Your Learning Technologist of the Year wishes to thank all her colleagues at IET, Open University, particularly Doug Clow for immortalising her recent visit with this commemorative paper plaque.
I’m just wondering if my former employers, the University of Strathclyde are creating something similar, or if my former office has now reverted to a stationary cupboard.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the agile approach the OER Research Hub team at the Open University are adopting, and in particular the use of sprints. This week I’ve been in Milton Keynes with the team for their latest sprint week and have had the opportunity to experience first hand a research sprint.
As I said in my previous post, the notion of a research sprint has intrigued me. Could this software development technique really be adapted and more importantly be effective in a research context? Well, it seems it can. As part of my Evaluation Fellow role I was interviewing all of the team during the week and there was unanimous agreement of the value of the sprint. Particularly in (re) focusing attention on key project level deliverables and sharing of findings within the team.
The project is taking an active collaboration approach and this week the core team were joined by three of the project fellows (Kari Arfstrom from the Flipped Learning Network, Thanh Le from Vital Signs/ Gulf of Maine and Daniel Williamson from Connexions/OpenStax). It’s probably too early to say just exactly what the fellows think of the sprint approach – they are probably just over jet-lag today! But it certainly seemed like a perfect way to quickly focus attention on activity and give a wider perspective of what is going on in within this quite complex project and establish strong connections within the core team at the OU.
I have to confess I don’t have a lot of personal experience of being in a sprint, but I did participate in a couple of scrums for a software project a couple of years ago, and the experience this week was very similar. Profs and project leads Martin Weller and Patrick McAndrew take the role of product owners and, with the project co-ordinator Claire Walker, had devised a list of tasks/products. These were prioritized and allocated by the whole team on Monday afternoon using a combination of voting and post it notes.
Each morning this week a short scrum meeting is taking place where everyone shares what they have done and what they are going to do for that day which is directly related to the agreed tasks. Standing and the catching/throwing of a small smartie box plays a vital role in keeping the meetings running smoothly and to time. Shared google docs with task lists are also keeping track of progress. The team are also keeping a shared reflective diary of the week. It’s not appropriate for me to share any information about this, but I do think that shared reflection is vital when participating in a relatively new way of working – not least just to ensure that lessons learned are shared and (hopefully) incorporated into future projects. As the project has four distinct areas of research, I found the sprint reminiscent of a programme meeting in bringing a set of smaller projects together and focusing activity on key areas.
Although I had to leave half way through the week there was a palpable sense of things getting done and that by the end of the week the project will have a number of deliverables ready to go and a clear focus for others over the coming months. This includes a series of webinars starting next month where Rob Farrow will take the lead around OER and policy changes at institutional level.
I’m not sure if it actually makes a difference by I did particularly like spending most of my working week in a “superpod”. As you can see from the picture below, you too could quite easily convert an office into a superpod too 🙂
The ALT-C conference is always a bit of an annual highlight for me and many others in the UK learning technology community. It’s always a great place to catch up with old friends, make new ones and meet online ones in person. This year was particularly special for me as not only did I get a short paper presentation accepted but I was also one of the invited speakers. I even got to be interviewed by Martin Hawksey for ALT-tv. And, of course the highlight of the week for me was being awarded the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Award.
I can’t begin to explain how much that recognition and validation of my work from my peers means to me. As I said in my post yesterday it is also a huge validation of the work of all my Cetis colleagues, and I hope goes some way to explaining the themes of my invited speaker session where I tried to emphasis the role of networks and sharing in allowing innovation and ideas to spread and thrive in our community. Have the space for thinking outwith institutional pressures is vital, and I really hope we don’t lose it.
Unsurprisingly there was a lot of talk about MOOCs over the three days, including my own session where I reflected on my own experiences of MOOCing and some of the strategies I have developed to navigate myself through various courses. There was a lot of discussion about dropping out, and if we should think of MOOCs as courses or as Stephen Downes said in his keynote, more like newspapers where it doesn’t matter if you don’t read the whole thing.
I’ve dropped in and out and even finished a few MOOCs now and to be honest I’m not sure it matters that much what you call them. If you are going to engage in any kind of learning you need to have time (and be realistic about that commitment). You also need the confidence to develop your own “learner driven strategies”. I think for a lot of people particularly in the educational learning technology community MOOCs maybe the first time in a long time that they have experienced what is traditionally seen as failure by not completing a course. We really do need to have some major mindshifts about “completion = success”. I could rant on about that for hours but won’t instead you can have a look at my presentation from yesterday where I examine my own experiences.
I was (and still am) absolutely thrilled to have been awarded ALT’s Learning Technologist of the Year award at the annual conference dinner last night. The recognition of my work by my peers is fantastic and I join a very elite club including James Clay, Josie Fraser and Cristina Costa. As I’m not a traditional learning technologist, this award is even more significant to me as it is recognition of the role of people like me who work to support innovation in the sector through community building and sharing, my presentation from yesterday’s showcase illustrates more. Although an individual award, I have to thank my good friends and colleagues Christina Smart and Lorna Campbell for doing the hard work and filling in the application form and then telling me 🙂 In many ways this is a team award and recognition of the work of everyone at Cetis. I’d also like to congratulate all my fellow award winners – there really is some brilliant work being done in the sector, and it is great that it is being celebrated by ALTs award scheme.
I was also overwhelmed by all the good wishes from people not here in Nottingham this week I received on twitter and facebook. And I have to share this particular one from Jisc colleagues Lawrie Phipps and Myles Danson. I do hope that they managed to get out of that car last night.
This week I’m at the ALT-C conference in Nottingham, and in a slight change to plan my invited speaker session was shifted to yesterday afternoon. In my talk I tried to convey the complexity of working in innovation and the need for space for people to connect, reflect and share. As well as warning people of the danger of “following the shiny things”, I also wanted to convey the importance of have people like me who have the space to look at new things outwith an institutional context and feedback into the sector. I also may have mentioned shoes and Sponge Bob Square Pants . . .
Here are my slides, and once the recording is made available I’ll put that on line too.
It’s been a bit of a strange week this week, but work wise I’ve mainly been thinking about the ALT-C conference next week and I’ve been enjoying exploring the new conference platform designed and built by my good buddy and colleague Martin Hawksey.
I’m delighted (and slightly terrified) to be one of the invited speakers this year, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my presentation titled “my life as a sponge” which will be a bit of ramble around the theme of innovation via Sponge Bob Square Pants. I’m also presenting a paper on Learner driven strategies and technologies for effective engagement with MOOCs, based on my own recent experiences. And even more excitingly I have made the short list for the Learning Technologist of the Year award so will be joining my fellow nominees on Wednesday morning for a showcase of our work.
A couple of non ALT things tho have caught my eye this week including the news that SNAPP (Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice) is now working again. For anyone interested in learning analytics and exploring networked behaviour in discussion forums it’s well worth a look.
Also on the analytics front here’s really interesting video presentation from Kirsten Zimbardi, University of Queensland called “Analytics of student interactions with electronic feedback using UQmarkup” -which is an “academic friendly” system for giving feedback to large cohorts (c. 1,000 students).
As I blogged about earlier this month, I’m currently working with the OER Research Hub team helping them to evaluate their progress, outputs and future developments.
The project is taking a collaborative research approach which includes practitioners/teachers from a number of different educational sectors and countries as well as the “core” team of researchers based at the OU. Given the global spread of project fellows a key challenge for the project is to ensure that the team are able to share their findings and experiences between themselves effectively and provide the basis and data for the OER Research Evidence Hub.
One of the approaches the team has been experimenting with is taking the premise of agile programming and adapting it to a research project (see Patrick’s post about the first research sprint for a bit more detail).
Now, when I heard about this I was intrigued. Typically educational research “products” don’t really lend themselves to anything particularly agile, particularly some peer reviewed journal outputs. Any research based on actual teaching practice does need more than a few sessions to generate meaningful results. Agile programming tends to have very specific, pre-defined outputs, it’s actually often not the most creative of approaches. Whereas academic research (particularly in the education domain) tends much more open ended. Hypothesis are there more to be broken as well as to be proved, the unexpected is embraced.
Bringing researchers who form part of a globally distributed team together for set periods to focus on certain aspects of research project does make sense. As does having some kind of structure, particularly for focusing “group minds” on potential outputs (products), adaptation of peer programming could be useful for peer review etc. However implementing “proper” agile programming methodology to research is problematic.
But if we stick with the programming analogy and stop thinking in terms of products, and start thinking of research as a service (akin to software as a service) then maybe there is more milage. A key part of SaS approaches are APIs, allowing hooks into all sorts of sites/ services so that they can in effect talk to each other.
I noticed earlier this week a post from Brian Proffitt on readwrite talking about the need for personal APIs to help organise individuals interactions, but what I’m thinking of in this context is quite the reverse. I’m thinking of researchers seeing themselves as APIs. They need to be the hooks providing entry points into their research which create effective, interactive dissemination or more accurately communication (as described in this Is it time to ban the term ‘dissemination? post by Caroline Cassidy).
