tech-ed collisions

Amazon Kindle for education

Recently I had the good fortune to attend the IMS Learning Impact Conference at Long Beach CA. While I was there I ran out of reading material and tried to find a bookstore. Well, things have changed since the last time I was there (what with the demise of some major bookstore chains) and I was unable to find a good bookstore. In the end I found myself at a Best Buy store looking at e-readers. Amazon had this special on the Kindle with special offers. At a great price, it looked very good and a great solution to my lack of access to some decent books - so I bought one.
I must say that after about an hour's use I knew I had made a rash decision. 'special offers' turned out to be a discounted Kindle with ads to subsidize the price. There were ads across the bottom of the screen, ads in place of the screensaver and annoying as they were, I knew it was going to get a whole lot worse when I got home as they were American ads and well, I don't live in the USA.
Fortunately for me Best Buy has a great returns policy so I returned the device and upgraded it to the 3G version (wish Australian retailers had the same attitude towards customer service).
What a transformation! No more ads and free worldwide access to 3G networks. Think about that for a moment and the potential it offers for education. No more paper text books to weigh kids backpacks down and no traffic costs for downloading content. Now if only education could get it's act together and negotiate something like that.
I have never really given much thought to e-readers and have had an iPad instead however they are completely different experiences. The Kindle leaves the iPad in it's wake when it comes to reading texts. Sure the iPad can do a whole lot more but for the simple use case of delivering text books to students and readability there is no comparison. I have several apps on my iPad for reading but none of them come close.
The only downside I have experienced so far is the woeful keyboard (although you don't use it much). Lining all the keys up vertically as well as horizontally just doesn't work. Touch typists will find it a nightmare. The keys themselves are concave which has the unfortunate characteristic of always catching a light reflection making it very difficult to see the letter on the key (which is hard to see anyway given the lack of contrast to the Kindle surface) which you tend to rely on given the awkward alignment of the keys. For me the keyboard is a usability disaster.
Overall though these things would be fantastic in a classroom in place of paper textbooks (especially the 3G version if you could get access to curriculum texts). They are at a price point well below iPads and while they do a lot less, they really deliver on the functionalty they were designed for.

Cheers,
Jerry
Ps and after all that I found a good bookstore near Best Buy.

Filed under  //   content   gadgets  
Posted July 12, 2011

Bringing the cloud into your LMS

The Web can be a wonderful place, filled with an un-estimable number of great tools and content that have tremendous teaching and learning potential.  At the same time though, there is so much material on it that is completely inappropriate to have accessable from a learning environment. 

As we move towards digital curricula, more integrated online learning environments, adapt and adopt technologies for use in education, many schools and other educational organisations are implementing Learning Management Systems (LMS's).  These have been around for quite some time and are mature and very sophisticated applications however they are far from ubiquitous.  This post is for those that use LMS's and other online learning environments, and those that understand them.

LMS vendors, no matter how good they are and how fast they can roll out new functionality, cannot keep up with the pace of the Web.  New content and services are being introduced at an astounding rate.  There will always be someone who can do something better or something new that is really useful and has great applicability in the classroom.  The best of the vendors recognise this and for some time have allowed plugins, widgets, blocks etc to be integrated into their environments.  Trouble is - they all had their own unique way of doing it so if you are a small tool/service provider, in order to get your tool into their LMS's, you would have to write custom interfaces for each of the LMS's you wanted to integrate with (a difficult and costly exercise for small providers).

Enter IMS LTI.  The IMS Global Learning Consortium  (IMS) "is a global, nonprofit, member association that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact."  IMS has quite a number of technical specifications to support the use of technology within an educational context however three of those specifications form the core of their 'Digital Learning Services'.  These are:

I will endeavor to look at the broader Digital Learning Services in more detail in a later post but for the moment I am interested in exploring Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).  LTI allows you to 'launch' an external tool from within (typically) an LMS.  There is a great overview of LTI here by Dr. Chuck which is well worth a look at if you want a much better explanation than I can offer.

