OpenLearn2007 Getting it together - techno style

The OpenLearn2007 conference is almost upon us. At the moment I am just getting to grips with all the recording technology. This blog, as far as I can tell, if I have tagged it correctly should appear in some blog aggregator on somewhere on the Knowledge Network...not quite sure where yet.

This facility should allow many people to blog and these blogs appear automatically in a shared space. Alse we have the OHRE blog set up by Patrick. I can blog directly into this if I wish since he has given team members access. This probably would also appear in the aggregator.

Besides this as theme chair I will be making sure that the sessions in my theme (Users) are blogged and photos are taken here and there. For this I will use Flickr. Photos taken on the digital camera can quicly be uploaded from the SD-card of my camera to my laptop and thence to flickr. I think that it is then easier to transfer the pictures to the relevant blog (perhaps becausee it nicely resizes the photos - must set slightly smaller size on upload program).

I will also be taking a video camera in tomorrow - just in case.

This is very much working it out as I go along....the digital camera is relatively new to me and the aggregation a new experience. So all of this by tomorrow morning...now I hope I've used the right tag!

Trip to Poland

to be completed

The Night Before

Here I am in Copenhagen - such great public transport! I am still putting together my slide show and have just been collecting any emails from work and tyring to get hold of some up-to-date bog standard statistics (need to check how many courses we now have - think it is over three hundred). Here is a key element list that I need to follow in order to polish up things...a to do list if you like:

1. Re-read paper for examples of contradictions - make notes and create 1 or maybe two slides on this.

2. Need to introduce basic elements of activity theory properly

3. Put website address on slide show - prominence

4. Include some bog standard stats

5. Look through slide show to identify new areas to tackle

6. Do a talk through - probably best to have two of these...must watch time

then take it from there....How much of this I will do tonight I don't know...will probably work for about an hour before relaxing with a drink...and then maybe some on the morrow.

Andreia is also presenting in UTAH so I hope here session goes well - perhaps she can blog me....that's a good idea perhaps I can get her to guest.

Spoke to two interesting people from the Copenhagen Business School who are hosting the event...try to find out a little more about them tomorrow.

Busy Time

This is only a ten minute post so shall write as much as I can within the time.

Will soon be going to the ECEL 07 conference in Copenhagen to give a presentation. I will see if I can blog this experience.

We had a good reading group last week and were looking at the interpersonal communication sides of online learning. There was debate about how these experiences can become effective in terms of learning. Gill illustrated from the Second Life research work at the Open University.

I, like Wallace in her article, recognise the importance of a teacher or 'more knowledgeable other' although I perceive a continuum or dimensional aspect where we are all more knowledgeable in some respect.

At the moment I am trying to get my slide show together for the ECEL conference, write up some older research work, conduct an ethnographic study about using OpenLearn where I am a learner (monitoring my own experience), preparing for my trip to Warsaw in a couple of weeks time (which requires gemming up on all things open in terms of International awareness), getting up-to-date with my neglected blogs, and adminstering our new questionnaire. Another thing I must do is push for the in depth interviews with OpenLearn users. Perhaps I should identify and email some tomorrow - before I go to Copenhagen.

I hope there is good wireless connectivity at the conference so I can continue to have web access. Of course I have once again left my adaptors in Bristol.

Perhaps I should experiment with this blog over the next few days or so.

Virtual Ethnography, the Reading Group and our research

I thought last weeks reading group on Virtual Ethnography was particularly good and interesting. The passages were taken from Christine Hine's Virtual Ethnography and it was a fairly substantial read. Since I am not too hot in terms of my knowledge of Ethnography it was a good introduction to the underlying principles of the method. Virtual Ethnography necessarily differs in terms of its method in that the principles of 'being there' within the community of study in terms of geography and time are very different. There was also some discussion on virtual reality and actual reality and the cross over between the two worlds.

As a result of this reading group the OpenLearn researchers (me, Andreia and Patrick) have decided to conduct an ethnographic research study ourselves where we will become users of OpenLearn, picking a number of units to study and recording, perhaps by blogging our experiences.

