Rebecca's Research Blog

Great infographic summarising approaches to pedagogy, making connections with key thinkers in the field.

http://cmapspublic3.ihmc.us/rid=1LGVGJY66-CCD5CZ-12G3/Learning%20Theory.cmap

Notes on seminar by Dr Ilya Goldin

Dissertation ‘Peering into peer review with Bayesian models’

Interested in how we can help students who are learning to analyse open-ended problems. How do we help them to do peer review? Peer review removes the instructor from the interaction beteen students. How do we keep the instructor within the loop?

Students need feedback that explains to them their current level describes target performance and suggests ways of getting there.

Rubrics are used in peer review to inform assessors of criteria, to support reviewers in their evaluation, and to give a structure to the feedback received by the author. They state the criteria of interest and define each criterion.

When dealing with open-ended problems you need to focus on argumentation. Generics rubrics can be replaced by domain-relevant rubrics or by problem-specific assignments. However, the rubric is then more limited in its scope.

Experiment was run with 58 law students. Each essay received four peer reviews, these were passed on to the authors (who had adopted pseudonyms), and then the authors gave feedback on the feedback. Assessed pre- and post-measures on a quiz. Students received one of two rubrics – one that was domain specific and concept oriented and one that was domain relevant and argument oriented.

Domain relevant was focused on issue identification, argument development, justified oveall conclusion and writing quality. For each dimension you were given one anchored rating and 1 comment. eg 3 – develops few strong, non-conclusory arguments, and neglects counter-arguments. (Prior research suggests that if people just give a rating, these tend not to be as well justified.)

Problem-specific rubric was focused on breach of non-disclosure, trade secret misappropriation, violation of right of publicity, and two examples of idea misappropriation. Here, an example of a review might be

3 – identifies claim, but neglects arguments pro/con and supporting facts; some irrelevant facts and arguments.

This rating scale could be used with many problems, if you were aware what the key issues were.

If students were taken as individuals, and you looked at an average of what peer review scores were, they were not helpful for predicting instructor scores, However, if you worked on the basis that scores in the class were likely to be related to other scores in the class, then it was possible to predict instructor scores.

HEA accreditation is a ‘recognition of commitment  to professionalism in teaching and learning in higher education’.

You can be an associate of the HEA, a Fellow, a senior fellow or a principal fellow.

At the OU, this will be replacing our taught courses such as the postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning in HE and the postgraduate certificate in academic practice.

People who benefit will include central academic staff, staff tutors, ALs…

To participate – engage with the wiki, the resources and the faculty-based forums on the OpenPAD Moodle site, have support from a faculty mentor, completion of practitioner inquiry based on own practice, this should take 6-12 months, and will be assessed by he accreditation panel for OpenPAD fellowship. This will lead to both internal and external accreditation.

IET provides accreditation for staff via the HEA.

About 116 people registered to attend the Alpine Rendezvous this year – 10 workshops, almost every country in Europe represented and several attendees from outside Europe.

Report from Workshop 1: Orchestration

How do teachers orchestrate events inside and outside the classroom?

First model – started with a very dry mathematical model. How does the teacher manage their workload? This only applies if you think of the classroom as a shoebox.
Second model – takes the context and the students into account.
Third model – include meaning making.
Fourth model – take emotions and feelings into account (emotional intelligence of teachers and learners).
Fifth model – include identity as a driver of learning.

Grand Challenge: Link with the emotions of teachers. Make teachers happy throughout their working lives – and still believing in and expecting things from all their students.

Workshop 2: Data analysis and interpretation for interactive LEs (DAILE13)

Mainly computer scientists

Paper along the lines of analytics for intelligent tutoring systems, and also to support decision-making for different actors

Grand challenge: Interactive learning analytics: from accountability to ‘opportunity management’ in a multi-actor perspective

Moving beyond the focus on learners and including data from other actors. Want to use analytics in a socially responsible way. Consider the interdependence of analytics feedback on decisions and ultimately on power relations and empowerment. Make human responsibility explicit. Support reflection and openness.

