Australian Digital Futures new website – a work in progress!

In the last few weeks, the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland has undergone some major revisioning activities. The 2nd decade of the 21st Century is the most challenging and amazing time for knowledge and for learning. The Australian Digital Futures Institute plans to tune into the future, work with uncertainties and generate new, positive, preferred actions through prototyping.

We enable foresight for learning, teaching, knowledge construction and creative expression. We act as a harbinger for USQ and through our global learning futures network seek to impact on viable futures for Australian and international partners. We deploy the metaphor of exploration into the cosmos of space to enable us to investigate further and faster. We believe that everything we do today and tomorrow in our personal and professional lives to confront the future will have an impact. Individual and collective acts add up to collaborative action.

Our vision is to break the no longer appropriate patterns of the past and tune into the highest future possibilities for learning– and to operate from that place – see our new website, a work in progress, for further information.

Check out the latest press release on the upcoming Follow the Sun conference!

 

It’s a conference that no delegate could fruitfully attend in the real world: Three countries, three time zones, and 48 hours of non-stop, global activity. Please see the latest press release on USQ’s Follow the Sun: the Learning Futures Festival Online 2011 to be held jointly with the Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester. The conference will be held on April 13-15 and is free to all USQ staff and students!

For others, registration truly reflects the exploitation of digital technology and accommodates the busy professional! More information can be found at the conference website: http://tinyurl.com/followthesun.  All interested attendees should register NOW!!

More about Follow the Sun 13-15 April 2011!

Follow the Sun: Entirely online conference

13-15 April 2011

Handovers between Leicester (UK), Seattle (USA) and Toowoomba (Australia), 48-hour conference , six shifts of eight hours each, with a keynote speakers introducing each shift.

Accessible from home or office from any connected desktop.

All sessions will be recorded and made available as open educational resources.

Visit the conference website for details and registration (Earlybird closes March 25): http://tinyurl.com/followthesun

FREE TO USQ STAFF – PLEASE REGISTER NOW

Another great ascilite conference!

The 27th annual ascilite conference was held at the Novotel Sydney Brighton Beach on 5-8 December 2010. The conference theme and sub-themes provided the opportunity to consider challenges in the context of the curriculum, technology and transformation for an unknown future. The conference was jointly hosted by The University of Technology Sydney, The University of Queensland and Charles Sturt University.

Keynote and invited speakers included:

Prof. Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Vice-President (Teaching, Learning and Equity), University of Technology, Sydney

Prof. Jan Herrington, School of Education, Murdoch University, WA.

Prof. Ron Oliver, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning), Edith Cowan University,
WA.

Dr Martin Oliver, Reader in ICT in Education, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, UK

Dr Lev Gonick, VP for Information Technology Services & Chief Information Officer, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

Prof. Tom Reeves, Professor Emeritus of Learning, Design, and Technology, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Proceedings are available online.

Virtual worlds

Several sessions (11 papers and symposiums) were devoted to exploring, demonstrating and/or discussing virtual worlds technologies – Second Life, OpenSim, etc. At the Virtual Worlds symposium titled “Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?” speakers presented at the conference (Helen Farley, USQ, Sue Gregory, UNE and Geoff Crisp, UofA) and were joined inworld by Allan Ellis (SCU) and Matthew Campbell (ACU).

 Worthy of note:

Allan Ellis, in response to the question, “Is it worth it?” suggested that the value of virtual worlds for learning and teaching will be more obvious once students get out into the workplace and demonstrate their skills. In response to the access and equity question, one speaker made the point – “Don’t hold students back who can access the technology”.

To the question, “Why try and recreate what already exist (ie the real world)?” the response was that for some simulations, it is important to re-create exactly as is (e.g., taking blood pressure) but is not often important. This is the difference between building a replica of and a representation of the context.

 Pearson suite of products

As I had been asked to Chair the session presented by Pearson, I did take a few notes. This company is more than a publisher of books. It is purported to be the leading educational solutions and services provider in Australia providing educational materials, technologies, assessments and related services to educators and students. They apparently own Penguin, Financial Times, LMSs e.g., eCollege, and have recently acquired The Learning Edge International (Equella) which is a digital repository for storing content in one location (USQ Library uses this product for storing reading materials for courseware.