During my work on the Mellon supported project I acted as a participant observer by taking the Open University Astronomy course S282 - a 30 point unit. This was a great course and I was looking at its interactive elements. I was hesistant to call it ethnography however because I was not fully aware of the principles of ethnography in doing the research. Rather I considered it participant observation and S282 was a case study within our overall research on the Mellon project. We used Yin's Case Study text as a guide to structuring the research. Being a participant myself however gave me a very different understanding of the course and I could see how people responded the way they did to some of the technological evidence. The research however also involved other sources of data such as interviews with other students, staff members involved in setting up the course, and statistical data from our own research and the University archives.

Reading Group - Virtual Ethnography

Today our reading group is centred around Virtual Ethnography by Christine Hine. I have decided to blog this weeks in terms of my experience. I have started and read pages 14 to 34 but still have about 30 pages to go, and 40 if I do the extra bit.

I think I will try to get the reading group forum on OpenLearn going before the meeting.

Here is the link to it



So...I am off to the library for the next two hours or so to finish off the reading.

Forum Discussion

We are currently having a discussion on forums and learning journals...present are Jenny, Alex, Juliette, Patrick, myself and Simon.

We are having a problem in that the number of people who are using the OpenLearn forums and making postings is rather limited. It is felt that the reasons for this may be:

• there are too many forums


• the forums are often too deeply embedded


• people may not be encouraged to enter the forum

Ideas discussed include making it look like there is just one forum, but with many threads, reducing the total number of forums so that there are a few key ones, centred around discipline areas for example.

Maybe forums are not the answer....learning journals can represent thought collection. What can we use the learning journals to do...encourage the idea of thought collections...personal learning journals.

They are personal, but you can get your journals so that they are viewable to everyone. It would be interesting to find out how many people are using the journal.

Discussed the need to make it easy to find the forums.

Jenny suggested there needed to be a generic invitation paragraph to each of the forums (rather than 700 or so different invites). The problems of getting and trying out good ideas and experimenting with them e.g. putting the tools next to the content.

Patrick said we were in an experimental mode and that there might be ways of doing things more quickly.

Jenny then added a new bit of information on the page following the discuss your ideas link. [TERM: Sticky block - part of the Moodel site that is stuck on every single page - usually located on the left and right hand sides]. This gave instructions of where to find the forums and a link to the forums.

Writing Week 1 - 57 papers?

Last week we as the openlearn research team decided to have a writing week. To start this process off we had a brain storming session to get ideas for writing. This could take the form of papers, reports, technical descriptions or whatever form we wished to employ. The point was to get ideas, and to get some writing done.

After the brain storming session we identified a number of areas to write about. Each of us had particular priority areas, and the rest of the areas were distributed randomly between us. There was then a little shuffling around of some subjects to those who wished to write about particualr areas. However, not too much of this was done so that it gave an opportunity to explore areas that did not necessarily fit with one's current expertise.

The topic areas are diverse and interesting and a full list for myself, Andreia and Patrick can be found at

http://iet-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OpenLearn_papers

As Patrick later jockingly suggested - 57 papers!

So if we get this lot done we woul never have to write another paper...at least for a number of years.

Anyhow, wishful thinking but a helpful start. I have included my list of topics below and will talk more about this in subsequent blogs. The aim was to prioritise one or two topics and then to write 5 or more shorter paragraphs on some of the other topics (all though to tell the truth I would like to do this on all of my topics). These topical paragraphs, or abstracts could then be shared with the others in the team. I will probably publish some of mine within my blog (if they are not too long).

In the case of the higher priorities each of us would become the lead author for our priotised paper but with the other two acting as second authors. That's the general jist of things but there is a lot of flexibility in all of this.

So, here is a list of my topics and priorities:

• Learning taxonomies
• Reflections on research using Activity Theory and Action Research (Denmark) (priority)
• Feedback from pilot studies (tech report?)
• Open research methods – remote research etc.
• Ways of looking at the process of making open content and size of initiative.Story of the initiative.
• Impacts on the host organisation: marketing, benefit, changes,
• Learner experience: stories and patterns of use and wider contexts for learning
• What XML does for us
• Literature review of field of Open Education
• Action Research in practice
• Just in time learning through open content
• Subject matter in open content: folksonomies and new subjects
• Constructing short term communities for learning
• Learning theories and their roles in open content.
• Detecting paths of learning from user behaviour
• Learning designAffordances – do people do what they can do with tools.

