Fortnightly Mailing

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

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.

Privacy and self-disclosure on-line

This week's Times Higher Educational Supplement had what struck me as a slightly overegged feature by Adam Joinson "Does your VLE virtually undress its users?" with the lead-in:

"Few educators are aware of how online learning tools can betray the privacy of individual users and stifle their learning experience."

Joinson's article [120 kB PDF] made me wonder whether VLE using organisations ever have a policy of explicitly telling users what aspects of their behaviour on line can be and, more importantly, are monitored through the VLE, and what they tell users about how long they retain data of this kind, and what use they put it to.

I wonder if Government has fully considered privacy and data-security issues in its enthusiastic promotion, for education, of personalisation, unique learner numbers, personalised learning spaces, and e-portfolios.

Certainly this kind of issue can sometimes be taken exceptionally seriously by users, with plenty of scope for reputational damage.  For more on this see dana boyd's excellent 8 September 2006 essay Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. (Facebook is a several million member  university-oriented US social networking rather like My Space.)

Joinson's own web site has links to some very interesting material, including a 40-slide powerpoint presentation from 2005 - Who's watching you? Power, personalization and on-line compliance" [1.35 MB PPT] - which reports on fascinating research on what leads people to part with personal information when asked to by management or (in the case of students) by their institution.  Joinson's site led me to the ESRC funded Open University project Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online Project (PRISD) which is summarised thus:

"Disclosure of personal, often sensitive, information is critical to the development of trust and understanding in human relations. Increasingly, we will also need to disclose such information to relative strangers and information systems.

The PRISD project examines the determinants of people’s willingness to disclose personal information to Internet-based systems, the limits of that disclosure, and the consequences for the design of systems.

Uniquely, the focus of the project is on both the technology used to request personal information, and the social context in which the information is sought. The project uses experimental social psychology methodology and psychometrics to investigate people’s willingness to disclose personal information."

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, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

5/10/2006. Added forward link to Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical? 11/10/2006. Added forward link to Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig: the Free Culture movement, and the support it needs from Free Software

Lawrence Lessig, who is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and one of the key people behind the "Creative Commons" license, gave a keynote speech at last August's Linux World conference.

"In this talk, Professor Lessig describes the Free Culture movement, and the support it needs from Free Software. The struggles and the threats are largely parallel. The solutions need to be parallel as well."

Link to page with embedded video of his 15 August talk.

Benchmarking e-learning - Wikipedia

This new page about benchmarking e-learning has plenty of links to different benchmarking frameworks in the English-speaking world.  It is an example of "day-to-day" stuff which might easily be (indeed is already) posted on an agency web site, in this case the Higher Education Academy's, being put into Wikipedia where it might be expected to:

• gain input from the wider community;
• be found by many more people.

See Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? for more on this.

Designing Usable, Self-Paced e-Learning Courses: A Practical Guide

eLearn Magazine has just published this In Depth Tutorial by Michael Feldstein and Lisa Neal.

"This guide was primarily designed to help teams of instructional designers and content experts create effective, self-paced e-learning. It teaches best practices for improving usability that can be applied by any instructional designers or content experts and was created so that no prior knowledge of usability is required to use the techniques."

Some readers will like the article's emphasis on "hueristic usability testing"  (that is when one or more evaluators systematically inspect online materials and judge their compliance with recognized usability principles).

I particularly support Michael and Lisa's reference to the value of choosing some personas of potential learners before you start, with a view to ensuring that the course will make sense to, and be usable by, all of them; and this is something that is written into the publicly available, wiki-based, TUC Online Course Development and Management Manual.

Readers who find this whole area of interest may be able to make use of Supporting eLearners [150 kB PDF]. I wrote this last year with David Jennings to show the practical application of the British Standards Institution's BS 8426 A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems.  The handout, upon which feedback is welcome, contains an overview of the standard, details of how it has been applied to some specific courses, and some discussion questions.

"Come dance with me" whispers the neuroscientist to the teacher

Based on an original idea by Cath Tate Cards

In June 2004 I wrote in Fortnightly Mailing about Frank Coffield's soon-to-be influential demolition job on learning styles inventories and their widespread, baseless use in UK FHE. "Come dance with me" [20 Feb 2011 - link broken - here is a report from the meeting - PDF] is Coffield's slightly inconclusive reflection from a 2005 meeting in Japan on the contribution of neuroscience to our understanding of teaching and learning. Here is an extract from its seductive introduction:

Education is apparently about to be swept off her feet by the omniscient new god of neuroscience, who will answer all her questions and solve all her problems.  When?  How long shall education have to wait?  Five, ten, twenty years? I returned from Japan refreshed and invigorated by the Network meeting, but with a number of growing concerns: for example, if brain science does not learn from the past failures of psychologists, who promised teachers the moon and gave them instead such shoddy goods as intelligence tests, programmed learning and learning styles, then it may suffer the same fate of being ignored.  If teachers are turned off by premature claims that prove to be overblown and inaccurate, brain science is likely from then on to be overlooked, no matter what advances it continues to make. The first pitch, the first chat-up line, the invitation to the dance is all important; finding out what the main stresses are on teachers and how neuroscience can help may be a better starting point.

The piece is organised in five sections:

• findings from brain science;
• gaps in our knowledge base;
• general concerns;
• hopes for the future;
• suggestions for policy.

One point I strongly agree with is Coffield's call for some public statement from brain science

"about what is common ground among neuroscientists, what is currently disputed territory, what are the controversial claims of eccentric individuals or ‘rogue’ teams, and what can be safely dismissed as ‘neuromyths’."

It would be particularly useful for such a statement to deal with neuroplasticity, since reference to this term is now so frequent in discourse about the impact on computer games playing on learners' capabilities and preferences and in the (false, I think) debate about digital natives and digital immigrants.

Learning Spaces - 43 chapter Educause eBook edited by Diana Oblinger

Big and wide-ranging recent e-book from Educause, with 13 chapters on principles and practices, and 30 institutional case-studies.

"Space, whether physical or virtual, can have a significant impact on learning. Learning Spaces focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology from the perspective of those who create learning environments: faculty, learning technologists, librarians, and administrators. Information technology has brought unique capabilities to learning spaces, whether stimulating greater interaction through the use of collaborative tools, videoconferencing with international experts, or opening virtual worlds for exploration. This e-book represents an ongoing exploration as we bring together space, technology, and pedagogy to ensure learner success."

Many chapters have additional resources, for example the video interviews with Carol Burch-Brown [12091KB WMV] and Kerry J. Redican [4657KB WMV] that supplement the chapter about Torgersen Hall, an advanced student-centred communication and information technology centre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Update - 10/9/2006. Andy Black of Becta has included links to a number of other, mainly UK, "learning space design" resources.

The Freedom Toaster. For when people generally cannot get on line to make downloads.

Freedom Toasters are conveniently located, self-contained, computer-based, 'Bring 'n Burn' facilities. Like vending machines, preloaded to dispense confectionery, Freedom Toasters are preloaded to dispense free digital products, including software, photography, music and literature. The Freedom Toaster project began as a means of overcoming the difficulty in obtaining Linux and Open Source software due to the restrictive telecommunications environment in South Africa, where the easy downloading of large pieces of software is just not possible for everyone.