In any research based on teaching practice as is the case with the OER Research Hub, there is always (imho) a tension between research and practice. Sharing effectively lessoned learned with actual teachers and at the same time producing the empirical data that qualified “proper” research requires is challenging and can actually create a gulf between research and practice. I think Learning Design suffered a bit from this. For example, as a teacher I really want to know quickly and easily what people did with OER, where they found it, how it actually changed things for them in the classroom, the pragmatic stuff, not the “science bit” with all the statistics. I probably don’t have time to read an academic paper. As a researcher I may well be more interested in the quantitive data, and reading a “proper academic paper”. As a funder I really want to know what you’ve done with my money, what difference have you made? I don’t need you to regurgitate in several different ways the original project proposal. Equally in all cases I might be interested in more “lite” reflection such as a descriptive blog post, video interview etc, or a combination of them all.
The key thing therefore is for the researcher to think of themselves more as the interface between their work, the data, the findings, the “what actually happened in the classroom” bits and focus on ways to allow as wide a range of stakeholders to easily “hook” into them so they can use the outputs meaningfully in their own context.
In many ways this is actually the basis of effective digital scholarship in any discipline and of course what many researchers already do. In the context of open collaborative research into OERs and wider open educational practice in particular, I wonder if the research as API analogy could help focus development of sharing research outputs and developing really effective interactions with research data and findings?
The team have already identified a number of key challenges for next year including measuring impact -v- attitudinal data, the validity of comparing diverse contexts as well evidence for critical reflection and its relation to OER so have lots of potential hooks and the project blog is filling up with some really useful reflection and early findings from the research to date.
I’m joining the the team next month for their next sprint so will be getting lots more insights into how a ‘research sprint” actually works, but in the meantime I’d love to hear any views you may have.
Although August is traditional holiday time for most in the sector (and beyond), I was one of about 300 people who travelled to Dundee yesterday for the annual eAssessment Scotland conference. Now it its fifth year it is becoming a well established date in the Scottish, UK and international calendar. It’s certainly one of my favourite events, and now being self employed, the fact that it is free to attend is an added bonus.
I’m still adjusting to my new working life, and although I am able to carry on using almost the same technologies to support my practice, the downside of not having a “.ac.uk” email address is that I can’t connect to the eduroam wifi service. Now, on a day to day basis that isn’t an issue but at conferences held at Universities, connection to the service is something I have started to take for granted. As you’ll know dear reader, I have been know to send one of two tweets from conferences. The latest Jisc Inform (scroll down the page) has a short article by me about my use of twitter and in particular its use in conferences.
So yesterday I was “caught short” a bit as I couldn’t automagically connect to eduroam, my mobile phone signal wasn’t very strong in the lecture theatre and so I wasn’t able to tweet. I should have checked with the fabulous conference team and I’m sure I would have got access to another network, but I just didn’t think!
Now, not being able to tweet for most people wouldn’t be a big thing, but I was quite startled how strange it was for me just to take notes and not tweet and share the #easc13 goodness. In fact several people did ask me why I wasn’t tweeting. So at least I know at least I’m recognised for something . . .
One of the themes the first keynote by Cathrine Cronin (a long standing twitter buddy of mine and it was lovely to at last meet her face to face) raised was openness, and the value of sharing with peers. I know I have become a much more open practitioner over the past 6 or so years via twitter and blogging. Not being able to instantly share instantly yesterday was very counter intuitive for me. Also as I said in the Inform Article, conferences are a great place to utilise twitter to share, meet and then continue relationships and extend your community. So over the weekend I’m going to explore the twitter archive and try and catch up with the “chat” from the day.
It’s always difficult to distil a conference in a single post but just for the record some of my highlights were:
So well done to David, Kenji, the sponsors and all the team for yet again pulling off another great event. I’ll be back next year, and hopefully at full tweeting strength.
Open and education, they go hand in hand, a bit like bread and butter or fish and chips. For over a decade, the open education movement has been steadily making inroads into the collective conscious. Through various global initiatives there is increasing evidence to illustrate that there is more than “just a feeling” that OER and open educational practice can have an impact on teaching and learning.
Building in particular on the work of the OpenLearn, Bridge to Success and OLnet projects, and other developments in the wider open education movement, the OER Research Hub is focused on gathering evidence around the positive impact of OER, and open practice in teaching and learning.
Funded by the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation, the project provides:
a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question ‘What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?’ and identify the particular influence of openness. (http://oerresearchhub.org/about/)
As the project moves towards the end of its first year of funding, I’m working with the team to evaluate their overall approaches, methodologies, findings, outputs and dissemination. So, I have spent some time over the last couple of weeks immersing myself in the world of the OER Research Hub and familiarising myself with the complexities of fully understanding an evolving project with a number of different research activities and contributors.
