David Davies: Edtech

URL of this weblog category has moved

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 10:07:36 GMT

The URL of this weblog category has changed to: http://david.davies.name/weblog/categories/edtech/ The RSS feed is now: http://david.davies.name/weblog/categories/edtech/rss.xml Please update your bookmarks and aggregators.

Metadata, what metadata?

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 20:59:16 GMT

Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? An obvious question perhaps but a valid one nonetheless and depending upon the context the answer might not be as obvious as you may think.

Metadata is all around us yet how aware are we of its existence? An example. Most of us use Google at some point to search for pages on the web. Google uses metadata, quite a bit of it in fact yet most is not obviously apparent to us, at least not as metadata per se. There's a web page's title, metadata of a kind though you might rightly argue that's part of the page's data rather than metadata. More obvious metadata for any given page might include the date the page was last modified (available via the web server's page cache), the language, mime type (not all objects on the web are HTML web pages; think pictures, video, PDFs, etc.) and a few other bits of information. A web page's URL is also metadata, and that's quite an important part of searching Google, not least because Google creates its own metadata about a web page used to compile its PageRank. All these metadata are used to construct your search results when you search Google. Thankfully you can be blissfully unaware of their existence and still get pretty authoritative results. However, awareness of Google metadata can help you perform more focused searches but generally most of us are happy with the results we get when using the familiar single, simple search box.

Then there's learning object metadata. How aware are we of that, and indeed my main question, how aware should we be? The current learning object metadata specification from the IEEE weighs in around 69 metadata fields, that is 69 boxes in which something could be entered to describe a learning object. Let me say at the outset that you don't have to enter anything into any of these fields, they're not mandatory. But of course if a metadata system is to be of any use you'd have to use at least some of these fields otherwise what's the point. And it's a given that some metadata is essential for resource discovery and reuse, and therefore standardization in what those metadata are is essential. However, depending upon what your learning object is, some IEEE LOM fields will be more useful than others at describing your object. Some groups are working hard at helping to create a consensus as to what are the core fields that a learning object could use to aid resource discovery and reuse.

There's clearly an overhead associated with creating metadata as any data that can't be automatically gleaned from the object itself or created by the system a la Google has to be added by someone. Consequently there must also be a trade-off between the utility of metadata vs the cost of adding metadata. At one extreme no metadata is probably not going to be very helpful (and actually quite difficult to achieve given the inherent metadata surrounding any object placed on the web - see above). At the other extreme a comprehensively completed IEEE LOM record is likely to be too costly for many objects. As a result of this trade-off one of the hot topics in e-learning is trying to identify where the balance is, recognising that it's probably going to be different depending upon the context.

So, back to the question. Should a well implemented metadata system be transparent to the user? And a supplementary question, how can we as learners use this metadata to enhance our learning experience beyond that which was possible before the creation of the IEEE LOM?

Are there any really effective implementations of metadata e.g. the IEEE LOM in learning management systems that are transparent to the user yet sufficiently useful to justify the effort that went into creating them? And the $64,000 question, are these implementations used, and if so how, by whom and to what effect?

Updated RSS feeds from learning object repositories

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 11:58:56 GMT

Scott Leslie has updated his list of learning object repositories that offer RSS feeds of their items. Nice work Scott. I particularly liked the collapsible headlines (once I figured out they were there: click the minus sign in the box at the right of the headlines in blue).

RSSWinterfest

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 23:51:49 GMT

Although I expect RSSWinterfest won't mention learning object syndication using RSS or the importance of syndicating e-learning content in general, I will still be a virtual attendee in the hope of being pleasantly surprised.

Semantic Web Designer Post

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 10:22:06 GMT

Here's your chance to make a difference and help create the semantic web. This new post is based in the UK at QinetiQ, the largest science and technology research enterprise in Europe. Don't hang around though as the closing date is 10 January 2004. The job advert states "... the initial focus is on military applications ..." so you'll get to work on black ops too but at least you'll have access to a large budget!

Pitch in

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:29:19 GMT

I can't bear the thought of Alan not having anything to read via RSS so here's a quick post. It's nice to be missed, though I don't feel as though I've been away. As Seb has written, sometimes other things just take over your life. I've also been keeping my typing fingers busy with other projects.

