Canberra Cab Spots

One thing I learnt at the MoodlePosium was the existence of "Cab Spot 12 - The Street Theatre". This is one of several dozen Cabspots

iPads at Moodle e-Learning Event

Greetings from the wrap-up session of the MoodlePosium at Australian National University in Canberra. Of the twelve people I can see around me in the audience, six have devices in front of them. Three have iPads, one an iPhone, one laptop and I have a netbook. Looking at how these devices fit on the small flip-up desk provided in the lecture theatre, the iPads are the least conspicuous. It would be difficult for the presenter to tell if the audience was using an iPad or a paper notebook, when the iPad is flat on the desk.

However, I found using the the iPad virtual keyboard clumsy and the screen reflections from overhead lights painful. One delegate had a very elegant blue-tooth keyboard and their iPad propped up as a portrait format screen. This was very elegant but very conspicuous.

The iPhone user is hand holding the device. The laptop user has the unit covering the full surface of the small desk with the screen hanging out into space.

A 10 inch netbook seems to fit very well in this environment, not covering the whole desk. An alternative would be the Kensington KeyFolio Case for iPad, which has a built in rubber Bluetooth keyboard. This turns the iPad into a netbook format device.

Copyright in your Moodle Course

Greetings from the last day of the MoodlePosium at Australian National University in Canberra. Vanessa Tuckfield from CIT is speaking on managing copyright in Moodle courses. She pointed out that copyright law applies to much of what educators use, even if they have Creative Commons as an ideal. Copyright generally applies for 70 years after the death of the creator, thanks to the Disney Corporation. There are some statutory licences which educational institutions can purchase (such as Screen-rights).

CIT is working on having electronic surveys of copyright use to avoid teachers having to fill in paper forms. CIT has a repository of materials. Teachers put material in there and this can then be used for multiple courses. This sounds to me like it could be a good idea, even without copyright considerations. The items are tagged with the type of licence.

One point to remember is that in the VET sector, material created by staff is owned by the institution. So organisations need to make sure they do not end up paying for using something they already own.

Vanessa pointed out that educators tend to forget to reference images they use. It may be difficult to include traditional academic references in interactive material. She also poitned out that for material which is not clearly labelled, the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) will collect fees and hold them for collection by the author.

CIT have a "sticky" Moodle block which outlines Copyright of the course materials.

Version control killer app for higher education

In his keynotes address to the MoodlePosium at Australian National University, Martin Dougiamas, developer of Moodle, mentioned how Moodle 2 would de-duplicate files. That is, if two people upload the same file, the system can detect this and only store one copy. This could make considerable savings. But it also got me thinking about the more general issue of version control in courses and more generally in the work of universities. Perhaps version control will be the killer application for higher education.

If a file is changed in Moodle, only the new version is kept, the old version is lost (unless a backup has been done in the interim). As a result there could be numerous slightly different versions of the same file stored (with the user creating a new copy). The system will not know these are versions of the same file. This has implications for computer resource use and also for pedagogy. The copies of the file will take up space, wasting storage. When a file is changed the person making the change will not be alerted that there are other copies which perhaps should be changed. Those using the changed file will not know what changed or why.

Software developers have created a sophisticated revision control process for managing such changes, based on previous manual procedures for engineering documents. Version control software, such as Subversion, can be used to manage versions, allowing for multiple versions of the one document and the merging of changes. Not only does this reduce the system resources required, by just storing the changes, it allows for the management of very complex development processes. Word processors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org have a limited form of version control built in, with the ability to record changes, as do some content and repository management systems.

During the World Computer Congress in Brisbane I talked to a university professor who was having problems with email. They were keeping copies of all messages from students and book collaborators in the university mail system. As a result their mail box was clogged with copies of draft papers and books. This was partly a failure of the university's administration in not providing suitable online tools for handling large documents which will be required for several years. However, it was also a conceptual failure. When I asked them about version control, they looked at me blankly. I had assumed that this would be something familiar to any professional handling large amounts of information, but it appears to be confined to engineers and IT professionals.

