Linking Personal Learning with Institutional Learning Experiences from the Project

1
Linking Personal Learning with Institutional
Learning - Experiences from the
Project

• Paul Trafford and Karl Harrison

E-Learning SeminarDepartment of Educational
StudiesOxford University24 May 2006
2
Overview

• Background a changing educational landscape
• What is meant by personalised learning?
• Introducing RAMBLE motivation and terminology
• Linking environments - the component-based
  approach
• Summary of blogging activities and VLE
  development
• (Mainly technical) observations and issues
• Experiences from Chemistry requirements
  gathering
• Where next?
• Summary and Conclusion

3
Background (waterfall)

• Changing nature of work means
• No job for life
• Greater flexibility in nature of work, skills
  etc.
• Educational impact
• Need greater and more diverse use of educational
  centres during ones life
• UK Government Policy of wider participation and
  lifelong learning.
• Impact on ICT
• DfES e-Strategy integrated services,
  collaboration, personal support.
• Impact on JISC Calls
• JISC e-Learning programme DEL E-Tools and

4
Waterfall and JISC now

• JISC Circular 3/06 (April 06) Capital Projects

The e-Learning capital programme is an 11.36m
investment to support the sector in harnessing
the potential of e-learning to support lifelong
learners. A particular area of investigation will
be around providing a personalised learning
experience, meeting the needs of individual
learners in a range of settings through the use
of technologies such as e-portfolios,
e-assessment and social software."
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Personal vs. Personalised Learning

• General Educational Perspective
• Personal Learning
• Generally about supporting individual growth,
  creating opportunities for all, offering choice,
  and contributing to society
• No definition available from .gov.uk sites (?)
• Personalised Learning
• In schools, about individually tailored learning
  pathways, created by learners supported by the
  educational services
• Definition A National Conversation about
  Personalised Learning
• ICT and e-Learning Context a confusion?
• Can Personalise your office desktop, Web browser
  settings etc, but it largely echoes an
  institutional environment
• DfES e-Strategy refers only to Personalised
  Learning activities,..
• JISC 3/06 Call refers to Personalised Learning
  CETIS working on personal learning environments
  but developments is for desktops.

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Project Information

• RAMBLE Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for
  Learning Environments
• JISC-funded, part of DEL E-tools for Learners and
  Teachers programme
• Short project (7 months), aiming for quick
  results
• Emphasis on open standards through E-Learning
  Framework
• A technical project for writing code, not a
  pilot.
• and open source software in deliverables
• Yet interested in personal learning aspects

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Motivation at Oxford

• Kick-start work on m-learning
• Problem of co-ordination between college and
  departmental-based teaching (can be penalised in
  QAA)
• Existing methods for gathering feedback through
  standard departmental forms, paper and hardcopy
  not successful
• Restricted physical environments, e.g. for staff
  and students in hospital environments to keep
  clinical logs
• Does WebLearn support m-learning?
• Can mobile devices provide extra support for
  students in the special Oxford environment?

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• Digital remoteness w.r.t. Internet connection
• Physical remoteness - can be away from usual
  physical spaces of teaching and learning
• Temporal remoteness outside normal hours of
  lectures and tutorials.

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• Writing that originates from the participant
  (student)
• A creative process
• A reflective process supported by the removal of
  physical and temporal constraints
• On an electronic device a Personal Digital
  Assistant (PDA)

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• 1981 Portable Computer
• 5 screen
• 64K RAM
• External keyboard
• Office software
• Optional modem
• Optional battery pack

• 2004 Handheld Computer
• 3.5 screen
• 64MB RAM
• Optional External keyboard
• Office software
• Bluetooth
• Built-in battery

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• 1981 Osborne 1
• Weight 11Kg

• 2004 HP iPaq 1940
• Weight 124g

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• A Weblog (blog)
• is e.g. a journal, commentary written by
  individual or group of people and published on
  the Web
• can be about anything and everything
• is very simple in essence - consists of entries,
  each essentially of two fields
• can be multimedia text, photos, video..

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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning
Environments

• Emphasis on personal reflection
• Personal Learning Space Personal Learning
  Environments that can wrap around a person
  without physical or temporal discontinuity. Eg.
  Its what happens when a student has a wonderful
  solution to the Professors knotty problem and
  records it whether in her room or waiting for
  the bus etc.
• Institutional spaces Virtual and Managed
  Learning Environments (such as WebLearn)
• Special issues privacy and security

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Architecture
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Personal Reflective Blogs

• Personal reflective blogs can be facilitated in a
  number of ways, e.g.
• in form - make them intuitive to view and
  navigate
• for contribution - make writing and publishing
  easy
• for application developers - make the software
  simple
• in use - allow free expression without
  constraining unnecessarily.