James Dalziel demonstrated what’s new in LAMS (Learning Activity Management System):

• this product is marketed as a means of designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities
• demonstrated LMS integration – single sign on; the ability to drag and drop Moodle tools straight into LAMS; use of quiz scores to determine pathways.
• provided a hard copy booklet on Practical eTeaching Strategies
• directed the audience to www.lamscommuniy.org
• mentioned the templates of good teaching practice (Activity Planner) – which you have to pay for but is given to existing LAMS users.
• mentioned the hosted version hosted version LessonLAMS.com – free download for up to 30 students; paid version next year $30 month for over 30 students

See http://tpack.org for model -types and sources of knowledge for teaching and design.

Lev Gonick  – keynote speaker

Spoke about imagining the future. He discussed the Case Connection zone – Cleveland Ohio – where 140 homes in the inner city have extra fast internet connection, etc. with a focus on:

• Energy conservation
• Health issues – obesity. Health and wellness program – links straight back to health provider
• Build numbers of science professionals
• Community Partnership Program
• Revitalization reimaging reinvention of university – standards based, open, neutral
  onecommunity : university + Cleveland and on to state of Ohio – HealthNet
  1500 sites across Ohio; free public wireless connectivity

Tom Reeves, key speaker

Books worth a look:

The narcissism epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement – Jean Twenge & Keith Campbell

The book of learning and forgetting – Frank Smith

What the best college teachers do? – Ken Bain

Gerry Lefoe and Dom Parrish (University of Wollongong)

Spoke about strategic leadership and a conceptual framework of distributed leadership

The Leadership Capacity Development Framework focuses on 5 key domains:

• Growing
• Reflecting – peer interaction, mentoring, coaching
• Enabling
• Engaging
• Networking

Iain Doherty, Learning Technology Unit, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland discussed systemic change through embedded continuing professional development for teachers and directed us to http://www.fmhshub.auckland.ac.nz/23.html – a rubric of teaching performance.

The Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences’ Teaching and Learning Hub  is worth a look!

Julie Willems (UNE)’s paper on student disadvantage  is worth a look.
as is Richard Wenchao He’s paper titled “Enterprise architecture roadmap for the development of distance online learning programs in tertiary education”. This paper discusses how the Zachman Framework is adapted to propose a concise roadmap for universities to convert their normal face-to-face courses into e-learning programs in a large scale (see Table 2 in this paper).

Robyn Nash, Sandra Sacre, Jennifer Lock and Pauline Calleja’s paper (from UNE) on developing the leadership capabilities of clinical supervisors was also a good paper. I have suggested that our own Dr Helen Farley contact the team regarding the project we are planning with nursing using virtual world technologies.

Through a presentation by Tom Reeves, Susan McKenney, Jan Herrington on the  importance of Educational Design Research (also known as Design-Based Research), our attention was drawn to:

• So Much Reform So Little Change – by Charles M. Payne
• The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond
• Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus
• Educational Design Research (contains a chapter by Tom Reeves) and
• the work of Madhabi Chatterji from Teachers College, Columbia

Ron Oliver

 Some of Ron’s recent work has been in the VET sector as part of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. See the Learning Design tool at http://ldt.eworks.edu.au

Geoff Crisp spoke about assessing students in Second Life. See

http://www.transformingassessment.com

http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=QrulhMVgYI

This prompts me to commit to using Second Life to do more creative things and look further at sloodle. As Geoff says, recreating many elements inside the environment is such a waste of time – just link out to other related sites.

Shannon Kennedy-Clark presented an interesting concept in her “MUVEing Slowly:

Applying slow pedagogy to a scenario-based virtual environment” paper written with Miriam Tanti. This concept of slow pedagogy is well worth a look, particularly in this crazy/quick/fast world in which we live. The concept is derived from the Slow Food movement – rejection of the fast food movement – and came out of Turino, Italy (see the slow food festival held here – must happen about mid November)

They claim that this approach:

• Questions if quicker, faster, etc resulting in better learning?????
• Is the opposite of making everything fast – fast access, etc.
• Is learner centered
• Is not just about the speed but time to explore, make mistakes, solve problems
• Look at study in India where a woman has applied slow pedagogy to a rural school

Swee Kin Loke, Phil Blyth, Judith Swan discussed the Otago Virtual Hospital and Helen Farley – teaching first-year studies in religion UQ religion bazaar.

Anthony McKnight and Garry Hoban (Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong) gave a great paper on animated storytelling to support non-Aboriginal pre-service teachers in understanding indigenous perspectives. The presentation “Animated storytelling about “My Special Place” to represent non-Aboriginal preservice teachers’ awareness of “relatedness to country”” was very interesting. 

