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ICTs - losing our history before it’s made

15 July, 2008 – 1:13 pm

I have every letter that I have ever received. True. They live in a few big plastic storage containers under my bed - written on paper, by hand, or on typewriter. A few typed on a word processor and printed out and sent via snail mail. Letters from the time that Susan Campbell moved away in grade 3 and we used to write to each other. Letters from the pen pals I had in Canada, Italy, Germany and Ghana when I was 12. Cards for my birthday from friends I no longer remember. Letters, air letters, and postcards from father, mother, brother, boyfriends and best friends.
That was in the days before email, the internet and mobiles. Now, all I have are emails - 1 or 2 liners - or SMS’s or Twitters that without context mean next to nothing and which are read and then deleted forever, and may be as profound as ‘get mlk on way home, pls’.
This is not just a personal issue: the internet has created a giant gap in our ability to know and interpret the past as we move into the future. Stuff is on people’s personal email clients, or on corporate servers belonging to Yahoo and Google (and who knows where they will be in 1000 years). We have Facebook pages and MySpaces, nings and Sharepoints, corporate intranets and LinkedIn profiles - but we aren’t keeping our letters stored under the bed or in boxes in the shed for posterity.
The 2000-year-old Rosetta Stone may have enabled the unlocking of the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but in the future there will be, perhaps, just one Mac Classic on which to run thousands of floppy disks found in some warehouse somewhere and perhaps only one person who can work out how to run the Classic only to find that the software needed to run the floppy is not on the computer. Where will our history go? How will we retrieve it? How will we be able to make sense of it?

Read More »

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, future, preservation | Comments (1)

social e-learning: resources, case studies for social networking in e-learning

30 June, 2008 – 8:48 am

The term ’social e-learning’ is a new one to me (there’s a new term generated every minute it seems) - it’s a conflation of social networking and e-learning.
A group funded by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework has created a useful set of guides, case studies and resources with a practical focus to support educators who want to learn about and/or use social networking as part of the learning experience that they provide to students. It’s particularly useful because it demonstrates how people have used these kinds of tools through the case studies as well as providing information on how to develop your own skills in the area. Although this was developed by VET, it is relevant to anyone from any sector who uses, or wants to use, social networking tools in teaching and learning.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, social networking | Comments (0)

Reducing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous learning outcomes

13 May, 2008 – 9:09 am

The current Australian Government has made a commitment to reducing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous learning outcomes. Indigenous education is not an area of expertise of mine (disclaimer) but it does seem to me that the issue is bigger than just indigenous education in itself, and may require some very creative thinking. There’s a thoughtful 1997 paper ‘Aboriginal Ways of Learning and Learning Styles’, by Paul Hughes at Flinders University and Arthur J More at The University of British Colombia in Canada, which is worth a read. There may be new research that builds on this work, but of particular interest to me was 5 ways of learning that are different between indigenous and mainstream learning styles that it describes. The authors don’t present these in opposition to each other, and are at pains to stress that there is a continuum and that non-indigenous learners may have ‘indigenous’ preferences and vice versa. Read More »

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, indigenous, early childhood, national curriculum, playbased learning | Comments (1)

What does a flight simulator have to do with learning spaces?

9 May, 2008 – 8:22 am

I have always wanted to have a go in a flight simulator and see if I could land a passenger jet without killing all on board. In an episode in the TV show, Mythbusters, the two presenters had the opportunity to do just that and it is an interesting case study on learning spaces, and ways that we learn.

In the episode each presenter had two attempts to land a virtual 747 using the simulator. Each made their first attempt without any instruction or assistance. Each used trial and error as their learning method, and each crashed their plane into the ground.

Oops. Read More »

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, learning spaces | Comments (1)

Death of the author: killed by an algorithm (patent pending)

22 April, 2008 – 3:48 pm

I am able to announce death of the author.

Forget Peter Carey. Forget J. K. Rowling. Forget Manning Clark. The monkey has been at the machine long enough and has written Shakespeare (sort of…).

Reportedly, Philip M Parker has written more than 85,000 books - and they are listed on Amazon ready for purchase. Another report has him the author of 200,000 titles. His amazing feat raises the interesting question of the role of the author or what ‘authorship’ is in the internet age. And even more interesting questions about intellectual property, plagiarism, information reliability, information literacy etc.

Philip has an algorithm or team of them… (patent pending) which enable him to write books by gathering pre-existing content from the internet and compiling it in book structure and format. An explanation of the process can be found on his YouTube video.

