Archive for May, 2007
Last Friday I made a presentation at the IANIS Policy Seminar in Brussels in ‘eLearning for Regional Development’ entitled Lifelong Competnce Development.
As promised here are the slides from the presentation. And below there is the full audio of the talk. There are also two papers and a book which go with this set. Will add these later in the week when I have a little more time.
Lifelong Competence Development [18:38m]:
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May 14th, 2007
We are a bit late with this edition of Sounds of The Bazaar. But to make up for it we have a jam packed bumper edition.
First off I give an update on the development of Open Educational Resources and what I think the major issues are. This follows from discussions at the Hewlett Foundation conference on OERs in Houston, Texas in March.
Web Site of the Month features Cwmglas Primary School in Wales. It is a great site - make sure you check it out. And there is a visitors book to sign to show the students who is visiting their web site.
Continuing the Open Educational Resources theme we feature a short interview with Andrea Mulrenin from Salzburg Research about the OLCOS project on OERs. Salzburg Research has recently published the OLCOS Roadmap 2012 for the further development of Open Educational Practices and Resources. It is a 130KB PDF download and well worth a read.
And then we have an interview with Patrick Mac Andrew form the UK Open University Learning Space project. Learning Space is a fast evolving repository of Open Educational Resources. It also features great tools for free use. Patrick talks about future planned developments with Learning Space.
You can listen to individual items or listen or download the full version. The full version features music by Jampy, an artist from Italy. It contains blues, jazz and also experimental elements. The featured tracks are from Jampy’s album “Nghzk!”.
You find this album and a lot more music published under a Creative Commons licences on the great music site Jamendo.
Many thanks to Dirk Stieglitz who has done the sound engineering on this issue. I think regular listeners will notice the improvement in quality.
Sounds of the Bazaar 11 - Full edition [53:36m]:
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Introduction [1:56m]: |
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Feature - Open Educational Resources [15:22m]: |
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Website of the month [6:28m]: |
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Open e-learning content: Interview with Andrea Mulrenin [3:07m]: |
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Learning Space Project - Interview with Patrick McAndrew [18:11m]: |
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Epilogue [2:24m]: |
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May 12th, 2007
Open Content in education relates to the ability of (re-)using the content produced by somebody else in a different educational context. Although it is very good that one is allowed to use or modify the content according to a legal framework respecting the author’s rights, an important practical question arises: will that be possible when using different systems, or different computers? A positive answer to this question should be provided by interoperability; its goal is to enable that content works across different applications, operating systems, computers, …
The World Wide Web is probably the best example of interoperability achievement: the web documents use html as language and a http protocol, which have been widely adopted. Thus, in general, web documents can be seen with different computers, operating systems, browsers, … In this sense, this is an excellent basis for Open Content.
However, the functions needed in education go beyond “seeing” documents. For instance, most e-learning in practice is based on Learning Management Systems (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, …) which have functions that enable student tracking, content organisation, assessment, administration … These Learning Management Systems are largely not interoperable, since functionalities such as those we have just mentioned do not transfer easily from one system to the other. For the author it means that s/he is locked to one system, and changes of system are expensive in human resources.
How to enable interoperability? Through agreeing interoperability specifications, which all the applications, systems should follow to allow for it. When these specifications have been agreed by certain international bodies, they are called standards. Currently there are several organisations which have proposed specifications in the e-learning area. IMS is the most important and acknowledged among them. The most significant IMS specification from an interoperability perspective is IMS Learning Design (IMS LD, for short). According to this specification, besides the mere content, a learning design has to be provided, a sort of a real lesson plan; the perspective is that people in roles, such as student, teacher, tutor, …, develop activities (with a certain educational flow) within an environment which includes resources, tools, … Using this type of description, the goal is that educational descriptions can be really re-used, they can be moved across different Learning Management Systems – and actual implementation can also be exchanged.
The adoption of a specification depends to a large extent on the availability of good, well-documented, open source implementations. Due to the complexity and recentness of IMS LD, just a few compliant tools have been implemented. The most significant are the Reload editor, the CopperCore engine, and the Sled player. Several European R+D projects focus on different aspects of the standard and are also producing new tools. However, the limited set of available tools is making authors to use other open source tools, being Moodle the main option. Moodle provides an easy-to-understand interface, as well as an easy and well-documented API that enables developers to adapt the tool. A huge community of Moodle authors, users and developers already exists, where a big number of learning resources is accessible. In fact many universities are moving its learning management systems from commercial solutions to Moodle.
