October 2006 - Posts
Last week I attended the inaugural ICT in Higher Education Conference, organised by Neil Stewart Associates at the Barbiacan in London. The event was aimed at people responsible for IT strategy in their organisations, and was focussed on eLearning. Here's a quick summary of some of the key points I picked up from the speakers.
David Lefevre from Imperial College outlined the approach they were taking to encourage the use of ICT. Probably the most controversal statement was the fact that Imperial were offering additional money to staff to make material available online.
Professor David Vincent from the Open University gave a talk entitled 'The Open Content Initiative: Revolution Learning', and there may well be truth in the hype in the title! Essentially the OU have made content from a large number of their courses available at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ . The content is parts of modules rather than whole modules, but each element should be a useful 'chunk' (my word!) of learning. Professor Vincent explained that this was in the spirit of the original television OU television broadcasts, and could be used by individual learners or other Universities. They have also launched a second site - http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ where people can both download and then improve and deposit updated versions of courses. Both of these are fascinating developments, and raise loads of questions (eg what is the role of a University if it gives its 'content' away, will the 'improve and redeposit' model work ...) and I'll come back to them in a seperate posting.
Professor Gill Salmon from Leicester outlined their strategic 'Surf and Turf' approach to elearning. Professor Salmon presented a useful quadrant diagram plotting market/mission against pedagogy/technology. I'll attempt to paraphrase it for our insitution
1. Exisiting Students/Existing Techology: eg getting greater takeup of our mLE
2. Existing Students/New Technology: Engage innovators - need process to move success to quadrant 1.
3. New students/Existing Technology: eg franchise use of mLE, new markets etc
4. New students/New technology: eg can we use technology to reach additional students?
Leicester have a nice site using the ananlog of a zoo here: http://www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/mediazoo/
Professor Diania Laurillard, Chair of Digitial Technologies, Institute of Education asked why technology hadn't transformed education, given the expenditure on it. She looked at the barriers, seen in 2004 as low skills, weak content and lack of infrastructure. The way forward: strategic priorities at a national level, and supporting lecturers in the process of change and innovation. One idea was the concept of generic designs. Eg we have textbooks (text on paper, chapters etc), lecturers (one room, one to many etc), essays (text on paper, defined topic), but have no equivalent for elearning - would this be possible?
Dr David Nicol from University of Strathcyde took up a similar theme, looking a 'Prospects for Transformation Change'. Transformation change = either improving learning or reducing costs. An interesting example of the former was as follows. Students are given access to a voting system, and are asked a multiple choice question to check their understanding of a topic. They are then asked to discuss their answer with a peer - if they gave a different answer to try to pursuade them they they are correct. The students are then re-polled, which usually shows a greater understanding of the topic. Probably haven't explained that very well - I'll try and find the reference to the original research paper on this.
Other sessions included Professor Tricia Greenhalgh explaining how she won e-Tutor of the Year (by investing in her staff) and Richard Millwood from Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin explaining how their wholly online degree programme worked (this one seem to fit closely with our mission by attracting wide participation, so I may come back to it).
Was the conference useful? There was nothing groundbreaking, I came away with the feeling that most other people are in similar position to us, but there were some useful ideas, particular on the strategic side, in the phrases and metaphors that people used to express their ideas, so it was worth attending.
A techie posting this time, but I won't apologise, as there's been a lot of debate about this one in the development community.
When redeveloping our myLearning Essentials site our development team decided to use
Ajax a relatively new development technique (the term was only coined in 2005, although its roots go back further).
Essentially the aim of Ajax is to make web applications more interactive and desktop like. Layout is completely controlled through style sheets, and content is pulled into the page asynchronously as the user interacts with the page via
XMLHttpRequest, rather than reloading the entire page each time content changes.
Unfortunately myLearning Essentials is only accessible to university members, so unless you are member you won't be able to see the results. MyCommunity, the public part, doesn't use Ajax. The best example is in the 'MyDocs' section, where users can browse through directly listings - only the directory listings change, not the menus etc, making the whole thing a lot smoother to use.
There has been a lot of debate in the develoment community about the pros and cons of Ajax so I thought I'd summarise our experise.
On the pros side, it defintely makes the whole thing a lot smoother to use, and does eliminate the whole page 'flicker' that you see in non-Ajax sites . I guess this is something that users take for granted, although if we re-immented without Ajax is would definitely feel like a real step back.
It also makes it much easier to develop the site futher - just a case of 'Ajaxing in' the new content, not developing whole new pages.
The jury is still out on the change in the way back button works. Basically with Ajax the back button doesn't take you back one step - it takes you to the previous page. Obvious really, but users are used to using Back as a sort of undone. This one does catch me out occasionally as a user, but not a major problem.
The other slight issue is the change in bookmarking - bookmarks just go to the main start page. We've had implement a workaround in one section where users need to bookmark a certain point (bookmarking directories in myDocs).
The most serious problem we've had is with older browsers, specifically Mac IE and Safari 1.0. There were still people using these on a daily basis, and Ajax sites just don't work with them. We've redirected to a non-Ajax version, recommending upgrading to Firefox etc.
So was it worth it? Without a doubt. I firmly believe that future of the web is in providing (and surpasing) a desktop application experience, and without engaging techniques like Ajax that isn't going to happen. Yes, there might be a few issue to solve on the way, but it's the only way are going to move forward, and ultimately this sort of technique will provide a much better user experience than standard HTML sites.
MySpace and Facebook tend to grab the headlines when it comes to web based social networking, but plenty of others are well worth investigating.
LibraryThing.com is a networking site for book readers - you add details of books that you've read and it then lets you browse collections of people with similar tastes, and recommends books based on what other people have enjoyed.
It's a breeze to add books as it it can use any public catalog - I pointed it at Amazon.co.uk, and quickly added around 100 books that I've read fairly recently. My catalog is here:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/michaeldwebb .
Don't laugh! I guess is shows I'm a Murakami/Coupland fanboy and can't resist '3 for 2' deals!
Once you've joined you can use the 'Pssst!' button get additional recommendations.
I looked at LibraryThing a while ago, and was put off by the fact you have to pay, but you get to add 200 books for free, and it's only $10 a year to upgrade - having used it I think it is well worth the money.
Incidentally last.fm is a similar thing for music - it interfaces with with iPod/iTunes or most other PC MP3 players, and shares what you've been listening to. My Last.fm page is here:
http://www.last.fm/user/michaeldwebb/