EdTechUK

Personalisation

Personalisation has emerged as a key concept in the UK government’s vision for public service sector reform, and facilitating personalisation in seen as crucial to the ongoing development of state provision. Charles Leadbeater has compellingly argued that meaningful personalisation implies not just a choice of services for citizens to decide between (which school or hospital to receive the services of) but the active participation of citizens in designing services; in determining what those services deliver, and how. While personalisation seems to designed to directly address and compensate for social inequalities, both choice and the more radical approach of participation raise serious questions about the extent to which personalisation excludes the already disadvantaged.

Anyone who has heard me talk recently will know that what personalisation means, how we define it, and how we recognise planning and provision which account for it, is something that I'm thinking a lot about right now.  Personalisation is the broader context currently informing UK discussion around e-portfolios, Personal Learning Environments, as well as broader educational provision. As such, how we understand it has the potential to empower or exclude learners. Tomorrow I'll be posting AoC NILTA's position statement over at my work blog, it's up! but I'm keen to point out here what I think is the key to the approach we're talking, which is a clear definition of the component parts of personalisation - the identifiable (but also intertwined) elements by which we can understand how we are facilitating personalisation or not.

This approach is hardly radical and won't come as a big surprise to anyone working in the field. My starting point is Point 27 of the recently released UK FE White Paper which calls for “Increasing personalisation so that individual needs and circumstances are built into the design and delivery of education and training”. I'd argue that it is precisely this kind of misguided assurance - that the scope of individual needs and circumstances can be anticipated to the extent that they can be built in to provision and delivered to learners - that leads to exclusionary practice.

Josie Fraser, AoC NILTA October 2006 (click to view larger version)

Currently, when we look at approaches within education, we can see that the discussion is predominately focused on adaptive personalisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (for example registration, tracking, identity management) and customisation (Ferguson, Schmoller, Smith 2004) (choice between predetermined elements of provision). While I'm not dismissing the importance of both of these elements, at all, I would say that a discussion of personalisation that stops at customisation is not good enough. What we also have to factor in, if we are serious about supporting their learning and teaching experiences and recognising their differences, needs and preferences is the acknowledgment of and opportunity for dynamic personalisation to take it's place. 

More PLE questions

Some interesting questions being raised about Personal Learning Landscapes across the blogosphere right now. This recent post by Juliette White,  a couple by Catherine Howell.

Also - for background and kudos, this post by Stephen Powell which really well sums up what the thinking was following the June Cetis PLE meeting.

One of the projects I'm currently working on is as an Advisory Board member to the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) 2007 Horizon Report. Here are some of the 2006 trends which are currently being carried over:

* '''Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes are becoming more widespread and accepted.''' No longer in their infancy, tools for working collaboratively at a distance are easier to use and more commonly available than in previous years. It is no longer unusual to attend a conference online or to contribute to a project wiki. As the tools have matured, the practice of online communication and collaboration has increased. This trend is at the heart of social computing and is driving personal broadcasting as well.

* '''Mobile and personal technology is increasingly being viewed as a delivery platform for services of all kinds.'''  The presence of small devices like cell phones or mp3 players being carried about everywhere is almost a given; delivering content to those devices simply makes sense. This trend is growing in the consumer arena and is beginning to be felt in education as well. The ubiquity of these devices has enabled personal broadcasting (podcasting and vlogging) to take off almost overnight, and that is just the first wave of broadband content that will be ported to phones in the next few years.

* '''Consumers are increasingly expecting individualized services, tools, and experiences, and open access to media, knowledge, information, and learning.''' The demand for personalized content and services, increasingly met by savvy retailers and service providers, and greatly enabled by the ability of the Internet to allow marketers to meet individualized needs will surface with increasing frequency in the world of academia.   Scholarly and cultural institutions are already beginning to differentiate themselves along these dimensions and that can be expected to continue and accelerate for some time.

* '''Collaboration is increasingly seen as critical across the range of educational activities, including intra- and inter-institutional activities of any size or scope.''' As the ways in which researchers, students and teachers can collaborate with each other increase, knowledge is becoming a community property, and the construction of knowledge, a community activity. A renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is leading to an exploration of the science of gaming, context-aware environments and devices, and their application for teaching and learning.

To me, the whole PLE project is an attempt to articulate and address these interwoven changes
- articulating the conceptual shift that acknowledges the reality of distributed learning practices and the range of learner preference. In that sense, a PLE could be described as basically a mechanism, process or interface through which a wide spread of data, conversations, ideas etc are able to be constructed, organised, accessed and presented.

This might suggest that the current state of web 2.0 is great, that all we need to do is work out some way of feeding our flickr account and a bunch of blog posts and comments into a CMS so that it can be evaluated and/or repackaged into a CV/research bid/presentation friendly format.  I don’t think this is the case though – I think that we’re currently limited in articulating what a potential PLE might be like by a lack of diverse examples. We also need a wider range of organisations involved – for example, the exam boards – in order to continue to check the formal and institutional limits of what’s possible. The CETIS Team have done a great job building an example of a desk-based version (although as someone who loathes desk-based aps, this wouldn’t in practice appeal to me), and the Elgg team have done a trailblazing job producing the first example of a web-based working version.

The PLE debates are stirring up a bunch of stuff, in their focus on the ways in which people learn across and between communities and networks, and the importance of synthesis and creating connections. They also raise a host of difficult technical, legal and organisational issues.