“Slowmation” (abbreviated from “Slow Animation”) is a simplified way for university or school students to make a stop-motion animation to explain a concept or tell a story. It is an engaging way to learn because students conduct research and make the animation as a representation of their learning by taking digital still photos of manually moved models and playing them at 2 photos/second to produce a slow moving image. The explanation or story may be enhanced by students adding narration, text or music. See www.slowmation.com  

Also have a look at My People’s Dreaming – by Uncle Max Harrison

ALL IN ALL, A GREAT CONFERENCE!

Follow the Sun – an exciting concept for an online conference!

The Beyond Distance Research Alliance and the Australian Digital Futures Institute will be holding a joint online conference named Follow the Sun on 13-15 April 2011. With handovers between Leicester (UK), Seattle (USA) and Toowoomba (Australia), this innovative 48-hour conference will incorporate six shifts of eight hours each, with a keynote speaker introducing each shift. The conference will be delivered through Elluminate Live!, Second Life and Moodle, and simulcast through all platforms. All sessions will be recorded and made available as open educational resources.

Please make a note of these dates in your diary – 13-15 April 2011 - and visit the conference website at: http://tinyurl.com/followthesun Details about themes, speakers and registration will be available soon.

Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) event…

Last week I attended the AIIA event in Brisbane – a presentation by David O’Hagan, Assistant Director – General, Chief Information Officer, Information & Technologies, Department of Education and Training.

He discussed the Smart Classrooms strategy launched in 2005 which contains:

• Concept of “distributed co-creation”
• One School – Single ERP system used by all public schools in Qld
• The Learning Place – Qld DET Learning Management System
• Identity Management – tracks learning productivity

This is linked into the Qld Dept of Education and Training Strategic Plan 2010 – 2014 – of interest:

• Performance metrics gathered that indicate the relative importance and traffic size of sites visited by students (ie bubble charts that indicate Google sites, Maths, Numeracy, etc). Facebook for staff but not accessible by students
• 3G wireless trial underway (Gin Gin and Varcity College), 70,000 devices purchases in 2011
• Virtual Worlds used (teaching sustainability and climate change)
• The Learning Place (LMS) is accessed 60% in school time and 40% outside school hours

Topics of interest mentioned by other speakers:

• Business Schools Connection Roundtable. This appears to have been an outcome of the 2020 summit held in 2009
• THIS IS SIGNIFICANT, I THINK – Qld DET cannot wait for the NBN (8 year implementation timeframe) and must take the initiative itself
• Backed up by benchmarks comparing Australia with the rest of the developed world (lack of investment by successive governments has led to this situation and action is required now.)

What were the critical messages?

• campus ICT facilities and use of mobile technologies (including wireless) must be comparable to those provided in secondary schools or we risk providing a poor experience and not attracting/retaining students
• the Learning and Teaching experience provided at universities must be comparable if not better than that provided currently by current secondary schools. This includes support for virtual worlds and other new and emerging technologies.
• Educational institutions cannot be digital-free zones!
  

Evaluating learning spaces seminar and workshop

Recently I attended the “Evaluating learning spaces” seminar and workshop conducted at the University of Queensland. This was presented by folks from UQ (Trish Andrews), Victoria University (Julie Dixon) and Swinburne University of Technology (Nicolette Lee) as part of an ALTC project titled Evaluation of Learning Spaces. The project aims to provide a framework for a full evaluation cycle, from conceptualisation and design to implementation and post-occupancy. This project relates primarily to physical learning spaces.

Notes from the seminar outline:

Shifts in student mobility, pedagogy, curriculum management and technological tools are beginning to impact directly on the planning and development of campus learning spaces. However, building and refitting learning spaces is an expensive and potentially risky enterprise. An inappropriate space is not only costly in financial terms, but also for the reputation of the institution, student experience and staff confidence in the driving educational principles. Both pre- and post-occupancy evaluations are important tools in understanding learning spaces and their impact on the curriculum, the institution, and most importantly, the people who use them.

The aim of this seminar and workshop program is to disseminate findings from a recent ALTC funded project on the evaluation of learning spaces, and to provide a forum for sharing experience and expertise in evaluation methods that have been trialed in the tertiary campus environment. Three facilitated workshops will focus on opportunities and challenges faced by participants in evaluating their own spaces.