I

At the OCW conference

16:30 At the Open Courseware Consortium conference in Santander getting near to the end of the second day of the course and some delegates are getting up to give good ideas. Battery is running low so may not have long to write.

Recommendation for new starters - visit someone else that already has one going such as MIT and TUFTS (and us of course at openlearn).

CORUS - group of students in Asia, Africa, USA. How to present open course to difficult and resistant institutes or countries. Course for 'mankind'. More discussion on usage.

Number of courses being studies - not just potential students - pick and combine materials as their own courses...this is what people often do with text based systems. Annotating and adding metadata a tags to data.

Aggregate, collate, all resources that exist.

Quoting former tutor form MIT 'Why are we here...two reasons - one it to have interesting ideas...the other is to make music'. Education allows us have to good ideas. Next year the group will have to fit into the stadium and Pedro will have to make music for us.

Talk about languages...start learning Spanish...see brochure on the table. Everyone in the world to be comfortably fluent in two languages.

Closing Remarks

Shortly we will be having a session where people will be able to present their projects. I shall be going along to this with Laura and others from the team.

users and openlearn - an analogy

I think of openlearn as a bit like a shop on the High Street...as people may pass by they may look in the window. The window in this sense is the Home Page, or one of the content pages. The window should suggest what a shop sells and should entice people into the shop. Many look but not so many enter. Once inside a shop some customers will buy things, others will not. High selling popular items are often close to the entrance, the more obscure less popular items are often located more deeply within.

If you think of this as analogous to openlearn it will give some idea of the pyrimidal nature of openlearn usage. Many will pass on by, fleeting visitors. Others will enter and have a little look at some of the courses and/or tools in the site. Some will study, or interact...these, at the end of the day, are the ones that tell us if the site is successful.

So besides asking ourselves the question of the proportion of passers by, fleeting visitors and engagers we need to ressearch each of these three groups and what factors in terms of content, site design, and the nature of the learning materials or, more appropriately, learning processes will lead to a successful site.

A marketing question:

Do you make the customer want the product or do you design the product to fit the customer?

Pre-launch - Lunchtime

Just to say firstly...the Research presentations yesterday went fine. A couple of interesting points that were raised - I''ll just jot down:

- how do you research those that do not normally respond to research?

- importance of fast feedback and bite-size research

The Qualitative vs Quantitative thing came up a little and there was a bit of debate on this.

Two representatives from Hewlett were there and seemed friendly and constructive. Talked to Sarah who is the liaison person with Hewlett and was pivotal in building the relationship and helping to get us the project. She was quite excited about the launch and I felt the buzz myself despite that kind of restrained English thing.

This morning we had a briefing about the event tonight. K gave a briefing to the team about how to be good hosts/ambassadors etc. It felt a bit like the type of staff briefing you would find in an episode of West Wing. Much of it was straight out of Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People". There were some bits that made me feel slightly embarrassed or that I don't quite agree with but I will certainly go along with the spirit of the thing.

In terms of being aware of all the things to do with the project the area of weakness for me is probably the Creative Commons license...I shall try to get to understand this better. I think I can pretty well remember the funny numbers/targets

-900 by launch date - looks like we've made this
- 5400 in two years
$4.45m with $4.45 pending
$1m from OU

9s seem to dominate these numbers

Labspace - got a feeling this is 5100 but cannot remember

OpenLearn Launch - Penultimate Day Part 1

Tomorrow it is time for the launch - with the big event in London - although the site is already up. This afternoon we are presenting as a Research unit to the representatives from Hewlett...the funders for the project.

I only have to do a ten minute talk and have prepared a power point presentation. I am reviewing the results from the initial trials. Likewise my co-researcher Andreias is also presenting. Don't feel too nervous but a little coldy. It might be just a slight sinus thing.