While I was away doing other things David Wiley and team have set up their pitch with a new peer reviewed publishing project. Bravo! It's early days although a few papers have already been published. I'm not yet sure how Pitch will be different from other collaborative systems though with the pedigree of the first three authors I expect we'll see some great things. I anticipate that many of the hidden strengths of the project are in the work flow. Anyone who's had a paper peer reviewed and published in the 'established' literature will know that even rapid communications can take weeks to appear (though some are very rapid I accept) and a full paper can take months. Still, once your paper is accepted though it must be good, right? Well (stop the presses), no, peer review is no guarantee of truth, quality, and non-biased writing. That's reflected by the fact that we have tens of thousands of peer reviewed academic journals, often many tens or even hundreds of individual journals in the same small field. There are different degrees of 'truth', 'accuracy' and 'non-bias', at least there are in the published literature although in terms of absolutes there aren't of course (read this for a readable piece on understanding science and the science-based literature). Community interest and custom-and-practice can inadvertently perpetuate bias despite the most rigorous peer review.

But I digress (this is a topic that tried writing about before but have yet to get it right), back to the work flow advantages and community commentary offered by journals like Pitch. With regards the lengthy traditional peer review process, of course it doesn't have to be this way. It's as much about peer consent as it is about peer review. By that I mean the academic community accepts that in order to publish in the literature you have to (as a generalisation) submit your paper to a journal's editorial team, submit to their peer review process, assign your copyright to the journal's publisher, and then finally pay to buy back a copy of your (hopefully) published paper. Well times they are a changin. Increasingly authors are retaining their own copyright, are contributing to electronic journals (though not all offer the apparent cost and time saving that the electronic medium would seem to offer thanks to the strangle-hold of the existing publishing industry) and through entrepreneurial publishing ventures are getting their papers for free. Communities are springing up around some online journals where commentary extends debate.

So, let us welcome Pitch and let's all pitch in and make it a success because it'll likely only ever be as successful as you make it.

A rose by any other name

Tue, 16 Sep 2003 00:23:32 GMT

As a postscript to my post last week, it's not that I don't think reusable learning objects have a lot to teach us about how e-learning might work. I do. Much of my effort over the last few years has been in some way related to RLOs. It's just that I have a dawning realization that what educational technologists think of when they talk about learning objects is not the same as what lecturers and teachers think. And I don't just mean the old debate about whether a picture is an RLO or whether a course is. I mean something much deeper, about the way people interact with RLOs, what they're for and how they work for us. What works in the real world of teaching and learning, and what doesn't. At some point I think both communities needs to start interoperating.

RLO processors

Thu, 11 Sep 2003 21:11:54 GMT

I learnt many things while at a conference in Bern earlier this month. Apart from the finding that Bern is a beautiful city and was where Einstein developed his Special Theory of Relativity (I was fortunate to be able to visit his flat, now a museum at 49, Kramgasse), I also learnt much about reusable learning objects (RLOs) or more precisely, what other people thought about RLOs.

What I learnt was that despite the many exciting advances we've made in working with these instructional quanta, the concept of RLOs is still light years (no pun on Einstein) from most teacher's every day lives (and I expect those of learners though it was primarily a conference for teachers). Exactly what an RLO is, why they're important, more importantly exactly how you might use them, and even more fundamentally, what tools you might use to do these things were issues about as far away from everyday teaching as you could imagine, at least for most people. There was a tangible feeling of 'so what' about much of the RLO discussion, at least amongst the non-techies. As an aside the techie discussions about RLOs was very constructive but more about that in a later post.

The biggest issue is I think the lack of inexpensive, easily available, easy to use desktop tools, for without such tools people can't experiment, try out for themselves, and get their hands dirty with RLOs. Sure, there are some great tools out there but many are either development projects or are sophisticated systems yet to make a big impact on campuses. Also true, many of the popular VLE vendors sell products that claim to use learning objects, but often these are not low-level or low aggregation RLOs, the systems are not proper content management systems nor do they offer the kinds of authoring tools that authors need.

What we are going to need before working with RLOs becomes as familiar as word processing or at a stretch web page creation are studies on the ergonomics of RLOs, human computer interaction studies, and a deeper analysis of how educators can use RLOs to built teaching packages and more importantly how RLOs are going to benefit the learning process. We need a tool for RLOs just as familiar a word processor is for words. Though please not like Microsoft Word ;-)

e-Learning in Medical Education

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 14:31:56 GMT

I'm at the AMEE medical education conference in Bern this week. My presentation on 'Reusable learning objects, content syndication and resource discovery'was this morning. I'll put my presentation on the web when I get back for anyone who's interested though elements of it are scattered around this weblog already, in particular RSS autodiscovery for reusable learning objects.