Version control may already be avilable with many Moodle installations, as it is built into the Alfresco content repository, an open source package installed alongside Moodle. Perhpas it would be possible to use Alfresco to add version control to some parts of Moodle.

Also perhaps version control should be part of the basic training for anyone who will be producing large volumes of material at unviersity (essentially anyone doing an undergraduate or postgraduate program or research). They could then be trained to use these techniques as part of their education and research. The versioning process is in some ways analogous to education or research: these are measured on what has changed since we started.

Instead of a student sending hundreds of pages of thesis draft with a few changes, accompanied by a message indicating where the changes are, the system could be used for this. Instead of version control being incidental to education, it could be central.

However, my enthusiasm for versioning may not be shared by others. Peter Sefton, creator of the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) for creating educational course ware, commented: "... versioning is not one of ICE’s most used features and people would be happy to sacrifice it for extra speed ...".

Moodle Odyssey

After lunch the MoodlePosium at Australian National University has reconvened to hear from Martin Dougiamas, developer of Moodle, on "Moodle 2 Good Stuff". During lunch I was talking to Martin, who mentioned he was on his way from Greece to Educause 2010. Martin emphasised the community aspect of Moodle, taking it beyond isolated individual courses (that seems to be a theme emerging at this event). One new aspect of the development of Moodle is Moodle QA. It might be interesting to see if some of the Quality assurance (QA) ideas for software find their way into course development.

Martin talked also about the internationalisation and security of Moodle. These are issues which arisen as more people in more places use the software.

Some other additions are dock-able blocks. The Navigation block provides an overall menu for navigating around Moodle. These features should remove some of the problems with having to decide what to fit on scarce screen space. The designer can put what they think is appropriate and the student can change it.

One practical feature of Moodle 2 is de-duplication of files. If a file is shared between courses, only one copy is kept. However, there is no version control built in, so if a file is changed slightly for one course but not for another then two complete copies of the file are kept and there is no record that the files are related. Martin commented that institutions tended to use specialised products such as EQUELLA Digital Repository (Allfresco may also be an option). However, that might be missing something fundamental to education about version control. As an example, instead of treating an assignment the student submits as being complete and fixed, it could be versioning, with the student and teacher then working together to improve the assignment.

One useful addition to Moodle is the concept of "completion". The designer can set criteria which when met, the system indicates the student has completed this part. This can also be used to progressively reveal content, based on what the student has completed. Perhaps the criteria could be used to award the student a degree automatically, when they have ticked all the necessary boxes. ;-)

The concept of a user in Moodle has been expanded, with enrolments and roles. I did not understand the details of how this works.

Moodle Hubs provides directories of Moodle courses. This allows for a "Publishing site" where a course can be downloaded from and a "Community site" which allows enrolment. One problem I have with the publishing is that there is no concept of versioning, so that each copy of a course is an independent entity, with no way to later share content. So if I download a published course there is no way to find out what updates may have been made later.

Martin mentioned a Mobile API for Moodle. This was disappointing as it is about building new and unique mobile interfaces for Moodle. I would prefer to see the Moodle interface be made to work on a mobile.

However, I suspect that Moodle 3, will be time for a redesign or another developer to do what Martin did: unhappy with the complexity and difficulty of Moodle, they would create something simpler with a philosophy behind it. In "The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist" (Addison-Wesley, 2004), Fred Brooks describes the OS/360 Job Control Language as the worst programming language ever designed, because the designers did not realise they were producing a programming language. Similarly Moodle has a large number of modules, some of which appear very similar. It may be time to rethink the design with fewer, more powerful modules.

Future of Higher Education in the Digital Age

Greetings from the Australian National University, where the MoodlePosium started this morning. Currently Peter Evans from USQ is talking on Moodle Hacks, Tips and Hints. One issue he raised was how communication between teachers, particularly temporary sessional teachers could be accommodated. Peter then went on to discuss how to get outsiders into a course. The obvious solution are "guests", but they can't interact with students. Self enrolling is a cumbersome process. He suggests using a meta-course and then establishing a community forum as a child course. He suggests making a student the moderator of a forum to allow them to demonstrate leadership.