LTI comes in two flavours (three if Basic LTI Simple Outcomes gets the promotion it deserves!).  These are:

  1. Basic Learning Tools Interoperability
  2. Learning Tools Interoperability

Essentially Basic LTI allows an LMS to 'launch' an external tool while full LTI will allow you to launch that tool and return some data back to the LMS from the tool. 

In LTI terminology, an LMS is known as a Tool Consumer (TC). The external tool is known as a Tool Provider (TP).  Tool providers can really be any manner of interesting Web 2.0 style services, content etc, making for great potential teaching and learning opportunities.  A Tool Consumer is not restricted to an LMS either.  An LMS is simply a 'context' of a TC.  It could also be a portal or any other type of Web environment that may be used in the delivery of learning.

Security is supported via the use of OAuth.  Using OAuth, teachers/tool providers are able to ensure that only authorised users (eg students) are able to launch and play the tool.

For teachers this is great - often they are restricted in their access to the Web in schools.  You can easily imagine though how getting access to great tools and content and making them available through a safe and secure channel in the LMS could open up the classroom to some fantastic services from the Web.

We have trialled Basic LTI as both a tool consumer and tool provider and are keen to go through the conformance testing from IMS to get listed as compliant.

I can imagine a whole market opening up for small tool providers as they now have access to significant markets via LTI compliant LMS's that are used by education departments and schools worldwide.

The following is a short video highlighting the experience of one such provider:

Cheers,

Jerry

Filed under  //   standards  

ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning

Here's a presentation I did some months ago on ePortfolios for Lifelong Learning.  I lost this presentation and have just found it so I am really just making sure it is 'more' available or discoverable to me.  There are better ways of doing it but anyway....

 

ePortoflios for lifelong learning

View more presentations from jerryl.

 

 

Filed under  //   eportfolio  
Posted July 26, 2010

Common Cartridge in action - some teachers perspectives

A great video here providing some perspectives from teachers on the use of Common Cartridge and the application of it in Moodle.  The video was taken at a summer school for the ASPECT project in Europe. 

There are some really savvy teachers and others in the support of education in this project.  They really understand what interoperability can achieve and how to adapt content and their teaching/learning environments to meet their needs.  I would love to see examples of their work - I am sure they would stand out as stellar examples of leading practice.  

Filed under  //   standards  
Posted July 21, 2010

An Identity crisis - of sorts

So now that I am blogging as an individual rather than part of my work I have had to rethink my identity on the Web.  Blogging has been part of my professional identity for almost four years.  As I move into a different role with a new look organisation, the likelihood that I will be blogging 'professionally' as 'me' is pretty remote.  However, as an individual I still have things I'd like to say about the use of technology in educational settings. 

What has become obvious is that I need to separate my 'professional self' from my 'personal self' - something that as I dig into it is becoming pretty difficult.  Many of the people that do know me or connect with me in some way on the Web know me through my role in the company where I have worked for some years.  Additionally, as an early adopter of many social networking services, most of the people in those networks that I have connected with have been professional or work relationships rather than personal ones.  Many of my personal friends and family joined these networks much later.

Very early on I was interested in trialling different social networks and obviously the best way you can do that is by connecting with others - most of whom at the time were early adopters and largely known to me through work. Once my personal friends came along I needed to decide whether to have a personal identity and a professional identity or just combine them into one.  Since our personal and professional lives are so intermingled it made sense just to have the one identity. 

That was then.  Now however I am faced with quite a different set of circumstances.  Disentangling the mess that is my Web identity is turning out to be very difficult.  Moving my work blog to a new environment, not associated with work sounds easy enough.  An RSS export migrated all the posts but was not able to migrate the comments and categories.  Additionally, my old blog used to have good 'Google juice' but now all that's gone and I am starting from scratch.  Anyone who subscribed to the old blog probably won't know that I have moved.