Why there should be more than one SCORM

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 17:53:23 GMT

What I've never fully understood is why there's only one SCORM. Why do people talk about the SCORM instead of a SCORM? The very notion that there can be a Shareable Content Object Reference Model for learning objects would seem to suggest that there can be more than one. What's relevant to the US Department of Defense in terms of e-learning is unlikely to be relevant to, say, training doctors. There's an a priori assumption made by many that one size fits all. This isn't a claim made by those developing SCORM but it has been an assertion that's formed nonetheless.

The work of IMS is to create interoperable specifications that allow domain-specific requirements to be catered for by selecting the most appropriate combination of specs. For example, a subject domain that requires groups of learners to interact can adopt aspects of Learning Design and Learner Information that fits their needs. A domain that's more focused on objective knowledge and the sharing of content might pay more attention to Meta-data and Digital Repositories Interoperability, and so on. More likely an individual subject domain would select a wide range of specifications to create a reference model and application profile. More precisely, they would create a SCORM for their domain (rather than adopting the SCORM that exists at present).

Expect to see at least one new reference model and application profile emerge over the next 12 months as initiatives such as IVIMEDS establish themselves.

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 23:27:15 GMT

This is a group I've not heard of before. I found a reference to the Observatory in the recent UK government's 'Towards a Unified e-learning Strategy' document. The Observatory provides an environmental scanning service to higher education, particularly the Association of Commonwealth Universities and Universities UK though the analysis and commentary they provide will be of interest to anyone in HE. Their monthly Breaking News commentary seems to provide some useful links in the field of e-learning. Check out their national reports section under 'Key Resources'. Loads of really useful strategic documents.

Semantic Grid

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 14:49:30 GMT

"Lying at the core of scientific development is the discovery of new knowledge. The rapid increase in the volume and variety of data inherent within e-Science and mirrored by e-Commerce and e-Government means that any supporting infrastructure must provide a set of semantic services. These core services must be able to equip data with meaning and generate a surrounding semantic context in which data can be meaningfully interpreted. Fundamental research on knowledge systems and services is needed to allow us to move from the current data centric view supporting the grid to a semantic grid with a powerful set of knowledge services." The JISC and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council have just announced funding for two projects under the semantic grid initiative. Here's the original call for proposals that gives some of the background to this initiative.

CO-ODE (Collaborative Open Ontology Development Environment), lead by the University of Manchester.
e-Bank UK, lead by UKOLN at the University of Bath.

The CO-ODE project in particular sounds interesting. Although these projects are without doubt important pieces of the semantic web jigsaw, projects that tell us more about how we handle data in every day life are still thin on the ground, although there is an active community.

Towards a Unified e-learning Strategy

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 17:20:59 GMT

The UK government department for education and skills has issued a consultation document to "shape an e-learning strategy for all learners and potential learners and all sectors of education and training from early years through to Higher Education and lifelong learning". The document highlights the key contributions from e-learning as:

Virtual Environments
Flexible Study
Online Communities
Personalised Support
Individualised Learning
Tools for Innovation
Quality at scale
Collaborative Learning

and identifies the strategic actions necessary to embed e-learning across all sectors:

Supporting innovation in teaching and learning
Developing the education workforce
Unifying learner support
Leading sustainable e-learning
Aligning assessment
Assuring technical and quality standards
Building a better e-learning market

Why do you believe what you read?

Sun, 11 May 2003 20:40:29 GMT

Why are you reading this piece? Maybe you're reading this because you've read other things I've written in the past and you like my style. Maybe you came across this piece because of a link from another site. Or maybe you ended up here following a Google search. These are three typical reasons why anyone reads anything on the Internet and recently all three have been the subject of speculation, in particular in relation to how we interact with weblogs.

The very fact that this piece was written for my weblog might change how you find future pieces by me or other weblog writers. Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive at Google has said that the Internet search company will soon be offering a service for searching weblogs. The Register has picked up on his comments and speculated that weblogs might get their own tab in the familiar search engine's home page and that it's even possible that weblog data may be removed from Google's main index. The trouble, or so it is claimed, is that webloggers are inadvertently exploiting Google's PageRank algorithm to gain extra credibility with the result that weblog posts tend to occupy the top slots for many Google searches while 'proper' information is relegated to the lesser ranks.

First, a quick observation. Google is a lot smarter than some people give it credit for. Sure, a lot of weblogs turn up in Google searches but not always and certainly not always for current news topics. Google uses its clever algorithms and relevance matching tricks to identify search terms as being of topical relevance. For example, a Google search for 'SARS epidemic' not only produced some Google recommended news site links (no weblogs) but also mostly credible articles from established media such as The Guardian. Certainly no 'amateur' journalists posting to their weblogs. I'm not going to get into the weblog as journalism debate, that's been discussed many times elsewhere.