One major issue was the way Austrlaian universities cut courses into 13 week individual modules. Peter suggested using a Mahara ePortfolio for the student over the life of their course and beyond. This rasies itneresting issues about the nature of education.

These might all sound like trivial details and hot related to the big issues of tertiary education, but as I will discuss in my talk tomorrow on Education Informed Research Using Moodle, it is these sort of details which are important to teachers and they will decide the future of education, not Vice Chancellors or government policy makers. For those who doubt the power of such event, I noticed Martin Dougiamas, developer of Moodle sitting just in front of me. The usual process of canvassing ideas, preparing proposals, having them reviewed, listed and implemented can be reduced from years to days. What is discussed here will shape the future of education in Australia. What I found from helping implement the Internet in the Australian government was if you proposed someone which made sense, people would implement it, without the need for formal policy.

Creating a Better Moodle Online Course

Greetings from Copeland room G25 at the Australian National University, where Mark Drechsler is presenting a Moodle Makeover Workshop, before the MoodlePosium tommorrow. He has started by presenting "Creating the perfect Moodle course".

There is an interesting mix of students, about half from ANU and half from University of Canberra. This creates some difficulties for Mark, as while the two universities are only a few km apart they use different terminology for what they do.

Another challenge for Mark was the setup of the computer lab, which has the presenters workstation facing into a corner of the room away from the class. To operate a presentation, he has to put his back to the audience.

I found it curious that Moodle was not used to present the workshop. Several minutes were wasted waiting for printed copies of handouts to arrive and to be distributed. It would have been very simple to have provided these material via Moodle. In 2001 I was Using Moodle live in the classroom. I am surprised it is not being used more.

One of the handouts was a useful "Moodle course review template", which could be applied to other LMS, or course material in general. Good web design was emphasised, as was educational design. One example provided was Tomaz Lasic's "Water!" demonstration course.

The most interesting part of the afternoon was the discussion of why Moodle is being used. At this point the realities of student life and university policies and how they effect course design were discussed. Another interesting discussion was over how much we require students to reveal information about themselves in online discussion forums. My suggestion was to treat online forums in the same way as face to face tutorials. I invite students to talk about themselves but do not require it. In particualr some students when answering questions about their workplace do not say where they work.

Context and Critical Thinking in Course Design

At the 2010 ACT MoodlePosium in Canberra next week, I am chairing the Friday morning "Andragogy" session featuring Margaret Robson (CIT) on "Engaging learners by incorporating critical thinking and reflection" and Srinivas Chemboli (ANU) on "Contextualising learning outcomes and course design in Moodle". I need to introduce the speakers, and while these are people I know, I did not want to make the mistake of assuming I knew of all the accomplishments, so here is what I found with a search:

Margaret Robson, Education Designer, Flex:Ed, Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT), Canberra

Margaret Robson has worked with flexible and online learning at CIT since 1997, firstly whilst teaching in the Department of Software Development and more recently in Teacher Education where she used Web 2.0 social networking tools to re-engineer programs to provide multiple learning pathways.

She has published IT workbooks to support flexible learning programs.

Margaret co-facilitated the Flexible Learning Leaders online network throughout 2000 and 2001 and holds a Graduate Diploma of Computing, a Master of Education and a Graduate Certificate of Facilitating and Managing Elearning.

Expertise: education design, resource development to meet learning goals, professional development facilitation.

From: Who are Flex:Ed?, CIT, 2010

XHTML, HTML & DREAMWEAVER
This book supports ICAITU019C and ICPMM65dA in Certificate III and IV in Information
Technology (Software Applications) ICA30199.

Copyright Margaret Robson, October 2002. Revised January 2006.
Author : Margaret Robson
ISBN : 1-74123-151-5

Srinivas Chemboli, Postgraduate Student / Educational Technologist, OESG,College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, Canberra

Srinivas Chemboli is a PhD student in the ANU School of Computer Science, researching effective capture and reuse of intellectual effort in scientific workflows. He is also an Educational Technologist in the Online Environment Support Group (OESG) in the Division of Information at the ANU.