Grand challenge: towards adaptive and adaptable learning in massive online courses

Workshop 3: (Our workshop) – Teaching Inquiry into Student Learning, Learning Design and Learning Analytics

Grand challenge: Empower the future teacher

Workshop 4: Smart Cities

Concerned with well-being of people in those cities. A way of optimising resources, including time. Smartness is different from country to country. The UK doesn’t care much about environment, Finland scores very high on governance. So there are cultural issues involved.

This can become a consumer approach – in which citizens consume the smart cities that have been developed through them. An alternative approach would be a bottom-up approach, achieved with and through learning

Should we talk about a smart city or about a smart territory? The most important thing seems to be the space of flux around the city – for example the commuter belt.

They used Villard as a case study including interviews and tour. Identified perceived needs and came up with actions such as a Vercors card giving access to benefits and facilities in the area, learning through space gamification, learning about Villard life by monitoring relevant traces and emergent behaviours.

Multidimensional monitoring embedded into the learning (learning analytics aspect).

Grand Challenge: International observatory on smart city learning. To raise awareness and attract people to get involved.

Grand Challenge: Promote smart city learning and people-centred smart cities / territories

Workshop 5: Crisis and response

Some of the questions that emerged: Political and pedagogic implications of the interpenetration of real and virtual worlds. How are digital cultural resources distributed? What are the candidates for a mobile, highly networked pedagogy? Investigate and advocate for pedagogies of meaning making, identity formation, contingency and (resilience to) provisionality

Grand challenge: How can TEL contribute to resolving educational inequalities?

Democratise access to learning through digital means. Need a more rigorous identification of the role TEL developments are playing in the systemic inequalities. Europe has some of the historically most democratic and emancipatory education systems in the world.

Crisis of legitimacy in the face of open online education

Can we significantly alleviate inequalities of educational outcome?

Examine the big picture of digital capital and capability across Europe.

Workshop 6: Technology support for reflecting on experiences and sharing them across contexts

If you search ‘technology enhanced learning’ and ‘vocational’ on Google you don’t get many hits.

Vocational learning is dual centre – you have your workplace and you have your classroom. How can what you learn in these two contexts be integrated?

The partial solution is called the Erfahrraum (experience space). This has collection, validation and exploitation phases, bringing together practical and conceptual knowledge.

Workshop 7 (Coming up): Challenges of analysing multi-scale and temporal data

Existing research methods to not fully utilise the temporal information embedded in the data which reduces their explanatory power and limits the validity of their conclusions.

Notes on ‘You heard it here first’ seminar at the OU from Anne Adams.

When considering research about innovation, is it catwalk or ready-to-wear? Is it ready to use off the shelf, an innovation that people can take up and use, or is it a catwalk approach, testing and showcasing what is possible without suggesting that this will be taken up as it is? A catwalk approach may bring together elements from many different approaches and disciplines. Participants need to know which you are aiming for, so they don’t expect something they can take away and use if the project is about experimentation and high-tech solutions.

A ‘boundary creature inhabits more than one world’. They may move between practice domains and can be seen as a deviant from the norm, a form of monster (Donna Haraway, 1991).

Wenger’s view is that distance learning locates learning closer to the learner because it goes to people in their space rather than expecting learners to shift into the academic space.

Technology can act as a boundary object, crossing knowledge domains and structures. It can support communication and collaboration by acting as a shared interface. However, it can form a barrier if it is too associated with jargon or with specific practices.

Researchers bring:

spatial acuity - sensitivity to spatial issues in the environment such as weather and use in space and spatial triggers

temporal acuity – perception and reality of time in relation to the environment including time taken to learn systems, flow of time in the lab

socio-political astuteness – perceptions and interactions of a variety of stakeholders, around inhibitions, safety, expectations and ideologies

Launch event for the Open Learning Design Studio massive open online course.