How does intellectual property work here? Under what IP jurisdiction is the writing of the books? Does he own the intellectual property because it’s a unique compilation of the facts and content? Are there ‘contributors’ in the traditional sense?

Does this process mean that large parts of the works are plagiarised from others? If this is the case, what are the ethical implications?

How reliable is the information in the books? On 85,000 titles plus (or 200,000, but who’s counting?), I don’t imagine there can be time for a lot of vigorous fact checking. What might that mean for readers who rely on the information - many of the books are about medical conditions?

He is also using, or intends to use, the same process for the creation of other kinds of content such as quiz shows and, eventually, romance fiction and TV.

I do wonder if Philip M Parker actually exists. He seems like the perfect example of an internet hoax - he exists to be Googled, there is a the wikipedia entry, a page at INSEAD where he works, a list of titles on Amazon, a picture of a pleasant chubby cheeked middle aged guy. He’s got YouTube videos.

What he’s done is so remarkable as to be unbelievable but is the kind of thing to be picked up and reported everywhere from Melbourne to Montreal to Madrid. Regardless of whether it’s true.

He’s also on Zoominfo, which is another aggregating service using algorithms to give the impression that a human being has been involved in creating personal profiles of individuals. But it’s all publicly available information gathered by a bot and compiled by a software program. Is this what happens when you leave an algorithm alone on the internet?

But Philip’s on the web, therefore he must exist. The information is on the web, at multiple sources, therefore it must be true.

Right?

For educators the issue is about information literacy in an environment where not just wrong information is published but where algorithms might be the authors - of books and of web pages. To survive, to be successful in the information age, citizens will need the ability to tell fact from fiction, monkey do from Shakespeare, and an author from an algorithm. They will need to question the validity of everything they see, hear and read. They will need to cross-check their information, and test their own assumptions. This will be an essential skill for their information future.

I can’t wait to read a romance novel written by an algorithm and compiled by a software program. Internet dating will take on a whole new meaning.

 

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, innovation, authorship | Comments (1)

Update on e-portfolios

21 April, 2008 – 9:06 am

A great update on e-portfolios from education.au’s Jerry Leeson which was presented at the Australian VET Research Association conference in Adelaide on 3-4 April 2008. The paper provides a summary of some major initiatives including the Australian ePortfolio Project (AeP), the PILIN project and the Australian Higher Education Graduate Statement, and reviews how social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace are starting to compete with institutional approaches to eportfolio provision.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, e-portfolios | Comments (1)

Snack attack learning?

7 April, 2008 – 10:00 am

The trend towards short dramas for delivery via mobile phone is a great opportunity for educators. If people, particularly the young, are looking to commercial ISPs for 4 minute doses of drama, what’s to say that they won’t be interested in a 4 minute refresher on their biology prac, their French verbs, or the lyrics they’re learning for their high school musical? Great opportunities exist to appropriate the ubiquitous phone and get mobile learning happening in a snack attack format. Clearly, attention to the delivery media is necessary. According to the Sydney Morning Herald article, it is not the same as producing for TV - different lighting requirements, different needs when moving between shots etc, as well as the need to keep it short.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, just in time learning, digital natives | Comments (0)

edna creating and supporting communities

31 March, 2008 – 11:20 am

For the last 10 years, education.au has been supporting the development of online community spaces for the education and training community through the edna project. For those of you who aren’t aware, education.au is a not for profit ICT agency owned by all Australia’s ministers for education and training. And the edna project is collaboratively funded by the states, territories and Commonwealth. Both, in my view, are great examples of cooperative federalism and the benefits of collaboration and cooperation.

Since edna began, we’ve used different generations of software solutions to deliver a ‘community’ service. At the moment we are using Moodle (open source) to deliver edna Groups, and Lyris (commercial and proprietary) to deliver email list services. education.au has also custom developed ‘me.edu.au’ which is a communities of practice/professional learning kind of environment for educators.

What we have noticed particularly in the last three years is that the education and training community is now embracing the potential of these communities to support their own learning and professional development, as well as to support their teaching practice. This is a cross-sectoral phenomena with school education and VET strong users of the services provided by edna.