Now since I really am separating the personal from the professional me, a really tricky challenge is of course Twitter.  My Twitter friends include professional and personal relationships, professional ones that have become personal and others that I just don't even know how to categorise.  Should I create a personal Twitter identity and a professional one? How do I split my friends up?  Having the freedom to blog independently has also given me the desire to tweet more independently than I have before.  Luckily for me Twitter seems to have solved my dilemna by continually failling when I try to change my username.

My work demands (quite rightly) a level of professionalsim and personal values that is not always shared by people I know outside work.  Some of my friends work in completely different areas, have quite different social and cultural backgrounds and think quite differently to my colleagues at work.  This is a good thing - imagine a world without diversity.  How boring that would be.  However, that can make me a source of well, amusement at best to some of my friends who share the same social networks as my work colleagues - they see me as a hopeless geek if I talk technology as that's not important to them at all and they never talk work in their social networking rants.  Equally, if I respond in the same vein as my personal friends, I may be appearing on some professional friends 'feeds' blurting out something out of context for them.

So, this change in roles at work has forced upon me a rethink of my digital identity.  It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Filed under  //   identity  
Posted July 20, 2010

Blogging from the dark side

So here's my first real post from tech-ed collision's new home.  The company I work for has merged with another and I have a new role.  At the moment it doesn't seem appropriate for me to be blogging using my old work blog while my role is changing but there are still so many things happening in the world of technology and education that I'd like to comment on.

A long time ago I had some great correspondence from a colleague in NSW (whose views I regard very highly) who chooses to blog about his profession but on a personal blog - Thanks Tim, I am looking forward to the same sense of liberation. 

I was able to copy all my old posts over to Posterous but not the comments and categories.  Its a great pity the comments didn't come across as they are the most valued parts of my blog.  Thanks to everyone who commented on my posts, I have learned a great deal and will most certainly be trying to get an export of them somehow. Its a bit weird starting from scratch again and I hope anyone who has found any of my thoughts interesting can find me here - to think that some of the people whose views and work I have the utmost respect for have time to have a read of my ramblings means a lot to me.

As for the categories, while they didn't come across it has been really interesting to go through all my old posts and tag them.  Most likely they will have different tags now and that's ok because hopefully I am a better tagger.  What has been great though is to look at my progress as a blogger and lifelong learner.  I would encourage anyone to take a walk back through time and have a look at all their old blog posts or other contributions to the Web and sharing of our knowledge, ideas, thoughts etc.  Its really quite illuminating.

Cheers,

Jerry

Filed under  //   blogging  
Posted July 7, 2010

iLust, iBan, iTry, iHope, iReview

So this post can only be about one thing - the iPad. As a review, this isn't really going to be hot off the press and out as soon as the device itself. They have been around for a month or two now so are old news technology wise. For good or bad though, I walked into a store very soon after they arrived in Australia and they just happened to have three left so I bought one. In this post I am going to describe my experiences with it after owning one for several weeks.

When I first read about the iPad on the Web I must admit I wasn't really that taken with it. It just looked like a ridiculously over-sized iPhone and didn't appear to offer much more than its smaller stablemate (in fact, probably less).

Then I had the opportunity to play with one. Let me say there is a huge difference between reading about the iPad and having it in your hands. Unfortunately the one that I had to try out was a demo and there were none available for purchase. Here comes the iLust part. After trying it out for about fifteen minutes or so I was sold. I wanted one. At this time I was very fortunate to be attending a conference related to technology and education and it was great to hear the number of educational organisations that were really interested in the device and what potential it offered for education. These organisations were not simply jumping on a new hyped up device but were looking very seriously at whether or not it had the capability to support delivering better outcomes for their students. They were not seeing it just as a replacement technology but as a transformational one.

As a replacement technology however there are a number of benefits. From a very simple standpoint, as a parent I'd rather see my children carrying one of these around than a pile of textbooks and notebooks and/or a laptop weighing down their ridiculously oversized, overweight backpacks. A fairly trite example I know but all the same...

As a transformational technology, multi-touch, web-enabled, go anywhere devices offer so many new ways of exploring, learning and collaborating, with access to so much amazing information and great services. At about this time I was also reading about other organisations rejecting these types of devices unless they could effectively modify them and lock them down. There are some very compelling arguments put forward for doing so and it is very informative to listen to why such approaches are needed.

More locally we see a number of trials of iPads in schools, universities etc happening - educators are out there trying.

A disappointing aside however can be the media. I mostly read electronic media and it seems education is dammed if it does and dammed if it doesn't. I have seen posts criticising education departments for whatever approach they take (jumping on the bandwagon and having a go or working hard to provide a safe secure environment). They are never going to please everyone. However, the education system has many people passionate about education and passionate about making it relevant to the 21st Century and the world in which their students are growing up in. Let's hope they succeed. So, enough of the hype and big picture stuff - what about the device itself? Out of the box it offers some great features. Music, video, photos are all fantastic and what you would expect. The quality of the screen is great. The big improvers over the standard iphone applications though are the mail and calendar functions. They are fantastic. Email in particular is now fun to work with again.

If you are going to use the iPad more seriously (beyond entertainment) then you really need to consider some productivity apps. I downloaded the iWorks apps so I have Pages, Numbers and Keynote available. Now these are really stripped down versions of the desktop apps but for the price you would be foolish not to give them a go.

Pages works great for creating and reading documents on the go. The keyboard doesn't take all that long to get used to and after a few minutes effort you should be really competent in it. The lack of any tactile feedback creates a bit of a challenge but who knows what may happen in future improvements to this type of device (see this article for one possibility). The first thing I tried to do in Pages was review a document. To do so I wanted to highlight some excerpts of text but this is not possible (unless you make changes to the text itself). Pages on the iPad works great if you accept and can work within its limitations. I imagine it will only get better and the first version was just getting it out the door and onto the iPad. Keynote is good to for viewing presentations. I haven't really tried to create any serious ones but just playing with it gives me the impression that you could comfortably create some quite good ones.

Numbers was a bit of a disappointment for me. The interface just wasn't quite there and it seemed to 'clunky' to work with. Perhaps I didn't persist for long enough.

The Safari web browser looks great and works well for casual surfing of the Web. It really brings the Web to all parts of the house when at home and has been really useful in that respect. The iPad is far more mobile than a laptop so working in the kitchen, finding recipes, checking out what's on at the movies, television etc are now very convenient, as is access to all your favourite social networking applications.

It doesn't take long to discover the constraints though. You can't search within a web page (something I now realise I do quite often). No flash is a real issue (so Apple the entire Web really isn't available to you, despite what the ads say). Tabbed browsing is not there which slows things down. The good news however is you don't need to stick with Safari. I am now using iCabMobile which is looking to be a great browser. It is quite configurable, has tabbed browsing and you can search within a web page. A definite improvement over Safari.

iBooks is a great book reader. I haven't really got into electronic book readers but can quite easily imagine myself using this app quite regularly. The battery life is great. You really do get quite a few hours use out of it. I haven't timed it exactly but seem to have to recharge only every few days. It does take a while to recharge though.

Since this is a personal device for me rather than a work device (although I have been using it for work as it is very effective when mobile), I have put a few games on it and it is a good gaming platform. There are some really entertaining games out there that exploit the features of the device and this will undoubtedly get better as more games become available.

The Youtube app seems to be configured to your location which is really annoying. Featured, Top Rated etc all seem heavily biased to local content and I can't find any configuration options to change this (I hope this isn't what its going to be like in a 'filtered' world because I really dislike it - but that's a whole other story). I prefer, by default, to get global, not local content.

The Maps application is great - the increased size of the screen makes this a great interface to interact with.