Lots of people struggling to be here – the Cloudworks link is down and YouTube doesn’t seem to be broadcasting anything. Some people can pick up via Stadium – others are having less success. Lots of discussion across Google+, Twitter and Facebook. Some people getting in after half an hour, others still struggling. I’ve given up on online access and walked downstairs to see it in RL.

Keywords around the field of learning design: context (local theories, metic reasoning and ecology of resources), practice (pedagogic practice, design practices, epistemic practice and learning as confluence), representations (designing representations, representations of design, design principles, design patterns, design narratives), curation and tools (tools include CADMOS, Collafe, Learning Designer, Pedagogical Pattern Collector).

This is a project-based MOOC.

Cycle: initiate, investigate, ideate, connect, prototype, curate, evaluate, reflect.

Initiate is about conceiving the project and finding a team to work with. Working on something that is a real concern, that you can work on with a team of people.

Investigate is about investigating the context in which you are working. How to work from that context to achieve your aims.

Ideate Focus is on techniques for brainstorming designs and generating ideas.

Connect your ideas with other people’s ideas and look at design patterns. Which patterns and principles are applicable to our project.

Prototype Build a quick initial implementation of your idea. Something you can work with and play with.

Curate

Evaluate - Maybe evaluate the design as an artefact or evaluate it through use

Reflect on the process and through this, look at various processes of learning design.

Prezi: http://prezi.com/b44jwdgvs8nl/olds-mooc-introduction/

Augmenting Reality with the Kinect

Rob Miles, University of Hull – Robmiles.com

The Kinect includes two cameras, an infrared sensor and four microphones

The further you are from the sensor, the further apart the infrared dots appear to the Kinect. When you are about 80cm away it has very good depth perception. However, objects such as tables cast shadows. The software can track six people – two in detail and four by position only. Multiple Kinect sensors can work because each one moves slightly eccentrically

A Kinect body has 19 bones and 20 joints. The new sensors will be able to track fingers.

The Vision and the Reality – discussion

Who is augmenting reality? Mainly marketing and the military.

From an educational perspective, the army is using it for drill and skill, it can be also used for surgery training – for example to let you see where a tumour is.

There is a tendency to use AR for its novelty value – Wikipedia with a shiny wrapping.

QR codes are not necessarily used in a thoughtful fashion http://wtfqrcodes.com/

Augmented reality has the potential to be used to support situated learning and enhance a sense of space. The Holodesk Microsoft is a place to go to carry out premeditated activities.

Newcastle University Rock Art on Mobile Phones project http://rockartmob.ncl.ac.uk/indexD.php

History pin – pin your history to a collaborative map http://www.historypin.com

The SecondSight app can provide a premeditated way of taking another look at National Trust properties http://www.mysecondsight.com/experiences/index.php

Augmented reality can provide a connection to data that isn’t available through a keyboard

Steve Boneham – Conclusion

If we are going to use AR, we need a reason for doing so.

We want to go beyond a shallow marketing experience and build activities that allow for prompts, collaboration, investigation and interactivity. We shouldn’t use AR just to replicate what we could do already.

Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures

We can now use devices to deposit versions of ourselves into an online environment.

Vision is proving to be a limited way to augment our perception. AR can pollute our visual senses.

Neil Harbison is a colour-blind artist. He wears a prosthesis that allows him to hear colour.

http://www.kuriositas.com/2010/06/i-am-borg-worlds-first-recognized.html

Data gloves let us feel virtual objects

http://www.vrealities.com/glove.html

Olly, the web-connected smelly robot, gives you smell notifications – and you can make one yourself if you have a 3D printer

http://www.ollyfactory.com/

Link to scent-based AR: http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Shop/ProductsDisplay/VRInterface.php?ID=29

If we are to start navigating information environments, we need to look at things that are already good at those environments, such as machines and robots. Digital alter egos can help us to navigate these information environments.

Kanye West: Media Cyborg http://snarkmarket.com/2010/6262

Telepod allows us to have telepresence – talk to a 3D holographic representation of someone rather than just a screen image http://www.hml.queensu.ca/telehuman

Lester Maddan, Augmented Planet

http://www.augmentedplanet.com/

AR is a collection of technologies that can be used together in certain ways to produce what we call augmented reality. Virtual reality was about entering a computer-generated world, isolated from physical reality. AR is about bridging that gap.