One of my concerns for the launch proper is monitoring the statistics. It looks like we shall have to use Moodle itself to do this. Patrick today has emailed me a load of info on this but I shall have to wade through it after this afternoon's presentations. If I can get it to work fine....I feel it is important, no vital, to monitor the first few days, weeks whatever. This is an area that has concerned me all along but has not been my responsibility. There seem to have been some problems relating to stats and the site particularly with regard to getting VBIS going. ...this however does not monitor internal traffic within the OpenLearn site, but rather where people go to from the site.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get something off the ground later

First tool trials and just in time

Yesterday we completed our first set of trials on the tools. This was not particularly easy to set up since:

i) there was only a short amount of time to set it up

ii) the site was not initially ready or in a 'just in time' state

iii) there were a lot more complex preparatory issues especially relating to equipment

iv) we have had about a day to feedback information from the trials to the team

v) I had underestimated the preparation involved.

These trials were more difficult to organise and complex than the first set by an order of magnitude. One of the problems related to getting hold of equipment. Some of the equipment is not necessarily readily available e.g. one cannot guarantee a digital video camera, there were not enough head sets in the IT resources department. It is my view that researchers should where possible be fully equipped with their own personal set of equipment including:

audio recorder
digital camera
digital video camera
microphones necessary for job
tripod
headsets
laptop computer
data collection and analysis software

Much equipment tends to be located in an IT central area....this is OK for general use but researchers need to have equipment readily available, when they want, and at short notice...therefore it is best to equip them individually. I am not complaining about our own IT section here but simply talking about the need for big projects to self-equip their researchers. I will bring this issue up in our section and am sure it will be sorted. I was asked before the project what equipment would be required but decided to wait and see.

In the end, despite the difficulties I felt the trials went really well and that we gained some good data. Our set of participants have really given us some good data.

By the way the tools we test were FlashMeeting and Compendium

First Trials

Well, the first trials of the OpenLearn site have been completed and I am pleased to say I think they went well. My special thanks to those who volunteered, Anesa, Rebecca, Cling and Rob and also to Phil the IT support person who is from our department. I cannot sing his praises highly enough.

The OpenLearning part of the site is at this stage is very green and full of absent bits and bugs etc. Of course it would be at this stage but it is still possible to see what potential it might have. So what are the outcomes of the trials? Well I have not fully analysed all the detail yet and not even decided on the best form of analysis. It is certainly easy enough though to bring out important points. Many of the technical details would undoubtedly be corrected in due form but I have tried to summarise five positives and five negatives below to give a flavour of the feedback from the trials:

Five positives

All candidates were interested in the site and said they were very likely to return.

The discussion tool allowed interesting discussion and gave potential for learning. The journals were also appreciated.

The site seemed clear to the students and they found it fairly easy to use.

Two of the users found the subject content (B700) interesting.

All the participants enjoyed the French quiz despite the lack of video to which it referred.

Five negatives

Lack of interactive activities

Divorcing of tools from content.

Security and privacy concerns

Some navigation issues (sense of where you are).

A sense of being welcomed as an individual (personalisation).

Let's pick up on one of these areas - divorcing tools from content. In this trial the participants worked with a Business unit (there was not really any other unit for them to work with at this stage). Embedded within the unit were a number of activities for the participants to reflect on including tables which they have to imagine filling in (they are not able to physically fill these in and this was raised in the feedback). Consequently the participants made notes on paper. The journal tool which could potentially be used for note taking was divorced from the content and there was no quick way to navigate from one to the other. There needed to be some way of linking from the content to the tools...at this stage of the process this facility does not exist. Ideally, with tables, it would be best perhaps to fill in the tables directly.

I like the idea of interactive text...text that you can leave your marks on whether this is by highlighting, scribbling, marking or annotating. Interaction and feedback means being able to affect change in the objects in the interactive process.

Dealing with uncertainty

In the meeting this morning the issue of whether we would have the 900 hours of course resources available by the deadline date featured predominantly. It appears that we were likely to have 500 hours definitely in the bag and that there were an additional large number of hours. This would take us way in excess of the 900 hours. These however are at some stage along the process, or possibly simply identified and cleared but it was more tricky to give a clear indication of the actual number of these hours that would be available by the launch date. Somewhere along that line seemed to be the best situation available. Of course one hopes that ‘somewhere along the line’ just happens to be at about 900 hours by 25th October.

