EDUCAUSE | community

ELI Launches Top Teaching and Learning Challenges Survey

pkurkowski — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:50:44 -0500

Assessment. Learning space design. Changing student and faculty practice. When polled, focus groups within the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community identified their top “challenges” in teaching and learning with IT. But how does your list compare? What big issues dominate your campus conversations and water cooler debates? What challenges would you add?

This fall, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative is asking members to "weigh in" with their biggest challenges through a community survey, open through October. This brainstorming survey kicks off the EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges project, a new community effort to both surface issues and to aggregate resources that can help to address them. Through online brainstorming, face-to-face sessions at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, and an EDUCAUSE-wide community vote, participants will identify the top-five issues in teaching and learning with technology. With the list in hand, the community will begin building content around each challenge, creating dynamic resource pages in wikis within EDUCAUSE Connect, and through collaborative working groups on the Challenges Ning Network. Adding to the readings and resources, community members will also be asked to contribute new content by drafting case study "community solutions" or creating podcasts and videos to illustrate solutions from their own campuses.

Help set the agenda and collaborate with colleagues around real solutions and innovative directions. Visit the project home page for more details.

Spock's Risky Take on Trust, Privacy, and Identity Management Online

catherine — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:38:34 -0600

This post sort of follows on from my musings on Pownce, and the relative (in)utility of the current glut of social networking "services".

Received any Spock trust invitations lately?

Spock, a self-described “people search application that allows you to see what your friends and colleagues are doing on the web”, could potentially tell us something about the future of metasearch engines—those clunky crawlers that tried, and mostly failed, to bridge the gap between structured web directories like Dmoz, and the chaotic openness of Google’s PageRank™ technology. Although its interface design, a web-2.0-ified “Google Classic Home”, is so trendy that I’m afraid it’s already terribly dated.

The Spock team have got one thing right: web search is now the primary vehicle for information discovery, and the sudden realisation of this (by the media, at least) has created all sorts of headaches for identity management and privacy online.

We, i.e. the affluent, educated, Western audience that remains the dominant internet consumer group, have made search engines, and the companies that run them, immensely powerful because we have enabled them effectively to constitute our interface to the world. Consequently, we have endowed search engines -- and their enabler, internet connectivity -- with powerful social meanings. “Searchability” means potential, openness, connectedness, currency, agency—qualities that are socially desirable in early 21st century cultures; or at least, the “globalised” cultures of the developed world.

Spock’s positive appeal to consumers is to tap directly into these powerful social meanings. Its negative appeal to consumers consists of using the language of risk to talk about identity management on the web:

“The first step towards managing your online identity is putting the information you want seen about you online. That allows you to control what is being said about you. The second step is staying up to date on new information about you as it appears.” (Spock blog)

Both aspects of Spock’s appeal, positive and negative, come at absolutely the right time for the consumer market: in education, careers advisors are trying to convince students of the need to “clean up their profile”, while teachers, counsellors and youth workers grapple with issues around cyberbullying; in the media and political spheres, the risks posed by ID theft loom large.

So, no argument on my side that managing online identity is important, and becoming increasingly more so. But if you already have an online identity, and if you proactively manage your online identity by publishing indexable information that allows others to locate you, then I don’t see value in the “service” Spock provides. Instead, I see considerable risk.

If you read through Spock’s Terms of Service, it becomes immediately apparent that the Spock folks are terribly worried about two things: the currency of the information on Spock, and the potential for individuals to create profiles that do not belong to them.

Like many, if not most, social networking services (e.g. StumbleUpon, Flickr), Spock is largely reliant on its user community to create value. The first cause of anxiety for Spock, of course, is that if Spock user profiles become out-of-date, then Spock is a useless “non-service” and people will just go back to Google. So, Spock talks tough, threatening to terminate your service if you do not maintain your information.

The second worry for Spock is that a user profile might not “authentically” represent an individual. Again, Spock is totally reliant on users to co-operate in this way to create a community of trust, because Spock itself cannot guarantee identity, and if users do not trust the identities they find on Spock then Spock again is exposed as a useless “non-service.” Doing a couple of sample searches on Spock for people that you already know have a well-established web presence reveals an intrinsic problem for Spock: Spock can and often does generate multiple search results for a single individual, just as happens on the “open” web via a traditional search engine.

Spock tries to solve this problem by encouraging users to consolidate these results into a single profile, by “claiming” them. In this way, Spock is asking users to help conserve its overall aim of having one Spock profile represent a single individual.

