pault's blog

Having indicated that I would write something about Web2.0, I finally get round to doing something.  Have you ever wondered about the concept of 'friends' in social networking site?  I've been thinking for a long time that they dilute the meaning of friendship and try to address this here by appeal to some Buddhist teachings, particularly the Sigalovada Sutta...

This is to share an experiment in social bookmarking for the Seattle conference, in which I hope others will join.  Allow me to describe below...

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

Oxford made a decision in Autumn 2006 to migrate to the Sakai VLE with the announcement of the Tetra collaboration. Since the completion of the academic year, we've been able to focus more on the task in hand. For myself, I decided the best way to quickly gain a feel for Sakai was to attend a Sakai gathering and conveniently the 7th Sakai Conference was recently held in Amsterdam, the first time the conference had been held outside the United States. I was primarily interested in sessions that addressed system migration, deployment and support, but also keen to hear about pedagogy and usability, leaving it to my colleagues to cover the more technical development aspects. I wanted to know what approaches were adopted to move to Sakai: organisation, resources, timescales, etc.

So was it a case of all aboard...?

I've been following an interesting exchange between Stephen Downes and Leonard Low concerning the mobile sphere (see particularly Leonard's posts on Does Mobile Technology equate with Mobile Learning? , Stephen's response  and then and Leonard's follow-up, Making M-Learning Mobile, Open, and Ubiquitous ).

It is timely for me as I've volunteered to present on the topic, 'Handheld Musings - From Portability to Ubiquity - Observations on the Evolution of Mobile Computing.'  (The title itself should keep me going for a few minutes :-) As the audience is a Computing Services department, the focus is naturally on technology, hence mobile computing.   I hope to convey that general notions of mobility and the associated terms have been gradually changing and diversifying and that this really needs more attention support beyond enabling wireless access for laptops!   Indeed, the LSE on behalf of a technical working group within UCISA, recently launched a Mobile Computing Survey which recognised the growing support issue in this area.   Although it mentions in its preamble, "The support of "mobile" devices (in all their guises - Laptops, handheld PCs, PDAs, 3G mobile phones, Blackberries etc.)..." this survey is not aimed at laptops as the section on 'Mobile devices' asks: "What operating system(s) do you provide support for and lists as the named options: Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian."

[Sorry it is so long since I posted - the Western New Year and Chinese New Year have both passed!]

My job title of 'VLE Administrator' covers a wide range of duties, many of which are quite technical and system-oriented, but it also involves advising staff on developing their areas in the VLE (LMS), the service front line, as it were.  This term I've spent quite a lot of time preparing and delivering courses on how to use WebLearn;  the face to face contact makes quite a pleasant break from coding or answering emails stuck in front of a computer screen.

We are now coming to the end of this term's series of lunchtime courses.  They have usually consisted of a presentation with slides and demonstrations followed by hands-on where people work individually through a number of exercises, familiarising themselves with some aspects of the VLE.  The peak of interaction usually would not go beyond viewing each each other's test area. 

However, I've recently found myself in one of the so-called flexible learning spaces within the department - a wide room with islands of workstations and a lot of gadgetry.  After a couple of weeks delivering the standard format in this space, I've only just realised that I ought to make more use of such communal spaces. 

It's already a month since Educause 2006 finished and it feels like it happened only a few days ago.  However, that's time enough for me to stand back a little and reflect on why I went in the first place and particularly what - if anything - has emerged.  

One of the main reasons for my attendance was to promote Bodington through the poster session.  A bit of rush at the last minute, but eventually my colleagues furnished me with enough to weigh me down - laptop, CDs, posters, leaflets etc, resulting in a pot pourri presentation - lots to see, but perhaps not so coherent (this was at the end of the session and remarkably two Thornton mint chocolate creams remain).   If I ever get to do another poster, I shall endeavour to bring someone with me because once the doors opened, there was a constant flow of people, so no time to take a look at the other stalls.

I had various conversations, distributed lots of fliers about the Bodington 2.8 release, gave a few demos of the system, and handed out quite a few WebLearn bootable CDs.  What about the topic 'From Personalized Learning to Open Courseware: Learning Management Systems Can Be Flexible'?  I didn't receive a single query about personalized learning, which I found a bit surprising, though it may be that the term has been much more widely promoted in the UK than elsewhere, because of high level UK government support.   However, the title got spotted by a group from the OpenCourseWare consortium, and several of them came over, curious to know what I was presenting and seeing an opportunity for another member!  I subsequently attended their panel session and came back to the UK with plenty of enthusiasm.  However, since then my enthusiasm has waned as I consider a number of issues.

Whilst carrying out some moblogging as part of the RAMBLE project, I sometimes wanted to do quick sketches to augment the text input on my PDA.  Now that Firefox 2.0 has been shipped with improved support for SVG, I'd like to revisit the idea of supporting doodles, especially as more smartphones are now coming with styli.  Anyone interested?

One of the difficulties in working in a highly distributed environment such as Oxford is keeping informed about what's happening, who's doing what, etc.  Many potential opportunities for collaboration seem to go unnoticed.

This is just one of the many scenarios that social software and Web2.0 should address, which is my way of bringing in... the Learning Learning Technologies Group Spring 2007 Conference, The Shock of the Old 6: The Shock of the Social.

