COLMSCT Conference Chat

I presented the paper “Interaction Design and Usability of Learning spaces in 3D Multi-user Virtual Worlds” in a Human-Computer Interaction conference in October last year. This paper details our empirical investigation related to the design and usability aspects of learning spaces in Second Life which influence student learning and engagement. The conference paper has now been accepted as a chapter in a forthcoming book. If you are interested in the paper, please write to me.

The reason for bringing up this paper is to share with you the significance of conducting pilots before the main study in user-based investigations. During our pilots in our project, a colleague discussed usability of Second Life learning spaces and their impact on student engagement, an aspect which was an unanticipated thread of enquiry. Her inputs led us to change our interview materials and to develop an additional strand for data collection and analysis, which resulted in the paper I mentioned earlier.

In the pilots, we went through the entire process of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to check whether our research questions were being answered. Pilots are time consuming but they provide a sense of confidence for the main study.

Shailey Minocha

I was recently invited to present our Second Life (SL) research as a part of the research seminar series of the Computing & Mathematics Department of Keele University. The abstract of my talk which took place on 25th November 2009 is on this webpage:

http://www.scm.keele.ac.uk/events/seminars/Dr%20Shailey%20Minocha.pdf

The presentation was very well-received. There were some queries during the presentation about how we conducted interviews and empirical research in SL? how is an island set up in SL?; what is the difference between outdoor learning spaces, open spaces and sandboxes? why are people so concerned about navigation and way finding in SL when they can fly in SL? how can SL support people with Autism? are there avatars around that can disrupt a class/interview? can one set up access mechanisms so that only some avatars can enter some spaces and not the others? does having avatars makes people disrespectful to others as people may not know who is behind the avatars, in other words, does anonymity encourage disruptive behaviour in SL?

I will be addressing these issues in my end-of-fellowship report for COLMSCT. In the meantime, if you have any queries/comments about SL, please do contact me.

I am enjoying a train ride in the SL picture below.

Shailey Minocha

On the first day of the Open CETL conference (15th December 2009), I presented the research paper based on our Second Life research (Designing Learning Activities in Second Life for student engagement). On 16th, I presented the poster. The files (pdf) are available on this site: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/sm577/news.html

Liz Thackray gave a demo of Second Life in the same session in which I presented. We received a number of queries from the audience: why are educators conscious of their (avatar’s) attire to establish authority during Second Life tutorials? what are the perceptions towards Second Life of those students who have experience of video games and other 3D gaming environments? which islands/places (analogous to websites in Second Life) should educators visit for gaining an insight into the potential of Second Life for teaching and learning?

The poster session (Bringing educators and students into Second Life: Design of socialisation and skills development activities) brought up some very interesting queries from course teams and educators: how much time does it take to induct students and educators in Second Life? which are the ways by which induction can be carried out? which tools are available to support educators in their teaching in Second Life? do I have evidence that Second Life enhances student learning and engagement? Do students continue to use Second Life even after our initiative on a particular course ends?

Colleagues in IET, Physics and Astronomy and HSC have followed up with queries after the event. I will address the queries listed above in the end-of-fellowship report of COLMSCT. In the meantime, if you have any queries/comments regarding the role of 3D virtual worlds in education and particularly, at the OU, please do contact me.

The picture shows a supervision meeting in progress involving me and my student.

Shailey Minocha

Over the last month, I have attended three training programmes organised by this company:
http://www.shapironegotiations.com/virtualprogramofferings.html

The story is that Mark Jankowski, co-director and founder of this training organisation, has presented training programmes for imparting negotiation skills, probing skills, etc. for over 13 years but recently he noted that organisations were finding it hard to offer training programmes to their employees due to lack of funds for travel and training. Mark is now experimenting with the Second Life platform and many of his clients are keen that he organises training programmes in Second Life for their employees as it would save travel time and money. Mark is currently evaluating the training events with an invited set of participants.

I have come across literature that states that role-plays are most useful for practising and developing interpersonal skills including conflict management, negotiation, influencing, active listening, giving and receiving feedback, and communication. Since 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life enable creation of simulated settings for role-playing complex scenarios, some of which may not be possible or difficult to construct in real-life (for example, emergency awareness and preparedness situations), these 3D environments provide excellent settings for training.

