Beyond control 3

Continuing my report of ALT-C 2007… 

Staff and student perceptions of web-based lecture recording techniques – Dr Rob Phillips, Murdoch University

This was the second of three short papers with the common theme of user perceptions.

To set the scene: several Australian universities share a system of recording f2f lectures which can then be made available via the web. Lecturers can basically go into a lecture room, press a button and the lecture is recorded and then uploaded to a streaming server. Research into the use of the technology has been funded by a body called Carrick Institute. The students/staff were on campus, not distance learners. The main benefit for me in hearing this presentation was to see some parallels between attitudes to this particular technology and attitudes which we find in the UK in relation to different technologies such as putting lecture materials on a VLE.

• Students not only valued the web-based lectures for revision but also for deeper learning.
• Students rated the benefits much higher than the lecturers; even when students felt that the web-based lectures were helping them, staff said they didn’t know: staff didn’t seem to possess the mechanisms to judge
• Where lectures notice a drop in attendance at f2f lectures they can lose confidence and stop putting them on the web, rather than addressing other issues such as those of learning design.
• More info at www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/wblt/overview.htm

Going beyond management by control to management by engagement – are FE staff ready to engage?

A lively session by Alyson Dacey and Haydn Blackey of University of Glamorgan, describing an attempt to investigate attitudes to e-learning at one partner college of the University. Whilst the data gathered was somewhat sparse, it provides a useful starting point for the University’s efforts to engage in closer discussion with staff in its partner colleges about e-learning on franchise courses.

• management by compulsion is stressful and demotivating
• in order to change, staff must be willing and prepared (intrinsice rewards, such as personal satisfaction, are easier to access in HE than FE)
• engaged participants are ultimately more successful than management control
• SMT need to appreciate their staff’s values in relation to e-learning

In discussion, some ideas emerged about engaging staff: “recognition and reward showcase” events; newsletter features; staff who contribute to staff development events receive a letter of thanks copied to the head of school.

Summing Up of Large Scale Implementation strand

This was an attempt to ‘wrap up’ all the sessions that had figured under this strand. Some points emerged about what helps (or could help):

• collaboration (often achieved via funded projects)
• raising staff confidence (though as someone pointed out, speaking about students, “if you don’t want to learn you can’t be taught’
• Speed and flexibility of Web 2.0 – does this mean learning technologists are heading into the sunrise? (or is it the sunset…)
• need for politically astute/influential champion, a ’strategic ambassador’ to manoeuvre between different stakeholders
• learning technologists sometimes understand learning better than lecturers – they need to be on the relevant committees
• interesting idea that the enthusiasts are the wrong people to bring on the Luddites – their way of working is too different. And neither group are typical of the majority.
• Many staff are well disposed towards e-learning but don’t know how to start, lack leadership, are too frightened
• beware the ”next big thing” – this polarises people. SMT can be spellbound by hype
• Middle managers seen as important
• large scale implementation needs radical change (cf Selinger) yet institutions are risk averse, and benchmarking can encourage incremental change
• technology can be used to make space for change
• opportunity to serve greater diversity
• guerilla tactics
• whilst some of the discussion veered towards the pessimistic, there were notes of optimism: staff have access to much better training than in the past; also we should recognise that there is already a lot of good teaching about.

Peter Norvig keynote

This was an entertaining talk but I came away with few notes, apart from a book title Rainbow’s End.

Final observations

A number of people were blogging at the conference, but there was little free time in the programme to engage with these. Perhaps conference programmes need more space in future for such reflection. The ones I’ve sampled seemed to be a mix - some have really useful comments and others are breathtakingly trivial, though I guess it’s reassuring for example to know that other people are as bad at packing as I am. Came across microblogging for the first time (James Clay on Jaiku), can’t quite see the value at the moment, personally, but will have a look.

I’ve not been to a conference before where so many people have been visibly multitasking by working on their laptops during presentations, and during the breaks many people were glued to screens. James Clay has put some interesting comments on this aspect in his blog.

The international flavour of the conference was refreshing – we can be a bit parochial sometimes. It was great to hear so many accents – German, Indian, Australian, Chinese – and next year’s ALT-C in Leeds seem set to offer an even more international mix. 