Other issues raised included the nature of the interactivity that these units would present. It seemed that this would be relatively low at this stage. My own thoughts on this are:

1. interactivity is an important issue although student action in terms of 'doing' is more important
2. interactive tools would eventually be available in MOODLE for students to use e.g. blogs, discussion groups etc
3. greater interactivity would be added to the site at a later date

My thoughts are that there should be something to do other than read content. It is important to also allow the possibility of interpersonal interaction, content interaction, and tool interaction.

The integrity model of transformation does however provide a pragmatic approach in order to aim for the targets.

Will we hit the 900 hour target…I suspect not but there will be a conveyor belt of content coming through…almost as a continuous process rather than a batch wise approach…I estimate 750 hours…let’s see how things transpire.

Open Research within the LapSpace - Moodle and Tool functionality

Today I had a meeting with Alex Little who is helping to integrate MSG (a standin name) with Moodle. Essentially MSG is a chat tool that allows one to one simultaneous chat. I think it was developed by Chris Denham. The chat is also temporal in nature in that it is no longer visible after the participants have logged off.

How might it work?

A registered user of a course will have access to a list of other participants on that course. When the user is online and in the LabSpace they will be able to see if there are any other course participants on line at that particular time. They can then chat with one other participant using MSG if they so wish. Group chats might be possible at a later date but in the short term it will just be one to one.

This tool will be embedded into the Moodle structure and only be available in the LabSpace (in the short term at least). Other tools that will also be embedded include Compendium and Flash Meeting. Alex said that it was very unlikely that other tools would be included at this stage.

I am just thinking about what Patrick has said about Wikis and blogs, although there seems to be some blog capability in Moodle - this appears to be limited to journal like recording. Blogs potentially have the ability to provide a record of student or contributor experience. I think that whilst I am playing around with Moodle on my laptop I will try and copy/dublicate this work within the Moodle Blog environment

Getting Moodle to work on my laptop

Moodle is to be used as the platform for the Open Content initiative. The LabSpace part of the OCI will have as part of it a special space dedicated to researching Open Content. As far as it is currently envisioned this will be an Open Space where other Open Content researchers and Open content users can contribute, keeping within the Open Content philosophy. As part of this one of my tasks is to experiment with Moodle in terms of its functionality and consider good ways that it can be used in terms of our research and research in Open Content generally.

The first thing however....getting Moodle onto my laptop so that I could use it. V-.

The difficulty I had was I believe due to the fact that it was not easy to find clear instructions admist the vast amount of information on the Moodle site....the Moodle site also has a lot of technological jargon-like overheads for a new user. I guess this is because many of the first wave of users are also developers and programmers etc., but also in the way that it is assembled. So what would I advise if you wanted to get it onto your laptop to play around with? (Note: the version that you can play around with is not open to the world at large).

1. Know the version you should be downloading - this is likely to be the Window's version

http://download.moodle.org/

You will need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and choose the current windows package

2. In the end the clearest guide I found to installing it on my laptop was at

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Apache,_MySQL_and_PHP

You will need to scroll down the page to the heading Windows and follow on from there.

Make sure you unpack the contents into a folder in the root directory. Make a note of your password if you enter one.

3. When you have set up Moodle and you need to log in type admin in the User box and then the password that you may have assigned.

4. Ask for help if you get stuck - you can do this on the Moodle forums or ask a friend.

I would like to thank Juliette White, Alex Little and Karl Rajangam who helped me finally get it running on my laptop.

Note: You may have to set up a login account to access the above links...I'm not sure on this

Introduction

This blog represents my reflections as a researcher who is involved researching the development and use of the OpenLearn inititative sponsored by the Hewlitt foundation. It should not be viewed as an official by-product of this project but rather as my personal thoughts and reflections in relation to this project and my own work within it. Even though care will be taken in terms of the accuracy of content this is not guaranteed. Also some of the reflections are person specific, i.e. me and represent my subjective interpretations. The blog is a kind of diary of my involvement and research based reflections. In this sense it also represents a kind of ethnographic take on events that unfold

Hopefully I will get people either from within and outside the project to guest on this site or invite them to make comments.

My principle focus within the project is really to look at teaching and learning aspects of the activities and how they are produced? What are the learners experiences? Are we achieving the aims of the project?

The project as a whole is also viewed as an example of Action Research, where we ourselves are all researchers reflecting on the process.