But why would you choose to help Spock by doing this? One of the things about the web in general is that information has a short life, and that is exactly what enables people to retain some control over their privacy. What if I change my personal or career goals, leave an organization or group of which I was a member, or move to a different city? Life happens, and people reinvent themselves all the time. But that might not necessarily mean that I want to reject or withdraw “obsolete” information about me – at times, it’s best to just let it alone, and let new information take its place.

It’s not especially useful, and it could even be dangerous, for a company to try and create a public expectation that “identity management” equates to an individual actively “controlling” all the personal information that is available about him/her on the web. And I can’t help thinking that it’s naïve at best, stupid at worst to think that an individual can solve the problem of managing his or her online identity (which consists of a complex mish-mash of information, some generated by the individual, some created by others) by creating Yet Another Profile on this type of system. At this stage, Spock’s goal of a single profile per user looks fundamentally incompatible with the way people—and the web in general—works.

Spock is behaving a bit like the banks that try and stop consumers from sharing their PIN numbers, even with immediate family members. Its attempt to make one profile represent “one authentic user” already looks redundant. Try asking kids using Bebo or Xanga not to share passwords, or create new profiles for their friends -- an interesting theme of the recent symposium on Facebook research.

With my academic hat on, I’d say we’ve already got other, better mechanisms to do the things that Spock says it’s offering users. Mechanisms that allow people to selectively share their information with services and with other individuals, and that don’t rely on submitting personal information to a commercial third party provider. I recognise that my bias towards sharing information, and towards open systems and standards, isn't necessarily shared by tech firms or the general public. But if people are prepared to share information with a system like Spock, surely it's worth looking again at OpenID, ClaimID and FOAF for trust and authentication; or Explode as a way to display distributed networks of people. Somebody like Scott Wilson can probably explain this much better than I can; check out FeedForward, his alpha tool for personalized information discovery.

All aboard? Reflections on the 7th Sakai conference, Amsterdam

pault — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:28:38 -0500

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...?

Above is the luxury cruise liner, Silver Shadow, which was waiting for passengers to board. It was right next to the Moevenpick Hotel, the conference venue. In fact, it's designed to accommodate a little under 400 guests, about the number of participants at the conference, which rather suggests a dream future venue ... :-)

It's taken two or three weeks for my impressions to settle - I found the three days of the conference quite intense and took copious notes. I can say straightaway, however, that I felt there was generally a good sense of community, with a very constructive outlook across the various constituent communities, ranging from development through to pedagogy and research. Sessions were usually informative and presented well; there was a real sense of purpose and commitment It was consistent with what I've observed on the Tetra developers mailing list: although I'm not been involved in any Java coding myself, I have been seen how the Sakai developers have provided very helpful responses to the various queries raised by Bodington developers seeking to incorporate key functionality in Sakai. Furthermore, when some of these ideas were presented by my colleagues, Adam and Matthew, in their presentation on importing Bodington tool, they were greeted very positively - there is a willingness to learn. So I broadly concur with the encouraging sentiments expressed by Michael Feldsteain in his 'State of the Union' blog post.

There remain many questionmarks as expressed Ian Reid, whose responses were not so rosy: in wrapping it up, he perceived a number of weaknesses and for him fundamental questions remained unanswered. I can at least answer his first point about the product: there are certainly large scale deployments - e.g. at Indiana and Michigan. Further, many of the other points, such as the technical bias, are well known and as far as I can tell they are being actively addressed.

I have quite a number of concerns myself and among my colleagues may be the one who is most reluctant to migrate from our present WebLearn, based on Bodington, perhaps largely because I have spent so much time with it and naturally can get attached. My first query is what kind of system is Sakai? Is it largely an open source replacement for Blackboard or WebCT? At the culmination of the procurement process at Oxford in 2001/2002, we were left with a head-to-head between Blackboard and Bodington. There was a free vote and Bodington won very easily, largely because Bodington offered flexibility: in the use of terminology, in how it allowed areas to be set up, in who could do what in these areas, and in how users could navigate freely around the system. One could use it to augment existing teaching or research arrangements with little effort. WebLearn has subsequently grown organically - from the handful of resources in December 2002 to its present state of about 60,000 resources manually created and managed by thousands of users (staff and students) in the various colleges and departments. At the same time, Bodington also has many weaknesses - it's rather long in the tooth and has often been described as "clunky" - many of the tools are looking very dated and making changes can be very laborious.

