Google Glass Opportunities for Wrapping Old Ideas Up in New Techno-Babble

Google Glass is an  Optical head-mounted display. Such displays have been used by the military and some industries for about a decade. However Goolge which has captured considerable media attention by announcing a consumer product. But some of the hype around Google Glass seems a little excessive. As an example,  Brian Mathews writes of a glowing Google Glass enhanced education future in "Glass: my first encounter (and applying it to higher ed)", 1 July 2013. But much of what Mathews proposes as areas to explore with Google Glass are already a part of everyday education. Perhaps he needs to take off the Glass and look around at reality.

Mathews proposes streaming text chat to Google Glass while leading a discussion or lecturing. I have tried doing this while running a webinar. I found it very difficult to talk and follow the text back-channel at the same time. Most of the webinars I attend have a moderator, separate to the presenter, to handle the text. I can't see that having a head-up display for the text would imprve the situation.

Mathews suggests engaging students in the process of course creation. But creating a course takes months, if not years, of mostly tedious detail work. It seems unlikely that any student would want to sit through a live unedited recording from Google Glass of this. Students are likely to say that it is the lecturer's job to create the course, so they then get just the edited highlights.

I have produced several stream of consciousness type blogs while creating courses, but I would not expect my students to read all that waffle. As an example the 21 part series "e-Learning Course on Green ICT Strategies".

Mathews comments "... I have no real sense of how my students learn ...". There is extensive research on how students learn, some conducted using video recordings. Courses on teaching cover this material.

Mathews suggests cognitive life logging will have education value. Having read many postings with photos of what people had for lunch, I do not think this will be improved by a running commentary as they eat? ;-(

This back-story of a course, or someone life may be of interest, but will require considerable editing. It could be presented as pop-ups on a web page. I
can't see that a head-up display would really improve this.

Mathews envisions developing courses which incorporate self-reflexivity. However, such reflection is now a common part of advanced professional courses. The student submits a reflective journal, which can be text from their e-portfolio, video or some other format, such as interpretive dance (I am not making this up). At the moment I am trying a MOOC about vocational education, using a Moodle - Mahara interface. You fill in your Mahara e-portfolio and then press a button to submit it via Moodle for marking. So this is not new.

In education, we are continually looking at reflection, attitudes and cognition. But I can't see that a head-up display will help with this. Dressing up existing educational techniques in techno-babble to make it sound new will certainly not help.

My goal is to aid my students to be able to work with text. If they can do that they may then be able to tackle other media, such as video. Quality video is carefully planned in much the same way a written work is designed. You don't just turn on the camera and start talking.

Mathews concludes "Today I beheld the future… and it was beautiful. ...". Perhaps I am more cynical, as I work in a building where computer scientists and engineers invent new gadgets. Some of what they invent might be revolutionary one day (one example is WiFi developed by CSIRO, who have offices in the other half of the building). I occasionally asked to comment on new gadgets, most of which do not live up to their initial promise. So my conclusion is:

I have seen the future and it looks much like the present, but needs more batteries to operate.

Unpaid Work: Experience or Exploitation

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am taking aprt in an international on-line seminar (a "webinar") on "Work Integrated Learning (WIL)/Cooperative Education" hosted by ACEN. (next is 9 May). The first topic was "Assessing WIL outcomes through reflective practice" this is a hot topic at universities, where old fashioned harassment through examinations and assignments is being supplemented by asking students to think about what they have learned. One issue with this is how you teach students reflection.

The second topic for the seminar was "Experience or exploitation?" discussing the Report for the Fair Work Ombudsman, "Experience or Exploitation? The Nature, Prevalence and Regulation of Unpaid Work Experience, Internships and Trial Periods in Australia" (January 2013), which found widespread, exploitation of workers in Australia by employees, under the guise of work experience. Under Australian law, students undertaking legitimate education can be in a workplace being unpaid, or paid less than award rates. However, most cases investigated in Australia were of workers undertaking unpaid work, without receiving any formal educational outcomes, which is illegal. A Report summary, Full report, are available.

My professional body, the Australian Computer Society set up the "ACS Foundation" which has a Scholarship Programme for Work Integrated Learning (WIL). This has carefully established procedures to ensure the rights of the students are protected and so simplifies the process for universities and companies involved in the scheme.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 6: Past and Future

Reflecting on what my online tutor had to say, perhaps teaching a class of 200 students online needs different techniques and tools. My past experience as an online facilitator has mostly in developing public policy on IT, starting in the the mid 1990s. Internet based forums were used for this and part of the process was to try to develop a consensus view on difficult issues, such as Internet censorship.

My experience of acting as a educational tutor online is confined to one course "Green ICT Strategies", designed for mentored and collaborative e-learning. Having not been impressed tutors who talked too much in class, I decided to take a low key role by first setting some readings and questions, then leaving it to the students to discuss. Only if there is a problem do I take part in the discussion. During a 12 week course, I would typically need to take part in the discussion only two or three times. Instead I would provide individual mentoring of students.

