Learning Design
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Learning design as aspirin for the web 2.0 headache
In the last couple of posts I talked about some of the ways being online, and web 2.0 in particular, challenges some of our assumptions of higher education. The whole web 2.0 thing represents something of a problem, or headache if you will, for higher ed. On the one hand we can see how enthusiastic people are for it, and how it genuinely creates user participation, community, and quality content. All things we’d like to have in higher ed. And on the other we cherish lots of aspects of higher ed that seem at odds with it, such as the quality assurance of content, careful support and structure, hierarchical structures,…
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Thoughts on LAMS conference
I was at the LAMS 07 conference in Greenwich last week. I was presenting about the learning design project at the OU, see slideshare presentation below. As well as giving an overview of the project, I raised a couple of points. The first of these was that there is a continuum at the heart of pedagogic planners, (ie tools that are aimed at helping educators plan activities), which goes from open to structured. Some users want help and to be stepped through, while others want to do what they want and only have the tool as a canvas on which they work. The second point was that learning design represents…
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Learning design and the miscellaneous
I was at the LAMS 07 conference on Thursday, and then at a follow up session on pedagogical planners at the London Knowledge Lab on Friday. I was showing how we have been using Compendium to aid the design process, and there was presentations from Oxford’s Phoebe and the London Planner as well as LAMS. Like a lot of people I’ve read Everything Is Miscellaneous recently, and it is one of those books where you see its implications everywhere. I have had this uneasy feeling that my learning design work may not sit comfortably with the web 2.0 work. There is something perhaps a bit rigid in a lot of…
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OU Learning Design workshops
I ran four workshops this week for the OU Learning Design project. My colleague Grainne Conole had prepared the slides and done four the previous week, so I can’t take any credit for the sessions being well structured. We have been using the Compendium tool develop by KMI as a means of eliciting and representing learning designs. We added in an LD icon set, with icons for activity, task, role, VLE tool, resource, output and assignment. We got attendees to play with this tool, and I was surprised at how well received it was. There is always a danger when giving people a prototype tool that they get mired in…
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RSS as universal acid – revisited
I blogged before about RSS becoming the universal acid or lingua franca of web 2.0. Yahoo have just released the beta of their pipes, which is a way of remixing feeds and creating mash-ups without getting too dirty in the programming. With his talent for understatement Tim O’Reilly says it is "a milestone in the history of the internet." Tony Hirst has had a go creating a pipe for the openlearn content, and seems to like using them. I’m not quite as convinced that they are a) as easy to use as people think (what techies think is easy is not the same as the rest of us) and b)…
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The dilemma at the heart of learning design
I’ve been up in Birmingham for a couple of days at a workshop for the JISC D4L projects (I’m the director on the D4LD project). The two pedagogic planner projects generated quite a bit of interest. I know about IOE’s planner, so went to the session on Oxford’s Phoebe. This is a wiki-based resource that helps users with two main pathways in – ‘I want to do activity X’ and ‘I want to use technology Y’. This multiple perspective is essential I think in any design tool – I’d probably add in ‘I need resources on Z’. It’s a good resource, but as they recognise not something that is really…
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A dash of 2.0
I was up in London yesterday visiting Diana Laurillard to talk about their Pedagogic Planner project (which is part of the JISC D4L programme along with our own D4LD project). I was quite impressed with what they’ve done. They’ve taken a pragmatic approach which allows users to define a course using some of the standard data (e.g. learning outcomes, number of hours, etc), and then added a layer of pedagogic planning to this that builds on Diana’s conversational framework (although it could be any approach and is likely to be extended). They have framed it around a number of questions learners want answers for and then matched these with exemplars.…
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D4LD progress
The children are back in school (in their expensive new uniforms in my case), the holidays are over, back to work… First up was a conference call with the D4LD team at the OUNL and Liverpool Hope. Over the summer we have mainly been concentrating on looking at some of the performance issues of Coppercore and SLeD. It seems the iTunesesque (I know, I know, let it be Martin) response times we were experiencing have been replicated by the OUNL team when they have duplicated our set up. The likely suspect was optimisation of the HSQL database. By fixing this and some minor code tweaks and an improvement to the…
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Learning Design project
Had a meeting yesterday with the people from JISC, who are funding the D4LD project which I am project director for. Our colleagues from Liverpool Hope also came along and we had the OUNL on the telephone. The main aim of the project is to improve our Learning Design player, SLED, and the underlying Coppercore Learning design engine from the OUNL. We are doing this in the light of feedback from Liverpool Hope who are using the system on real live students on four courses. The improvements tend to fall in to three categories: Performance – this really degrades with a few users. We have found a few bottlenecks, probably…
