for a New Science of Learning

Foundations for a New Science of Learning by Andrew Meltzoff, Patricia Kuhl, Javier Movellan, and Terrence Sejnowski provides an interesting overview of current research findings. Abstract:

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared to other species. Humans are also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior, and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

Evidence-based policy in education?

The University of York maintains this Best Evidence Encylopaedia UK. Largely schools focused,  BEE "reflects an original US version which was created by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE) with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education".  The site is "intended to give educators, policy-makers, and researchers fair and useful information about the strength of evidence supporting a variety of programmes available for pupils of both primary and secondary school-age".

The rate at which latest updates are being added is very low, and the site has a disappointingly untended feel. I would be very happy to be corrected.

Sugata Mitra - "The hole in the wall": self organising systems in education

Here is the video recording of Sugata Mitra's 8 September keynote speech at the 2010 ALT Conference in Nottingham.

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

Teacher quality: how to get more of it. Plus numerous presentations by Dylan Wiliam.

Dylan Wiliam gave a great talk at the 2007 ALT Conference (there are links lower down). Many of Wiliam's presentations are available from his web site. The text of a March 2010 talk to a conference organised by the Spectator magazine - Teacher quality: how to get more of it [8 page DOC, extensively referenced] - develops some of the themes in the ALT-C talk, albeit without a technology slant. Excerpt:

"If we are serious about improving the quality of our education system to meet the increasing demands of the world of work, then we need a culture change. No longer can we accept that once one has been teaching five or ten years, one is “good to go”. Teaching is such a complex craft that one lifetime is not enough to master it, but by rigorously focusing on practice, teachers can continue to improve throughout their career. From teachers, therefore, we need a commitment—not to attending a certain number of hours of professional development per year—but a career-long commitment to the continuous improvement practice, and an agreement to develop in their practice in ways that are likely to improve outcomes for their students."

For the ALT-C talk "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control" use these links: slides and video of the talk, captured as an Elluminate Live! session [~75 MB]. Text transcript [75 kB PDF]. Slides [400 kB PDF]. MP3 recording [12 MB].

Jonathan Zittrain explains Ronald Bowes's work on the Facebook membership list

Here is a very clear explanation of how Ronald Bowes stripped out, aggregated, and republished a large number of Facebook users' already public data, along with some well-informed comments about whether or not it matters. In short:

• it was only to be expected;
• it probably does not matter all that much;
• caveat "emptor";
• if you change your privacy settings on the web, your previously public data may well be for ever out there beyond your control;
• this is good example of the generative nature of the Web.

Assessing the Effects of ICT in Education - an OECD report

Assessing the Effects of ICT in Education - Indicators, Criteria and Benchmarks for International Comparisons is a 200 page report from the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. It is available for free download from the OECD Online Bookshop.

Abstract:

"Despite the fact that education systems have been heavily investing in technology since the early 1980s, international indicators on technology uptake and use in education are missing. This book aims to provide a basis for the design of frameworks, the identification of indicators and existing data sources, as well as gaps in areas needing further research. The contributions stem from an international expert meeting in April 2009 organised by the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning, in co-operation with OECD (CERI), on benchmarking technology use and effects in education. The contributions clearly demonstrate the need to develop a consensus around approaches, indicators and methodologies. The book is organised around four blocks: contexts of ICT impact assessment in education, state-of-the-art ICT impact assessment, conceptual frameworks and case studies."