In the training sessions that I have attended, I have noticed that role-playing and the flexibility to change the 3D environment to match with the stories/examples being related by the instructor are very effective for understanding the concepts and for their retention.

Here is a snapshot from one episode of training on negotiation skills where the instructor  was relating a story of how he had negotiated the fees for Santa Clause(s) who go and sit in stores for amusing the children and shoppers, he changed the setting to a Christmas setting. In another scenario where he was relating a story related to a baseball player, he changed the setting to a baseball stadium.

Shailey Minocha

I’m blogging this at my own blog, so I’m just pasting the links here.

Vancouver

 Oh, conferences

 A bit more Vancouver

 Mixed bag

Last night

Elearn Wednesday

 Elearn Thursday

Elearn Friday

What I got from Elearn

My third conference of the summer. (I can’t be accused of not carrying out any dissemination activities!) This time it’s the Cambridge International Conference on Open & Distance Learning taking place at Murray Edwards Hall, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, just 25 minutes down the road from my home at the other of end of Huntingdon Road in Huntingdon. Well that was true yesterday; today it was 1 hour from home in the not-so-rush hour so I’m staying overnight tonight. This means that I can be here for the start of Grainne Conole’s keynote at 9am tomorrow without having to get up at the crack of dawn (I am not a natural earlybird).  

Grainne is the OU’s Learning Design evangelist (an area that, thanks to Anne Adams, I have recently discovered is key to my COLMSCT project) so I’m very keen to hear what she has to say. But, because of the nature of this conference, I’ve being doing that for the last day and a half. Grainne has been attending the conference and at this conference everybody gets to chat with everyone else – she’s even read my paper and she too is interested in looking at learning design from the student and tutor angle not just the course designers. Wow! Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round, me reading the keynote speaker’s paper and being interested in what she has to say? I’m suddenly feeling very grown up! 

There are only 100 attendees at the conference but the International in the conference title is well-deserved as the attendees come from 28 countries. The emphasis here is very much on discussion. There are four keynote speeches and after each one we break out into six groups to discuss what we’ve heard. This means that there is meaningful discussion that develops the ideas that were introduced in the keynote by putting them into the context of our own experiences and differing institutions. These home groups, as they are called, quickly put everyone at their ease and as a result we are soon recognizing faces and having relevant, friendly, coffee-time chats.  

The first keynote was given by Sugata Mitra of hole-in-in-the-wall fame. He was a very engaging speaker and his ideas about self organized learning environments, where children learn by using the internet in an unsupervised and unrestricted fashion, were brought to life by the experiments he has carried out by putting computers in remote villages in India and observing what children do with them. In contrast he has also carried out an experiment in Gateshead where children were shown to work much better when four children shared a computer to find out about something rather than when they worked independently. This has implications for learning in older age ranges where social interaction may produce better results than independent learning, one of the underlying themes of the OU’s new SocialLearn.  

The second keynote, given by Professor Morten Flate Paulson, reported on a regime of self-paced learning where students set their own deadlines for handing in assignments and the average turnaround for marking assignments is 2.76 days. This was compared to the OU’s commitment to two weeks turnaround time. 36% of students voluntarily teamed up with ‘learning partners’, students studying at roughly the same stage of the course, to provide each other with mutual support. Of course the implication of this figure is that 64% preferred to study independently. Again this has implications for SocialLearn. Personally I’m of the opinion that it’s horses for courses. Students are presented with so many different learning opportunities that it is important they find a path through the different activities that suits there personal requirements and learning styles. When finding this route they need signposts to alert them to which bits of the course are Essential, which are Desirable and which Optional – an EDO framework to be precise! – which leads me on to my own paper at this conference.

The format for the presentation of conference papers also puts the emphasis on interaction with the instruction to allocate just 1/3 of the session slot to introducing the paper and then encouraging those attending to make active contributions. My own session certainly led to many active contributions with discussions centring on the differing levels of internet access that were available to students both in this country and abroad. The idea of an EDO framework met with a favourable response which was a relief. I now need to think about how I’m going to develop it into something fit for a journal article. Perhaps my new friend, Grainne can help tomorrow morning.

