Jen Millea @ education.au

ICTs - losing our history before it’s made

Jen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:43:30 +0000

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?

At present historians can still go and sit in musty library reading rooms, or access digitised versions of primary materials via the internet. In a few hundred years it’s unlikely that much of our personal information will be retrievable. Perhaps there’ll be spotty bits and pieces here and there. But there are few people (are there any?) who print out their emails on paper and store them in folders or files. Where then go the books of letters written by famous people? Will their email be able to be accessed instead? Will they ruminate still or will their ‘letters’ be txt and emoticons. That may not matter for someone like me who is never likely to be famous, but Patrick White reduced to: 1 nbl prze woo hoo!

Archivists and national libraries who have the task of preserving our present so it can become our past have been aware of this issue for some time. There is no easy or neat way to undertake online archiving as the information has to be not only stored but retrievable which can mean maintaining and supporting ancient (in modern terms) computing equipment, superceded software and delivery mechanisms - and there’s so much of it. And further confounding issue is the disposability of information - into the recycling bin on the PC and gone forever.
Where once we may have been able to look at versions of book manuscripts in the collections of papers writers donate to libraries, to look at the crossings out and decision made to use this word over that, and come to know how a writer worked and thought and planned, now we may only ever have access to the penultimate version as the old versions are overwritten, deleted or lost on a memory stick somewhere at the bottom of a handbag in landfill.

The National Library of Australia has a major preservation project in Pandora - Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia. Pandora focuses on preserving websites and online publications of national interest. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has the Email Australia project. This project was a call to Australians to send in their ‘best’ emails to be archived for the future and provide a snapshot of life. A worthy project conceptually, but the examples on the website seem more focused on funny and quaint rather than thoughtful and profound - but perhaps that’s inherent in the way that we use email and other electronic communication methods.

Even with the supposed information overload, it could be that in a thousand years (assuming climate change doesn’t get us) historians only have access to a tiny portion of the current content as most is deleted, lost from servers owned by bankrupt or wound-up companies. A printed out email may have the same value then as the Rosetta Stone now.

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

Jen — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:18:14 +0000

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.

Reducing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous learning outcomes

Jen — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:39:47 +0000

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.

Learning style of Aboriginals: Observation and imitation
Mainstream learning style: Verbal and oral instruction

Learning style of Aboriginals: Personal trial and feedback
Mainstream learning style: Verbal instruction accompanied by demonstration (see my post on the flight simulator)

Learning style of Aboriginals: Real life performance
Mainstream learning style: Practice in contrived settings

Learning style of Aboriginals: Mastering context specific skills
Mainstream learning style: Abstract context-free principles that can be applied in new, previously inexperienced situations

And finally, the paper says that indigenous learners are (paraphrasing) person oriented rather than information oriented (ie there is no institutionalised office of teacher). This means that Aboriginal children and adults will assess, respect or ignore white teachers more on the basis of how they relate as persons, rather than according to how they perform as teachers.

For people who do a lot of reading in the field of how people learn there’s probably nothing particularly revolutionary about this. But for me it got me thinking about a whole range of issues in relation to reducing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous learning outcomes, the national curriculum, and the Australian Government’s initiative to ensure that every child of pre-school age gets 15 hours of “play-based learning” (amongst other things).

Firstly, it suggests to me that reducing the gap is not just about delivering specific, targeted programs to the identified group (which is what governments tend to do). It suggests that really we need to do a lot of deep thinking and rethinking about the HOW of teaching. I’m not suggesting that teachers don’t already try and do that, but realistically, most teachers are trying to survive the day rather than having an opportunity to rethink everything they currently do, and everything they have been taught to do, and they largely work within systems that have expectations of ’standards’ and do testing on things like literacy and numeracy. It is difficult and dangerous work to experiment on other people’s kids.

We have definitely put teaching using ICT on the agenda in terms of recognising that new pedagogies need to be developed that acknowledge what technology is doing to us and what we are doing to technology, but we haven’t really grappled with re-thinking the whole box and dice of teaching and learning. That is, reducing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous learning outcomes may give us the opportunity to rethink the whole thing - and that may be good for everyone as it’s not just indigenous kids who have issues with schools or having their learning styles accommodated. There’s a long list of others who are alienated from current schooling practice for various reasons.

Secondly, this brings into question how a national curriculum works (I’m a supporter of this concept) when you are trying to apply one curriculum and one set of standards across a diverse community of learners, in an environment that is learner-centred. Learner centredness and a standardised curriculum are in tension. How does one accommodate the other?
Thirdly, I question play-based learning, and I’ve been doing so for some time. This is personal experience rather than anything gleaned from papers or research - I have 2 and half year old twins. What they absolutely love is doing something useful. Not pretend play, but something really useful that matters, and which they can see matters to the overall functioning of the house. It can be hard to find things for them to do (where they don’t demolish or destroy ) but simple things like turning lights on and off, opening blinds, getting the brush and shovel etc all makes their day.
From that point of view it seems to me that the Hughes and More research that describes Aboriginal learning styles describes a way of learning that makes people from the earliest age authentic members of the community. The concept of ‘childhood’ as we now perform it is a relatively new phenomena. I’m not suggesting returning to child labour and chimney sweeps but perhaps instead of play-based learning as our focus, we need to be looking at opportunities that make young children important and authentic contributors to community life rather than just spending their time playing at life.