Now a more fundamental observation. Implicit in some of the objections to weblogs as information sources is that just because weblogging software is used then what is written using this software must in some way be less credible than what is written via other means. Dave Winer was spot on some time ago when he wrote "When that journalist writes something on the weblog, therefore, it must not be journalism. Suppose the journalist writes exactly the same words on her weblog that she writes in a column in the newspaper she writes for. In one place it's journalism and in the other it's not?" and "It also goes without saying that if an idiot writes a weblog, then you get idiocy in a weblog". That weblogs are any more or less subject to the maxim bullshit in, bullshit out than any other form of writing is false.

So what about credibility and where does it come from? Well here's where I'd like to make another observation. Recently there's been some discussion in my professional area (educational technology) surrounding writing in public in weblogs as opposed to writing in scholarly journals. An individual who has a high profile in the academic community (a track record of publishing in scholarly literature) has recently started a weblog. Now the weblog community in this area is particularly active, but often amongst individuals without a track record publishing in academic journals. That's a simplification and there are many exceptions but as a generalization for the purposes of this piece it's a valid statement. So in this example, where does the credibility come from? The scholar or the webloggers?

Both!

And here's why. As a member of academic staff I write for peer reviewed scholarly journals. An article I write may take 6 months to appear in print but when it does you can be assured that it's been read by at least two of my peers and therefore is credible. That's how the academic community moves forward. Blatant lies, untruths and falsehoods are weeded out at peer review stage (at least they are in most cases) so that what appears in print has at least passed the most basic test for veracity.

I also have a weblog and so I can decide to write a piece today and by this evening it'll be available to a global audience. In this case how do you assess the credibility of what I write? Instant publishing is transforming the availability of information. So much so that academic journals are adapting to this new medium by offering pre-prints and other forms of rapid publication including fully electronic journals that cut the time to publication dramatically. But these rapid forms of publication still use peer-review and so are still credible. So can the weblogging world gain the kind of credibility that renders its community information worthy of being on the first page of a Google search result? I think it can and the method by which this credibility is derived is through communities of practice. To quote Etienne Wenger, the originator of the communities of practice idea; "The basic idea [of communities of practice] is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act". To revisit the earlier example of educational technology weblogs, a community of practice has emerged centred on a core of bloggers that gives the ideas and discussions that emerge from this community a credibility that's every bit as valid as the peer reviewed community publishing articles in scholarly journals.

The big difference between writing for a journal and writing on a weblog is that crap written in academia tends not to get published (with very few exceptions) whereas crap written in a weblog can appear in the results of a Google search. But here's where Google's PageRank can help us. A weblog or weblogger that's consistently crap is less likely to partake in a community of practice than one that routinely generates active debate. The latter is also more likely to reach the top 10 in a Google search than the former exactly because of another of the phenomena of weblogging communities of practice, web links or the ubiquitous blogroll.

I think it's going to take a little while for these weblogging communities of practice to establish themselves in many areas but when and where they do I think we can look forward to more informed information and debate than has yet to grace much of what is written on the web. And when they do emerge I for one will be proud to call myself a blogger.

So back to Google. If Google creates a tab specifically for weblogs then that will propel weblogs from a relatively small-scale specialist activity into something of global relevance, in your face every time you do a Google search. Whether or not this is a good thing only time will tell. If on the other hand Google devise a way of removing weblog posts from its main index then I really do thing that the Internet will be a poorer place for it.

Note to readers: This piece has not been peer reviewed but has instead been blogged.

RSS Autodiscovery for Learning Objects

Fri, 09 May 2003 23:22:00 GMT

Bingo! Brent fixed NetNewsWire to correctly work with RSS autodiscovery. View this page in a web browser then subscribe to it with NetNewsWire 1.0.2b8 or later (or any other RSS reader to support RSS autodiscovery). Now we've got a nice way of syndicating learning objects on web pages that use them in context.

Project Finder

Fri, 09 May 2003 16:55:57 GMT

The Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Generic Centre has set up a new project finder service. "This database contains details of a variety of external nationally funded projects. It currently contains LTSN Subject Centre Miniprojects, FDTL 1-4, HEFCE Disability Strand 2, Action on Access regional projects, Innovations and TLTP projects." So now there's no excuse for not knowing about prior art in any given area, for example e-learning.

CETIS Pedagogy Forum

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 16:58:04 GMT

For all those interested in following the debate on putting the learning back into learning objects, the newly formed CETIS Pedagogy Forum will be an important meeting place. The launch of this new group has been reported by Wilbert Kraan. The forum will be an essential focal point for discussion on the new IMS Learning Design specification, not least because CETIS' own Bill Olivier was a chief architect of the draft specification.