I’m coming at this from a very specific angle and other people will have different concerns– great. The thing that most excites me about the PLE at the moment that it isn’t fixed or settled, that it’s fundamentally a conversation across the edtech community about what learners need, what institutions might be providing, which PLE methods might be most useful. I see it as a practical attempt to get beyond the current dichotomy between closed CMS’s vs the small pieces approaches, by pushing innovators and institutions to develop and explore tools and platforms where communities and individuals can themselves determine boundaries, permeability and connections.

MySpace: Better than Emo

Only just got round to watching this really funny Daily Show investigation of social networking (and in particular, MySpace) - contains the best diagram I've seen since Brass Eye went out of business. Thanks Alec!

Also, I think I caught caught the amazing Danah Boyd being interviewed on BBC World Service at some point early this morning, about her MySpace research that was presented at AAAS on the 19th. The slot was called something like "let your kids spend more time online - it's good for them!" and featured Danah's research and another woman's research into an international kid's community. Can anyone help me out with more information? It sounded great but it was about 3am.

e-Portfolio roundup

There’s a frenzy of e-Portfolio related activity in the UK at the moment. I’ve picked out some recent highlights but this list is by no means exhaustive.

The UK Government’s e-strategy, Harnessing Technology outlined a clear commitment to ensuring learners have access to Personal Learning Space (PLS) where they can “store coursework, course resources, results, and achievements…with the potential to support e-portfolios”, available in every school and college by 2007-08. It’s proved to be a popular idea – with many intuitions engaging in research and investigation, and even becoming early adopters of the currently available e-portfolio products. There isn’t currently an agreed definition of PLS or e-portfolio functionality and standards: however, guidelines, ideas and recommendations are fast emerging.

The cynical money is on the provision of little more than storage space for learners to keep documents and files, with options for privacy and sharing - a straightforward, unimaginative solution that fulfils the letter if not the spirit of the governments requirements. Personalisation should be more ambitiously approached – luckily there is vision and the buzz surrounding the topic at the moment, focusing on the idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) – accessible and interoperable institute hosted systems which would not only enable the learner to engage with institutions, projects and individuals, but also provide the ability to accommodate learner selected and preferred technologies – in-system tools or externally hosted services – for example blogs, feeds, and  photo sharing programmes.

My advice? If you are investigating e-portfolios at the moment, hold on to your money. The only product I’d currently recommend is the excellent Elgg – a freely available, open source personal learning environment, suitable for use with all ages of learners which has a ton of unique and innovative features (easy podcasting for instance) and many more on the way, including Moodle integration.  It’s currently being used worldwide, and is a flagship e-learning product for the UK.

• Derek Morrison recently interviewed Oleg Liber about the Personal Learning Environments project. There’s an audio file of the interview and a discussion about the disruptive potential of VLEs.

• Becta have just published an introductory guide for schools and colleges:  Becta's View: E-assessment and e-portfolios (pdf)

• Four new guidance papers for specific professional groups by Helen Richardson and Rob Ward of the Centre for Recording Achievement (CRA), are now available. These are based on what has emerged as the key framework document for e-Portfolio development in the UK 'Getting what you want: Implementing PDP through e-portfolio'.

1. A starting point for technical managers in HE

2. A starting point for MIS managers in HE

3. A starting point for students in HE

4. A starting point for Personal Development Planning (PDP)

• The most recent Association for Learning Technology (ALT) newsletter included An electronic learning curve: implementing ePortfolios by Richard Ingram.

• The e-Framework for Education and Research (a joint initiative of JISC (UK) and DEST (Australia)) Newsletter 2, January-February 2006 is now available and has an e-portfolio update.

• The JISC 'Legal Study to Explore the Legal and Records Management Issues Relating to the Concept of the Lifelong Learner Record' (pdf) has produced a new report which outlines the results of a consultation of selected professional associations on national developments regarding lifelong learner records and e-portfolios. A selection of professional bodies were interviewed about their perceptions of the legal issues relevant to e-portfolios / lifelong learner records; their particular areas of legal concern; benefits they envisage gaining and risks involved in entering into formal co-operation with the education sector in this area.

What does sustainability mean?

It's a question that has been obsessing me for the last couple of years, along with many other edtechs and e-learning related researchers and policy makers. I put in a proposal to the upcoming Open Source and Sustainability Conference last month, titled Sustainability as a key factor in a multi-site roll out of the Moodle open source learning platform:

"I’m currently in the second year of a multi-site VLE roll out, across 5 FE Colleges (total student number circa 60,000) and two schools. The first year of the project consisted of evaluations of a range of mainly proprietary platforms, against the project criteria, of which ‘sustainability’ was a dominant consideration. This paper will outline the variety of concepts and outputs the project addressed under the umbrella term ‘sustainability’, looks at how these have stood up in practice during the second year."

So it's with his usual perfect timing that Stephen Downes posts the excellent Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources, which takes a whole spectrum approach to the question of sustainability, and settles on the key fact Open Education Resources need to be contextualised "as only part of a larger picture, one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control."

One of this years key papers and a comprehensive reading list to boot.