Ingrid and I chat with Martin Bean at the ALT-C conference dinner in the stylish surroundings of Manchester Town Hall.

 You can find recordings of the keynote and invited speakers as archived files on: http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/. You’ll need to select the Recordings tab and the conference date (8/9/10 Sept 09) to get a list of sessions for that day. Elluminate is a powerful learning tool and watching/listening to a session, soon makes you realise the potential for a tool of this sort to bring current debates, in the form of experts and specialist speakers, into our own courses in presentation.

All in all a really inspiring 3 days and still lots going on. Join the network on Crowdvine if you’re thinking of coming to the conference in Nottingham next year.   

Ali

… are just some of the words that sprung to mind in the first 5 minutes of Martin Bean’s keynote speech at Alt-C. He started off with several quotes from the last 300 years from educationalists who thought that the introduction of slate/paper/ink/fountain pen/biro would be a detriment to a child’s education. This got some of the biggest laughs I’ve heard in an academic setting! I was pleased to hear him talk about how important social justice was to him but, like many others around me, I was confused when he moved on to talk about STEM which he assumed we knew about. (Apparently it’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.) There were a few more of what I can only assume were Americanisms that left some of us wondering exactly what he meant! The main theme of his speech for me was about removing the barriers between formal and informal learning and, in particular, where education meets social networking. The OU’s new SocialLearn is the area of the OU that he’s most enthusiastic about. The other thing that will comfort many at the OU who are worried about his Microsoft commercial background is that when he put up a slide saying People Process Technology he pointed out that People and Process were far more important than Technology. To sum up then, an interesting speech that was well-received by all.

The keynote was followed by a lunchtime session where the VC designate met ‘OU staff’, including at least one AL – me! Well, actually I didn’t meet him. He was working his way round from table to table and it was clear that he wasn’t going to get as far as me before I had to rush off for my own presentation. But I was fortunate to be sitting next to his ‘minder’ from the VC’s office. We discussed whether he’d met any ALs which she assured me he had, at Regional Offices. I pointed out that most ALs don’t work at Regional Offices but are a pretty isolated and disparate bunch of people who communicate by phone and online. I don’t know who she was, but to her credit she realised that there was a large part of the OU workforce that he had not made contact with and made a note to discuss it with him. So when/if you get invited to an Elluminate session with Martin Bean, remember that you read it here first!

My own presentation was attended by around 20 people and got some interesting responses. As expected, the audience were internet residents who found it difficult to grasp that some people really do have difficulty getting the reliable, fast internet access that is common in their working and social lives. One likened not having internet access to ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuse. I was immensely grateful to the guy who said that when he lost broadband for three weeks life became very difficult! Later on I was approached by the person who had done his best to get me using Twitter. “How does Twitter for Prison Tutors sound?” he asked. I can’t see it taking off somehow!

Poster feedback

One of our reasons for attending ALT-C was for Ali and I to present a poster on our LINA findings (see Ali’s photo). Don’t be deceived by the quiet surroundings pre the poster session. Later there was quite a buzz, and some stimulating conversations, including with someone who has worked on creating adaptive questions in assessment for many years and who said he might ‘copy’ the Confidence indicator tool, which he found very interesting. He also indicated he would check our journal article for references (who knows, we may get our first citation from this!). The biggest buzz, our crowning moment (!), was a visit from Martin Bean himself, having just completed his keynote. He happened to pass us at our poster and – after a brief introduction where we explained we had to pass up his invite to meet him and other colleagues over lunch due to our poster session clashing, he promised to return later, and he did! Just to show how chummy we have become (!!), take a look on Ali’s blog to see if she’s posted a photo taken later that evening… at the Town Hall Gala dinner.

Martin Bean’s new role featured widely as a topic of conversation, and people I spoke with seemed uniformly very taken with his enthusiasm, genuine commitment to the OU, and the prospect of his leadership – especially since he brings highly valued credentials and insights re. learning technologies into the role of VC.  A very unique combination at a very timely point in the OU’s history. Personally, I feel a new optimism.

