Fortnightly Mailing

Microsoft certified Moodle – Guest Contribution by Jim Farmer

A "Microsoft certified" version of Moodle can be downloaded now from SpikeSource, a venture capital backed US company that aims to make Open Source software "business ready". Available since February 27, 2008,  neither Microsoft or SpikeSource announced the certified version. A representative for SpikeSource said this was a routine extension of the company’s certifications for Microsoft.

JISC Learner Experiences of e-Learning: Half way through the phase 2 research - Guest Contribution from Ellen Lessner

The second phase of the research into the learner experience of e-learning is one year old, with most projects due to finish in March 2009.  Phase 2 of this programme is made up of 7 research projects, with a "Support and Synthesis" project running in parallel.  On the public area of the project wiki you can get a good idea of the work that’s been done so far.  While the 7 projects are doing their individual research, the Support and Synthesis project has run 4 support workshops which have enabled the project teams to work together while focusing on the issues surrounding data collection, methodology and dissemination outputs.

You may have seen the publication from the first phase of the research - In Their Own Words available from the JISC website, and you may have seen coverage of LEX here in Fortnightly Mailing. There continues to be considerable interest in the many aspects of this phase of the project; not only the possible findings but the different types of data collection (video and audio), the methodologies used by the range of projects and the model of support used by the Support and Synthesis project.  We’re now at the stage where a variety of themes are just beginning to emerge.

Evaluating what learners are doing with technology is obviously important and there are a number of UK projects, mainly HE centred, focusing on this theme.  For example, the Higher Education Academy has funded a project, running from January to July 2008, called the Experiences of E-Learning Special Interest Group (ELISIG), for those involved in investigations and evaluations of learners' experiences of e-learning.  An initial ELISIG workshop held in March 2008 was attended by over 40 people.   

For more information on the Learner Experience Projects,   contact Ellen Lessner, Project Manager, Support and Synthesis Project or Sarah Knight, JISC Programme Manager.

OLPC: Good, Bad or Ugly? Hands-on report by Geoff Stead and the Tribal m-learning team

After all our enthusiasm for the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC) it was amazing to be able to spend the last two weeks testing one out for real (thanks Seb!).

So what is it really like?

The lunch-on-the-move quick read version

We, the Tribal m-learning team think the OLPC X0-1:

• is inspirational, embedding good educational ideas and collaboration;
• solves several big technology challenges;
• is great fun, but pretty slow;
• is full of first-generation quirks;
• has an amazingly rich seam of support info on the OLPC wiki;
• leads the field in several key directions, but might be superceded quite quickly?

One quirk worth mentioning is that almost everyone who tried to open it first time ... couldn't! To avoid this, and other basic blunders we have made a bluffers guide to the OLPC  to be released shortly ...

The sit-down-and-eat longer read version

There are so many competing views and agendas around this little green machine that we felt the best way to review it would be collaboratively. We got the entire Tribal learning technologies team in on the act, including animators, UI designers, teachers, academics and programmers. We also enlisted the real experts: our kids! (aged 6, 9 and 11).

The good:

• The XO is all about sharing. It has a great visual representation of available local networks, and of the people in your group. This is all about kids doing stuff - and building stuff - together, the collaboration is hard-wired into the system.
• Seymour Papert lives on. The XO includes great tools (like pippy and turtleart) to help everyone develop basic programming - and from that problem solving skills.
• The interface is interestingly different, without being counterintuitive ... even for those of us wedded to the Windows / Mac metaphors.
• The XO includes inspirational technology solutions to many 3rd world equipment problems that until now were ignored by the mainstream, but that we can all benefit from. Things like:
  • good protection from the elements (especially dust and spillage), as well be being very robust;
  • fantastic screens that can even be used in direct sunlight;
  • flexible power use and generation (very low power use, and you can plug it in just about anywhere or even generate your own power by sun or friction);
  • mesh networking: a combination of powerful wireless connections (can travel over 1km!) and ad-hoc networking help get many users sharing a single Internet connection;
  • no license fees, and endless scope to customise the software (thanks to a cut down Linux OS and open source apps);
  • good extensibility, with plug-and-play for standard USB peripherals (useful for an extra mouse and keyboard if you have got grown-up fingers - the keys are tiny!).
• Useful fold-back screen and mouse / tab controls on the screen casing. What it really cries out for in this mode is a touch screen, though.
• This device, more than any other we have seen, is all about kids. All about sharing. All about communicating and problem solving - in fact all about learning. OLPC should be a wake-up call for the first world as well ... why aren't we giving our kids the same tools?

The bad:

Slow and Unresponsive. This may sound ungrateful for such a cheap device, but bad responsiveness very quickly becomes a barrier. You can load multiple apps, but with two or three running at the same time the delays between mouse-movements and on-screen responses get so slow that many apps become unusable. Even drawing a single line in Paint results in a series of disconnected bits.

The ugly:

The interface (both software and hardware) suffers from many small irritants that you would hope get resolved in later releases. Individually they are just "quirks", but together they do start to make the "collaborative" nature of the OLPC development more visible. Some of our pet peeves are:

• The mouse pad: it looks like there are 3 mouse-pads, but only the central one works. You finger has no cue that you have moved onto one of the not-working pads so you keep "loosing your mouse". The pads need raised lines to separate them.
• The mouse buttons: need to stand out a little more. They are sunk-in, so tricky to use.
• Integrating with Sugar: the Linux interface being used (called Sugar) lets you access the main menu by moving your mouse to the 4 corners of the screen. A great idea, but several of the bundled apps also use the corners of the screen for menus and icons, which means the menu pops up by mistake when you want to use them!
• Webcam is off to the side of the screen, so the only way to get your face in shot is to lean over sideways! (Why not put it on top?)
• Even our veteran Linux developers struggled to find out how to upgrade what. It needs a single application to display all the technical information. For example: hardware version, software version, flash player version, security settings etc. Without this it is very fiddly to upgrade.

Overall we loved the X0 - but want more:

We love the fact it has had so much philanthropic energy put into it, and the bold, exploratory and collaborative ideals it encompasses. But we were frustrated enough with the speed and some of the interface quirks to give it the thumbs down until the next version gets released. If those get sorted, and it gets a touch-screen added, it will be one amazing device!

 

Review by Geoff Stead and the team at www.m-learning.org. Their blog is at moblearn.blogspot.com.

Selecting content for OpenLearn - an insider account

Guest Contribution from Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn

Note. This post arrived as a comment on Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?, but is published with Andy's agreement as a Guest Contribution.

Seb recently added to the debate as to whether the OU was publishing the right content on OpenLearn. In particular Seb said:

"I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) innovative environment. That would be a major missed opportunity."

On my part I an unclear as to what he thinks the 'best stuff' is or should be and what is the 'missed opportunity'. As Director of OpenLearn I can take full responsibility for what we have published and explain why we have done so, and make some comments on what I think he might be getting at.

It was always part of the plan that we would publish material from our existing courses and not write new stuff nor significantly rework the existing stuff. It was about opening up some of the wares from across the breadth and depth of what we have that our students study and generally find very satifactory giving the OU's results in the National Student Satisfaction surveys. And it is about exposing such material to both learners and teachers to make what they want of it.

The New Curiosity Shop Online College - Guest Contribution from Noel Chidwick

I needed a change. After twenty years in a Further Education college I thought it was about time to try something new, come out from under the stifling blanket of institutional life.  I am fascinated by the potential of online distance learning, but I watched with despair how colleges and universities were shedding their general interest courses in favour of  training for the job market, and how adult learners were becoming sidelined. In Scotland, the number of distance learners in FE dropped from over 27,000 in 2001 to under 13,000 in 2007. In a recent response to a consultation paper to the DFeS NIACE claim: “1.4 million places in publicly-supported adult learning in England have been lost over the last two years.” I thought it was time to stop talking and start doing.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Arthur Chapman, who also spent twenty years in the same college, agreed. After careful planning we built the model that is now the New Curiosity Shop Online College.

Help to define the requirements for a college web portal

Keith Burnett, who last year wrote a Guest Contribution about using Blogger to get teachers started with e-learning is seeking advice. He writes:

"I'm trying to map out what a college web portal should provide for various types of people: students; teachers: and middle managers. I'm trying to do this in a way that makes few assumptions about the systems used to provide the services/information. I've hit upon the 'extreme programming' ploy of 'user stories'. I'd be most grateful if people had a look at these and simply made comments - either to add services, or subtract them or to specialise the roles to more finely divided kinds of people."

Ten years of online learning at The Sheffield College: taking a new direction - Guest Contribution by Julia Duggleby and Julie Hooper

Earlier this year the Sheffield College celebrated 10 years of delivering online learning. Significantly for us, the end of this decade also marks a new beginning where the two previously distinct teams, Online Learning and Online English, have merged to combine resources and experience in new online learning initiatives such as a fully online BA Foundation Degree in e Communications (beginning February 2008) validated and topped up with an online BA Hons year by Sheffield Hallam University.  These teams have developed respectively some well known and award winning courses such as LeTTOL and English GCSE Online.

So as the College moves into its 11th year, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we have achieved, what challenges we face (and not always overcome), and what we hope to gain from the merger, through the e Communications Foundation Degree and in other ways.

Northern Rock fiasco, Google, my local primary school, and the OLPC device

Guest Contribution by Dick Willis

Those of you who listen to Radio 4's 'Round Britain Quiz' will be familiar with their format - the team has to work out the connection between various apparently unrelated items. Well, here's one for you: the Northern Rock fiasco, Google,  my local primary school, and the OLPC device?

OK, don't waste your time, you've got your email to deal with; I'll tell you...

Peoples-uni.org - an open access initiative for public health

Guest Contribution by Dick Heller

Dick Heller recently retired as Professor of Public Health at the University of Manchester, UK, where he developed a fully on-line Masters course in Public Health. Previously Dick was at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he was part of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network  (INCLEN).

Let me tell you about http://www.peoples-uni.org/ which aims to develop educational content around Open Educational Resources, freely available on the Internet, to help with Public Health capacity building in low- to middle-income countries.

Local universities offering public health education may be oversubscribed for face-to-face courses and fees for overseas universities, including e-learning distance programmes, are higher than can be afforded by most potential students in these countries. Internet-based e-learning has the exciting potential to deliver high quality learning resources anytime and anywhere, and although access is by no means universal it is improving quickly.

There is an ever expanding range of high quality on-line education resources freely available through the Internet, and a number of universities are putting educational material on-line for open access, although they do not include either teaching or accreditation of learning. Peoples-uni.org aims to provide educational context around the materials freely available on the Internet. A number of national and international partners have agreed to be part of this, and momentum is building.

We are starting with Public Health, building towards Masters level courses, and are piloting our first course module on Maternal Mortality currently. We have a large interest in accessing this course and the pilot is going very well. Draft course modules on Maternal Mortality and Child Mortality can be seen on http://moodle.cawd.net/course/category.php?id=68.

We are hoping for collaborations to develop to assist with this initiative, and plan to keep costs low enough to allow access by those who will benefit. Any groups or individuals who wish to join the initiative in any capacity will be welcome.

Dick Heller -  dick.heller "AT" manchester.ac.uk

Freebase: lowering the barriers for participation in the Semantic Web. Guest contribution from Phil Rees.

Freebase is a web application that organisations and individuals use to easily publish information on-line, in a semantic structure, collaboratively.  Contributors from around the world can use the application to structure and edit any topic in the system or define meaningful links and relationships between topics.  All of the information in Freebase is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means it can be reused for any purpose without going through a copyright clearance process.  To encourage the reuse of information, Freebase has made some programming tools available to ease the creation of web applications that extract live data from the system.