It'll be our sixth annual one-day conference on educational technologies and will take place at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, March 22nd 2007.  Details available on the LTG site at:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/shock2007/

The dust is now settling after Educause 2006 came to Dallas, Texas. It was the first time I had attended and I enjoyed very much those few days of heightened activity - the Dallas Convention Center was an excellent venue, the presentations were varied and informative, some quite entertaining; the chats were friendly and stimulating, the hotel was comfortable, even my cell phone arrangements worked out fine.

It's tempting to think that when a conference closes with its final keynote, that you can slowly wend your way home and have the luxury of gently pondering all that's gone on. I was back in Oxford on Friday, so at least I had the weekend, but I used up a fair amount catching up on sleep and I spent the greater part of Sunday just tidying up the copious notes I had jotted. I knew that once I returned to the office I wouldn't have much opportunity to tidy them up much further, especially as the conference took place during Week 1 of Michaelmas, our Autumn term, not an ideal week to be away!

So it's back to user support queries, teaching preparation (rather more than expected), ideas for e-learning projects and funding applications, and more queries generated by the important Tetra announcement and so on.

Can you guess where this is...?



It's inspirational and aspirational - I hope the rest of this week will be likewise for all participants in Educause '06.

Today - Sunday - has been my first full day in Dallas, with a chance to start exploring the city, probably the only chance during my brief stay this week.  I took the opportunity of registering in the morning, whilst it was quiet, and then proceeded to head towards the Arts District a little to the NE of downtown, within walking distance of the hotel where I am staying.  I spent several hours at the Dallas Museum of Art and what struck me was the spaciousness, making the art galleries I'm used to in the UK seem rather poky in comparison.

I took the above photo at the Nasher Sculpture Center. The artist is Jonathan Borofsky.  I think it's very clever; at least everyone who walked in its vicinity gazed up for some while in reflection - few other sculptures seemed to receive the same acknowledgement. I think the clouds create an interesting effect, more interesting than simply a blue sky. Does anyone here play the game of spotting patterns in cloud formations...?

As the abstracts for poster sessions could have a maximum of 50 words, I've been posting here to explain in more detail the background behind my forthcoming poster session about WebLearn, the centrally hosted LMS at Oxford University, based on the Bodington software.

The last bit I need to talk about is 'open courseware.' This can have many conotations, but here it refers simply to course content has been made freely available to the public and does not require guest access or visitor login. Many academics were keen that their materials - especially in teaching - could be indexed by search engines, to help promote their courses. On the other hand some were concerned that Google would sneak into areas they thought were private, so we had to be sure of all exposed URLs and circulate that as a list beforehand.

Before April 2006, as with most VLEs you needed to press a 'log in' button to gain access to anything, which was felt unnecessary for those resources that were meant to be openly viewable. So the barrier was removed. Now if academics want to enable access for Google and friends, the general procedure - which applies to most resources in the LMS - is as follows:

On Monday 2nd October, there was a new release (version 2.8.0) of the Bodington VLE software, now under the Open Source Initiative (OSI) certified Apache 2 license. New features include support for the MySQL database, display of RSS and Atom newsfeeds, with various ways of rendering them and a Peer Marker Tool, whilst other tools have been improved/brought up to date, such as the support to import and export of IMS Content Packages. Further details are available from the official release announcement.

If you want to get up and running quickly, go to the file releases are available from SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodington/
and select the bodington-quickstart_war, which is a preconfigured version of Bodington consisting of an archived package that you can upload into a Web application server like Tomcat.  The language is technical, but actually there are only a few steps involved, so it only takes a few minutes. It's designed to get you up and running with Bodington with the least possible effort. Instructions are provided in the download.   If you want the very latest builds for Bodington you can obtain them from CruiseControl running on one of our development servers (also available for WebLearn).

Here's my second post to explain the poster session that I'll be hosting in Dallas.

There's been a lot of promotion of 'personalised learning' in the UK, strongly encouraged by the government, and this is reflected in funding available to JISC projects. Within JISC itself, CETIS has a PLE project. On the 6th and 7th June 2006 there were a couple of meetings organised up in Manchester to explore the area.  I was invited to attend the first one and then subsequently required to submit a short paper. Although a bit of an inconvenience, it did provide a prompt for me to step back and try to make sense of what's going on. My experiences from the RAMBLE project had already pointed to looking at a student's daily routine as a whole and this very general view stayed in my mind as I wrote on 'PLEs as Environments for Personal and Personalised Learning'  The set of papers as a whole showed a huge diversity of views and my impressions at the meeting itself indicated that there's little consensus on what all this means in practice.

I have a little poster session coming up at Educause with the rather loong title of 'From Personalized Learning to Open Courseware: Learning Management Systems Can Be Flexible', reflecting many elements that I'd like to convey. I hope to elaborate in the following posts.

The watchword is flexibility, as this is what really matters at Oxford. In 2001/2 a working group with broad representation from academics, IT staff, and administrators undertook a lengthy procurement process for an LMS (we tend to call them VLEs in the UK) - a list of documents is available from the LTG Web site. We evaluated about 30 systems against both a features checklist and a more probing set of requirements encapsulated in two mock courses. It was the latter that proved most illuminating because for all their features, bells and whistles, the commercial offerings were unable to fit our needs: ranging from simple things like terminology to more fundamental issues with the data model. They also seemed designed for substantial investment of resources so that if you used just one tool, your 'course' would contain lots of empty space, whereas we wanted a very gentle transition for academics, who could start tentatively by simply uploading a lecture handout without need the help of an IT officer. And with the commercial systems there were the licensing fees to consider.