Author: sleslie

Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design

“Discussions about the use of information and communications technology (ICT) based learning environments often assume that use is defined, or at least severely constrained, by the inherent intentions of the designer. However, typical uses of educational software involve a subversion of the designer’s intentions to match contextual needs.“

Via a post in James Farmer’s weblog comes reference to this interesting paper, originally presented by David Squires in 1999 to the International Conference on System Sciences. Anyone who has ever actively supported a CMS in an educational setting (or any software for that matter) will agree – one can simply never predict all of the uses that both instructors and students will find for software.

(As an aside – a recent favourite hack I heard of with WebCT was an instructor who was using the file upload/download capabilities to send audio messages to his students that he recorded on his desktop with a simple mic setup – instant voicemail system! Maybe obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of it and the software’s not specifically designed with this in mind.)

This paper goes deeper than that, though, arguing for a design process that accomodates such ‘subversive use’ of the technologies. One thing I think is missing here, and often missed in the debates on the effects of media types on instruction is the fact that a distinct characteristic of web-based applications/content is the ability to record (and aggregate and ‘playback’) *how* the software/content is being used. Putting aside for a second the big-brotherish aspect, this seems to me to point at a new source of design data – a way for designers to see, after the fact, how their design intentions are interpreted/mis-interpreted, used/mis-used and to make changes accordingly. – SWL

OpenSector.org and Open Source Advisory Service

Two new unrelated but seemingly important sites for news on open source developments and higher ed.

The first, OpenSector.org, promises to be a news service for open source developments relevant to the public sector. Brand new and not much there, but they have received some initial funding from the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) of Chandler fame.

The second, Open Source Advisory Service (via George Siemens on the Open Education site) is also brand new. A U.K. initiative funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, the site promises to act as a clearinghouse for information on open source software and standards relevant to the higher ed community. – SWL

Is it Really RSS that all The Fuss should be about?

I’m being pretty facetious here. I know the people leading this discussion well enough now, and have even talked with them about this, to know that they all already get this. In fact the notes on the wiki have Brian making this very point in –  

“Cheap, simple, existing tools and standards point to an approach that…foster communities of practice (if COP = group of people who form based on shared a set of goals, use a common set of resources), and integrate the “product” with the process. Why? Because the tools, techniques and standards emerge from existing and growing use of “social software.” COP’s working with this model are not a theoretical construct… they are a reality. “

But apparently I feel the need to flog a flogged horse. RSS *is* important as a lightweight application of XML that can enable LOs to show up in different places, be found and aggregated from various closed off sources and is accompanied by an ever-expanding set of tools that make it easy to produce and consume. So for all these reasons, it’s important, exciting and worth making a fuss about.

But for me, ‘blogging’ (and more importantly participating in the ‘blogosphere’) and RSS are not synonymous. Maybe you couldn’t have had the phenomenon of the blogosphere without RSS. But the phenomenon I see Brian describing above, the one that excites me, is in my mind occuring not just because of RSS, but because of the conventions, many of them not always particularly well supported by the tools or the protocols, that are arising surrounding blogging – blogrolling, people following up on their referrer logs and then reading that person’s blog, people citing a fellow blogger as the source for just spotting something (not just the authors) ….  One could argue that many of these couldn’t exist without RSS or something similar. But one can publish a blog without a blogroll, and re-post items that one has read in another’s blog without citing the source or adding to it.

The Autism of Knowledge Management

Via a reference in the recent Macromedia white paper Challenges Impeding the Learning Object Economy comes this paper. One must give credit to the Macromedia paper for citing it, for it presents quite an invective against the objectified notion of learning that supports their notion of an LO economy.

I’m not sure I like the use of the metaphor of autism here, and hopefully that’s all it is here, accurate though it may seem on the surface to characterize the lego-like notion of learning and learning objects.  I think I prefer the less extreme explanations like those recently offered by Norm Friesen. Regardless, I think they are both mainly coming from similar places philosophically. But I think David Wiley is ultimately on the right track with this – we shouldn’t be turning this in to an either/or but try to find the middle ground. – SWL

BELTS – Basic E-Learning Tool Set

“ The Le@rning Federation has undertaken the Basic E-Learning Tool Set (BELTS) project to develop and deliver a delivery system and framework for a learning object discovery and presentation system. ”

Version 1 software available for download from sourceforge, released under a license that permits re-distribution and modification as long as attribution is kept attached to source code. – SWL

Deakin University CMS Evaluation site

Note sure why I haven’t posted this before, but the Brandeis site below reminded me of it. I have now seen the Deakin site held up as an exemplar of CMS evaluation process in a number of different RFP/selection processes, and I think for good reason. They provide extensive documentation of the selection process and intemediary steps. And as an aside, they ended up selecting Vista for their institutional CMS. – SWL

Project CMS @ WBW.edu

As a follow up to the earlier posting about the recent EDUCAR research report on an evaluation framework for CMSes, this link points to the actual project site from Brandeis University from which the research report sprang. The report itself deserves a more studied response, but worthy of highlight on this site are both the instructor and student surveys, which exemplify the approach being promoted. I think there is lots to admire in this approach, not least of which is the seemingly obvious (yet often not followed) advice to include student feedback in one’s decision making process. – SWL

An Evaluation Framework for Course Management Technology

http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=ERB0314

“This research bulletin describes an evaluation framework for analyzing the teaching and learning processes that course management technologies support. Because the project has pedagogical goals at its foundation, the framework assesses the gain (or loss) of learning effectiveness and of teaching efficiency and the total cost of ownership. “- SWL

Iconex LOR

New to me, this object repository was developed in the U.K. by the University of Hull as part of the nation-wide Distributed National Electronic Resource initiative (I’m sure I have this wrong, but I have  a difficult time sorting out the players and funding envelopes in the U.K.)

Not certain the extent that this was intended for prime time yet. I could access it in IE but both Mozilla and Opera seemed to fail. The reason I checked is that the front end seemed to be done in Flash, but either  they are doing browser detection on these other browsers that is failing or else this isn’t Flash but maybe some IE specific technology. In any case, there are a number of good multimedia objects in there – the one that drew me here in the first place is a Flash-based card sorting exercise that is familiar to anyone who has ever had to facilitate a design session with a customer who won’t set priorities.

The app is very good, you can download it and change the cards by editing an XML file. If you do manage to access the site you can find it in the ‘Generic’ category. Which points out another flaw with this approach – the individual objects do not appear to be directly addressable. – SWL

PORTAL – Presenting natiOnal Resources To Audiences Locally

A number of useful background resources are available as a result of this project in the U.K., funded by the FAIR Programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee to “explore issues around the deployment and use of portals within the higher and further education community.” 

Of note so far are the ‘Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals’ (www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/stakereq.pdf) and a report detailing the available metadata standards for the description of portal users (www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/Metadata.pdf.) – SWL