Innovating University Education

At Unconference Canberra,on Saturday Dr Shayne Flint from the Australian National University discussed new ways to teach students a wider range of work relevant skills. One of these is "ANU TechLauncher" where students work on a project in a team for a real client. Students have the option of doing their own business start-up through the Canberra Innovation Network (where the conference was held). To help, I am preparing a module on "Introduction to Innovation" which students can do on its own or as part of another course.

Augmented Reality Bus Shelter

Greetings from Unconference Canberra, where I took part in a session on "Climate Adapted People Shelter" (CAPS). This is a project to design better bus shelters for Western Sydney. This project seems misdirected to me. The bus shelters installed in Sydney are not hot and uncomfortable because no one knows how to design a comfortable bus shelter. The priority for local government is to maximize the advertising revenue from the shelter, not the comfort of the bus passengers.

Shelters with advertising are made transparent so that the advertising can be see from the road, while the passengers waiting can see the bus coming. Unfortunately the result is a shelter which is very hot in the Australian sun.

I suggest it is possible to design a shelter meeting both the needs of passengers and advertisers. As an example, a low tech solution would be to use perforated advertisements, so that those waiting for a bus could see out through them (just as some buses have advertising wrapped over the windows).

A high tech approach would be a translucent electronic display or virtual window on the bus shelter. Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) consist of active material sandwiched between two sheets of glass, there is then a white sheet of translucent plastic behind to diffuse the back-lighting. It would be possible to replace the translucent sheet with a transparent one, so you could see through the screen from the back.

An approach using off the shelf equipment would be to install a camera outside the shelter and display the street scene on a screen inside to make a virtual window. This has been used as a marketing gimmick as augmented reality in a London bus shelter in 2014. The London unit used a screen the full size of the advertising panel, down to ground level, but a practical unit unit emulating a window needs to only use a screen of about 100 cm. Rather than just a simple video display, the screen could also show the bus timetable. If the unit showed which buses were approaching and indicated which were going to stop, that would be particularly useful for the passenger. Such a display could also include advertising, to offset the cost.

For those who want to take the alternative approach of removing advertising from the bus shelters, the challenge is not redesigning the shelters. The challenge is to redesign local government political and financial arrangements to compensate for the loss of revenue. Can the political benefit to elected officials of a more comfortable bus shelter be shown to be sufficient to compensate for the loss of revenue?

Lego and Government Websites

Greetings from Unconference Canberra. I just talked about "Online Colombo Plan". Now there are two sessions which seem to be about Lego and one on GovCMS. The latter is an implementation of Drupal from the Australian Department of Finance, configured for use by government agencies. This has been a little controversial as another government agency, Digital Transformation Office in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has been working on a new improved GOV.AU website. In my view the two agencies activities are complementary, not competitive. Finance are working on the details of how to implement, whereas DTO are working on what to implement.

Canberra Unconference

Greetings from Unconference Canberra. About fifty people arrived on the top floor of the old ACT Health building in the middle of the city for a conference on a Saturday morning, with a completely blank program. The idea is that the attendees volunteer to talk about anything. First there was a warm-up exercise run by Kinnford Consulting, then first session was on photo composition and the next is on "How to Write a Gender Neutral Conference Talk". I will be speaking at 11:20 about the "Online Colombo Plan".

Unconference Canberra 2016

Unconference Canberra is Saturday, 9 April 2016 (register free). My first such was in 2009 (then BarCamp Canberra). It is worth attending one of these "un-conferecnes" to see what it is about. But the seemingly cohos and jargon can take a little getting used to.

MOOCs with Books at BarCamp Canberra

Greetings from the Inspire Centre at the University of Canberra where BarCamp Canberra 2013 just started. This is an "un-conference" with a more spontaneous presentations. My talk on how to blend traditional and on-line education last week in Sydney went well, so I thought I would do an expanded version today.

What is a MOOC?

1. Massive: 100,000 students or more. Australia's large university has less than 50,000 students.
2. Open: No scholastic or financial barrier to enrollment. Materials may also be  open educational resources.
3. On-line: Materials delivered and students interact via the Internet.
4. Course: Similar in size to an Australian university subject of about a 12 week semester one quarter full time student load (a US course). But does not provide a credential on completion.

Some MOOC Suppliers

• udacity
• edX: ANU joined recently
• Coursera 
• Class Central (course aggregator). 