AR provides an immersive experience. You have a phone in your picket, it recognises where you are and starts to give you an audio tour. If you stand still, that suggests you are interested, so it carries on.

A barcode can be thought of as an early form of augmented reality, interacting with print through technology. After barcodes we had QR codes, and Microsoft tags.

Markers are high-contrast images that enable tracking and are used for 3D. The computer picks up where it is in relation to the marker, and also your orientation to the marker. You cannot add markers retrospectively.

Natural feature tracking allows you to overlay 3D graphics. Software picks out high-contrast areas of an image and builds an image map that is uploaded to a server. The machine then looks for matches. Natural markers can be applied to most things, and can be applied retrospectively.

Markerless AR uses the camera to provide context and also uses information from the GPS accelerometer and other sensors for location. It can, for example, track where you are in relation to the white line in the road, or the car in front.

Other techniques are object recognition and face recognition. Both Google and Apple are investing in face recognition. An app could recognise someone’s face and then display their social profile.

Demos of some augmented reality apps developed using ‘String’ http://www.poweredbystring.com/showcase

Scrawl lets you do 3D drawing in augmented reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRM68MiEixU

Interact with NASA spacecraft in AR
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spacecraft-3d/id541089908?mt=8

The Google Goggles app lets you do visual search – for example, it will identify a famous building or picture – or give you reviews of a bottle of wine based on its label
http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

Aurasma is a visual browser
http://www.aurasma.com/

Lee Stott, Microsoft @lee_stott

AR is a method of looking at the world through a different lens.

Several current issues: connectivity, need for Internet and app store, device ownership, user interfaces. Either you build new interfaces for every devices, and people keep buying new devices, or you go for the lowest common denominator.

Commercial AR: Kogan AR app allows you to see what a piece of tech such as a television would look like in your room.

Games-based AR: finding objects in your house that increase your points in a game that you are playing.

Sensor-based AR: looks at input from device sensors. Examples include Photosynth and the Live Butterflies viewer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO43NOXgzyE that uses the iPhone gyroscope.  You can download a free toolkit to build these (although I didn’t get a link to that, and I can’t find it)

Geo-AR: takes real-world objects and adds information from the augmented world. It takes into account your location and your direction. Intel have a device that pulls information from your Facebook account and advertises directly to you when you walk into a shop such as Top Shop (again, I can’t track down a link to this, though Intel are obviously doing things with AR http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/11/intels-checklist-of-innovations-coming-the-next-18-months-on-the-pc/ )

Wii as AR – the wii is augmented reality in that you are doing things and the computer knows about it. Microsoft is about to launch Nike Plus Sports, which will allow you to get awards and recognition for games but also to build up stamina and fitness.

Physical-interaction-based AR. Two million sensors embedded in a table, which is thin like an LED screen and which can be mounted at any angle.

Microsoft is working with Guide Dogs for the Blind to transform the ways in which blind people get out and about. Good technology is almost invisible to the user – they view as part of their physicality. The work in this area is not solely for people with a visual impairment, these technologies have the potential to benefit everybody.

Cool video – well worth watching www.guidedogs.org.uk/inspiring-future-technologies

Personal AR – an evolution of personal AI, and of decision engines. Getting an AI agent to do things like make appointments for you and to make predictive suggestions.

AR Browser: Nokia City Lens is built into the Nokia Lumia phone. It knows where you are and can display local information http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMdNtVqYJIw

What lies ahead: more cultural heritage in digital form, AR more accessible to more people, people better equipped with tools to add creatively to the AR resources available, an exponential growth in mass cultural expression, and a cloud culture.

Graphene is making all this possible – it conducts electricity and can be embedded into any material http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

Also important is near field communication (NFC), a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish communication when near each other or touching. This enables, for example, contactless payment.