Sakai was felt to be the most promising way forward, but as it stands there are serious limitations in its design. The name of Michigan's deployment itself hints at one of these 'CTools,' rather indicating a technical focus: indeed much of the talk at the conference was 'tools' oriented, but during the past year or two, in WebLearn, we've deliberately tried to move away from 'how does tool X work' to 'how to carry out activity Y [using the tools available]' with a recent project looking at activity-based use cases for WebLearn. Also, the course subscription model in Sakai will not be not sufficient (in theory, Oxford's undergraduates are at liberty to attend any lecture at the University); the role-based access control is more coarse-grained (in fact, Bodington doesn't have any fixed roles - they can be defined via group memberships), and the overall organisation of materials lacks hierachy. There are many other smaller issues - e.g. what about those horrible Sakai URLs?

There are many concerns, but there is reassuringly intense activity to address them and this is leading to mutual enrichment. So, a lot of discussion has flowed on the topic of groups; a new hierarchy service for Sakai might have a name component that will enable nice URLs etc. I also saw some good examples of how requirements are driving the development; how development goes through a proper processes of evaluation and many other encouraging signs, such as the use of the term of Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), getting away from the systems-oriented language.

So, largely reassured, at this stage my biggest concern is more in terms of timescales and resources regarding a full deployment of Sakai: it's a question of when than if. Looking around, it seems fitting then to note Stanford's announcement on 21 June:

After a year-long pilot, Sakai went into full production at Stanford today, fully replacing our legacy home-grown system. We've taken a long, careful path toward deployment to assure a seamless transition to the new system. It is localized, integrated and well tested, and today we flipped the switch. This is a big achievement for us, fulfilling the commitment we made to ourselves, and to our collaborators at Indiana, Michigan and MIT three years ago when we started this project.

So it can be done, but a long road lies ahead and if we are to achieve this at Oxford for everyone's benefit, we really shall need all aboard!

Building community in learning environments – what about teachers?

pault — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 07:08:23 -0500

Having extolled the virtues of sharing, my blog has been void of any further contributions. I'm sorry about that and aim to post a few entries in the coming week, especially as I prepare for the Educause conference in Dallas. At the very least I should elaborate soon on my abstract for my poster session on Wednesday evening.

In the UK there's been a lot of discussion and debate around the notion of personal(ised) learning environments (PLEs for short), with further funding available from the JISC in their latest call (04/06 Capital Programme) - see e.g. e-learning strand Call III. All this has raised fundamental questions about the nature of learning as individuals and within communities, let alone what this means in terms of software systems. It can be a heady and contentious mix and in all of this I wonder what about the role of teaching, guidance and so on? Is it being devalued? So here I'm going to reflect on my brief experience with an online venture where personal spaces and community were closely connected, with occasional pauses to refer to learning environments. However, in this case
I'm thinking especially about involvement among academics (faculty).

About 10 years ago (Autumn '96), I received an email out of the blue responding to my personal Web pages on Buddhism. The message invited me to "take the site to another level" and join a new online venture. Was I interested? Even then before spam was suffocating Inboxes, I was somewhat wary, but out of curiosity I sent a reply. Soon after I received another message, this time from someone else, who expanded a little on what his 'associate' had expressed before. I was informed, "This is going to be the biggest thing to hit the 'Net!'"

For one with English sensibilities, a touch of understatement is considered slightly more appealing. However, when some elements about the venture explained to me, it seemed to me a good proposition. The basic premise was that hitherto to find a quality-controlled and edited guide to resources on the 'Net there was little choice beyond the impersonal Yahoo-style directories. This venture was to change that by creating a kind of directory service with real people serving as expert guides to the resources.

I eventually joined as one of the first 'Guides' for what was then called The Mining Company, later About.com. My task was basically to maintain and develop an area in their site on Buddhism, publishing an original article at least weekly and growing an edited links directory. The article could be a news item or topic of interest, so not dissimilar to a blog entry. Further, there was a requirement to foster community, mainly through synchronous discussions. How personal could this area be? How much did it have to conform to corporate demands? There was considerable freedom - you could write on the topic of your choice; the input from others came largely on the style of presentation, writing with the audience in mind, with the aim of establishing rapport. I enjoyed the work and I think most others did too, and that is one of key factors of its success.

