mattriddle's blog

Catherine Howell tagged me today for a meme that requires me to post 5 things I think you probably wouldn't know about me, and then tag 5 more bloggers. I don't actually usually participate in these things, but this time I was so annoyed that I had forgotten my login details to my Educause blog that I set about hacking back in to my own account, and lo and behold I made it. So here goes.

1. When I was 12, I went trekking in Nepal.
2. I suffer from labyrinthitis, which has brought a new appreciation for a sense we rarely think about: balance. Nobody can see the effect of this illness.
3. I've been to the USA 14 times in 14 years. The last time I was there was 2003. Most of these trips have been work-related, and I want to go back this year because it seems like such a long time ago that I was there.
4. I've lived a double life since the early 1990s, as a member of obscure online communities such as The Foothills, Brainstorms and GCS. None of these communities has a special topic, they're there for online discussion, and I met some of my best friends at them.
5. Tonight I'm performing in the opening night of a dance show called 'Elemental' at the ADC theatre here in Cambridge, and I'll perform every night this week, finishing on Saturday.

I tag dogpossum, Vike, Dozka, Barrington and Swingsuz.

This second podcast is about role-plays as well, but this time the role-plays don't use online technologies at all. The Knowledge Resource Network (KRN), sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), aims to make learning materials developed for the CMI M.Phil. courses available to other UK higher education institutions. The KRN Project identified a number of role-plays as exemplars for possible reuse. This presentation to the CARET Evaluation Group describes a qualitative research project to investigate the usage of these role-plays. Also on The Zotcast.

Role-play has long been used as an educational tool to provide learners with a way to understand the real world.  Since the advent of the World Wide Web, online role-plays have become widely used in Australian tertiary institutions to provide students with authentic learning opportunities.  This presentation profiles two examples of online role-plays developed at the University of Melbourne: DRALE Online, in which final year law students form legal teams in a dispute resolution process, and The Campaign, a role-play about journalists and political advisors following a political campaign. To see the whole podcast, visit The Zotcast.

A very helpful comment from Jenny Reiswig on yesterday's blog entry lead to the discovery of the term 'desire lines' -- an evocative concept that has already been used as an analogy in the design of technical systems.

Larry Wall, creator of UNIX Perl language:

People will accept a new thing much better if it alreadyresembles something they're familiar with or the way theyare already thinking about things. A musician would say "Amusical piece lays under the fingers -- it looks hard but itis easy to play." Another way of thinking of it is (byanalogy:) At the University of California at Irvine, whenthey first built its campus, they just planted grass. Thenthey waited a year and looked at where people had made pathsin the grass and built the sidewalks there. I did the samething with Perl. I looked at the paths people liked totraverse in UNIX, and distilled them down to a language thatstill in many ways contains the essence of UNIX. The realdriving force behind porting Perl to Windows and Macs isprimarily disenfranchised UNIX programmers who want to havea little bit of the old country, and with Perl they getthat. On a Windows machine, we make sure there areWindows-specific interfaces, but the notion of being able tohook everything up to everything else in a simple manner isreally shoving a wad of UNIX glue into the middle of theworks. (It's about) taking a system where "you can't getthere from here" and letting you get there from here.

Larry Wall Articles and Interviews

Scenario 1

A newly constructed block of flats is built, and the city plans for the large number of people living there by building a bus stop directly outside, a car park, and wheelchair access to the flats. Because of the steep gradient from the street to the car park, the wheelchair ramp is built parallel to the street, doubling back on itself to create a long entry point for foot traffic. Residents at the flats become annoyed with having to traverse the ramp, and begin to step through the newly constructed garden beds and jumping into the car park below. The garden beds become trampled, and residents risk injury. The design has failed to meet the goals of the majority of the residents who use the bus.

Scenario 2

A Landscape architect is designing a new playground which will include an adventure playground with various features, a sand pit, drinking fountains, and paved pathways. They construct all of the equipment, but they decide to delay the construction of the pathways. Instead, they spread tanbark evenly around the equipment, including between the equipment and the amenities. The new playground is opened, and receives heavy use over the first 2 weeks. The landscape architects return, and map the areas where the tanbark is thinner. These pathways through the tanbark have been left by regular use of children as they move around the new playground. The landscape architect uses the map to specify where the paved pathways, which are added to the playground to complete the design.

A lot of work in educational technology claims to be at the crest of the wave, at least technologically speaking. That is, technologies that are now prevalent in homes and workplaces are being exploited for educational uses. The original design of technologies is often adapted to achieve educational aims that weren't originally considered. Marconi proved wireless radio communications were possible in the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the 1950s that HF radios were used to teach school kids in remote locations in outback Australia. The internet is, of course, another obvious example. But is it always the case that educational uses of technologies need to lag behind their discovery for other purposes? One disadvantage of considering educational aims as a second thought is that we are always forced to adapt something that has been designed for some other reason. It may be that we can never really understand the way a technology will be used until long after its invention, but at the very least we could start to look at emerging technologies and their possible educational uses much earlier than we typically do. A list of emerging technologies might include:

• Podcasts - already being used in some educational settings, but not widely

I'm just at the end of my 5th week at Caret, but already I feel like I'm getting my teeth into some interesting stuff. Looking back, it did take a while, but at this moment I feel as though a lot has happened. Today was a highlight, with our second observation of a role-play in action, complete with film crew and student interviews. Or interview, as it turned out that most of the students we lined up beforehand had to cancel. We'll have to do follow up interviews next week. So why are we doing this? Well, we've spent quite a bit of time looking for high quality learning resources, and identified some role-plays conducted in the MPhil courses here as candidates. We want to identify key elements of these exercises, including important learning advantages of the approach, as well as any problems encountered. With that information we hope to build up a picture of how the resources that support the exercises can be used in other institutions. It's a fun project, and the outcomes are tangible and potentially very useful, so I'm enjoying it a lot.

One of the things you can't help noticing when you arrive in Cambridge is the architecture. The buildings with their archways and courtyards and the narrow cobblestoned alleyways. And the walls that surround them all. Signs warn that this area is PRIVATE, or that the grass is for the enjoyment of those more privileged than the reader.In fact the whole place is designed to regulate behaviour in very specific, time honoured ways so that at every turn you are made aware of your place -- or rather, just how difficult it is to get to the next. I've enountered this not only in walking around the city, but in all of its institutions, from its bike shops to its banks. The most curious example is probably the University Library, which is a rather imposing building already, since its tower is by far the tallest building in the area. Before even arriving there, however, it was more than a challenge to discover whether borrowing rights extend to every member of staff by default. The Library website lists 10 different categories of university staff. Exactly which of these I fit into is still a mystery to me.Despite assurances from some colleagues that staff are unlikely to receive sanction from the venerable UL Admissions Office without considerable effort, I decided to presented myself to the front desk to politely enquire as to the process. I was told that I would need to return with a copy of my employment contract. Dutifully, I returned the next day with my contract, and I was directed to a waiting area outside the Admissions Office, which has a sign on it reading "Please do not knock on this door. We will attend to you at our earliest convenience."

I've recently moved from Australia to the UK to work at the University of Cambridge. I intend to use this blog to reflect on my time here, and talk about issues in educational technology along the way. I'm an educational designer, and have been working at the University of Melbourne for about 13 years. My new job is as a research associate at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET).