#JISCEL12 Making your mark
I’ve just finished a Skype call with Tony Toole who is preparing a presentation for Session 3 in the JISC Innovating e-Learning Activity week.
Tony was the project manager for the JISC “SWANI” (Secure Work-Based Learning Administration through Networked Infrastructure).
The Project successfully created a digitised document management system for the administration of Work Based Learning in South West Wales which included a digital signature system that satisfied the audit requirements of the EU and the Welsh Government who jointly fund the WBL programme.
The POTSPAN project follows on from SWANI, and is piloting the digitised system with the Skills Academy Wales WBL consortium partners.
We’ll be discussing solutions to problems of authentication and other related topics on Tuesday 13th November 2012 15:00-16:00 in Blackboard Collaborate.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 The Noble @Dr_Black
@stephenfry: The noble @Dr_Black has her @unbounders book on Bletchley Park out now. #BPark How the war was shortened…
Original Message:
http://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/261567705331679233
“The noble Dr Black” has the ring of a first class Bond Villain, but in this case it’s Dr Sue Black, computer scientist, and friend of Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park was the centre of code code breaking during World War 2, and home of not just pop heroes like Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers, but apparently thousands of bright young minds.
The work they did there not only saved millions of lives, and cut the war short by 2 years, but was the genesis of the modern computer.
@Dr_Black used social media in a campaign to help save Bletchley Park, and has written about this in an “unbound” book. You can support publication of Dr Sue Black’s book by pledging at: http://unbound.co.uk/books/saving-bletchley-park
You can hear Dr Sue Black provide the opening keynote at the JISCEL12.
The Keynote is titled: “Innovation, Innovation, Innovation” and will be looking at “What could be more important than helping others to learn?”.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/elpconference12/programme/opening_keynote.aspx
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 Black magic
I can remember doing a very brief demo of some Augmented reality technology at an RSC event in Birmingham, probably in 2003?
The demo was from HITLabs NZ “Black Magic”, it involved printing out the big blocky fiduciary markers, aiming a web cam at them, and running a program in a terminal window.
If you held out the marker in your hand a little sail boat plotted a course around your palm.
I waited for ages to see a really useful educational example, not having much use for small sailing ships in my day job teaching Agriculture, and the best stuff seemed to be part of the abortive BBC Jam project.
More recently I’ve had the real privilege of seeing the SCARLET project build AR toolkits to extend the teaching and learning capacity of rare books: http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/ and the work at Exeter on unlocking the hidden curriculum.
All this leads up to my delight on hearing that Kendal College were successful in getting funding for a project in the recent JISC Advance FE programme, to create some AR resources to support plumbers, having already seen their AR prospectus.
The second Activity week session at the JISC Innovating e-Learning conference will look at the Kendal College project, the Colleges Wales project, to build an itunes hub, and reflect on the other 28 projects in the programme.
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 solving more interesting problems
In planning the JISC innovating e-Learning Activity week Timeline session I encountered an issue that will be picked up in the first session of the main conference week: “Open Architectures”.
We often say that we let the pedagogy lead our decisions, and whilst this is a noble aim, any decision on technology has an impact on what is possible, and what must be sacrificed. I am using Googledocs to populate my Verite teaching technology timeline. This has the advantage of being fantastically simple to set-up:
- grab the google spreadsheet template from the Verite site
- add a form to allow folk to submit their own entries
- publish.
I then had to twiddle a few lines of html and it all sprang into life.
The form means anyone can submit items to the timeline, without needing to login, or run special software.
The disadvantage is that the Google API (Application Programming Interface) limits things to 100 entries.
restriction can be a plus
At this point I could have chosen to investigate building a form that submits entries to a timeline database as JSON, which was not without appeal.. but the more interesting problem is to see how I can make the restriction work to my advantage.
In this instance the restriction works well, giving me a limit to the timeline size, and adding in a level of competition to the Activity week session, where folk will have to defend their choices. It also lets me use the “History in a 100 objects” in the title, resonating with Radio 4 listeners.
The sacrifice is the lost data points, the additional stories that might not get told.
The first session of the main conference week: “Open Architectures – solving more interesting problems” will be looking at how the decisions we make shape what is possible.
I will be looking to see what happens when I reach 100 objects.
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 The final countdown
There are just 19 days left till the JISC Innovating e-Learning Online Conference 2012 opens its virtual doors for the first Activity week session… my session!
The theme of the conference is “shaping the future”, and it occurred to me to plot our trajectory we really need to think about where we’ve come from. I’d seen the XCRI timeline that Lou McGill had created for CETIS, but wanted something that could be used collaboratively.
I asked the champs list for suggestions for suitable timeline tools, and settled on the remarkable Verite timeline script combined with a Google spreadsheet and form, as suggested by Martin Hawksey.
The Verite TimelineJS can use Flickr, Googlemaps, Youtube and maybe even tweets, and even creates an embed generator to run the script from their site.
Here’s a link to my first attempt at adding some of the key timeline landmarks from my teaching timeline plus a few I pinched from Ben Ryan’s talk at Dev8ed :
http://wychwolf.com/jisc/timeline.html
We’ll be starting fresh in Activity week.
What technology made a difference to your teaching?
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
#JISCEL12 The way of the future
The theme of this years JISC Online e-Learning conference is “shaping the future”, and it’s perhaps timely to look back and think that we’ve been running the conference for seven years and consider how far we’ve come.
Would the conference delegates of 2005 think we’re living the dream, or still asking the same questions, and trying the same solutions?
In the run up to the conference I’m going to be looking at the topics covered in the conference Activity week sessions, considering the distance travelled, and what the future might hold.
To help with this reflection, I’ll be asking three questions…
What does the future hold?
What do we need to change?
What are we doing to adapt?
Of course my flip answer to “What does the future hold?” is always jetpacks and rocket-boots.
But if I’m serious, what does the future hold?…
What are your answers?
I’m also going to be picking up on the idea of pledges from the closing keynote of #jiscel11 Ewan Mackintosh. Did you make a pledge last year? Did you stick to it? Will you make a pledge this year?
#jiscel12pledge
Recording of closing keynote 2011
Powerpoint from closing keynote 2011
I’d be delighted to hear your comments.
Changing the learning landscape
JISC communities may be interested in two current opportunities in the Changing the Learning Landscape programme, a new partnership venture we’re involved in which aims to take a multi-pronged approach to helping English higher education providers make strategic changes in the way they use technology to support learning, teaching and the student experience. If that sounds a bit all-encompassing, it’s meant to: the programme has a broad focus which encompasses technology-enhanced learning as well as using technology in other ways to support students and staff. It’s also broad in its audience group – the programme’s activities will be relevant to senior managers, anyone involved in implementing technology-enhanced change, educational developers, and academic programme teams. There is a strong theme of student engagement which runs throughout the programme.
The progamme is a partnership between the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, the Higher Education Academy, Association for Learning Technology, National Union of Students and JISC, and is funded by HEFCE. It has three strands of activity:
- an intensive development programme for strategic leaders;
- the provision of consultancy support and expertise to institutional teams involved in technology-enhanced change; and
- a CPD programme for academics and educational developers.
The first two of these strands are currently open for applications.
The strategic change programme aims to equip leaders of learning, teaching and the student experience to develop, communicate and deliver a vision for the enhancement of these areas through the strategic use of learning technologies. It has interesting links with JISC’s Developing Digital Literacies Programme, which has identified digitally literate senior management as one of the key emerging themes: what skills do strategic managers need in order to develop digital capacity across the institution and develop a cutting-edge digital environment for learning and research? Applications for the strategic change programme are now closed, and the programme started with a face to face event on 27-28 November.
The consultancy support strand offers the equivalent of six days of support to institutional teams to help them implement strategic change in the use of learning technology. Support is available in a wide range of areas, and is provided free of charge to the institution. JISC is planning to bring everything we have learned about supporting our projects to this strand. Bids from institutions will need to outline the project they wish to work on, with evidence for the need for the work. Round 1 is now closed, but watch out for round 2.
Minding our open language at ALTC
Amber Thomas and I ran a session at the ALTC2012 conference entitled “Openness – Learning from our history”. Amber has already written about her reflections on the Digital Infrastructure team blog, and I’ll be capturing some more of my reflections after a similarly themed presentation at OpenEd with Sheila MacNeill of CETIS.
But the main point of the session, for me was to spark a discussion on where “open education” had been and where it might go. I had an (admittedly uncontentious) conception that the “open education” movement was a set of occasionally allied “strands” rather than a single unified idea – and I think the discussion proved that.
But you might be here for the langague…
Many delegates chose to describe (for me) fundamental issues with open educational practice with elision, as if they were a taboo word. So we had:
- The “f-word”: Funding
- The “a-word”: Academics
- The “p-words”: Policies and Pragmatics
- The “c-words”: Competencies and Confidence
- And the “b-word”: Business models
Now this may have been just a bit of a “conference LOL” meme, but I was surprised that so many of the things we have been talking about explicitly right the way through the UKOER are still seen as “things we don’t discuss”. For such a simple idea “putting stuff you use in teaching on the web to let others use it” has sparked a lot of different responses and initiatives, spiralling off in a number of (often contradictory) dimensions.
We’ve seen:
- the growth of online courses, harking back to the democratising learning through technology dreams of the late 90s.
- the advocates of usage data attempting to demonstrate the worth of openness.
- The advocates of large-scale formal repurposing (with roots in the c2002 reusable learning object model) sighing in despair at the “anarchistic” and wilfully diverse OER ecosystem.
But, at heart, the simple idea of OER is now established. It is quick, free and easy to make something and stick it on the web with a license. As one delegate put it: “Openness is the potential to do a lot with very little funding”. The costs – I am increasingly made aware – come with drawing it together and describing it.
With concerns around costs and business cases, many are beginning to grapple with questions of commercialisation. And much of the discussion concerned the obvious and unassailable tension between open ideals and commercial “reality”*. I don’t think anyone expects to see – in their lifetime – a world where all content is open, and there are many fascinating projects (PublishOER springs immediately to mind) that are engaged in understanding the interface between the paid- and free- content worlds.
Finance is also a big part of some strategies to capture the attention of institutional managers – again supporting the Wellerian “big OER” content-plus model of release. One delegate reminded us with such approaches comes the pressure to “compete with expert content providers”. And, naturally, it is needed to support the nascent “open online learning” movement, evidenced by the flurry of venture capital around big US start-ups.
There’s a danger in these “open silos” (as one delegate put it) of what I like to call “OER plus” initiatives that we lose the simple practicality of open release, and with it the simple message that it really is pretty damn awesome to share.
As UKOER3 funded work comes to an end there is a lot of interesting things to participate in. If you have an interest in the technology around OER, please do contribute to a forthcoming book “Into the Wild”.
* yes – there is a whole can of worms in that choice of word which I tried to unpack elsewhere.
Managing Change
Following conversations with representatives of a number of projects over the months since the Course Data programme began it has become increasingly apparent that there was a recognised need for some additional support and information around change management.
Change is at the core of so much project work and if it is not managed appropriately it can have major implications for the success or otherwise of a project.
We held a workshop for Course Data and other projects on Managing Change this week led by John Burke, a Senior Adviser at JISC infoNet.
A number of Course Data colleagues (some of whom also have Transformation project roles) participated in the workshop which took the form of a mix of theory and interactive elements. The main interactive element was a computer simulation depicting the realities in implementing change in the education environment.
One of the first activities we took part in involved identifying, from our own experiences, both positive and negative approaches and outcomes of change and change management. There were dozens of post-its filled in and stuck to the H forms on the wall with smiley faces to represent happy/good experiences and sad faces for the unhappier/bad experiences. Broadly the responses could be summarised as follows:
Bad change management as experienced by the workshop participants were the result of poor communication and consultation; changes happening too fast; increased pressure and workload experienced by those affected; lack of training to support the change; use of jargon which can confuse and alienate and ultimately lead to feelings of disempowerment; change for its own sake – lack of strategic vision and anything impacting negatively on staff morale.
Good and bad experiences of change management presented here on an H form
And the good…. a clear vision – so that even if you disagree with it you understand why it’s happening; good communication – someone happy to answer questions; structured change; obvious improvements made- bottlenecks removed, more appropriate and efficient systems resulting from the change; creative approaches used; fresh challenges and new opportunities resulting from the change and time for reflection available during the process.
John gave us an overview of Change theories – included drivers and strategies for change and he outlined some tools and approaches that could be used to help manage change successfully. Much of the content of the workshop relates to the Change Management infoKit which provides further details on the theories and tools that have been tried and tested within the sector.