Women in ICT Survey

Are you a woman working in the UK ICT sector? The Directing Equal Pay in ICT (DEPICT) project has been funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) to investigate the gender pay gap within the ICT industry, and aims to uncover intended and unintended barriers to women's pay and progression:

"Currently there is no specific national data regarding the gender pay gap and the ICT industry. The in-depth study will be undertaken to identify the main issues and the impact of the gender pay gap on the under-representation of women in the ICT labour market. One of the main outcomes of the project will provide a basis for presenting solutions to the problem, whilst impacting on UK Government and employer policies.

The DEPICT project team invite you to partake in the research and giving approximately 20 minutes of your time to complete our on-line survey. The DEPICT survey offers a unique opportunity for women to provide (and for us to gather) information about pay, progression and working conditions in the ICT industry throughout England. Women from other areas may complete this survey, the data collected will be used for academic purposes only.

Additionally if you would like to help further by being interviewed allowing you to tell your story in more detail please contact Angela Tattersall or Claire Keogh to arrange a convienient time."

Direct link to survey

e-Learning and college inspection

Thanks to Martin Cooke, ILT Curriculum Advisor at the JISC Regional Support Centre East Midlands:

References to e-learning from the draft of the 2005 Ofsted handbook for inspecting colleges:

192. E-learning is learning facilitated and supported through the use of ICT. It may involve the use of computers, interactive whiteboards, digital cameras, the internet, the college intranet, virtual learning environments and electronic communication tools such as email, discussion boards, chat facilities and video conferencing. E-learning should form part of the overall teaching and learning strategy for each course. There should be appropriate references to e-learning in schemes of work, lesson plans, assignments, course reviews and staff development plans. An overall strategy for e-learning should be supported by senior managers. Effective e-learning should:

•  improve learners. understanding of topics or activities that are part of their academic or vocational programme
•  improve their skills and their knowledge of the technology being used
•  help to maintain their interest in their programme.

193. In particular, inspectors will evaluate whether:

•  staff and learners have the relevant IT skills to make good use of elearning facilities
•  there are adequate resources for e-learning
•  the quality and effectiveness of e-learning is well monitored
•  there are appropriate opportunities for learners to use e-learning facilities outside scheduled lessons.

Panic in the streets of New York

David Shaffer and James Gee on why learning technologies (and investment) are crucial in US education today: It's not just about better, faster, smarter - it's underpinned by a fundamental paradigm shift away from (only) knowing how to do stuff, to preparation for life long learning in it's most innovative sense: finding, evaluating and applying information, tools and techniques. This is why top twenty skills lists can only ever function as  temporary markers.

Before every child is left behind: How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education (pdf):

"The coming crisis is this: Young people in the United States today are being prepared—in school and at home—for “commodity jobs” in a world that will, very soon, only reward people who can do “innovative work” and punish those who can’t." 

From elearnopedia

14-19 and Digital Technologies

Nesta Futurelabs regularly produce well written and relevant literature reviews - their latest, Report 13, is now available. 14-19 and Digital Technologies: A review of research and projects is written by Chris Davies, Geoff Hayward and Linariah Lukman, Department of Educational Studies, Oxford University. The conclusion points up gaps in current research, including the largely absent voice of our students.

Other available reports focus on creativity, mobile technologies, games and e-assessment.

Elsewhere on the site you'll find another newly published, worth-reading paper: Hail to the Thief: The Appropriation of Music in the Digital Age by Teresa Dillon, Learning Researcher, NESTA Futurelab (May 2005).

Overcoming social exclusion through online learning

NIACE (The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education - England and Wales) is currently running "Overcoming social exclusion through online learning", funded by the Community Fund (now the Big Lottery Fund) for the period 2002 - 2005.

There's quite a few interesting things over at the site, including two huge PDF files containing a worldwide literature review relating to the delivery of online learning (1980's onward).

eLearningScotland: Challenges Survey Results

The second eLearningScotland portal survey took place in April: eLearning Challenges. The compiled results are now up.

The survey ranks 30 challenges, divided in 3 broad categories, according to how practitioners perceived their impact upon effectively embedding eLearning within their organisation. The categories and the biggest challenges are identified as:

1.The Challenges of Implementing eLearning:
Lack of budget for eLearning. Identifying & calculating a return on investment.

2.The Challenges of Technology:
Finding non-sales information about what the eLearning tools can do

3.The Organisational Challenges:
Encouraging people to make time for their learning

Full survey results are available in PDF.

Reviewing E-portfolios

Developing and Implementing a Methodology for Reviewing E-portfolio Products is a recently published report commissioned by JISC and written by Helen Richardson and Rob Ward from the Centre for Recording Achievement and the MLEs.

Reviewing 12 UK e-portfolio/PDP/progress file products, the authors developed a mapping template which can be used to frame your e-portfolio evaluations. In terms of whats currently already out there, accessibility/standards issues didn't fare too well:

"Very few systems currently support learner selected screen display preference settings, such that the learner can set screen display including font size and background colour, which are then applied automatically at log-in.  Some systems are planning development in this area.

Most system developers report that ‘conformance with e-learning standards is under development’ including development towards UKLeaP, and a few give a more specific time frame such as ‘within the next 6 months’.  A few developers report that they plan to improve usability and move towards WCAG compliance and IMS ACCLIP specification."

Learning technologists: officially unruly

Derek's already posted about this over at Auricle, but just in case you haven't heard about this foolishness yet.