Putting the learning back into learning objects

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 00:32:16 GMT

I read Norm Friesen's 'Three objections to learning objects' but something in the arguments raised didn't match with how I view reusable learning objects. So in the spirit of Norm's article, here's another perspective on the debate about the positive and negative aspects of the vision of sharing educational resources. 1. The old 'what is a learning object' debate. In the context of e-learning, "any digital, reproducible and addressable resource used to perform learning activities or learning support activities, made available for others to use" works for me (thanks to Rob Koper, 'Combining reusable learning resources and services with pedagogical purposeful units of learning' in this book). 2. When I read the IMS learning Design specification is see "The IMS Learning Design specification supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning.". I don't see pedagogic neutrality, in fact I see a tool that builds upon the excellent groundwork laid down by those fine fellows at the Open University of the Netherlands on the Educational Modelling Language (EML) and delivers a specification that can put the learning back into learning objects. Here's a key paragraph from the IMS Learning Design Best Practice and Implementation Guide: "While the Learning Design approach allows different kinds of learning strategies to be supported, there is currently no vocabulary provided for describing different kinds of learning approaches, in part because the runtime system does not need to have such a vocabulary in order to correctly interpret learning designs - it just has to be able to interpret the meta-language. This provides a means of expressing many different pedagogical approaches in a relatively succinct language as set out in this document. This language in itself must be pedagogically neutral. In consequence, a system that has to interpret this language does not need to know the pedagogical approach underlying the design: it only needs to be able to instantiate the design, allocate activities and their associated resources to participants playing the various roles, and coordinate the runtime flow." 3. If you have a strong pedagogic model and are serious about learning design then forget SCORM. How can anyone be serious about SCORM when it only models the single learner, single interaction, and is fundamentally unable to model the kinds of interactions between groups of learners and learning objects that makes e-learning (and learning objects) work. IMS Learning Design is new, and as such will be refined, but right now it could be the most significant e-learning specification yet developed.

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 12:32:03 GMT

We're all off to Sebastian Fiedler's place to talk about custom-built RSS feeds. Hope to meet you there, there's an interesting discussion forming.

Reusable learning objects and RSS autodiscovery

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 00:59:41 GMT

I had an idea that if RSS is such an obvious format to use for reusable learning object (RLO) syndication then why not use RSS autodiscovery? Put simply, if a web page that contains RLOs has an RSS autodiscovery header item then all of the objects on that page become discoverable by automated systems such as RSS news readers, auto-subscribe bookmarklets and more importantly, RLO aggregators. So I made a demonstration page. Pages such as this backed by a content management system would make the insertion of the RSS link automatic thereby making resource discovery and the reuse of learning objects fairly painless.

Sebastian Fiedler joins the trail blazers

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 15:42:03 GMT

Now that Sebastian is on board I think we can expect some interesting dialogue. Here's Sebastian's first trail, the EduBlogger Gallery alpha.

Learning Objects in Motion

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 01:20:40 GMT

This short piece in the latest Syllabus magazine contains a useful introduction to syndicating learning objects using RSS. Typically though it misses some of the crucial prior art in this area. Given that this working example I put together to not only syndicate multiple choice questions using RSS 0.91 but also to perform cross-institutional search for RLOs was 2 years ago I guess they can be excused for missing it?

Learning Object Contextualization

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 22:18:46 GMT

This piece on learning object contextualization was in part triggered by reading David Wiley's recent paper "Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities" but also because I wanted to get down some of the work we've been doing in this area in our curriculum. The piece is illustrated by examples from our medical undergraduate programme and in particular our VLE.

CETIS report on the release of the RELOAD metadata editor

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 19:37:37 GMT

"One issue that keeps popping up in debates about learning objects is the metadata question; how are educators supposed to make an interoperable description of a learning object that will allow it to be found by others? The Reload elarning tool development project decided to attack that problem before any others, with the first results already appearing." Check out the RELOAD web site: http://www.reload.ac.uk/ There's even a Mac OS X installer. Yay!

New book - Reusing Online Resources

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:11:37 GMT

OK, so anyone else seen this book yet? I picked up a copy at my local bookstore at the weekend. Nothing particulalry new in the book though it's a useful collection of articles so as such it makes a handy reference. The collected articles have a strong UK bias which makes a change. There are 19 chapters under the broad headings:

Vision and theoretical perspectives
Design perspectives
Resource perspectives
Strategic perspectives

The book is suported by a website. http://www.reusing.info/ There's a link to an online debate section hosted by Journal of Interactive Media in Education though the JIME special covering topics in this book isn't available yet.