Michael Webb's Blog

SCoHMs Learning Environment Space Design Workshop Report

I spent yesterday in Birmingham at a workshop on Learning Space Design, lead by Associate Professor Peter Jamieson from the University of Melbourne. Peter's role in Melbourne is to lead the design of learning spaces from an academic perspective. He was a great speaker, and used the session to illustrate lots of his points through the way he managed the session. I won't attempt to summarise in a short space, as we covered loads, but here are a few key things I came away with.

• Student attendance is decreasing across the sector, so we need to create great spaces that students actual want be in.
• If we want to move away from didactic 'teaching' then we need the right sort of teaching space.
• Groups of 6 work best, but the groups need to be able to interact with one another as well.
• Providing a shared space (eg LCD screen) for each group of 6 works well, but they need to be able to share with the whole group as well.
• Research shows that students don't actually need to be able to see the lecturer all the time (ie that the concept of being able to gauge understand by eye contract is a myth). So, for example, teaching 'in the round' as a viable option.
• Give students somewhere to store their things in the room, so people can then move around freely.
• Make a space too flexible isn't necessary good - it means it may not be able to do anything well.
• Use metaphors for teaching space to facilitate more imaginative thinking. We used a 'rugby club' metaphor which led is to realise that we don't give nearly enough thought the student's needs before or after the 'game' (or lecture).
• Get the starting formation of the room right from the start - you don't want to spend ages rearranging it mid session.

A lot of these are the sort of things we debated when designing A40: http://mycommunity.newport.ac.uk/forums/thread/3625.aspx

I think we got some thing right (like sacrificing flexibility), but I learnt a lot that could be applied to improve things as well!

On thing was that immediately apparent is that high space utilisation and high quality space don't necessarily go hand in hand. Here's a space that Peter designed in Melbourne:

http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/viewimage.php?id=3127

Great space - only problem I can see is that is was a hundred person lecture theatre, and now hold 40. It wasn't an issue in this case as the theatre was rarely very full anyway.

Here's an example of some work areas in Edinburgh the follows similar principles:

Note the way the students are working in groups, and have a shared display screen so they can work together.

We had quite a debate about how the experience in large lecture theatres could be improved. Ideas include increasing the height of the tiers every other row rather than every row to facilitate group working, or have banana shaped arrangements to sit students in groups were discussed. Personally, I think creating a parallel virtual space where students are free to interact during the session may be a better way forward, especially as people are getting better at multitasking (we are getting so used to it that not multitasking can feel pretty tedious...).

So... great day, thanks Peter and SCHoMS for organising it.

PDPs, Elgg and Mahara

A quick update on PDPs following on from my previous posting.

Firstly, we got some pricing for PebblePad.  Wouldn't be appropriate to say any more on this here, but I'll share the prices internally.

Secondly, we've installed Mahara and Elgg. I'm pretty impressed by both of them.

I've not spent that much time with Mahara, but I like what I've seen. The user interface is exceptional in places, with a great drag and drop interface to create portfolios. It's got some social networking functionality, but this feels a little tacked on at the moment, although it may make more sense in the newly released beta, where communities can have forums.

Internal university users can have a look at our Mahara test install here.

Elgg will be more familiar to a lot of people - its a more general social networking application aimed at education. Interesting things are happing in the Elgg world, as it's being re-engineered as a general social networking platform - more about the here - http://elgg.org/news/weblog/1764.html

Elgg has a range of features that could be used for PDPs and ePortfolios. The portfolio side isn't as advanced as Mahara's, but the social networking side is a lot more developed. In addition, fields are available for recording education, goals, achievements etc, as well as blogs for reflection - ie most of the things we'll need for PDPs.

Nothing to do with PDPs, but the community side is great - users can create there own communities in a similar way to Facebook, but unlike Facebook, they have really fine grain control over access to the various elements of their community, and have a great shared file storage area.

We were so impressed with Elgg that we decided to make it available straight away, more for group working than PDP at the moment. We already have our first group of students making use of it.

We've dubbed our install ELC - E-Learning Communities (elc is also Welsh for elgg...). Anyone from the University can have a look here (you can login with your normal username/password):

http://elc.newport.ac.uk

We've got a PDP meeting shortly, so we'll share our findings in more detail there.

Asus eee pc

I'm writing this on an Asus eee PC - a £200 mini laptop - about the size of a paper back book

So is it any good? Absolutely!

Lets look at some details. First of all, it runs only Open Source software (one of the reasons it is so cheap). The linux interface is customised, bright and friendly. Open Office is a great alternative to MS Office, and is fully compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2003, but not 2007.

The keyboard is obviously small, but I've no problem touch typing on it. The buttons on the trackpad are a bit stiff though.

Tech specs? Pretty irrelevant really, but its got a 2GB solid state disk (not as daft as it seems, Linux isn't as big as Windows), a 800x600 7 inch screen, a processor around 600Mhz, an SD card slot (but obviously no CD drive). It's got wireless, ethernet and a monitor out - you can drive the external display at 1024x800, so it's fine for presentations. What you really need to know is that it boots quickly,  feels zippy to use, and the screen is easy to read.

As a first generation device its fantastic. It's similar to the Wii/DS, in that it shows the usabilty, fun and good design are for more important that high technical specification.

I would imagine it won't be long before we start seeing lots of these around the University. It does everything that most people need, and unlike most laptop is light enough that you won't actually mind carrying it around. Thorougly recommended!