Of course you can run your iPhone apps on it too. When run in standard resolution they look small on the screen but there is a x2 'button' that you can press to get into full screen mode. Some apps tend to look a bit ordinary when in this mode but overall they are ok.

Perhaps the best measure of how good the iPad is, is the takeup by the rest of the household. Our iPad is a really 'in-demand' device and everyone in the house enjoys using it. Its actually become a scarce resource now and I have to compete for access to it.

I (we) have the wifi only version and this seems to be good enough. Given the size of the device (ie I can't carry it around in my pocket or hand everywhere), almost all locations where I do go with it have wifi so I haven't felt compromised by not having the 3g version - after all, most phones now have reasonable web/data interfaces for when you are really mobile and need that sort of access.

The one thing that really annoys me about the iPad is the lack of a (front facing) camera. It would have made it a killer device. FaceTime on the iPad would be awesome - there's enough screen real estate to do quite effective group video conferencing. Deep down I just know I am going to be annoyed at being an early adopter with Apple again as I am sure the next version will have this in it. I just hope we see an addon camera available for 1st generation iPads.

So there you have it. Aside from the lack of a camera, for me this continues to be a great new device and one which I think is going to get even better as new apps come out that fully exploit it.

Filed under  //   Apple  
Posted June 30, 2010

Privacy, a continual vigil

Just read an interesting post on ZDNet entitled "Facebook's privacy changes: When will it go too far (and will you even notice)?". Now I had kind of been aware that Facebook has been tinkering with privacy settings and knew that I should check mine out to see that everything was in order. One of the reasons I use Facebook is to share photos with my family of my family and I want to protect their privacy (maybe I am kind of foolish to use Facebook to do this). I thought I had locked down my Facebook account enough to be able to participate in networking with friends, colleagues and family at the levels that I wanted. However, the continual changing by Facebook seems to have eroded that completely. For example, while I thought I had protected my family with the initial basic settings that Facebook used to have, there is now a myriad of privacy settings and the default options for them are anything but private and bear no resemblance to the settings I thought I had in place. Today I found out that friends can share the following about me through other applications and websites:* Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)

* Status updates

* Online presence

* Website

* Family and relationship status

* Relationship details (significant other, looking for, etc.)

* Education and work

* My videos

* My links

* My notes

* My photos

* Photos and videos of me

* About me

* My birthday

* My hometown

* My religious and political views

The only option that was turned off was my photos however inspecting settings for them I was surprised at the number of levels I had to lock down to really keep them private too. The last thing I want is for Facebook to allow anyone or any application to share my birthday as that is a major identity risk but there it is. Other personal identifying information that Facebook has should be fully and very clearly under my control. Location information too is something that I want full control of over when and how I share it however any number of other services seem to have this information available to them without my knowledge or approval. There is an option to edit blocked applications but I can only see what applications I have blocked, not what others are accessing my information that I don't know about, have forgotten or otherwise. I urge all Facebook account users to check their privacy settings out just to ensure you understand what information you are giving away and try to think about the implications of that. The same applies for other social networks that you are using but Facebook does know a lot about us. There are some that would say we lost our privacy sometime ago and just need to accept it. However, our society is far from perfect and there is a need for us to be aware of the implications of how information about us can be used in ways that enhance our lives or to harm us. We need to manage that information to the best of our abilities and ensure that those who are custodians of information about us, protect that information and only use it in ways that we understand and approve.

