:Victoria University E-Learning Blog

Hi all,

Ant here – my take on Ascilite was that it was good – lacked a bit of energy but was revealing and interesting in other ways. Like Dave I tend to agree that the Blackboard\Webct push towards eLearning 2.0 is more rhetoric than actuality.

However, all is not lost as we can integrate some of our social networking tools with WebCT. As I have posted before in other forums, Asim has set up a WebCT powerlink to Elgg (our social networking software) so we can continue to work with WebCT for all of our basic course management stuff and also use Elgg for social networking/blogging/wikis/communities.

I think  that what universities will use in future in terms of eLearning technologies will be a continuation of the past – a tension from the centre towards consolidation and streamlining (fewer technologies) but a nearly equal tendency from users and innovators towards using other technologies for specific purposes. As these become popular or even critical they will be incorporated, merge with or even supersede the existing technologies.

But don’t fret! WebCT will be around for a while yet people.
Ant

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Following on from my last post, my colleague has accused me of being windows-ist by refering only to Shrook which is a Mac only app. You can find an inferior windows version at rssbandit

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So I am back in the office. Ascilite was a good gig. There was a real buzz around Web 2.0 and what this is going to mean for elearning in the future. I think that that the linear platforms that we have like WebCT, BB, Moodle and Sakai could be at obsolete in there present form, sooner rather than later. Blackboard have announced that they will, shortly, be releasing a Blackboard 2.0. I think, philosophically, this is problematic. Sometimes I see the Learning Management System in the same way as I see Foucault’s (or Bentham’s) panopticon. The lecturer is in the middle and all the LMS cells surround the teacher. We peer into the cells and moderate the behaviour of the inmates. A little bit dramatic maybe, still what Web 2.0 technologies offer us is the opportunity to put the learner back to the centre of learning. LMS aren’t as successful as they could be because the system is locked down. Why don’t students chat in WebCT? Because it is inflexible. Why use Blackboard to communicate with your peers when I can have MSN messenger open all the time, and be contactable all the day, and choose to ignore someone, or ping someone. The beauty of Web2.0 apps, is that their distributed nature mirrors the distributed nature of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t just plonked in one place, it is in many places, and with many people.

At learning matters yesterday I show some great use of Web2.0 apps, people find it more like life I guess. And maybe that’s at the heart of how e-learning can we great learning – when we make it more like life. Designing learning platforms should perhaps be more life myspace, and less like online banking.

For those who would like a visual representation of Web 2.0 I found this on Scott Wilson’s blog (which is actually from Fred Cavazza’s visual mapping of identity)

http://ulik.typepad.com/leafar/2006/10/ulik_unleash_id.html

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I sorry that I’ve not been able to blog earlier, but have been suffering from a bad mix of dead battery and fried RAM!

Yesterday’s conference was an interesting start to the proceedings. Mike Spector from Floria State gave a witty, and perceptive keynote on his work on how experts and novices figure things out, ie that the process that professionals use in deciding how to do the things we do.

Next up there was a session on ICT Strategies and Institutional change. One of the speakers was Grainne Conole, from the Open University, formerly of Southampton University in the UK. The OU has decided that their Learning Management System from February will be the open source software, Moodle. This has feed right into the very vigorous debate that is happening in e-Learning work around the software that you pay for, and the software that you don’t. Of course it’s naif to think that moving to a LMS like Moodle or Saaki has zero cost implications. With a lot of Open Source material you have to pay for support, or where support isn’t available you have to make this resource available in house. Recently Charles Sturt made the strategic decision that they would go with Sakai. I guess we will watch what happens with the OU’s experience of Moodle, and what CSU experience of Sakai will tell us. Though maybe the future of elearning isn’t about a LMS at all, and where the interesting stuff will happen in the area of social networking…hmmm, more on that anon.

The afternoon was given over to podcasting. We at VU don’t have any real infrastructure for podcasting at the moment, but I hope to sort this is sooner rather than later. I know there are pedagogic issues around ‘just putting lectures on the internet’, but I think that more and more students are beginning to expect this sort of service as a routine thing. This sort of development will be incremental, but at VU we do have some exciting projects that we’ll be able to talk about soon.

I’m looking forward to hearing from Scott Wilson, this morning. Scott works for CETIS, which is a research arm of JISC in the UK. He’s going to talking about a JISC funding project on ‘personalised learning’.