Overall I found the conference enormously stimulating. It was interesting to undergo total immersion in a very different professional culture from what I’ve been used to (information professionals and JISC folk). I first read the conference title ‘Beyond control’ as a rallying call, even a cry of liberation: in fact that was one of the things that drew me to the event. Yet (and perhaps it’s in the nature of an academic conference to do this) many people seemed to be describing and re-stating the situation rather than putting practical solutions into place. The phrase ’beyond control’ can be heard in different ways, it can be a troubling prospect, and we need to appreciate that.

Also, many of the people with whom learning technologists need to collaborate (information professionals and IT managers) are at different conferences, chewing over the same challenges. Perhaps the opening up of such conferences via blogs, Elluminate and other tools will help this to change in the future?

Anyway, to sum up, a great conference and I look forward to the next time.

Beyond control 2

Here’s the second of three posts reporting on my attendance at ALT-C 2007. 

Dylan Wiliam’s keynote

This was a highlight of the conference for me: as well as being hugely entertaining, it helped to underpin a lot of the ideas coming out of other conversations (academic and social) and bounced off other ideas that I was able to take to subsequent sessions.

A new aspect for me was the use of the Elluminate web conferencing tool, allowing remote viewers to post queries which a moderator relayed to the speaker at the end as part of the Q&A. Not many questions came via that route, but it was an interesting demo of the tool’s potential. It would be good to have something similar to extend the value of normal videoconferencing.

Dylan Wiliam’s specific theme was assessment, and he had a number of interesting points to make specifically on that, which I’ll note separately (haven’t worked out how to deal with attachments to posts yet). A few more general ideas I noted were:

• “The future is further away than you think” (quite a comforting thought…)
• A teacher is of little use for the first seven years, then they have accrued enough value to last them 20 years (rather less comforting)
• Perfect teaching is not possible. Cannot predict what is learned. Education a liminal process, somewhere between control and chaos. (another comforting thought…)
• Good to hear it said that learning styles theory is not helpful or even necessary when designing learning ( it may be better to learn in a way that is less comfortable than we would prefer)
• Where does the teacher fit: s/he engineers the learning environment, provides the engaging factor and the regulatory framework. (Echoes of Michelle Selinger there).
• Importance of helping the learner achieve ‘flow’  as defined by Csikszentmihalyi, again echoing ideas I’ve heard at JISC learning spaces events. Have just looked this up on Wikipedia and like the way Csikszentmihalyi explained ‘flow’ as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Appreciative enquiry

Another highlight was Rhona Sharpe and George Roberts’ workshop “What gives life to our community?” A research method ‘appreciative enquiry’ is used as part of the evaluation of the JISC Emerge programme, both to evaluate the programme and also to foster the development of a community that is working with Web 2.0 tools.

To demonstrate how the technique works, we worked in pairs to interview each other about a community we had been part of, focussing on the things that had worked best.

I had had a brief glimpse of both Emerge and appreciative enquiry because Swansea University is participating in the project, and I had already been interviewed once using this technique. By taking the role of interviewer I was able to observe the technique working in relation to someone else’s situation. I was already convinced of its potential, but by taking the opposite role I was able to understand it much more fully.

Often when we are in the process of trying to help people engage with technology, which usually involves some change in their role, we have to find out about their context and what their drivers are. It seems that the appreciative enquiry approach which could help, for example with its focus on the positive, the licence it offers to break away from the self-deprecatory mode we often fall into, and celebrate the ‘best bits’. We discovered how talking about the positive can steer you in a positive direction; it can help access deeper feelings, revealing what makes people tick but in a way that feels relatively ’safe’ and structured.

In discussion it was pointed out that it is possible to learn positively from a past failure, but perhaps the appreciative enquiry technique can act as a corrective, avoiding too much dwelling on the bad side. It was interesting to learn that appreciative enquiry came from the world of NGOs and development economics.

The conversation begun during the appreciative enquiry session continued through lunch, as a colleague and I compared ideas on how we might use the technique in our work. I’d like to read more about Wenger and communities of practice to follow up the session.