Some MOOC Courses

1. Harvard edX CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science 

2. MIT edX 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming (uses a textbook)
   

Software and Training for MOOCs

• edX XBlock open source software (released 13 March 2013)
• Class2Go from Stanford
•  Introduction to Class2Go

Implications

1. Massive: Systems and software need to scale to deliver materials, provide automated student support and ways for students to interact.
2. Open: Wider range of students will need more help. Ways for students to find their group needed.
3. On-line: Ways to support students who have limited and intermittent Internet access are required.
4. Course: Will need to integrate with conventional university programs or create a whole new on-line university system. Ways to credential students on-line required.

Traditional Teaching On-line

1. Books: Course content provided in a down-loadable standalone structured module (textbook), using existing e-Book formats (web, Moodle Book Module, EPUB, IMS Content Package).
2. Formative Feedback: Short tests can be used to aid learning by student.
3. Groups: Students can be formed into groups for mutual support, on-line and off-line.

How Books Can Help

• On-line courses tend to present material in small chunks which the designer decided
• A book provides a carefully structured set of materials for the course, which can be used off-line.

How Software Can Help

1. Massive: Develop plug-ins and upgrades for free open source systems, such as Moodle and Mahara, to allow the to handle millions of students.
2. Open: Develop software which uses existing e-learning and e-book standards (web, Moodle Book Module, EPUB, IMS Content Package, SCORM Package).
3. On-line: Develop off-line support for e-learning, using mobile devices.
4. Course: Develop software which supports an integrated program, course module development process, not just delivery of isolated courses, so students get an education which meets community standards.

More Information

1. Demonstration of Using Moodle for Postgraduate Professional Education with eBooks and Smart phones
2. A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online 
3. Demonstration of Using Moodle for Postgraduate Professional Education with eBooks and Smart phones
4. On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century
5. Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques

Topics for BarCamp Canberra 2013

The BarCamp Canberra 2013 "un-conference" is on this Saturday, 16 March at the Unviersity of Canberra Inspire Centre. John Sheridan asked via Twitter for ideas on waht to speak about. It may seem odd for a senior government official to be wondering aloud \what to speak on at a conference in only a few days time, but this is an un-conference. Those who turn up with a traditional Powerpoint intensive set speech will be in for a shock. The un-conference format is similar to an academic symposium, in that all participants are potential speakers.

My current interests are online engagement courses (aka: Teaching How to Teach On-line, ), Sustainable Development, On-line Professional Education, Green Computing and New Forms of e-Learning for Developing Nations. The last of these I will be talking about at an international computer education conference in Colombo. The leader of the federal opposition, Tony Abbott, recently proposed a new "Colombo Plan" . The Colombo Plan secretariat office is in Colombo, so I might pop in and visit them.

ps: At the first I attended (BarCamp Canberra 2009)  I did not understand what was going on. There were people with strange codes on their name tags instead of names (these turned out to be Twitter addresses) and there were people writing on post-it notes and stucking them on a board (this is how you offer a talk on the day). It was difficult to work out who were the speakers and who were the audience (a person who looks in their late teens, in torn jeans and fluorescent hair may turn out to be a software engineer from the world's leaning web company).

Captioning Digital Video Using Web Standards

Greetings from Barcamp Canberra 2012 where Christopher Giffard is reprising his excellent talk on captioning digital video, (including his own too a tool Captionator.js) from the Web Standards Group this week. The short version of this is that webvtt is likely to be the supported format for captions for subtitles for videos on the web. Within a few months this should be supported by the major browsers as part of HTML 5. This will make captioning videos much simpler. It will also be possible to provide a table of contents to allow the viewer to jump to a part of a video, which will be very useful for education.

eLearning at Barcamp Canberra 2012

Greetings from Barcamp Canberra 2012 "un-conference"at the ANU in Canberra. I gave a talk on eLearning, which worked okay.

We have enough computers and telecommunications for a digital education revolution, but it is not just about connecting schools to the Internet and buying tablet computers for students. Teachers need to learn a new (or old) way to teach and students need to take responsibility for their , own learning. As a society we need t invest in the skills and systems to do this. ...

Gamification of open source software development

Greetings from Barcamp Canberra 2012 "un-conference"at the ANU in Canberra. Where Melanie Rooney from open source software company Suqiz is talking on their internal "roadmap" product. Tis is an internal online service which the management use to get the views of staff and clients on what the company should work on. This has elements of Gamification: using features of a game in non-game software. But what I found more interesting was that there are also aspects of e-democracy, with staff and clients debating the value of various options for new products. This could be useful for government.

Barcamp Canberra 2012

Barcamp Canberra 2012 is on Saturday 17th March 2012. This is a very well organized "un-conference", if that is not a contradiction in terms. It is free and is better than many of the paid conferences I attend. The theme is usually around government and Internet technology, but strays into other areas. No doubt there will be people talking about 3D printing, as that is trendy. At BCC2011 I talked about "Designing for Dialogue" (there was also a wired sign on the door saying "Please help keep this building a Comic Sans free zone"). At BCC2010 I talked on "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads" and at BCC2009, it was "National Bushfire Warning System". I don't know what I might talk about this year, but it may be to do with the e-learning revolution in higher education. One of the pleasures of the event is that you are under no compulsion to speak, or not. I decide what to talk about on the day.

GovCampNSW

Greetings from the NICTA Building (National ICT Australia) at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney, where GovCampNSW just started. This is a one day "un-conference" . Apart from Twitter (Hashtag: #GovCampNSW), there is a Co-social case builder being used (whatever that is).

The schedule for the day will look something like this:

8.45am		Briefing for volunteer social reporters and event wranglers
9.00am		Coffee and registration
9.30am		Welcome and introductions
9.35am		Presentations (10 mins each)
		Martin Stewart-Weeks
		Dominic Campbell
10.00am		‘Conversation cafe’ round-table discussions: What are the issues you want to talk about in the barcamp sessions? Co-facilitated by James Dellow and Allison Hornery
10.40am		Feedback and agenda setting
11.15am		Barcamp sessions (20 mins each in parallel rooms)
1.00pm		Lunch
1.45pm		Barcamp sessions (20 mins each in parallel rooms)
3.15pm		Closing session
		Presentation: Crisis response – Anthony Baxter (Google)
		Lightning talks: One-minute speed talks by participants
		Observations on the day: Deirdre O’Donnell, NSW Information Commissioner
		Report back: Discussion with panel on GovCamp learnings
4.00pm		CLOSE and adjourn for drinks

……………….

= Short presentation by guest speaker

= Interactive presentations, demonstrations and discussion by attendees

Reimagining education and government at BarCamp Canberra 2011 this Saturday

BarCamp Canberra 2011 is a free "un-conference" this Saturday at the Australian National University in Canberra. There are 158 people registered, with 41 free tickets remaining.

Proposed topics include:

• Designing for cognitive disabilities
• Graffiti: art or vandalism?
• Open Public Transit Data in the ACT
• Enabling Digital Society: The Government's Part
• Minecraft - using games as building and creativity tools
• What's Australia's Open Government Future?
• Information Philanthropy in Australia
• Online collaboration across public sector organisations - lessons learned/gained
• Web Apps to Enable Social Inclusion
• Gaming, transmedia, convergence and the whole, messy shebang
• Demos from the Make Hack Void members
• Communicating science and skepticism
• How to run a neighbourhood or a nation online: Can we use the same online systems to run a communal block of flats or a country?
• Designing for Dialogue: How do we design buildings and online systems in a for people to talk, learn and make decisions together?
• WiFi Access Liability: Legal risks when providing and using open wireless access points
• Materials Handling and Logistics using contemporary robots, automated guided vehicles and production control systems.
• Running an Agile Business: Taking common agile methodologies and how to apply them to business management OR
• Agile methods within Government: Iterative and customer focused development and how it can work within Government
• Tweeting for your Country - what it takes to get social networking going in government
• More than document formats - advantages of a common operating environment policy for government
• How to deliver a kick-ass presentation

You can offer your own topic.

ps: The topic "How to run a neighbourhood or a nation online: Can we use the same online systems to run a communal block of flats or a country?" is from Pia Waugh and myself. But I am not sure I have told Pia about it yet. ;-)

pps: The topic "Designing for Dialogue: How do we design buildings and online systems in a for people to talk, learn and make decisions together?" is a preview of my presentation for the 2nd Annual Learning Commons Development and Design Forum in Brisbane, 20 March 2011.

Bar Camp Canberra 2011

Bar Camp Canberra 2011 will be held at ANU College of Business and Economics in Canberra on 19 March 2011. This is free and there is room for 150 people. You can register online.

These events are a little geeky, with participants referring to each other by their Twitter "handle" and almost everyone having a wireless handheld device switched on all the time. But they do show how the blend of computer technology and old fashioned meeting procedure can work.

Broadening Public Discussion

Today I attended a meeting at the Moot Court at the Australian National University in Canberra from 12:30pm to 4pm. Fourteen people from academia, government and industry were discussing the creation of the "Australia Forum", a project for enabling public policy discussion. I attended for the School of Computer Science at ANU which researches the technology for such forums and also has hosted some. I wrote a blog post summarising my understanding of the background of the project.

The "Moot Court" is a room in the Law Faculty which simulates a court for training lawyers. This was selected as the best space for the meeting as it has furniture which can be arranged into a circle.

After acknowledging the original inhabitants of the land the chair asked us to sum up what our contribution could be in one sentence. I explained I was from ANU Computer Science and teach using online forums, help design physical spaces for this. Also I pointed out CS has hosted such events in room N101 for Senator Lundy and others.

As with a real dialogue, the difficult part is working out who everyone is and where their points of view come from. The task is to work out what we are attempting to achieve and what we have in common.

The Australian Forum is over ten years old (although I only heard of it for the first time last week). The ANU's Australian Centre for Dialogue also has been in existence for several years. There is obvious possible synergies between the two projects.

One of the difficulties is understating exactly what is proposed. It could be a convention centre or a web site, or something in between. Also it is not clear if the philosophy of "dialogue" requires any particular physical or virtual infrastructure.

Unfortunately much of the original promotional material developed for the Australia Forum is based on the idea of a symbolic building in Canberra. This makes the project look like the Canberra building industry asking for a government handout to build an expensive building which will hardly ever be used. The project has evolved to include a more flexible and virtual approach. But this is not yet reflected in the promotional material.

I spent an hour trying to work out what was wrong with a project which apparently worthwhile project and how to fix it. Senator Lundy then arrived and mentioned the NBN and Public Sphere. These were the missing piece of the puzzle. Not everyone agrees that the NBN is the best way to get broadband across the community, but most would agree if you have the broadband it can be of great use for community consultation. Senator Lundy's Public Sphere process provides a methodology for carrying out such processes.

Senator Lundy described the meeting "in the round" she attended recently in Geneva. This was the Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations Human Rights Council. These international forums have a very structured process. The Senator suggested using online tools to help make these processes more flexible. Also the Senator raised the idea of Australia hosting such international forums.

Senator Lundy suggested that any forums need a strong nexus with political issues of the day. This will then supplement the political process, not compete with it. Digital tools can provide a more granular approach to discussion. That discussion can take place from formulation of public policy through to its implementation.

Pia Waugh pointed out that we want human synthesis of the conversation, not just automation. I pointed out that we now use these techniques for teaching at university. There are approaches to this which are well tested and can be applied to broader public discussion.

The Australian Forum is planning to put out its next planning document in the next few months. In the interim, those who want to get a taste for what a well run Internet enhanced face-to-face meetings are like, can attend the free BarCamp Canberra 2011, being held at ANU, 19 March 2011. These are a little geeky, with participants referring to each other by their Twitter "handle" and almost everyone having a wireless handheld device switched on all the time. But they do show how the blend of computer technology and old fashioned meeting procedure can work.

Innovation Camp in Canberra 15 May 2010

An Innovation Camp will be held in Canberra, Saturday 15 May 2010, from 9am to 5pm (followed by drinks). This is part of the Innovation ACT program, teaching how to turn an idea into a product or service. Teams of innovators will develop an elevator pitch, write a media release win awards and meet a mentor to help with their business plan. The event is free, including lunch, morning and afternoon tea, and evening drinks.

Government reports as ebooks

One response to my talk on "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads" at BarCamp Canberra 2010 was from Senator KateLundy. She tweeted: "With so much govt information online, Tom's talk makes me wonder about the merit of publishing public info in ebook formats too". This seems an idea worth investigating.

I have long advocated providing government reports as a set of web pages, rather than as one big PDF file, as is typically done. However, government people are reluctant to do this.

One argument against web pages is that they are more difficult to make, but as I show my web design students, if you take an accessible approach to design, then this is not hard. If the document designer concentrates on making a document people can read online, where most will be read, rather than concentrating on producing a pretty printed report (which hardly anyone will see), then web format is a viable option.

Another argument is that web pages are not legal documents, which I explain to my electronic document students, is not true either. There is a commonly held, but incorrect, assumption that government reports must be in PDF format to stop them being edited. It is more difficult to edit a PDF file than a web page, but not impossible. In any case this is irrelevant to the protection of government reports.

But I suspect the real issue is that a set of web pages do not seem as real as a "book" and does not have the needed look of authority a government report demands. Collecting the web pages up into an ebook format may give them the needed gravitas. This could done with a three step process:

1. Here is the printed report, see it looks like a proper printed document,
2. Here is the ebook, see it looks like the printed report,
3. Here is the web page, see it looks like a chapter from the ebook.
   

As government agencies are already using content management systems, it should be feasible to support commonly used ebook formats with minimal effort by authors and publishers. The CMS would simply collect up a set of web pages and package them in an ebook format (a simpler system would do the reverse, saving the e-book and unpacking it on request to separate web pages, which might better meet archiving requirements).

As discussed in my talk on "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads", the obvious e-book format to use is EPUB. This is based on XHTML and CCS as used by government web sites. It is also being popularised as a format by support on the Apple iPad. EPUB requires some extra XML files, but these supply information which agencies are required to provide anyway and should already have in their systems.

Convincing agencies to use an ebook format should be a lot easier than convincing them to use accessible web pages. Instead of having to explain why a whole lot of decorative junk is not a good idea and that instead information should be clearly and simply, it will be just a matter of saying "yest, that is a wonderful animated app, but unfortunately the ebook format does not support it".

There will be some inefficiencies, as ebooks are designed to be standalone. Therefore the CSS, logos and "about us" text which can be shared between web pages (and automatically inserted as required by a CMS) will have to be duplicated in each ebook. However, this duplication already occurs with PDF versions of reports, where fonts also contribute to the size of the resulting files.

Ebooks should also make archivists happy as they include their own metadata. In fact ebooks are conceptually similar to the archiving techniques used electronic archiving systems, which wrap up all the associated files of an e-document along with an XML encoded set of metadata.

The public could still read an individual chapter of a report as an ordinary web page. The system could also still provide automatically generated PDF, if anyone wants it. But if the web version is offered first in the list of options online, I suspect most people will be happy to download a few dozen kilobytes of the summary of a report, rather than megabytes of the full report in PDF. I might try out the idea with my students this year and see if the practice then diffuses into the Australian government.

Paper makes ebooks real

One of my throwaway remarks at BarCamp Canberra 2010 got the attention of the Twitterarty:

vinhvanlam Show someone single copy of a "real book" & they'll read and trust the online version says Tom Worthington #bcc2010 moodle to mobi to kindle

AndrewBlanda "When you have a real book (just 1 copy), people then begin reading the online version" Tom Worthington #bcc2010

This is something I noticed when helping set up the conference publishing system for the ACS. Holding up a bound copy of conference proceedings impressed many professors more than did a view of the online papers. But having seen one "real" (paper) copy, they were then happy to use the electronic version.

BarCamp Canberra 2010

Greetings from BarCamp Canberra 2010 at the famous Room N101 at ANU in Canberra. There are about sixty people here so far and the room is filling fast. About one third of the room seems to be from Sydney, boosting the Canberra economy. You can follow the event in Twitter: #bcc2010.

The infrastructure is well set up with video projectors, WiFi, power-boards and Senator Lundy just arrived with duct-tape to hold the cables down.

For this I have prepared "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads":

Simple web pages and free open source software
to create an accompanying e-book for a university level e-learning
course. Educational materials can be provided for Netbooks, Amazon
Kindle, Google Android, Apple iPhone. This technique should also work
for the recently announced Apple iPad.

Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads

For the BarCamp Canberra 2010, tomorrow I have prepared "Making e-Books for e-Learning on i-Pads". This is about how I used simple web pages and free open source software to create a university level e-learning course and accompanying e-book. Educational materials can be provided for the Netbooks, Amazon Kindle, Google Android, Apple iPhone. This technique should also work for the recently announced Apple iPad for education.