The greatest challenge I see in the future is to have enough resources to be able to carry out the facilitation role in courses. In small courses of up to 25 students, which I have been tutoring, it is relatively easy to get to know the students and they each other. Peer pressure and individual mentoring can then keep the discussion on track. But if there are 200 students (because the educational institution wants to lower costs), can normal group dynamics work and can there be time for the tutor to provide individual mentoring?

It may be possible to have larger groups by using social networking techniques, as applied to business by services such as LinkedIn. As Franklin and van Harmelen point out:

"LinkedIn acts, at a professional level, as a model of educational use in the way in which it can be used to disseminate questions across the community for users seeking particular information."

From: Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen, JICS Repository, 2007

Such systems automate some of the work the tutor normally has to do manually. This then makes it possible to create and maintain a sense of group purpose in a much larger group. Some of those tools are already built into e-portfolio tools such as Mahara.

However, I suspect the larger part of the challenge will be to educate university administrators on why there is still a need for tutors to have the time for interaction with students, even when that interaction is online.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 5:

My tutor replied to my "Reflections of an Online Student", agreeing the course on how to tutor online could be improved but commenting that my experience is different from most other students, who are happy with the course. They suggested this might be because the typical tutor for their courses has up to 200 students and are used to using the Blackboard Learning Management system to handle them.

I find it hard to conceive how any tutor could cope with providing the individual attention which students deserve, in a group of 200. I like to limit my classes to 25. If there are more than this many students, the class needs to be split into several groups. This is partly so the tutor can get to know the students, but also so they can get to know each other. How could you work in an amorphous group of 200?

Also perhaps if I used Blackboard as much as I have used Moodle, I would get used to it. At least it seems more suitable to my way of working than Web CT was. This is partly a matter of simply getting things to appear on the screen in a way which I could read. It may be that I am not using the system correctly. But I an not a novice in using web based systems and either it is doing things in some way I do not understand, or more likely just does not work properly.

However, it is also perhaps a matter of philosophy. In using the Blackboard system for this course I had the constant sense that there was some key to the way the course material was arranged which I was missing.

In designing an online course (admittedly I have only done one) I assumed the way to do it was like a web page. I design a web page with material positioned in order of importance, in the same sequence as text is read: for an English reader, left to right, top to bottom. So I put the course material on the page with the most important information at the top and then following down, usually in the sequence it is to be used by the student. Usually there is something for the student to read, then do and then be tested on. It is difficult for me to understand what other sequence could be used. In the course I have just done I spent a considerable amount of frustrating time wondering where was the resource I was to use next: why wasn't it on the screen in front of me, in sequence, under the previous step?

My conclusion from all this is that I should not be tutoring the sort of courses which I have just been trained for, in this on-line course. Neither the educational approach used, nor the technical tools are ones which I am comfortable with.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 4: Student forums

Having caught up with some readings for my Course in Online Student Centred Discussion, it was time to post to some of the online forums. I was not looking forward to this, being late to the course, with no excuses as a self-professed e-learning expert. Also I was still having difficulty getting the Blackboard learning management system to work reliably. The system told me that some functions may not work as I was using Apple OS9 operating system, which was a worry as I was not using an Apple computer. Blackboard seemed to confuse OS9 with Linux.

However, the online student discussion forums seemed to working so I posted an introduction about myself. In doing this I noticed that there appeared to be no way to format the text, or include hypertext links. While I like using plain text, it was a bit disconcerting as the formatting bar was not functioning on my web browser. This required me to write my posting elsewhere so I could spell check it, before pasting it to the forum.

The forums seemed to work much like any threaded conversaiton system. But I was able to find a function to shown me just new postings and so each time I had to laboriously scroll through all the postings looking for new ones (at least the new postings were in bold, so I could see them).

Seeing what was posted calmed some of the panic I had been in for the last few hours, since discovering the course had started more than a week ago. The other students seemed to be tutors like myself with the same concerns. The tutor also seemed to be doing a good job of responding to student issues.

As I had partly come to grips with the system, reading material, doing quizzes and posting, I decided to make contact with the tutor and request assistance. However, I could not find how to use the system to send them a message. Instead I reluctantly decided to content them by email (I don't like doing this as it is annoying and time consuming to get communications from students outside the LMS).

My message resulted in a prompt and useful reply. Apparently I was not really late starting the course: there were two separate cohorts of students doing the same course using the same materials. Unknown to myself, I was in the later second group. This made little sense to me, as it did not match the timings in the course materials. But it was explained in an e-mail message forwarded to me by the tutor, and which appears to have been stopped previously by my spam filter.

Some more communication with the tutor answered some of my other concerns: the grade book made no sense as this course was not for assessment. This cam as a surprise and a disappointment as one of the primary reasons for doing the course was to be assesed. Without the assessment, this made little sense as a university "course".

Also it was apparent that that some of the problems I was having was because I was not using a computer running a Microsoft operating system and Internet Explorer browser.

The tutor also explained that they had inherited the course and it was due for redevelopment. That went some way to explaining the non-logical arrangement of the material.

For a few days I did readings and posted discussion items. But I felt that I had learnt as much as I was going to from this course. What it mainly impressed on me was the need for:

1. Clear and logical arrangement of course materials,
2. Software and content which complies with web standards so it will work on a wide range of student's computers,
3. Frequent communication between the tutor and student

Unfortunately this course provided those lessons by doing none of those things. The course was so poorly delivered that at times I wondered if this was deliberately done to make a point to tutors, but in this case the course seems to have been poorly design, implemented and run.

The course was useful in confirming that I do know something already about designing and running on-line courses. It also gave me the confidence that I was not doing a poor job compared to other university on-line courses. It also emphasised that poor course content delivered with poor tools can be partly made up for by good tutors and fellow students.

In the end I realised that being a university student has not got any easier since I last tried it and is not something which should be undertaken lightly. I will be treating my students with increased respect, with a better understating of how difficult what they are attempting is.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 2: Where are the lessons?

Having found I was late for my Course in Online Student Centred Discussion, I decided to try to catch up. The Blackboard Learning Management System had a familiar looking interface with a menu down the left side and the course content beside it. But the text was too small to read. So I increased the font size on my browser. This made the text bigger, but half the text of each menu item disappeared. The problem was that the text of each menu item was over a coloured rectangle. When I increased the text size, the background did not increase proportionally and the text overflowed the background. It was not clear to me if this was a fault in the design of Blackboard, or just poor web design for this particular course, but in either case it was not very usable. Given a choice between a page of text I could not read and half the menu text missing, I went for the latter option. I assumed that after a while I would get to know what the options were, but it did not work out that way, after several weeks use I was still not comfortable with the interface. So much for the interface: what about the course structure? See part three.

Reflections of an Online Student, Part 1: Where is the course and when did it start?

This is the first of a series of postings on my experience of being an on-line university student. This was very educational, but not in the way I was expecting.

I was offered the opportunity to take part as a student in an on-line course run by a university on Online Student Centred Discussion run for tutors. This was an appealing idea, as though I have designed and tutored an online course, I have no formal qualifications in how to do this. In fact while I have been designing and delivering postgraduate education for nine years, I have no formal qualifications in teaching.

It is ten years since I undertook any formal university studies, and that was not a pleasant experience (a business Masters by coursework, which I withdrew from after a few weeks). So it seemed a good way to ease myself back into formal studies with a relevant short course in an environment I am familiar with (online).

So I signed up for the course and waited for it to start. I had never been a very good student and one recurring nightmare, from a primary school experience, was to be asked for an assignment I did not know about (and so had not done) in front of the class. After years of peace this nightmare re-occurred so I thought I should tackle it by logging into the learning management system and see when the course was due to start.

To my horror, I found that the course had started a week and a half before. As this was only a four week short course, I was already considerably behind. Leaving aside the question of why my tutor had not contacted me, I spent several frantic hours trying to catch up. Given I was an expert in the use of the web (I teach web design at university) and had designed and delivered online courses, I assumed this would not be difficult, but I was very wrong.

To my further horror, I found I had considerable difficulty using the e-learning system, which is based on Blackboard. I have been extensively trained in the use of Moodle, somewhat in Web CT and have also used Sakai and Atutor. I assumed that all e-learning systems are much the same and I would have no difficulty using Blackboard. However, I found the system very difficult to use and after several weeks still cannot operate it effectively.

The first problem was to find my course in the system. After entering my user id and password I had what looked like a typical e-learning front page, with "Welcome Tom Worthington", which was a good start. There were two items listed below: "University library and your online course" and "Facilitating Online Teaching and Learning". While the first of these said it was my course, it wasn't. It seemed to be a list of generic resources to help online students, provided by the university library. The second link took me to a series of announcements which related to a course, so I guessed these must be for my course.

However, to my alarm, the first message in the course web site was not the "Welcome to week 1" I expected, but was about week 2. It seemed that the course had already started and I had missed a week and a half. At this point my nightmares about missing classes and being late for assignments became real. I considered sending the tutor a blazing message complaining about not having been reminded to start the course, but then considered how I would answer such a message. As a student it is my responsibility to be ready to start the course on time. While the tutor could be expected to notice if I am missing for more than a week, it is not their job to micromanage me. As someone supposedly experienced in running such courses I could not stand the humiliation, so I decided to see how much I could catch up on before asking for help. As a web expert, and someone with experience in e-learning design, I should be able to breeze through. How hard could it be? Find out in Part 2.