Back into the hall!

David

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Ascilite, the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, will be having their annual conference next week. It will be my first Ascilite conference. They have the reputation of being a more upbeat than its northern hemisphere sister Alt-C.

The theme for this year is ‘Who’s Learning? Whose Technology?’, and the conference papers say this year will be about understanding the needs of a diversifying population. I find it a bit curious that Ascilite talks about a diversifying population, rather than a diversifying population in Higher Education. I’m sure all will become clear next week.

As I usually have my MacBook surgically attached to me you can expect some regular updates to the blog during the course of the conference. The conference will also be podcasting their proceedings and I’ll put the link on the blog next week.

Have a great weekend

David

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FLU is happy to announce we now have a pilot Elgg installation up and running – thanks to the mighty Asim Aziz who installed Elgg, configured the powerlink and irons out the bugs as we find them.  Elgg is “social networking” software – it allows users to blog, collaborate, share files, host podcasts, create online communities, wikis and lots more besides.

Elgg will be powerlinked to Blackboard/WebCT.  This means that you as teachers will be able to have an elgg community space for your course or unit, and you can create elgg spaces independent of units. Some examples of use – spaces for research collaboration/communication, spaces for blogging for yourself, your unit or department, spaces for areas of interest in teaching or other work practices at VU.   Depending on the pilot project, VU may allow students to create their own elgg spaces and communities for example for clubs and societies, or for student circles or learning groups, etc.

Elgg (and other types of social networking technology) is a radical departure from traditional (Web 1.0/eLearning 1.0) type technologies – authorship is decentralised, students/teachers can be equal participants, students can create their own areas and communities, elgg networked communities grow organically.  For example, wikis (like wikipedia) could be used by students to develop a growing, changing knowledge artefact for a subject or subject area.

If you want to start to try using elgg, email me and I will give you the setup information.  However, bear in mind that Elgg is a pilot project at the moment – this means that technical support, training and advice from FLU will be very ad hoc and dependent upon our other work priorities.  Basically this is a way of saying use at your own risk!  Also, it means that because we are coming to grips with the social networking paradigm, pilot users will be expected to do things like use the online page help, go to the elgg documentation site to do their own research on how to use elgg and so on.

Elgg is currently only accessible from VU net – it is not yet available on the open internet.

More information on Elgg is available here:  http

A mature working Elgg community is here http://elgg.net
University of Brighton in the UK has an evolving elgg installation at http://community.brighton.ac.uk/public.php

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There have been changes to FLU recently. Antony Marsh has moved from Quality and Innovation to Flexible Learning, though he continues in his role of e-learning trainer; Asim Aziz our online learning administrator has moved from Sunbury, and joins the wider team based at Newport. I myself joined FLU, as the new Head of Unit in the middle of August. I come hot footed from the UK where I was based in the Unit for the Enhancement for Learning and Teaching, at the University of Kent.

Last week we had a planning day, where we discussed our Operational Plan. This will obviously be informed by the eLearning Stategy and the TLS operational plan. I hope to get this plan out for consultation quite soon, amongst our colleagues in Higher Ed. and TAFE. Part of that plan will be around community and the creation of forums and communities of practice. A couple of examples of what we are hoping to do is the setting up of communities around e-learning, where we’ll showcase what’s new, and interesting in the area; I also hope to have a conference early next year on e-learning where we can have practitioner input from both VU and outside.

We are always happy to talk to staff about e-learning and any assistance we can give! Contact any of the team, or myself.

David

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The Flexible Learning Unit, in the Staff College, are currently looking in the uses of blogs in education. As a way getting communities of practice together, ways that blogs can be used by students in TAFE and Higher Education.

As usual nothing is particularly easy, or straight forward so we are trying out several different Blogging Applications. This one is made through Edublog, which I’ve been using for a while.

The project is actually being managed by Antony Marsh, who is one of the guys who deals with online learning in the Flexible Learning Unit. If you want to be involved in any projects that are coming up to do with blogs drop him a line – he’s in the eguide.

This blog, or a blog like it will be a place where FLU can float ideas on elearning, technological advances, upcoming projects, and just general information and discussion.

The team will contribute to the Blog – hopefully the wider VU community will contribute.

David Cummings
(Head of FLU)

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