The impact of change cannot be underestimated, John spoke about parallels between emotions of bereavement and emotions involved in change for some people.
The second half of the workshop was largely based around a computer simulation activity. The participants worked in pairs on a scenario which, whilst factual, had elements that were not too far away from the reality of managing change within a real educational environment, including having to be delivered within a certain timeframe.
This element of the workshop helped participants to consider the challenges involved in how stakeholders within an organisation can react to change, to consider cultural aspects of work environments, nurturing relationships, and to think about routes into influencing change. As the introduction to the exercise explained ‘changing the way people think and behave in organisations is not a simple task and often requires a combination of different tactics to be used at the right time with the right people’. Furthermore in this exercise, as in real-life, it is important to consider the context in which you are working; review and understand the different initiatives available; develop a strategy to guide you through the project – eg be it top-down or bottom-up; be resilient, things won’t always happen as quickly as you’d like and often not as planned; stay focused on the goal and review and evaluate progress at regular intervals.
Delegates worked in pairs on Educhallenge computer simulation
The simulation offers the user the chance to use ‘interventions’ in order to influence the progress of the project – it is important to nurture an understanding of the individual people that are involved in the project in order to get the best possible outcomes. Working on the simulation in pairs offered delegates the chance to talk through potential implications and consequences of making certain decisions.
On a side note I talked to John about the reason behind using pairs to work on the simulation and he explained that his experience has shown that when people have worked on the simulation by themselves they have been more likely to treat it as more of a game – they’ve taken it less seriously; and when he has tried the exercise in groups of three it is often the case that one team member feels that their voice is not being heard in the decision-making process.
Decisions were made in pairs and trainer John was on hand for additional advice
We used an instant feedback approach (which would be followed by a more formal post-event feedback survey) at the end of the session to find out what delegates thought about the day and the types of approaches that had been introduced. Using pictures and post-its can be a very valuable way of getting an instant idea of what has been useful to the participant, what they really like, could use now, could use later and what isn’t relevant to them.
Instant feedback using pictures - trolley for ideas that participants will take back to their projects, shelf for ideas for the future, what to think about, what to discard in the litter bin, what was loved (heart) and what can be put 'in the pocket' for instant use.
The 'Shopper feedback' illustration filled with post-its at the Change Management event
Feedback on the exercise, and indeed the workshop, has so far been very good, and participants have already suggested ways in which some of the tools and techniques can be used within project activities.
A collection of Change Management related resources (including links to some of the tools and techniques used and the Change Management infoKit) was compiled that may prove useful to anyone dealing with change within projects and organisations more generally.
JISC: Sharing effective practice in lifelong learning, e-portfolios, innovation in FE, digital literacies and learning environments
The JISC e-Learning Programme team is pleased to announce the release of five new publications on the themes of lifelong learning, e-portfolio implementation, innovation in further education, digital literacies, and extending the learning environment. These publications will be of interest to managers and practitioners in further and higher education and work based learning. Three of these publications are supported by additional online resources including videos, podcasts and full length case studies.
Effective Learning in a Digital Age is an effective practice guide that explores ways in which institutions can respond flexibly to the needs of a broader range of learners and meet the opportunities and challenges presented by lifelong learning.
Crossing the Threshold: Moving e-portfolios into the mainstream is a short guide which summarises the key messages from two recent online resources, the e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit, developed for JISC by the University of Nottingham, and five institutional video case studies. This guide and accompanying resources explore the processes, issues and benefits involved in implementing e-portfolios at scale.
Enhancing practice: Exploring innovation with technology in further education is a short guide that explores how ten colleges in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (SWaNI) and England are using technology to continue to deliver high-quality learning and achieve efficiency gains despite increasing pressure and reduced budgets.
Developing Digital Literacies is a briefing paper that provides a snapshot of early outcomes the JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme and explores a range of emergent themes including graduate employability, and the engagement of students in strategies for developing digital literacies.
Extending the learning environment is a briefing paper that looks at how institutions can review and develop their existing virtual learning environments. It offers case study examples and explores how systems might be better used to support teaching and learning, improve administrative integration or manage tools, apps and widgets.
All guides are available in PDF, ePub, MOBI and text-only Word formats. Briefing papers are available in PDF.
There are a limited number of printed copies of each guide for colleges and universities to order online.