Observations from the event (in no particular order) follow:

Students should be at the centre of design decisions…

Learning space evaluation data collections strategies can include:

• peer review
• staff development workshops
• talk aloud protocols
• room mapping
• room booking data
• promotional events
• support requests

Swinburne used Stufflebeam’s CIPP (Context-Input-Process-Product) model as their evaluation framework.

Critical to have the evaluation process in train right from the start of the development.

Some findings from the evaluations conducted at the various sites (Swinburne, etc.):

• students like “transitional” spaces (for coming and going)
• students prefer to bring their own technologies to spaces
• students love meeting rooms
• if spaces don’t have a defined purpose, students not so keen on them
• individual booths not so popular
• chairs must be comfortable

A discussion with a colleague from Griffith University revealed some interesting ideas in terms of designing physical learning spaces:

• use the 7 principles of architecture to guide space design. Now I have to find out what they are!
• important to have a “committee” to manage spaces

• important to bring the outside in…
• paint a wall – and use it as a data gathering mechanism – for opinions, for suggestions, for ideas…. capture the data, paint the wall, and start again!
• note first reactions to spaces…
• use data from other studies to inform new designs…
• make use of all sorts of information to guide decisions – “grab” informal data…

And now I have found this site, which I must explore further… and check this out…

ADFI to welcome new Executive Director in the new year…

This is definitely the most exciting news and I am probably a bit late in announcing it to “my” world but here it is – ADFI will welcome its first Executive Director in the new year – PROFESSOR GILLY SALMON! I am thrilled with this news given that Gilly’s work has played (and does play) a significant part in shaping my philosophy of learning and teaching and influencing the development of my online pedagogical approaches. Here is Gilly sharing with us her philosophy of learning futures.

Professor Salmon is coming to us from the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester.

ACODE and blended learning…

My attendance at ACODE (Australasian Council for Open and Distance E-learning) 53 – hosted by Queensland University of Technology (Liz Greener, Convenor) on 8-9 July – gave me the opportunity to catch up with colleagues from across Australia and New Zealand – and report back on my recent visit to Spain and England. 44 institutions across Australia and New Zealand are members of ACODE. The focus of ACODE 53 was blended learning and the aim was to share knowledge and expertise about blended learning practice. To set the scene, a colleague from UQ, Caroline Steel, presented on the status on blended learning in Australasia, and I presented on the European/UK state of play.

Some general themes/ideas emerged from the day:

1. We should be beyond talking about “terminology” and “definitions” of blended learning. I referred to a paper by Mark Oliver and Keith Trigwell (Can ‘blended learning’ be redeemed?) – written in 2005 but will some provocative statements that ring true 5 years on such as:

The term ‘blended learning’ is ill-defined and inconsistently used. Whilst its popularity is increasing, its clarity is not. Under any current definition, it is either incoherent or redundant as a concept. Building a tradition of research around the term becomes an impossible project, since without a common conception of its meaning, there can be no coherent way of synthesising the findings of studies, let alone developing a consistent theoretical framework with which to interpret data. (p.24)

2. Policy rigidity in institutions appears to be stifling progress and innovation – it was generally agreed that policy should be adapted to suit and accommodate innovation. Another speaker suggested that picking a policy that reflects what you want to do might be a more expedient way of progressing innovation in an institution. Many institutional representatives acknowledged that ongoing funding to support the sustainability of innovation at an institution was a real challenge.

One member referred to the Learning Technologies Policy at Macquarie University which I think is well worth a look.

The following day was the ACODE Business and Networking Meeting and it was wonderful to have Professor Alan Smith, my former supervisor, recognised for the contribution he had made to ACODE.

ACODE 54 will be hosted by Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand (Gordon Suddaby, Convenor) on 11-12 November 2010 and again promises to be an interesting event with the focus on Open Educational Resources.

References

Oliver, M., & Trigwell, K. (2005). Can ‘blended learning’ be redeemed? E-Learning 2(1), 17-26. Retrieved July 23, 2010 from http://www.luispitta.com/mie/Blended_Learning_2005.pdf

Blackboard buys Elluminate and Wimba…

Well, this is certainly interesting news for me – being an Elluminate supporter, and a Wimba user…!! According to an article in the Wall Street Journa  posted today:

Blackboard Inc. (BBBB) said it agreed to acquire Elluminate Inc. and Wimba Inc., both providers of technology to the education market, for a total of $116 million in cash.

the Journal has more news on the acquisition…

Blackboard said Elluminate and Wimba customers shouldn’t feel any significant impact. “Elluminate and Wimba products will continue to be shipped and supported without change for the foreseeable future…

Interesting times…