The connection between the individual and community was built on personal interest and enthusiasm on a topic close to one's heart and there's ample evidence that it worked well. It wasn't just the model that was well designed, the whole infrastructure that supported the Guides was excellent – regarding the technical setup, content creation was straightforward using ready-made templates and any processes (e.g. file transfer) were well documented. However, there was another layer of support readily available behind the scenes within the organization, which had a feeling of a synergetic whole – whether it was to do with administration or the mentoring received when building your area. I found the mentoring particularly attentive and encouraging.

However, I had a very basic problem - access to the 'Net. A convoluted story, but it ended up with some forlorn investigations into mobile wireless access, which would prove prohibitively expensive. I also had to write up a doctoral thesis, sooner rather than later, so with considerable reluctance I gave up the work, before even the official launch! My articles are still available, just in my personal space, starting with the First Noble Truth .

The way the system gelled, across personal and technical spheres was altogether impressive and I often wonder what those of use involved in online learning systems, particularly in HEIs, might learn from this. On a structural note, the Mining Company's site was quite regimented, largely static content, with only a handful of templates, though considerable scope to use HTML as you wished. What a visitor is likely to notice about the site is:

there's someone who is looking after the pages personally
it's informative
it is kept up to date
on sending a query, you receive a prompt and helpful response

About.com contains a lot of instructional material and I'm thinking about it almost as a virtual academy with hundreds of academics who are very engaged online. That's not a huge number, yet About.com has been in the top 10 in terms of Web traffic – don’t think it was the biggest thing to hit the ‘Net, but it wasn’t far off! It shows that there is a natural thirst for knowledge that can be served remarkably well through a special synergy.

If I now glance over to WebLearn, the institutional Virtual Learning Environment that I currently administer, what observations can I make? It's quite busy with thousands of staff and students accessing it more than occasionally, with probably more staff contributors than About.com Guides. We have discussion lists, discussion boards, user groups, lots of interactive tools and various other ingredients. There's a lot of help documentation and a widely publicised email address for help, to which colleagues and I try to provide a prompt and helpful response.

After all that, the environment is often described as "useful" in terms of access to information, but I've not seen much online community. A lot of the content is to do with adminstration, is provided in large batches, updated infrequently with little indication of what's fresh or topical. Academics are as passionate as anyone about their own subjects, but compared with About.com Guides, they are generally less enthusiastic and nowhere near as engaged online. Perhaps it's not surprising given that an Oxford education is largely face-to-face, epitomised by the tutorial system, where networking is done inside the walls of colleges and departments. Yet it's is evident among students that there's scope for online engagement to mediate physical communities - an entry in Facebook is apparently sine qua non.

There are actually well-known limitations of Oxford's face-to-face networking because academic connections seem to be quite often the outcome of serendipity more than anything else. The limitations are perhaps more obvious when considering that increasing amount of research is interdisciplinary in nature. In fact, even the most recalcitrant professors are using the Web and email frequently, so I think we're missing the right means or environment of online communication; there ought to be better means of fostering the expert teaching community. Perhaps it is just a matter of resources? Perhaps academics are under too much strain, so can't embrace anything beyond what they're doing now? Or maybe I'm just naive - I once tried to encourage an exchange of ideas between two dons who both had an interest in software for teaching logic. The response was frigid!

The work on PLEs, at least as I've encountered it as sponsored by the JISC, is focused on students, but that's only part of the picture – or just one side of the equation when considering 'learning and teaching'. The relative lack of engagement among academics indicates to me that a greater emphasis is needed on teaching, tutoring, mentoring and guidance and through that more academics may become fuller contributors online.

So does that mean we need to look at the Personal Teaching Environment (PTE) or the Personal Instructional Environment (PIE) or the Personal Guidance Environment (PGE)? But then what about the Personal Research Environment (PRE) and the Personal Administration Environment (PAE)? As someone who favours a holistic approach, there seems to be a serious risk of fragmentation that I don't find very appealing, even though each probably have distinctive characteristics. The problems become manifest when you try to build systems - there's a temptation to build distinct systems for each. It’s already problematic to distinguish between a VLE and VRE - and if there are significant differences do you go and build completely separate systems for each? It's early days, though I gather that some patterns have been established in the JISC-funded Building a VRE for the Humanities.

There are actually numerous alternative online educational environments that lend themselves more to personalisation and community that may support the teaching side more. Pete Robinson, one of my colleagues in the Learning Technologies Group occasionally asks me have I taken a look at Elgg. I've always replied that I’ve only glanced at it, having never been able to allocate time to explore, but feeling I really ought to make time. Yet where might I find the time to consider even some of the issues this raises within an institutional context...?