Monday morning I received an email from the Curriculum Champions mailing list, out of the blue, informing everyone on the list that:

"This mailing list is now suspended during the election period (until Friday 6 May). All services provided by non-departmental public bodies (such as Becta) must comply with the General Election Guidance issued by the Cabinet Office."

since JISCList provides the mail communities (i.e. all of the national, interactive, actual practitioner communities) for UK learning technology, you can see how this is an inconvenience to say the least. Today the notoriously subversive 14-19 list was closed down. The Guidelines we're busy complying with?

GUIDANCE NOTE H
Communication Activities during a General Election
1. The general principle governing communication activities during a General Election is to do everything possible to avoid competition with Parliamentary candidates for the attention of the public. In addition, it has always been recognised that special care must be taken during the course of an Election since material produced with complete impartiality which would be accepted as objective in ordinary times, may excite criticism during an Election period when feelings are running high.

And specifically:

The Internet
10. Official websites, including direct.gov, are a form of broadcasting which perform both news handling and paid publicity roles. They will be scrutinised closely by the news media and the political Parties during the Election period and must be handled with great care. In general, they must comply with the sections of this guidance on free and paid publicity and their principles. There are specific instances in which communications staff and webmasters must take particular care:
a. News sections of websites must comply with the advice on press releases found in paragraphs 7 and 8 of this guidance. News tickers and other mechanisms for “push”, including viral marketing, should be discontinued for the Election period.

The Cabinet Office General Election Guidance 2005 (PDF) also recommends, bizarrely, that

b. Webcasts, particularly those involving Ministers, should be avoided.

A Manifesto for a Digital Britain

The BBC today covered the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr - lower caps)'s (Typepad hosted) blog - the snappily titled A Manifesto for a Digital Britain.

The ippr describes itself as Britain's leading 'independent progressive think tank', and was established in 1986, and addresses a wide range of social and public policy issues.

The blog seems to have been around for a couple of months now but is being used as conduit for the ippr's three week consultation exercise on the future of digital policy, which kicked off today.

Will Davies of the ippr also contributed this article to today's eGov monitor outlining the rational behind the consultation. There doesn't seem to be much of a reason for using a weblog rather than a more traditional site, in fact Davies comments:

"Our consultation will be based around a weblog, namely the Digital Manifesto blog. But instead of a rolling conversation, we want to ask three sets of quite carefully targeted questions, under three key themes of ‘Innovating’, ‘Reassuring’ and ‘Empowering’."

E at last

Today The UK's Department of Education and Skills finally got round to publishing it's e-Learning strategy. In PDF format. Let's hope this isn't a sign of the level of innovation to come.

It also has a shiny new title and strap line: it's now the e-Strategy 'Harnessing Technology: Transforming learning and children's services'. Working to a five year timetable, the seven action areas have become six priority areas:

An integrated online information service for all citizen

Integrated online personal support for children and learners

A good quality training and support package for practitioners

A collaborative approach to transforming teaching and learning

A leadership and development package for organisational capability in ICT

A common digital infrastructure to support transformation and reform

And for comparison - these were:

1. Help education leaders tackle the funding models that restrict innovation (leading sustainable e- learning implementation)

2. Support people who want to be innovative in the way they teach (supporting innovation in teaching and learning)

3. Give teachers career incentives and training for e- learning (developing the education workforce)

4. Give learners better e- learning support for meeting their personal learning goals (unifying learner support)

5. Make assessment a driver of innovation rather than a barrier (aligning assessment)

6. Build a better market for quality assured e- learning resources (building a better e- learning market)

7. Work out the technical standards to be used by all for e- learning (assuring technical and quality standards)

'Funding', 'innovation' and 'assessment' have all been demoted from headline objectives. More later.

Kelly plays it safe

It's been a depressing week for those of us who have spent the past couple of years hopeful that the Tomlinson Report could actually lead to positive changes with real impacts on the lives and learning experiences of UK 14-19 year old students. The excitement generated by the possibility of a cleaned up, streamlined qualifications framework which addressed the current, hierarchical divide between 'vocational' and 'academic' subjects has been palpable.

This Wednesday, Ruth Kelly announced her decision as new head of the Department for Education and Skills: Same old same old.

The BBC's Mike Baker contributes a succinct round up of the debacle here.   

Understanding the Audience

Not only have they got their own news blog, but the Common Information Environment (CIE) group today publishes the results of a wide-ranging survey undertaken for them by MORI, in which over 2,000 members of the UK population were asked detailed questions about their use of and attitudes towards online information resources.

Headline findings of Understanding the Audience include:

Most of the population is aware of the Internet to some degree, with just under half of all respondents (49%) saying they know at least a fair amount about it

92% of Internet users say that reliability of content is an important factor, including 63% saying it is very important

Home is the place from which people most commonly access the Internet, with 80% of current users saying that they go online most often from there

53% of all respondents go online at least once a week, including 30% who do so every day

3% of users access the Internet via mobile phones or GPRS as their preferred means of access

Over half of all current users (54%) of the Web use it as their preferred information source. In addition, some 59% of all those surveyed are confident about Internet use, and three quarters of respondents say that they find it easy to get access to the Internet

Duff new acronym for increasingly normal women tech enthusiasts

If you can get past the patronizing framing (Tif? That was really the best they could come up with? and LBD comparisons??! Do they think all women identify with or can even stand Bridget Jones?) Intel have published the results of the Women, Technology and Lifestyle research they recently commissioned. The sample was US based and research conducted only on line.

Via misbehaving.net

ILT in FE '04

Over at Furl you can find the results of the 2004 ILT Survey carried out by Becta in January and February 2004 on behalf of the Learning and Skills Council. The survey seeks to assess progress in the provision of information and learning technology within the sector along with the extent to which this provision is integrated into the teaching and learning process. Four previous studies undertaken in February 1999, September 2000, September 2001 and February 2003 provide comparative data to judge the impact of the deployment NLN monies for the development of ICT infrastructure and e-learning in the sector.

51% of all colleges in the FE sector in England responded to the study, which focuses on infrastructure, access, content, use within teaching and learning, and policy and strategy. The report on the whole shows that the sector continues to move towards the eventual aim of embedding ILT across the curriculum, with a cautious note about the sustainability of progress in relation to current funding levels in light of the expansion of student participation in post 16 study. As you can see from the above diagram, embedded e-learning is still some way off, with ILT still being mainly used to support and suppliment classroom practices.

There are three electronic reports out so far – text only summary at Ferl, the executive summery PDF and the full report PDF. The first table is taken from the full report:

and the second from the summary – notice any differences?

Let's hope they haven't gone to press yet.

Invasion of the RSS snatchers

Following on from my previous post which looked at the roll out of RSS feeds across the JISC services, is this article, Improving Communications within JISC through News Aggregation, in the latest issue of Ariadne.

From the Introduction:

JISC currently funds thirty-four services across the UK. These can be divided into Network Services (e.g. JANET), Content Services (e.g. BizEd, BUFVC), Development Services (e.g. TechWatch, UKOLN), Support Services (e.g. Regional Support Centers) and Expert Services (e.g. JISC Legal). The people and communities that they serve are varied, but what unites them is that, through JISC-funding, they all carry out some function which supports the needs of UK Further and Higher Education and research. A problem for people working for a JISC Service, for the JISC Executive or indeed for those amongst projects funded by JISC, is one which is faced by any distributed organisation. The issue relates to effective communication, targeted to ensure that the right people are informed about issues that matter to them. We detail how a pilot project, called JISCnews Pilot, being undertaken by JISC might provide some solutions to effective internal communication, the cultural steps needed to ensure its success, and some insight into the technology which has been developed to ensure objectives are met.

Future Curriculum Change: 14-19, Tomlinson and Beyond

Not breaking news I know - but here's a round up of useful resources.

The Tomlinson report, published on the 18th October 2004, recommends a diploma system should replace GCSEs, A-levels and vocational qualifications in a bid to improve basic skills in English, maths and computing. The recommendations in the report are seen as one of the biggest shake-ups of the education system since the 1944 Education Act.

BBC news has posted a handy clickable guide to the new diplomas proposed by Mike Tomlinson's team.

Key points were posted over at the Guardian.

Furl has published it's own summary, which looks at the tech implications.

For more information, and to read/download the report in full, visit www.14-19reform.gov.uk.

Copies of the full report can also be obtained by calling 0845 602 2260, quoting reference DfE-0976-2004

Becta runs the 14-19 discussion forum for practitioners and managers involved in initiatives to support the 14-19 agenda. This list is for all practitioners, strategic planners and managers in the area of 14-19 education who are involved or interested in the use of technology.

A summary of the report is reproduced after the jump:

What the Research Says, especially about modern foreign languages

I honestly thought I’d written more about Becta's interesting and informative What the Research Says series before. Since they've recently posted some new guides (there are currently 23), and since the word is that the series is soon to be discontinued, it may be a good time to check the reports out. Becta's What the Research Says series aims to give an initial idea of the available research evidence on aspects of using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in schools and colleges. It's designed primarily for teachers, ICT co-ordinators and school managers.

First up, the new reports (available in PDF or to order in hard copy):

 What the Research Says about using ICT in history
 What the Research Says about using ICT in geography
 What the Research Says about using ICT in modern foreign languages

This last report has attracted some comment, reproduced here from Becta’s ICT Research mailing list with kind permission of the authors, since the replies were so informative:

ICT IN MFL REPORT
From: Graham Davies

Dear colleagues,

I was pleased to see that BECTA has produced a report called: "What the research says about using ICT in Modern Foreign Languages":

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_mfl.pdf

It's OK as far as it goes, but it has a number of shortcomings, indicating that BECTA did not look in the most obvious places for evidence of the benefits of using ICT in MFL teaching and learning. For example, BECTA appears to be unaware of EUROCALL's work in this area: v. the many EUROCALL conference papers presented and published in recent years on action research into the use of ICT in the MFL classroom at all levels of education. Contrary to popular opinion, EUROCALL does not focus only on the FE and HE sectors. This year's conference, for example, included an excellent paper by two researchers on using ICT in MFL teaching in Irish primary schools and Norbert Pachler's keynote focused predominantly on the UK secondary school sector. For further information see the EUROCALL website:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org

See also the Joint Policy Statement on Research that was endorsed in 1999 by three of the world's leading professional associations dedicated to research in this area:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org/research/research_policy.html

I am, however, pleased to see that the report edited by myself and Anthony Fitzpatrick and entitled "The Impact of Information and Communications Technologies on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and on the Role of Teachers of Foreign Languages" is cited. This is a comprehensive report commissioned by the EC Directorate General of Education and Culture, which can be downloaded in PDF or Word format from the ICC website:

http://www.icc-europe.com - click on "Report on ICT in FLL".

