Fortnightly Mailing

Links for a talk

Below is an eclectic set of links that I included in, or drew material and ideas from, in talks at Learning Technologies 2009 in London in January, at a JISC RSC "e-Learning in HE: Strategy and Planning" event in Doncaster in March, and at the Cambridge Assessment Network in April.  At the bottom you will find a link to a (big) zip folder with the assets for the March version of the talk.

Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning - Technological Change "Thematic Paper"

The National Association for Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) has published Simon Mauger's Technological Change Thematic Paper [50 pages, 1.4 MB PDF] from the National Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL). I get quoted a bit in the document, which makes me feel well disposed towards it, and possibly clouds my judgement that though it is not saying anything earth-shatteringly original, the document does manage to capture in one place, and in language that policy-makers will relate to, the scale and nature of the changes taking place in the overall environment for learning.

Problem-based learning - York Law School's guide for students

This Guide to problem-based learning, which draws heavily on a similar guide written by students at Hull York Medical School, provides an impressive and comprehensive overview of an approach to (HE) course design and delivery that is used throughout the undergraduate law course at York University. Via Hull Work Medical School I came across this long list of probably a bit dated links to resources about Problem Based Learning maintained (?) by the University of Maastricht.

Formative "e"-assessment - useful project report

I had a very minor hand in a short JISC-funded project to scope a "vision of formative e-assessment". The project report [50 pages, 2.7 MB PDF] deserves to be widely used.

It contains is a coherent two-page synopsis, a clear summary of nine key points from a review of the literature, and there are constructive discussions of the term "formative" (how assessment can be used formatively rather than formative assessment per se) and of what "e" can add to formative assessment.

Alongside these there are extensve links to the various outputs of the project, for example the project Wiki, which is a repository of material associated with the activities and events of the project, and the output section of the project blog which provides an overview of the key presentations made by a range of speakers throughout the project.

A very welcome aspect of the report (and the whole project) is its focus on learning rather than on tools, and nearly half the report is given over to a sample of "design patterns" in the domain of formative e-assessment produced - think of these as a "theory informed" recipes, in various stages of development - which the project developed over a series of one-day workshops.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Here is a current article by Google's Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira [376 kB PDF], from the IEEE's March/April issue of Intelligent Systems. It is intelligible to a lay person, and it contrasts lucidly two broad approaches to extracting meaning from information. Though the article does not use the terms, you might describe these two approaches as taxonomic and statistical. These excerpts - the second is the concluding paragraph - give you a flavour:

"The biggest successes in natural-language-related machine learning have been statistical speech recognition and statistical machine translation. The reason for these successes is not that these tasks are easier than other tasks; they are in fact much harder than tasks such as document classification that extract just a few bits of information from each document. The reason is that translation is a natural task routinely done every day for a real human need (think of the operations of the European Union or of news agencies). The same is true of speech transcription (think of closed-caption broadcasts). In other words, a large training set of the input-output behavior that we seek to automate is available to us in the wild. In contrast, traditional natural language processing problems such as document classification, part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition, or parsing are not routine tasks, so they have no large corpus available in the wild. Instead, a corpus for these tasks requires skilled human annotation. Such annotation is not only slow and expensive to acquire but also diffi cult for experts to agree on, being bedeviled by many of the diffi culties we discuss later in relation to the Semantic Web. The first lesson of Web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn’t available. For instance, we find that useful semantic relationships can be automatically learned from the statistics of search queries and the corresponding results  or from the accumulated evidence of Web-based text patterns and formatted tables, in both cases without needing any manually annotated data."

"So, follow the data. Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data. Represent all the data with a nonparametric model rather than trying to summarize it with a parametric model, because with very large data sources, the data holds a lot of detail. For natural language applications, trust that human language has already evolved words for the important concepts. See how far you can go by tying together the words that are already there, rather than by inventing new concepts with clusters of words. Now go out and gather some data, and see what it can do."

Brewster Kahle - the man behind the Wayback Machine

Last week's Economist Technology Quarterly carried a two page spread about Brewster Kahle, the Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist behind the Internet Archive / Wayback  Machine. Below is  a 20 minute December 2007  TED talk by Kahle. Slick it ain't (Kahle looks to be the kind of person who simply does not do slick), but the overview provided into the scale of, and processes behind, Kahle's endeavor to create a free, online collection of human knowledge makes it worth watching in full. Fittingly, one of the three copies of the Internet Archive, is in Alexandria.

Integrating technologies into educational ecosystems, by Pierre Dillenbourg

elearning-reviews continues to provide a first-rate service with this review of Pierre Dillenbourg's Integrating technologies into educational ecosystems. Here is an excerpt from the Chrysi Rapanta's review:

"The article is divided in four basic sections called respectively: ‘Faded Myths’, ‘Convergences’, ‘Examples of Integrated Learning Environments’ and ‘Orchestration’. Starting from the first one, Dillenbourg addresses four basic myths, referring to overstatements about learning technologies that are currently losing their previously high status.

The first myth is about the overestimated effect of the use of media in education, stressing the fact that media itself do not bring pedagogical innovation, in the same way that teachers do not necessarily provoke good learning outcomes.

The second myth is about the futuristic approach regarding the upcoming ‘success’ of e-learning applications. According to Dillenbourg, teachers’ current technological skills are fairly well developed so that lacking skills do no longer count as an excuse for the poor development of TEL practices.

The third myth consists of the assumption that a technological application yields the best results when it is as similar to traditional practices as possible. Recent research in the educational field has shown that this is not the case. In addition, the author suggests that designing TEL environments in a way that imitates traditional campuses or institutions does not help teachers exploit the whole range of possibilities that new technologies offer.

Dillenbourg finishes with the fourth myth considering the teachers’ role. The teacher today is neither a ‘sage on the stage’ nor a ‘guide on the side’. To provide all the meta-knowledge ‘hidden’ in the learning contents he has to be in the middle of the scene, whatever the means of teaching are."

Note to self. Find out if Pierre Dillenbourg wants to speak in the UK.

WikiMatrix - a tool to compare wikis

From Fred Riley at the University of Nottingham, via the ALT Members' email list, here is a tool for comparing wikis, which Fred speaks highly of.

Carly Shuler's "Pockets of Potential - Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning"

Carly Shuler's 2009 Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning [600 kB PDF] for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (from which the diagram above is taken) provides a  cool-headed overview of the potential of mobile technologies for children's learning, and ends with some US-oriented "a multi-sector action plan to transform
mobile learning from a state of uneven and scattered innovation into a force for dynamic educational impact".

New Becta "Emerging Technologies for Learning" service

Becta's new Emerging Technologies for Learning web site describes itself as follows:

"Bringing together news, articles, research, views and opinions on emerging technologies for learning The Emerging Technologies for learning area draws together news, research, analysis and views around technology developments and trends relevant to education. It aims to provide an environment for debate on technology futures within the education community and those serving it, encouraging dialogue and building shared understandings about the future."

The site badly needs its RSS feeds to be available on every page (they can be found here, and this is the overal feed); and its editorial policy needs making clear. Specifically:

• who is writing it?
• what are its editorial policies?
• what if any process exists for drawing its editors' attention to "stuff" that needs covering?

By way of a relatively minor design quibble, users need to drill into the site too much for comfort. For example, to escape from the site's events listing to the web site of a listed event requires rather too many clicks. But overall, a definite improvement on what went before.