Filed under  //   privacy  

Review of IDEA10: "Learning Futures: Technology Challenges"

I was fortunate enough to attend this year's !DEA conference (IDEA10) last week and my first impressions of it were 'what a long way it has come over the last few years'. What started out as a lab where content and application developers got together a few years ago to test how they could move learning content from one application to another, along with some presentations on areas of interoperability has now emerged as a very important conference. As some of the speakers stated, discussions on interoperability and technical standards can cause many an eye to glaze over but when you look at what they are enabling, and the fantastic outcomes for education that they can and are achieving, you realise just how important this work is. Day 1 of the conference was the IDEALab Workshop. In the morning we looked at the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) and the work that is happening around the country as school education jurisdictions work together to solve common interoperability problems. After lunch we looked at the consultation work Link Affiliates has been doing for DEEWR in supporting the DER. These areas included:

  • 21C Curriculum Content
  • W3C Accessibility guidelines
  • Curriculum description
  • Lesson Plans
  • Content discovery and exchange
  • E-portfolio technologies
  • 21C Learning Environments
Following this we had a detailed session on Accessibility and the WCAG 2.0 (Web content accessibility guidelines). A demonstration on accessibility really highlighted for me just how much consideration really needs to be put into making your web content properly accessible. The 'Technology in Education Open Forum' began on day 2 and this was a really interesting day. The scene was really set in the panel session from a group of educators talking about what they want from technology to support and enhance the work that they are doing. Following this session a number of panels looked at how they, as infrastructure developers, providers etc are working towards providing the types of environments that our educators need. Another panel of educators then responded to the earlier sessions and discussed what was needed so that they could use these environments. Following this was a session which looked at some of the amazing work that is taking place - unfortunately I missed this session as I had some other duties to attend to. Finally, we had the IMS GLC Learning Impact Awards Regional Finalist Showcase. A number of initiatives were showcased and I would love to have seen them all however I was representing one of those initiatives and there was no time for me to get to see the others. On day 3 we had an international perspective from IMS GLC and ADL. These two standards organisations are doing some great work and gave fantastic insights into the work they are doing at the leading edge. What came through for me is that standards really do provide a platform for innovation. Finally we had the Winners of the Regional Learning Impact Awards and congratulations must go to Peter Higgs and his team at the Tasmanian Polytechnic and Skills Institute for the work they have done on Mobile Assessment and Online Recognition using QTI solutions. They are very deserving winners. I am also really pleased to say that we were runners up to them and took out the "People's Choice Award" for the work that we have been doing developing personal and professional development social networking environments using our tool - Fused. A big thank-you to all who participated.

Filed under  //   standards  

a global infrastructure for sharing learning resources

Here's a great little article on working towards creating a 'global infrastructure for sharing learning resources'. The article, on the Creative Commons wiki, discusses what you, as a repository or content owner might like to think about should you want to make your content discoverable and sharable as open education resources (and why wouldn't you). Of course, it isn't necessarily limited to OER - it outlines good practice and considerations for other types of resources. Firstly, you need a consistent way of structuring the information about your resources (title, author, description and so on). This descriptive information, known as metadata (data about data) should be created conforming to one of the many metadata standards. The OER team who put the article together recommend Learning Object Metadata (LOM) or Dublin Core Metadata (DC). LOM metadata is used to describe a particular type of learning resource known as Learning Objects while DC metadata is a more general purpose metadata specification used to describe a wider variety of learning resources. Once you have described your resources you need to make them more discoverable. There are a few ways you can do this. The OER folk suggest that you allow it to be 'harvested' (collected by a special computer program and stored in a centralised repository along with metadata from other repositories). This is similar to the way Google and other search engines collect information about your website. There are standards for harvesting too. The Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is perhaps the most well known specification for harvesting while more generalised Web specifications such as RSS and Atom might also be worth considering in some situations. Harvesting your data into a centralised repository is one way of making your resources more discoverable. Another way may be to participate in a real-time federated search whereby a search service will make multiple simultaneous search request over a number of repositories. The OER article recommends harvesting over federated searching and there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it is more efficient and more scalable, but also helps enable richer search functionality (it is easier to develop and implement advanced search features in one place than potentially many). GLOBE, another initiative dedicated to making educational resources more discoverable and sharable also recommends the approaches and specifications put forward in the OER article. GLOBE however does recognise that there are instances where there may be business rules in place that prevent harvesting and is looking at the SQI specification. A number of GLOBE partners have implemented SQI.

Filed under  //   standards