I am also pleased to see that one of my articles is cited, namely "ICT and modern foreign languages: learning opportunities and training needs", published in International Journal of English Studies 2, 1: Monograph Issue, New Trends in Computer Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, edited by Pascual Perez Paredes & Pascual Cantos Gomez, Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Murcia, Spain, but this is not the most recent and most accessible version, which can be found in Scottish Languages Review 8, June 2003, Scottish CILT:

http://www.scilt.stir.ac.uk/SLR/index.htm

An important omission in the report is the ICT4LT website, particularly Module 3.1, which presents three case studies of UK schools using ICT in MFL:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-1.htm

The site also contains an article by Ridwan Sedgwick: "Annotated bibliography on the effectiveness of computer assisted language learning (CALL)":

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/Sedgwick.htm

However, the most important omission is Terry Atkinson's edited volume "Reflections on ICT" (London: CILT, 2001). It contains a number of research studies and case studies written by prominent practising teachers, advisers and researchers. Failure to mention it in the BECTA report signals to MFL teachers who already know something about ICT in MFL that BECTA has not covered the field adequately.

Regards
Graham Davies
Emeritus Professor of Computer Assisted Language Learning
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/cvgd.htm

Response from Becta:

Dear Network members,

In response to Professor Graham Davies' comments regarding our recent publication titled "What the research says about using ICT in modern foreign languages", I'd like to take the opportunity to clarify the nature and purpose of the publications in the 'What the Research Says' series, and the approaches taken in researching the topics for each individual report. This in turn will explain the reasons why the research listed by Professor Davies was not included in the publication.

The chief purpose of the 'What the Research Says' series is to provide an initial idea of the research findings in specific areas of ICT in education, and to summarise these in as accessible a format as possible. The reports are written primarily for busy teachers and school managers, many of whom would not have the time to read a detailed and lengthy literature review; the intention therefore is only to provide an overview of a selection of the available literature, to encourage teachers to engage with ICT research, and to carry out further reading if they so wish. We do make clear in each briefing that the research covered should not be regarded as a definitive list.

When writing briefings for the series we spend many hours searching for and reading research reports and articles relevant to the topic, and from these documents we draw up a shortlist of those to be included in the final publication. This research is by no means systematic, however, and so we must make judgements, both on the scope of the initial literature search and also on which articles are most appropriate for inclusion in the final briefing paper. For example, depending on the topic, we tend to concentrate first on the more robust academic research studies, and to these we may add a number of other appropriate articles to support the principal findings. All of this is done with the target audience in mind, and in its present form the series covers only research carried out in the primary and secondary sectors, rather than in further or higher education.

It is therefore inevitable that in this process some articles will be either missed because they are outside the agreed scope of the initial research, or discounted from the final shortlist for any one of a number of important reasons. This was certainly the case for the briefing on the use of ICT in modern foreign languages.

We always welcome any feedback on the 'What the Research Says' series and our other research publications, and I am grateful to Professor Davies for providing a further list of research in the area of ICT in modern foreign languages, which I'm sure colleagues will find useful. I would welcome further contributions to this list from other Network members.

Andrew Jones
Project Manager - Evidence and Dissemination
Evidence and Educational Research Team
Becta

ICT IN MFL
From: David Wilson

I would like to endorse Graham Davies' comments about the BECTa report "What the research says about using ICT in Modern Foreign Languages" which is currently online at:

http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_mfl.pdf.

I'm particularly puzzled by the statement in the report that "the extent of research looking specifically at the role of ICT in MFL teaching and learning is limited". Computer-assisted language learning itself can be traced back to the proceedings of an American conference of 10-12 October 1961 on "Application of Digital Computers to Automated Instruction", which featured a paper describing how a PDP-1 mainframe computer was programmed to accept typed English renderings of German words, to keep a record of wrong answers, to print scores and to make comments varying from "Dummkopf" to "hot dog". The application of ICT to MFL at school level dates back to 1983 at least. Since then there have been numerous articles written by practising schoolteachers on MFL/ICT in Language Learning Journal, the six-monthly periodical of the Association for Language Learning, and elsewhere. I myself served as Assistant Coordinator of the National Flexible Learning Project North East - Modern Languages during the 1990-1991 school year, which researched the use of ICT with MFL learners of all abilities at key stage 4, an initiative involving sixteen secondary schools in four local education authorities. We published many reports and resources during and after that year!

Graham also mentions the omission from the report of "Terry Atkinson's edited volume 'Reflections on ICT' (London: CILT, 2001). It contains a number of research studies and case studies written by prominent practising teachers, advisers and researchers". In the response to Graham's message I read "in its present form the series covers only research carried out in the primary and secondary sectors, rather than in further or higher education." I can confirm that the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (the UK's national language learning organisation) "Reflections on ICT" volume focuses on the school sector, so the omission is disappointing.

Finally, I observe that the report rightly acknowledges the potential of ICT in MFL for "differentiation according to individual pupil need". This judgement is based, however, on just one source:

PASSEY, D., ROGERS, C., MACHELL, J., and McHUGH, G., 2004. The Motivational Effect of ICT on Pupils. Report No: RR523. DfES. http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR523new.pdf.