Technology Job Opportunities at Solano Community College

jwfield — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 18:42:25 -0500

There are 5 immediate job openings at Solano Community College in various technology support areas. These jobs should be posted by July 1 on the campus web site:

http://www.solano.edu

They will also soon be listed with the Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/jobs/

They include starting or anticipated salaries (depending on the bargaining unit representing that position) and we are awaiting the news on the California state budget. If adopted as proposed, there might be a 5.92% COLA for each of these jobs. The two bargaining units involved are each in the third year of a three year agreement that guarantees a total pass-through of the COLA to their members. Solano offers exceptional benefits as well.

These jobs are in Technology and Learning Resources, specifically in Technology Services and Support.

Customer Support Technician - help desk and operations for our legacy HP 3000 until it goes away with the implementation of Banner (underway).

Telecommunication Network Technician - phone and netwok support. We have a Mitel phone switch and are contemplating the move to VOIP.

Programmer/Analyst - support for our legacy administrative systems (mostly COBOL on the HP 3000) and implementing Banner.

Information Analyst (Lead) - the lead position is not a supervisor, but is tasked with a more involved role in the organization of the work involved. Also supports the legacy administrative system and will help move us to Banner.

(These two positions will work with the current Information Analyst.)

Webmaster - support the campus web server, intranet server, and help us add new web-based services, including implementing the Banner Luminus portal.

Solano Community College is located between San Francisco and Sacramento California. We are a small (8000 FTE) community college with enormous growth opportunities.

More information is available on the campus web site and I welcome any inquiries to me personally at jay.field@solano.edu

Jay Field
Vice-President, Technology and Learning Resources
Solano Community College

How to get people to work for free

StuartYeates — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:55:00 -0600

David Horton has published an excellent article " How to get people to work for free: Attracting volunteers to your free software project" all about how to encourage the users of open source projects to contribute to the ongoing success. The key recommendations are to have an explicit, user understandable vision and to break at least some of the work down into easily understood tasks to let new contributors get started. If you're trying to build an open source comunity, you need to read this article.

My First Blog

seanm — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:55:02 -0600

I had a talk yesterday with an Alumni Development Officer whose job it is to support the University's Alumni online community initiative (http://olcnetwork.net/uwindsor). She was telling me how difficult it is to have people join and participate, largely because so few people do... People join and there is not much going on so they do not come back. I guess that is because there is not a lot of community there.We also talked about our children... Each night I sit and watch my children (Grades 10, 8 & 7) use their computers to communicate with their friends, as they do their homework and listen to their music. I know this is different than the way I grew up - each night we would go and play football, hockey or baseball, depending on the time of year, and then make our way home to eat and then "focus" on our homework (my mother might argue with the amount of "focusing" I did - but I digress). As I watch the kids, I know that my first temptation is to think that they should be doing things the way that I did them (that worked for me), but is that the truth? The reality is that my children are doing fairly well in school, get their homework done without me nagging them (much) and have really good friends. What worked for me obviously is not what works for them. I know that my work day pulls me in several directions, seemingly at once, and I am sure that the world is only going to expect more multitasking . I think that the way that the kids are working right now is the best way for them to prepare for the world ahead, especially since they will be shaping it....I am sure one of the reasons for the good friendships the kids have is their use of technology and how they have used MSN chat to build their own community. We live in a rural setting, even though it is close to the city, and many of the classmates of the kids live miles away (for my oldest they might be 25 miles away). Using chat helps them to interact with their schoolmates and strengthen their school community in ways that we would not have had. I think that the children are using the chat facility safely (know the people they are chatting with) and that gives me comfort (although I know I must remain vigilent).And this leads me back to thoughts on how we can help to build community at the University. I think that there are ways ITS can help to use technology to meet our goals as an institution and provide the students with services that they want. The University is focusing on becoming Canada's leading personal comprehensive University, and I think that we can improve our chat facilities to make it easier for students to take advantage of the groups that they are part of - such as freshman, Psych majors, 2nd year HK students or 03-60-104-01 classmates - and make them into communities. I know that other Universities are setting up ways for students to use technology to setup studygroups, which this would certainly allow. This may also help to build community in ways that make it possible for students to stay in touch after they graduate, which would help Alumni associations to stay in touch with them. As students graduate, we can switch them over to Alumni's OLC inititative, which will help to build their community over time.Is anyone else doing these types of things?