A key message in his keynote which resonated with Ali and myself was: ‘when looking at People, Process, and Technology we should ask ” have we taken care of the people and the process?” ’ I think the fact he started his orientation around the OU by visiting the regions and talking to  students, tutors, and staff tutors, gives us a big indicator of what he means by this and how it can be actioned through opening and maintaining good communication. 

As I am interested in the personalisation agenda, I was interested in Diane Laurillard’s question to him about how he saw personalisation could be offered. He mentioned a few phrases in this keynote which i wasn’t familiar with – such as STEM (which many people didn’t seem to understand and I still am not sure of – did he mean this?). In response to Diane he mentioned ‘high touch’ [? it seems to be a phrase used in banking and other services to refer to a shift aiming to create a friendly, familiar, relaxing environment]- and he gave examples such as personal calls, connections, dialogues, facebook set up before course start per course, and Illuminate used to create personalised experiences. The mention of Facebook  echoed what i heard elsewhere, namely that there seemed to be a growing interest in using this to develop social networks and help blurring the edges between formal and informal learning. Walking from the hall of residence up to the university one morning, an ALT-C delegate told me how impressed he was that the OU library Facebook area had 3000 fans  ( it welcomes registered as well as not yet registered students into a space to develop a social network). This seems to be an example of work we are already doing, picking up something Marting Bean said – ‘knitting pathways in and out of education’.  

One of the highlights of today (final day) were the keynote by Terry Anderson in which he dazzled us with a ream of links to social networking sites and related literature, higlighting the links between the group/network/and collective, drawing on his work Taxonomy of the many – a conceptual model (Dron & Anderson, 2007).He talked about ‘managing the alignment of disruptive technologies’ and it would appear that one of his approaches is to be as ‘open’ as possible. Hence we heard about: Open Culture, Open scholar, Open Notebook, Open Access journals, OpenStudents.org and more!  He reminded us that ‘we save time by using the efforts of others’.

He has a blog at http://terrya.edublogs.org and can be found at http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/terrya.php

 The other highlight was an excellent workshop on  ‘Curriculum redesign’, looking at task, module/course, or Programme level. We held discussions with 3 groups moving round each of three posters in turn. The following poster (presented by Dr Alan Mason), seemed most meaningful to me and I could imagine using something like this to help course and programme teams to brainstorm their aims and aspirations, using prompts which are provided in this template, and appear against the 5 headings:

• Assessment and feedback
  Information skills
  Communication
  Teaching and learning
  Options & Pathways

Here is a close up which provides a little bit of detail:

A version of the template is due to be produced in about a month as part of the project’s next stage. Further work is being done on it but it’s appeal to me meanwhile was its simplicity. Following the timeline of the course the idea is to plot activities against it. Pick a point in time and select one of the 5 headings which would be appropriate. Then a series of drop down menus are offered, ( no longer than 7 +/- 2 items) and could act as promtps. The second column provides principles, e.g in Assessment it would be the REAP principles. The fourth column in free text to insert any ‘narrative’ into. 

So much to report but impossible to capture, hence these are just some snapshots from the conference. It was a very stimulating conference, and it seems to have improved over the years, this year there was no doubt it was focussing on learning and teaching. Whereas in the past you could be forgiven for thinking you’d come to a techie’s conference, now you will well and truly find yourself talking about student experiences and challenges within learning and teaching!

Martin Bean gave an inspiring keynote today, really underlining the Open University as the place to be for innovations in educational technology and global education online. Ingrid and I were lucky enough to talk with him during our LINA poster session, illustrating some of the work we are doing in the faculty and the COLMSCT CETL.

Two other invited speakers, Jonathan Drori and David Price, gave exceptional presentations.  Jonathon used to work for the BBC and based on his extensive experience in media and learning, gave a very clear 10-point list on how to ensure the success of innovative pilot projects (wish I’d known before I started my CETL projects!).

David Price inspired us all with the ideas behind Debategraph which is being used by governments and institutions (including the OU) to visually model complex ideas and public debates, including climate change policy. 

Finally, two very interesting  short papers on redesigning assessment using peer-assessment and scoring rubrics, from the universities of Huddersfield and Bath.

So much to take in. Ali