This source focuses on ICT usage across the curriculum in general, not on MFL in particular. Are members of this forum aware that there are at least 92 contributions to the online and printed literature specifically about using ICT in teaching MFL to learners with SEN? See:

http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/mfl/biblio.doc

which will feature in a European Commission report, due to be released soon, on the teaching of modern foreign languages to those with additional needs in Europe.

I appreciate that a report designed to be a digest for busy practitioners cannot cover the whole field. I hope this message, together with Graham's, will help to fill in the gaps.

Best wishes

David Wilson
Harton School, South Shields
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

UK Children Go Online: Latest Report

I’ve written about UK Children Go On Line: Emerging Opportunities and Dangers before. UKCGO is an ongoing, in depth research program, looking at 9-19 year olds' use of the internet in order to inform future policy. The third project report 'Active Participation or Just More Information? Young people's take up of opportunities to act and interact on the internet' is now available as a PDF file.

Fiona Romeo’s blog also draws attention to the new paper – Fiona’s interests are in digital identity and children’s media usage so it’s well worth bloglining her feed.

Blogging & Teaching English as a Foreign Language

The TEFL Web Journal has just posted an artical (PDF only) by Jason M. Ward, American University Sharjah, looking at the use of blogs in language learning, Blog Assisted Language Learning (BALL): Push button publishing for the pupils.

Ward's artical delivers an overview, history and definition of the format and practice of weblogging, and also includes student feedback about the experience of using blogs as a part of the learning process.

Thanks to Jane Knight, over at the e-learning centre !

Intellectual Property Rights

Just published over at JISC Legal - & under a Creative Commons Licence - a practical guide to IPR (intellectual property rights) in e-learning content development, available online & in RTF:

The guide aims to provide a user-friendly introduction to IPR issues for e-learning content developers and managers. It is intended to act as a point of entry to the field of IPR in e-learning that will provide a good foundation for building expertise in the e-learning developer community. It deals with the basic aspects of IPR, especially copyright, in e-learning content development, with an emphasis on reusing third party materials to create new resources. The guide has been written by an e-learning content developer who has had to deal with these issues in practice. The style of the guide is practical and approachable with many useful tips and observations but it also provides a sketch of the wider issues. It also provides flow diagrams, templates, case studies and further sources of information and guidance.

Excellent and about time!

Topic Maps

Very interesting artical over at CETIS today, introducing Topic Maps, or What Happens When Metadata Becomes Content, and Authoring Learning:

One of a number of emerging semantic web standards, it is the subject of quite a bit of research and development. The Norwegian estandard project and its members are busy working on educational applications of the technology.

Topic Maps are a means of capturing knowledge (as opposed to information) about a certain field. Rather than merely listing facts, it enables people to model how they think bits of information relate to each other.

The present ISO standard for Topic Maps was partially motivated as a means to merge book style indexes and seriously soup them up. That is still an important application of the technology, and not a bad way to conceptualise what they do: topics stand for meaningful concepts, and can point to occurences in a body of information, and be associated with each other, in a particular context.

The slot also links through to the Topic Maps in Education Wiki of the estandards project in Norway.

Also of related interest:

Steve Pepper's The TAO of Topic Maps

Lars Marius Garshol's Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all

Implementing Technologies

Great commentary just posted over at Online Learning - looking at a qualitative review of the issues involved in implementing web-based technologies in four English institutions (PDF warning!), published in Educational Technology & Society, 7:1. Joanne Tzanis writes:

Most of us have had the experience of seeing a new technology go through the following cycle: touted as a panacea, adopted hastily, introduced haphazardly, supported with inadequate training, spottily integrated, left to languish, abandoned as ineffective.

Draws out two key things I’m always banging on about: the importance of good project management (i.e. implementation plans that also include ongoing maintenance and support – take note President Bush – and are focused on clearly articulated project outcomes), and the key role people management skills play in being an effective educational/instructional technologist. Interestingly (& depressingly) the ALT accreditation project mentioned yesterday notes in project report no. 3, Consultation with learning technologists, employers and sector representatives on the development of an accreditation scheme , which looks at “whether common forms of practice exist across the different sectors” and “what form(s) of accreditation would be most valuable”:

There was some agreement on the core competencies, identified as: knowledge of their sector, the resources available and what they can offer: pedagogical understanding; accessibility; and development skills. However, organisational and ‘people’ skills were not mentioned.

More Open Source....

I seem to be talking more and more about Open Source in my working life – rumour has it that JISC are getting ready to support Moodle.

Of related interest this week, Derek Morrison’s E-Learning Flexible Frameworks and Tools – the Directors Cut paper has been posted over at Auricle, and James Dalziel, creator of LAMS, is interviewed over at Ferl

Open Source

I've been talking with Paul Chapman recently at one of our neighbour FE's, Leicester College, about the Moodle implementation he's currently masterminding over there. Derby College is also using Moodle now, and I've noticed a Moodle user group being set up over at our JISC Regional Support Centre. Our next ILT Curriculum Forum (19th October) features Paul on the implementation (and me, *ahem* - talking about Blog’s and RSS in education - probably looking in particular at Blogs & feeds in the context of MLEs/VLEs).