Whether Moodle will become a sort of standard de facto is not clear, although not unlikely. Nevertheless, there are efforts in the Moodle community to support IMS LD units of learning, which would be an important achievement from an interoperability point of view. Meanwhile, new tools have to be developed for IMS LD, where a key factor that has to be considered is the new social approach of using the web (Web 2.0), and its implications in the learning process.
Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
May 9th, 2007
I am in Odense, Denmark at a conference organised by the University of South Denmark on Scaffolding learning - web 2.0 and e-portfolios. I gave a presentation on Personal Learning Environments. The presentation focuses on the different ways in which people are using Web 2.0 technologies for social networking and creating and sharing. It goes on to assert that this is a major challenge to the future of education systems and institutions which are in danger of becoming irrelevant to the ways in which young people live and create and share ideas and knowledge. The final section of the presentation outlines the ideas behind the PLE- with the PLE being seen as a concept rather than a particular substantiation of technology.
You can see the slides here and you can listen to the whole presentation by clicking on the MP3 file below.
Personal Learning Environments:
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May 7th, 2007
Sounds of the Bazaar host, Graham Attwell, is producing a new series of short podcasts for the UK JISC Emerge project. We think these may be of interest to Bazaar readers and are syndicating the broadcasts through this site.
Emerging Sounds:
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May 5th, 2007
A Show-me-day « Creation of Multimedia Learning Modules form Open Content » was offered by the Cologne Bazaar team at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg, April 16, 2007. The major aim of the workshop was to inform teachers about where open content is already available and how it could be used. While creating their own learning modules the teachers should learn what has to took into consideration when using open content for their own learning material.
15 teachers from four countries attended the workshop.
The « Show-me-day » was hold as a four-hour session. In the first part the participants were introduced to Open Content and what ideas are behind this concept. Manifests and political implications of Open Content were presented, but also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property. The participants learned about popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU FDL and how to use these licences for own created content and what has to take into account when using contents of others.
During a second part there was talked about how one could use Open Content for the own teaching. The following tools and resources for finding and sharing contents were presented briefly: Flickr, Internet Archive, Connexions, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, CC Search and CC Directories. Other resources were mentioned as well. For every of the presented tools or resources some minutes were reservered for exploring and trying out. The participants discussed also practices for re-using Open Content and didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use.
In the hands-on-tutorial after a coffee break, teachers created multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. Some teachers have cooperated in groups, others preferred working by their own. One suggestion for the practical work was to create a short module about Open Content for their colleagues. Also a tool for creating the modules was suggested (OpenOffice with eLAIX extension to export a document as multimedia module to the LMS ILIAS). But some teachers preferred to work with their own environment and tools which was accepted as well.
The working atmosphere was very intense and all participants have tried out several tools and resources to find appropriate open content for their modules. During the entire workshop participants could ask for additional information or clarification. Most of the questions raised by the participants were about how marking an open content item with a licence correctly. Several participants asked for the easiest way to find open content lincenced images or textes. Most of the participants were astonished about the variety of resources the might use. But several of the german speaking and teaching participants were disapointed about the small amount of open content in German.
The evaluation of the event showed that open educational resources are not yet that important in daily work for the participants as their own produced materials. The majority of the teachers do not control the property rights of the content they use. And they pay only seldom for copyright. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of knowhow about IPR handling amongst them. But even if the knowledge about open content licences was different, the majority of the participants declared to invest further time to learn more about these licences after the workshop, even if they feel secure or partly secure in using open content licences. So the « Show-me-day » stimulated the participant’s interest in this issue - which can be seen as another step for establishing the use of open educational resources in e-learning.
May 2nd, 2007
This week I am participating in an on-line conference organised by JISC in the UK on the use of Web 2.0 for content sharing in learning and teaching. Its an interesting conference. I was much taken by a comment on the Web Forum by George Roberts who said “I am musing as I listen.
We are distributed, listening to someone speak and with whom we largely agree. It is a lunchtime seminar so we eat our sandwiches quietly. The slides are variously beautiful or informative. We share an aside with a colleague. So far so the same. Different: the presenter can see our aside so we censor or heckle with intent. We are online so we multi-task: a little e-mail, a quick f2f chat with a colleague who assumes I am listening to music and therefore interruptable, a comment here, a quick search on Flickr for a May morning image.
My question is whether we are simply using new technology to do what we have always done in the way we have done it? Or, are we doing something new? The distribution is new. What else? Maybe distributed co-presence is enough.”
That has started quite a discussion which I will try to come back to tomorrow.
You can view the slides from my presentation. And here is the audio.
May 2nd, 2007