E-benchmarking

What could have been a very dry session turned out to be very useful: several universities who had gone through the Higher Education Academy e-benchmarking exercise spoke about their own experiences. Though they were all using different methodologies and had been involved in different phases, there were a number of common points. All the projects are exhaustively documented as blogs, so here are just diverse points I noted from the different presentations:

• 7 Welsh institutions have been involved so far
• Of the various methodologies offered, most have gone for either OBHE (which has a long pedigree and therefore perhaps instils confidence) or Pick n Mix (for its flexibility, ability to scale to faculty/dept level). Clearly institutions valued the chance to choose a method that fitted with their philosophy.
• Institutions have related their benchmarking to national strategies
• Elgg is being used to support the projects
• Derby – workbased learning very important
• Bournemouth – e-resources were the main impetus
• Other drivers several people mentioned for the benchmarking exercise included: SMT change/restructuring; relevant point in the strategy production cycle; old practice has become old hat and needs refreshing; desire for external input; independent advice; lure of Pathfinder funding.
• Some institutions found it useful to define e-learning, but interestingly not all felt the need
• Benefits mentioned included: chance to refocus; enhanced knowledge of what is going on; highlight strengths; focus on the processes; links with other institutions; raised profile of e-learning; re-opened dialogue with departments; helped to make SMT realise that they need to resource e-learning. It’s a first step…
• at one institution, though they had axed basic IT skills training for undergrads since it was felt unnecessary, the exercise revealed that not all students are confident (this point was mentioned in other sessions I attended).
• strategies can be aspirational but need to be underpinned
• One institution mentioned that the big problem is: who is responsible for e-learning?
• One institution highlighted the challenge of showing return on investment and measures of success
• E-learning is often ignored in person specifications, prospectuses or faculty plans: need to raise its profile.

Beyond control: ALT-C Highlights Part 1

I’m just back from ALT-C, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology at Nottingham University, 3-6 September. It was my first visit to ALT-C and I would definitely recommend it. It provided an excellent way for me to mark my transition to a full-time role as Higher Education coordinator for RSC Wales. Contrary to my fears there were many other newcomers, and the group was very diverse.

The conference had around 500 delegates and as well as three keynotes there were four strands comprising workshops, short papers, symposia and research papers, not to mention a massive poster session and exhibition. Here’s an attempt to sum up four days of non-stop activity.

PebblePad

Kicked off with a pre-conference workshop on PebblePad, the e-portfolio product from University of Wolverhampton. The session was useful in giving an overview of the main features of the newly-released v.2 and allowing us to experiment with an account (everyone attending the workshop received one year’s free login). Most of the participants apart from me seemed to be lecturers whose departments either had or were evaluating the product. It’s in use in small and large HE, schools and some professional bodies such as the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists.

The interface is quite simple: clicking on a “pebble” on the home page (eg to create material) results in a zen-like water splash and in you go. I found myself presented with a variety of pre-designed templates for different kinds of activity, such as an action plan, blog or simply ‘thought’. We created different assets and were able to share and comment on them amongst the group. I have a few thoughts on how I could use this tool in the course of my work this year, eg for my own CPD record: fortunately it is possible to export your ‘webfolio’ as a standalone website if access is discontinued.

The workshop was also useful in highlighting a few generic issues around e-portfolios, e.g. space required on student servers; access for alumni; the fact that standards are still evolving; the development of PDA and WAP-enabled versions for access via mobile devices.

Monday evening took the form of a quiet drink in the bar catching up with colleagues from University of Glamorgan and Swansea, a gentle warm up for the marathon that lay ahead…

Day 2

The first day had been quite structured; the rest of my conference experience can best be summed up as one long conversation about learning in some shape or form.

In an attempt to convey the spirit rather than the factual content (which I guess will appear on the ALT website) here are some quotes and ideas I jotted down.