It’s worth talking about edna - I sort of take it for granted as it’s been around 10 years now and is just an assumed part of my education landscape. But edna is something that all the ministers of education and training in the states and territories and Commonwealth (who jointly fund it) can be justifiably proud of. It has shown leadership in a whole range of ways over its 10 year history - it created an education metadata ’standard’ when metadata was unpopular and/or misunderstood, it harvested that metadata from state and territory jurisdictions and became an aggregator, it started delivering its services as RSS when RSS was all new and shiny so anyone could integrate the edna services into their own websites, it developed a distributed search of educational repositories (now available as open source as OpenDSM). It now provides podcasts, delivers mobile edna, and is trialling edna.tv. In many ways it has lead they way and has provided examples of how technology can support teaching and learning, and support teachers in any sector in their teaching practice.

For example, it provides the edna sandpit to enable educators to have a go at technologies that they may not have access to in their day-to-day environment so they can get a sense of whether they work and/or how they could work as teaching and learning tools. At the moment there’s stuff on podcasting, Live Classroom, and LAMS.

The other thing I value about edna is the collaboration on which it’s based. Wherever you go, whatever conference you’re at, someone has been involved with edna - on a reference committee, a friends-of-edna group, as part of the national consultation. It really is a community, and that community has shaped the services that are provided though ongoing consultation and feedback loops.

And that brings me to my main point: its leadership, in my view, has really been in the area of developing and maintaining communities. As a combination, edna Groups, edna lists and me.edu.au provide a range of services that can meet many of the online collaboration needs of both groups and individuals in the sector and help link them with each other, technologies and ideas. edna services are also free of advertising and without ‘undesirable elements’.

Obviously everyone finds the online space where they feel at home, and after 10 years, a lot of people have found it at edna. edna also runs a program of workshops each year and the 2008 program has just commenced.

Some stats

edna Groups
750 groups
18,235 members

me.edu.au
Communities of practice 308 
Registered users of me.edu.au – 6079 

edna Lists 
750 lists 
List members 98,225 

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, edna | Comments (0)

What’s big in ICT?

18 March, 2008 – 8:03 am

education.au has been doing some work with the Cunningham Library at ACER - the library manages ATED (Australian Thesaurus of Educational Descriptors). education.au has used ATED for some years as one of the thesauri it uses to catalogue content for the edna resource database. No thesaurus covers every eventuality, so we use a number to meet the needs of the various sectors of education. The idea of ‘one thesaurus’ is certainly an idea that has appeal, but reality means that there are always going to be sectoral differences, as well as the peculiar requirements of particular disciplines.

The work that we’ve been doing with ACER is particularly interesting because the identification of the ICT terms included provides us with a snapshot of the priority areas in educational technology - that is, what’s big in ICT in education right now.

About 80 terms were suggested by education.au - the list of terms emerging out of the day to day cataloguing experience of education.au librarians working on describing resources for edna and inspirED. These were then reviewed by the Cunningham Library staff and either approved, debated or discarded with warrant for the terms being sought from various sources. The inclusion of the additional terms has made the ATED thesaurus a more complete tool and it now supports consistent classification of ICT resources for education and training. This is becoming more important as the semantic web, social networking and social tagging become a more general part of the education landscape.

And what are some of the big things in educational technology right now?

Accessibility, Authentication, Bandwidth, Blended learning, Blogs, Computer conferencing, Content management systems, Data projectors, Digital divide, Digital music players, Electronic portfolios, Geographic information systems, Instant messaging, Interactive whiteboards, Mobile learning, Internet safety, Learning management systems, Learning objects, Podcasting, Portals, Repositories, User centred design, and Wikis.

You can search ATED online at http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/mulcgi/index.htm

 

 

By Jen | Posted in Educationau, standards, repositories, metadata, thesauri | Comments (1)

Pedagogy(ical) interoperability

14 March, 2008 – 10:17 am

The concept of interoperability is generally applied to moving between technologies or the ability to shift data between datasets because of understandings about how the data is structured.

But how about if we think about interoperability in relation to pedagogy?

One of our education challenges is pedagogy-driven usage of ICT.  In conversations with Rob Fitzgerald at the University of Canberra, over a few cups of coffee we decided that pedagogy needed to be interoperable - that is, there needed to be fluidity between modes of delivery: face-to-face, multi-model, computer-based, online only, and anything in between. That is, we might think about the underpinning pedagogy enabling students to move between the different modes seamlessly in the same way way we  move across the internet without thinking about http, data packets, routers or the like. Students moving between modes without thinking or noticing (that is, for example, they are not doing their computer class). They are just using the appropriate mode and tool for that component of their learning experience. We liked the idea for having a language/term that removed distinctions between delivery methods and focused just on the teaching and learning.

By Jen | Posted in Educationau | Comments (1)