The overarching research question forms two key hypothesis as the central tenant for the projects’ research activities:
These “big” hypothesis have been further broken down into a subset of testable hypotheses:
Using a collaborative research approach, the core research team is working with a number of established projects and is further complemented by a number of open research fellowships. Each project/ fellow is investigating a combination of the hypothesis. In this way the project covers four major educational sectors (Higher Education, schools, informal learning and community colleges) as the diagram below illustrates.
(image from What makes openness work presentation, http://oerresearchhub.org/2013/07/17/what-makes-openness-work/)
Last month the team gave an overview presentation of the project to colleagues at the Open University. The recording and slides provide an excellent overview of the projects’ activities to date. Some more detailed reflections on the initial findings are included in this post by Leigh Anne Perryman.
The team have also begun to identify the some of the key challenges they need to address in next year:
*Educators are more positive about the impact of OER on performance & satisfaction than students (across OpenLearn & Flipped Learning).
*Open Education Models don’t necessarily improve access to education.
*Students using OER textbooks may save up to 80% of costs.
*Informal Learner Experience survey suggests that CC licensing is less important than previously thought.
*There is survey evidence the OER (esp. OpenLearn) are being used to prepare and support formal study.
*Examples of OER policies emerging for practice are becoming more common (UMUC, Utah Textbooks, Foothil-De Anza CC).
As well as these headline challenges, there is also the underlying challenge of ensuring that the research and various outputs from the first phase of the project are being disseminated effectively. How can the team ensure that their growing evidence, reflection, outputs is reaching not just the OER/open education community but the wider teaching and learning community? What other methodologies can be incorporated into their data collection and sharing? What are the key lessons from the “agile research” approach the project is taking? How are they refining/adapting/reacting to this approach? What lessons can they share from it? And most importantly, how can the hypothesis and their findings be made immediate and valuable to all of the projects’ stakeholders? Which is where I come in 🙂
Over the coming weeks I’ll be working with the team to as they prepare for their next phase and I’ll be sharing some of the approaches to answering the questions above both here and via the OER Research Hub.
Tweeting is part and parcel of my daily working life and I do genuinely believe it helps me stay connected, networked and informed in a way that wasn’t possible before. But there are a lot of tweets out there and some are undoubtedly more useful than others. I have my own slightly random filters and value system but this post on the LSE Impact blog by Paul Andre, Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther gives a properly researched overview of perceived values of tweets.
Our tweets might be funny, interesting, confusing, or just plain boring, but with little audience feedback it’s hard to tell; we’re often tweeting into a void. If we understood what content is valued (or not), and why, we may be able to 1) derive design implications for better tools or filters; and 2) develop insight into emerging norms and practice to help users create and consume more valued content.
As well as being an enabler of valuable conversations and interactions, twitter (like life) also has its dark side which has been highlighted recently in the UK with the Caroline Criado-Perez trolling scandal. Although I’m online quite a lot I have, thank goodness, only had one really offensive tweet (so far). I can’t imagine getting 100s of these an hour. There has been a lot of press coverage but I particularly liked Clare Allen’s take on Internet Trolls and the overt and covert sexism the debate has raised about acceptable attitudes and behaviours.
. . .the journalist Toby Young argues against the introduction of a “Report abuse” button on Twitter. “Let’s not try and domesticate the wild west,” he writes. But it is worth remembering that the wild west was never a place that was particularly friendly to women, and certainly not to women who demanded sexual equality. In fact, perhaps Young has unwittingly drawn an apter parallel than he intended.
Much of my work this year has been around learning analytics and really appreciated Michael Feldstein’s Desire2Learn Analytics Follow Up post which gives an insightful overview of the problems of the promise of analytics and the reality of current system capability to process data and produce reports within time-frames that users want and need. Echoing what I’ve heard John Campbell say many times before about starting with a simple problem first in analytics, Michael also suggests that D2L maybe need to concentrate on a smaller number of use cases and get them right, instead of the current situation where:
they check a lot of boxes in terms of features that could be useful, but I’m not sure that they’ve quite hit the bull’s eye for solving any one specific teacher or student problem.
Maybe IBM are going to help us all take a huge leap forward with data processing with their new era of cognitive computing, which will provide an architecture that will work more “like our brain” and provide the “fluidity and interactiveness” that our current systems lack. Sounds great, but is it just me or is there always an undertone of command and control/minority report in these developments?
And finally, for something completely different, but equally worthwhile. Lou McGill ( well kent learning technologist, photographer and artist) has launched a website for her gallery Life’s Little Ironies. Well worth a look to see some of Lou and her partner Tim’s work.