With the current JISC project Evaluation of the Practitioner Trial of LAMS and recent CETIS announcement that LAMS will be open sourced, OS solutions are fast gaining a presence in the sector and increasingly providing credible ILT options to put to Senior Management.

The r-smart group, a US based company that manage open-source projects for education has recently published a paper called Open source - opens learning: why open source makes sense for education:

Because of the rise in popularity and consideration of open source applications in all markets from education to government to business, it is critical for all decision makers to understand what open source applications are and what the implications are for their organization. This is especially true in the education market where budget pressures make the right decision an imperative. This white paper will offer a simple, yet thorough definition of open source in the context of education, describe the new market models, and dispel the myths about open source.

Thanks Jane!

They're also holding an open-source summit in Scottsdale, AZ in December. If, like me, considering visiting Arizona in the winter on any pretext seems like a cruel and self deluding thing to do, you should still go check out the summit website for the exceptionally scary logo. Kind of puts you off blog evangelism.

Retention, Achievement & Progression VI

IT can make a difference if IT is fit for purpose is new publication from the Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDA), examining the impact of information and learning technologies (ILT) on student retention and achievement in a range of colleges. It concludes that, when used in combination with other strategies, IT can help to reduce student drop-out, increase motivation and boost performance by acting as a catalyst for change. But it is only effective in the hands of confident and well-trained teachers who are focused on improving learning.

The document draws conclusions from a number of action research projects carried out by the LSDA in further education and sixth form colleges over the past five years and can be downloaded here

Personal & Collaborative Publishing

Great entry over at James Farmer’s blog, that references a session he’s running on Researching personal and collaborative publishing online - implications for designing for online communication & collaboration.

James! The links to this article are broken! Has FeedBurner eaten it?

Wow he fixed that quickly. Are you as handy with DIY James?

Narrative, Identity & Learning

Many thanks for the comment Stephen. And for the pointer to David Huffaker's artical (I'm already subscribed to your excellent blog).

I must confess I'd love to have more time at present to work on narrative in direct relation educational technologies and the current, (very specifically constructivist) pedagogical drivers - unfortunately I've got a PhD to finish and a son to raise, as well as a full time job. But I do want to find some time to play around with this. I'm more familiar with Derrida, Lacan & Foucault and intellectually very much engaged with what's become the post-structuralist cannon.

I've only very recently picked up on the work Etienne Wenger (& link to Seth Kahan's slightly scary site) is doing in the area, and I'd very much appreciate opinions and comments.

Retention, Achievement & Progression V

As you can see from the title, this is one of those things I'm always going on about (it's the social scientist in me), so I was pleased to come across this today over at Ferl:

Call for Expressions of Interest by 16 July 2004.

Research is being under taken to obtain a better understanding of whether e-learning improves quality and raises standards in Further Education (FE), with the aim of improving quality and raising standards. The DfES would like to obtain a better understanding of the relationships between e-learning and key outcomes of increased retention, participation and attainment in FE.

This research aims to:

Engage in research which makes links between e-learning and retention, progression and attainment, with a view to establishing the impact of e-learning.
Examine the conditions in which e-learning is most successful in achieving positive impact on retention, participation and attainment.

Is it just me or do these calls always seem to have a really short lead time?

The Myth of the Digital Native

I’ve just been doing some writing around learner cultures/expectations when I came across this short but sweet article, The myth of the digital native, by Martin Owen, Director of Learning, NESTA Futurelab:

"Recently there has been much talk about a digital divide in our society. This is not the divide of other recent debates about access for poorer people to the benefits of ICT; this divide is supposed to be a generational difference in attitude and disposition to use technology. Those who are growing up now are referred to as digital natives and those who approach the technology with some maturity are termed digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001)."

AoC NILTA Staff Development Questionnaire 2004

NILTA’s Staff Development Special Interest Group recently developed a questionnaire to gain an understanding of the current staff development activities that are being undertaken as a result of the NLN Staff Development programme, which is one year into its three year plan. The summery document is now available on site (although no indication of the sample size/spread).

Learning styles and pedagogy

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning : A systematic and critical review is available now over at the Learning and Skills Development Agency.

The report critically reviews the literature on learning styles and examines in detail 13 of the most influential models. The report concludes that it matters fundamentally which instrument is chosen.

Evaluation of the Student Passport to Elearning (SPEL)

Over at the relaunched European Journal of Open and Distance Learning (EURODL) : Preparing Students for Learning in an Online World: an Evaluation of the Student Passport to Elearning (SPEL) Model by
Francesca Lorenzi, Kay MacKeogh, and Seamus Fox - all from Oscail - National Distance Education Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland.

Thanks elearnopedia!
Abstract
This paper outlines the way in which Oscail (National Distance Education Centre - Ireland) has developed its technology strategy, from the initial research on student readiness to learn using technology to more recent studies which have identified the need for a programme specifically designed to prepare students for learning in the online world.

The skills for learning are not necessarily innate, and in particular, the skills for learning with technology need to be recognised and made more explicit. However, regardless of discipline, the development of preparatory courses for students to equip them with the skills for eLearning is essential if maximum benefit is to be garnered from the potential of this exciting means of teaching and learning.

The Student Passport for elearning (SPeL) programme has been designed as a learner-centred pedagogically driven module using a scaffolding approach to gradually introduce students to use of electronic media. Crucial to the success of the SPeL programme has been the level of support offered to students in pedagogical, technical and administrative terms.