Michelle Selinger’s keynote

• “Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” (Lloyd George). Yet we tend to tinker round the edges – academic publishers are still wedded to print; we create podcasts of lectures and put lecture notes on the VLE. [but I think our funding system and audit culture encourage us to take few risks]
• The original telephone was created for listening to concerts and making public announcements -  nice example of people veering off the path set out by the pioneers
• John Seely Brown - the importance of learning to improvise to solve problems (interesting echoes here of earlier JISC learning spaces discussions with Les Watson, and of current discussions in the library world about rethinking teaching of information literacy). Need for a knowledgeABLE society.
• North-South divide and ‘learning imperialism’ [could be applied to urban-rural Wales?]
• Personal learning environments predicted to be on the verge of takeoff, combining formal and informal learning
• Learners need analytical intelligence as well as practical and creative skills, persistence, metacognitive skills, power tools and play (“learning 2.0″)
• Need to harness the power of student-authored work
• Media literacy is important
• Interested reference to some Australian work with 8-12 year olds in schools, where the children devised what questions they were going to set themselves, learning there isn’t always a right answer, benefits of collaboration etc.
• Not all learners are ground-breakers
• Assessment is political
• Teachers model the learning process, they are the expert learner, apprentice model (echoes again of what librarians were saying at LILAC).
• Student literacy is acknowledged as a problem: partial solution may be to get them accustomed to writing for different audiences
• Student motivation problem: don’t want to learn when they have to leave their culture at the door, they need problems to solve.

Speed networking

All my careful planning with the weighty conference handbook went out of the window almost straight away, as my chosen workshops (on wikis) were fully booked. So it was purely by chance I ended up in a ’social networking’ workshop. Imagine speed dating with a pile of business cards, one party hat and four ‘dates’ at a time. Not as scary as it sounds, it was good fun and an excellent icebreaker for us ALT-C novices. Even if you couldn’t remember a thing about eachother by the afternoon, at least you had a few familiar faces to say hello to in the dinner queue. Speed networking definitely beats standing around wearing an ”I’m new” badge and a forlorn expression.

Informs workshop

Good to have an element of information literacy in a conference where librarians/information professionals were noticeable by their absence. Emily Shields of Manchester Met and colleagues from MIMAS gave a very useful workshop.

I’d seen Informs when it was first developed, but I hadn’t used it much and it was good to see how it has moved on in recent months, following its move to Intute.

In essence, Informs offers librarians a tool to create ‘guide on the side’ tutorials for topics like how to use a particular online database or how to choose resources. Interestingly some of the most popular types of guide are not for library resources as such but for tools like whiteboards and referencing software, in fact these have proved some of the most popular. Manchester Met staff showed how they’ve used Informs on a large scale in conjunction with their electronic library. There are around 140 institutions using, and 2000 tutorials (which you can easily customise).

Apart from a general facelift, Intute have enhanced Informs with a quiz creation facility, stats reporting and a facility for users to communicate, which it woudl be useful to find out more about.

They have worked out a way of integrating Informs with WebCT (and to a lesser extent Blackboard) but unfortunately not Moodle as yet- it would be nice to see this happen.

Three short papers to end the day:

• Online silence: a space for learning or anti-social? – this is some doctoral research from Sheffield University. I was intrigued by the title: I’ve noticed that non-participation in online communities is often perceived as very negative, whilst in a face to face group, the quiet person can often be an asset, perhaps by being ‘the good listener’ or doing the practical stuff. Unfortunately the short paper format didn’t really provide the space to explore the topic in any depth. However it was good to be reminded of the important role silence and reflection can play in a conversation, and in learning, especially higher and professional learning.

• Developing borderless learning spaces: interactive Teaching and Learning Observatories – this basically covered videoconferencing in teacher training at University of Nottingham’s CETL-Visual Learning Lab. They started off seven years ago doing straightforward lesson observation, but have gradually moved towards more interactive use. Several of their examples involved modern languages teaching and international conferencing. It was interesting to see how they had developed the use of the videoconferencing technology over a sustained period. Maybe there would be some useful contacts here for our Welsh Video Network.

• Bridging 3D and Web-based virtual learning environments – learned a new term: MUVE (multi-user virtual environments eg Second Life). Unfortunately this session was really talking about tools rather than seeing them in use, which felt rathre dissatisfying. The main points that came out for me were the drawbacks of Second Life as a learning environment (difficulty of navigation, lack of support, lack of orientation, “too much” freedom, authentication). Sloodle was mentioned, integrating Second Life with Moodle, but it wasn’t possible to learn much practical information and I guess it’s a question of getting in and trying it.

Comedy Night

Laughter, free drinks and late night conversation at Jongleurs in Nottingham, courtesy of Wimba. Here and throughout the conference, the commercial presence was surprisingly low-key, though we are unlikely to forget our sponsors’ slogan which was comprehensively ridiculed and thus imprinted on our brains. Good to get away from campus for a few hours.