There is something not quite right (and this is not a judgement of anyone as I do it myself three days a week) about dropping of the kids at childcare, to be looked after by people you don’t know, who are paid to do it (that doesn’t mean they don’t care - all the people who have looked after my kids have been, and are, legends), and who then spend their day pretending to do real things in an environment built and established and staffed so that they can do exactly that.

It’s not real life. The descriptions of Aboriginal learning styles describe a way of learning that is related to the way the community is living. I’m not suggesting one is better than the other, just that it is worth looking at alternatives and rethinking our current ways of doing things.

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

Jen — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:52:50 +0000

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.

On the second attempt the presenters had access to expertise in the form of an air traffic controller. He separately oriented each to the cockpit controls, explaining the ones that they would need to use to land the planes safely. The air traffic controller instructed the presenters using a radio, listening as they reported on the instrument readings, and based on that knowledge, telling them what to do next.

With the guidance of the air traffic controller using show and tell methods each presenter was successful in getting their plane to the ground without incident and everyone survived. Good job!

I’m not going to suggest that every Australian school should have a flight simulator and an on-call air traffic controller, but we need to take into account the variety of ways that we learn when we design our learning spaces. We no longer have ‘classrooms’: we have spaces in which a variety of devices including flight simulators, tools and methods may need to be accommodated. Once it was simple – a chalk board up the front and neat rows of desks facing it. Now, our learning spaces must take into account more complex requirements.

With new technologies and new technology devices emerging in a continuous stream of innovation, our learning environments need to be constructed flexibly so that these innovations can be part of our day-to-day environment and can be accommodated as needed. Although we may build the buildings to last, the tools, devices and theories we use to underpin learning experiences may change frequently. This means we need to think carefully about how we construct new learning spaces, and how we refurbish existing ones. This is in terms of the physical environment of rooms, desks, tables, chairs, stools, and the basic infrastructure to support devices and technology such as the number and location of electrical outlets, internet access, and wirelessness. There’s mundane items needed such as power boards, surge guards, extension cords, mouses, mouse pads, ergonomic desks and chairs, and storage and security considerations.

The spaces need to not only be able to be filled with stuff that supports learning, but be emptied of it as well to enable drama, movement, organic groupings, roleplays and simulations to be set up and experienced. Spaces need to be configurable to meet differing needs – not just for now but with an eye for the future as well.

This has become such a complex area that learning space design has become a specialisation for some architectural firms and the subject of many reports, sets of guidelines and how-to articles.

As well as the design and configuration of our physical learning spaces, online spaces must be taken into account. These are frequently integrated with or augment off line learning. In online spaces, information architectures, navigations strategies, ease of use, accessibility and tools that support the development of information and digital literacies, enable interaction, communication and collaboration with others and support delivery via multiple devices, have to be considered.

Regardless of what space is being designed, at the centre of the picture needs to be what it is that is to be learned, by whom, and what is the best way of going about it. From this standpoint, stakeholders in the design or refurbishment process can list their requirements and be explicit about their expectations of the learning spaces and decide on the solutions that will best address the needs of their school. The engagement of those that will use the space in the design process can be valuable in making sure it is suitable for a range of purposes.

The design of learning spaces will become even more important as the digital education revolution policy of the current Australian Government gains traction. The commitment to the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) and high speed broadband will mean schools and teachers will have opportunities to provide new kinds of learning experiences for students and will need to be able move them seamlessly between different modes of learning.

That is, the concept of ‘elearning’ as distinct from ‘learning’, and using the computer, or going to the computer room to ‘learn’ will be challenged and changed. Eventually, if the design is right students will move effortlessly between online and offline learning spaces and devices and perhaps will also move effortlessly between the 747 simulator and the real thing.

Lucky for us that, according to Mythbusters, today’s 747s are so sophisticated that there’s no need for a human to land one. The onboard computer can do it for us. Phew.

(This piece was first published in ACER’s Teacher magazine).

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

Jen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:18:41 +0000

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.

Update on e-portfolios

Jen — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:36:29 +0000

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.

Snack attack learning?

Jen — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:30:09 +0000

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.

edna creating and supporting communities

Jen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:50:04 +0000

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

What’s big in ICT?

Jen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:33:27 +0000

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

Pedagogy(ical) interoperability

Jen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:47:27 +0000

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.