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Blogging on PDAs 1/3

• Setup Features
• Foldaway keyboard is portable
• But needs flat surface
• Line of sight awkward to establish (especially if
  user PT doesnt know how the arm works!)
• Keyboard drivers needed

PDA and Keyboard
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Blogging on PDAs 2/3

• Features
• Simple interface
• Support for markup
• Can copy and paste text
• Supports multiple input methods

• Screenshot Pocket Blog

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Blogging on PDAs 3/3

• Features
• Simple interface
• Retrieves blog entries from server
• Can edit entries
• Can update blog at the click of a link.

• Screenshot Pocket Blog

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Personal Responses

• Mobility "really satisfying to use, more
  relaxing and easier - none of the hassle of
  switching on a computer. " I could do small
  pieces at a time and build up a piece
• BloggingIt meant that I wrote down and
  reflected on lots of ideas that would usually not
  be 'relevant' - e.g. effectiveness of health care
  systems, attitudes of doctors towards patients,
  my feelings about activities. The blog made a
  daily diary a useful learning tool rather than an
  introspective indulgence! "

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Observations on PDA clients

• Usage
• Students had little difficulty using the tools
  and became quite fluent (easier than sitting at
  a desk)
• However, problems due to reliability (these are
  generally not mature products)
• Fiddly to set up (server config, client config,
  desktop sync etc.)
• Offered many other uses
• Development
• Few moblog clients
• Software bugs in clients
• Difficult to code for all platforms
• Few clients released as open source

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General Questions for Blogs

• How many blogs per person?
• How to relate personal blogs (on Blogger.com et
  al) to institutional blogs?
• How to handle so much diverse information?
• What happens when students leave the institution?
• How to transport personal data?

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Observations on Blog servers

• Large selection of feature-packed systems for
  most languages (Java, Perl, PHP etc)
• Pebble Weblog one of few designed to support
  multi-user and multi-contributor blogs
• Lot of work to incorporate in institutional
  structures how do you find blog X among
  thousands?
• Harder problems when accessing blog server via
  another system issue of secondary authentication

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Blogs in Bodington - Potential

• Blogs may be incorporated in generic containers
  (suites of rooms)
• Any user can potentially be allowed to set up
  areas with blogs
• Fine-grained access controls can allow user to
  select who can do what, at campus, course, and
  individual level
• Aggregation facilities
• Various display options
• Embedding in context with interactive tools and
  links to related resources etc.

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VLE Create resource
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VLE set up blog link
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VLE Configure display
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VLE Display blog
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VLE Blog as Menu item
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Technical observations

• Fairly straightforward for information to flow
  from mobile learning into online systems
• No means of posting to blog server from VLE
• Limited embedding (contextualising) of blogs in
  VLEs need to be able to work with content,
  comment on it etc.
• Problem of sharing authorisation data among web
  services BEWT offers partial solution
• Organisational issue of site-wide SSO, shared
  authorisation even greater!

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Chemistry Intro

• Chemistry moBlog use
• Which students
• moBlogs
• Chemistry
• Chemistry -

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Chemistry moBlog use
How does student feedback fit in this picture ?
CAC
Department
CJCC
College
Q
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Students

• Chemistry a four year degree- has about 170
  students per year, 330 applicants, 195 offers,
  180 arrive, lose about 10 in the first year.
• moBlog Group 9 first year students a single
  practical class group

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Chemistry

• Lecture Demonstrations
• Lecture Style and Content
• Tutorials
• Practicals
• WebLearn
• IT

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Chemistry -

• Workload
• Lectures
• Tutorial/Lecture Content
• Heating !

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Where next?

• Blog clients
• Develop and well-featured open source client
• Add support for jotting/doodling
• Extending the blog tool in the VLE
• support categories, posting to blog servers
  (entries and comments)
• Support shared authorisation
• More support for services
• More flexible working with blog content
• Extend existing VLE tools to import blog entries
• Add PDP functions to structure information

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Summary and Conclusions

• Moblogging works quite well
• Users generally fine it easy and convenient, but
  not all
• Technical setup fiddly and not always reliable
• Virtual Linking enables physical linking
  Moblogging cast light on the relationships
  between
• College study (tutorials etc) as personal
  learning
• Departmental study (central University lectures)
  as institutional learning
• Embedding in VLE is only light
• More compelling use cases need to be found
• Challenge of shared authorisation

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Project Team

• Matthew Buckett, Developer
• Dr. Karl Harrison, ChemRAMBLE Co-ordinator
• Jon Hutchings, System Admin
• Peter Robinson, Analyst
• Dr. Vivien Sieber, MedRAMBLE Liaison
• Colin Tatham, Developer
• Dr. Paul Trafford, Project Manager/Analyst
• Dr. Danny Tucker, MedRAMBLE Co-ordinator

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• Project site
• http//ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Ariadne Article
• http//www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/trafford/
• Contact ramble_at_oucs.ox.ac.uk

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Any reflections?