From: Presentation for Wattle Wednesday, 2010

Research
Omnispective Analysis and Reasoning: An epistemic approach to scientific workflows ...

Teaching

• COMP1100: Introduction to Programming and Algorithms (S1/2009) (Tutor)
• COMP2110: Software Design (S2/2008)
• COMP2510: Software Design for Software Engineers (S2/2008)
• COMP8120: System/Software Development Methodologies (S2/2008) (Undertaken as part of the Pinnacle Program)
• COMP3110: Software Analysis and Design (S1/2008) (Tutor)
• COMP6311: Software Analysis and Design (S1/2008) (Tutor)
• COMP6442: Software Construction for e-Science(S1/2008)
• COMP6444: Software Design for e-Science (S2/2007)

From: Srinivas Chemboli, College of Engineering and Computer Science, ANU , 2010

Digital Education Revolution Skills

Professor SV Raghavan and Senator Conroy both talked on the benefits of broadband for education at the World Computer Congress 2010 in Brisbane this week. But will teachers know what to do with broadband?

More work is needed on tools and skills for teachers to use the fibre. I can say this sort of thing now I am an award winning online educator. ;-)

While the federal government has done good work on educating teachers with projects such as Edna and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework, the investment is relatively small compared to that being spent on computer hardware and networking.

Recently I have been taking part in an online discussion in the LinkedIn Group: Higher Education Teaching and Learning, of how to present materials to students. What was worrying was that many teachers were replicating poor paper based education in the digital domain. Faced with the problem of students not reading long wordy documents on paper, they put them online, producing long wordy PDF documents. When the students did not read those, the teachers gave the students to hour long lectures on what was in the documents which the students (sensibly) had not read.

This week during the World Computer Congress in Brisbane I talked to a university professor who was having problems with email. They were keeping copies of all messages from students and book collaborators in the university mail system. As a result their mail box was clogged with copies of draft papers and books.

Universities provide tools for efficiently handling documents in learning management systems and e-portfolios. However, the system administrators may be too quick to remove all data from the system at the end of a course. This then requires the teachers and students to manually store duplicate copies of materials elsewhere. Multiplied thousands of times across schools, TAFEs and universities, this is a waste of teacher and student effort. Also the students will be learning poor e-literacy skills which they will then take with them into the workforce. I will be discussing some of this at the Canberra MoodlePosium, 7-8 October 2010.

The ANU asked me to prepare a 6 week e-learning course on electronic document management to be offered from early next year. This would incorporate material on electronic document management and web design courses I previously presented in ANU face to face courses.

One problem I had with this was making it interesting. When this material is part of a larger course the student has to do it, to complete the course. A standalone EDM course might appeal to a few records managers and librarians, but then they are more likely to want to do specialist courses designed just for them. What I might do is call the course "Working in the Cloud" and present it for all information professionals (including educators) needing to support efficient online work practices. That would explore efficiency both from the point of view of getting the work done and efficient technical use of the online resources.

Moodle Andragogy

The 2010 ACT MoodlePosium, a conference on the use of the Moodle learning management system, is on it Canberra 7 and 8 October 2010. As well as talking on the use of Moodle for supervising research students, I will be chairing the Friday morning session on Andragogy (the study of learning by adults).

E-Moderating: the Key to Teaching and Learning Onlin

The Austrlaian Computer Society's Computer Professional Education Program is based on the Model of Online Learning developed by Gilly Salmon. This powerful and personal approach to e-learning is detailed in her book "E-Moderating: the Key to Teaching and Learning Online". The key to this technique is simple to understand but difficult to apply: guide the student, don't "teach" at them. I believe this technique can also be applied to research supervision and will be discussing this in a presentation at the 2010 ACT MoodlePosium, at the Austrlaian National University in Canberra, 7 October 2010.

I read the hardback second edition 2003 of E-Moderating. While the techniques themselves will stand the test of time, the e-learning software examples in the book are a little dated. It might be best to get the 2007 Kindle Edition or wait for the new paperback due June 2011.