MIT Search across and within lectures

MIT forge ahead on their Open Courseware initiative with some really smart search software that searches recorded lectures. Really clever and really useful.

It begs an old question - why on earth do teachers, lecturers and trainers refuse to record tehir work? Learning needs reflection, practice and replay, so why do these professions deny learners the very things they need the most. It's a sort of insane, inversion of need.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/52880/

Blackboard

So Blackboard win millions of dollars in their case against Desire2learn. The US Patent and Trademark Office is turning into a nationalist protection racket. The whole affair is a disgrace and a boycott of Blackboard's products is in order. The very idea that Blackboard invented multipe user accounts and access to learning resources is nothing short of software fascism. This should give open source VLE providers a real boost. Long live Moodle!

Narrow minded diversity training

As a board member of a large public sector charity I was ’subjected’ to a diversity training course this week. There we were, twenty odd, forty plus adults being talked at by a trainer, an average looking white guy. The tone was one of a patronising parent ticking off his recalcitrant teenage offspring.

Talked at
After the compulsory ‘talking to’ we did the clichéd ‘break-out’ sessions, where we were asked to sort several statements into three piles – true, false and don’t know. The statements were banal, sometimes plain wrong and not very useful. Here’s an example, “Can you advertise for a Welsh speaker who must also be of Welsh origin.” No was, of course, the obvious answer. So what was learnt here? How many non-Welsh Welsh speakers are there? To what problem was this exercise a solution? Did you know that Chinese adults are healthier, on the whole, than British adults? No, then again it’s not a fact I’ve ever reflected on. There was a moot point about the percentage of people who were born disabled. This is famously misleading as many disabilities have a mixed nature/nurture relationship, including mental illness, even short-sightedness has a genetic component. It was a tired old format.

Training needs to be more diverse
A more serious issue was why such training takes this form. We were talked at (hopeless for the deaf) and inappropriate for learners with learning difficulties, as it went at the pace of the trainer’s delivery, not the learner. We were bombarded with 100 pages of text – inappropriate for learners with dyslexia and literacy problems. The forms were all on CD-ROM. Why not on the intranet where they should be? E-learning with its flexibility around pace, media, screen readers, text magnification etc is the obvious answer. It’s the training that needs to be more diverse.

Glossy brochures
There were two very expensive, full-colour brochures full of those stock colour photographs you only ever see in corporate brochures – darts bang in the middle of targets, a jar of jelly beans, smarties, sharpened pencils, dice strewn across a table. Completely over-engineered. This stuff should be online.

The written case studies were a hoot – the West Bromwich Building Society, Ford and Bernard Matthews. West Bromwich Building Society – the brochure proudly claimed that a whopping 9% of their income was from ethnic communities – this is bang on the English average for ethnic population mix, but way below the 13% for the Midlands. and West Bromwich, not a fact to be proud of. Other astounding examples of progress - 34% of their managers are female and they’ve introduced Sharia compliant mortgages – all in the same breath! Ford’s token evidence includes brand awareness figures of 42% and 41% for sponsored events. So that’s what diversity policy is about at Ford – selling more cars. At Bernard Matthews, the brochure tells us, labour turnover fell from 57.9% to 42.9% - what an achievement! Let’s ask ourselves whether a staff turnover of around 50% may have something to do with the £5.72 hourly rate. The business case for diversity training was well nigh invisible.

Tragic waste of time and money
What is really worrying is the recommendation for Complete screening, impact assessments, monitoring and publishing. There’s a small army of champions and data gatherers, spending huge amounts of time on fruitless detective hunts, producing endless policy documents and amendments to such polices. All this does is bog organisations down in paperwork. To what problem is this a solution? These organisations are full of people who are sensitive to these issues. There’s no sense of proportion here. The time and cost associated with this process is enormous and wasteful.

Doesn’t work and often unproductive
And just for the record – read Professor Frank Dobbins Harvard report on diversity training in 702 organisations. It doesn’t work, and worse, is often counterproductive.

OpenLearn – another document dump

OpenLearn or is it LearningSpace (brand confusion is not a good start), is the UKs answer to MITs Open Courseware. After chewing through several million in funding I had high hopes, but here I am feeling rather deflated after wading (literally) through a great many of its, supposed, courses. It’s really no more than a repository of old OU print documents with some tools on top. There has been no attempt to do anything remotely interesting or different.

Document dump
This is really a huge exercise in document management, with a few images and videos added in just a few of the modules. They seem to have taken a few box loads of historic OU curriculum texts and published them online with no real adaptation or sensitivity around their online use, readability or suitability. To be honest I think I could have published this lot using free software in less than a week or two.

Million pound Moodle
Moodle is famously free, but dwell on the fact that the OU have spent a cool million in development time for this ONE implementation. Perhaps the most expensive free lunch on record. The good news is that this development has taken Moodle forward, solving some of its historic problems around accessibility and so on.

Cold content
As I sampled many of the courses it struck me how weak much of the content was in terms of academic credibility. Like many course notes written from within an institution, rather than published text, it has the feel of being cobbled together by good experts, but not the best. Much of it reads like standard, long-winded, written-in-the evening text. The writing is, on the whole, remarkably flat and dull.

Here’s the subjects with the number of available modules:

Arts and History 44
Business and Management 29
Education 37
Health and Lifestyle 15
IT and Computing 25
Mathematics and Statistics 26
Modern Languages 15
Science and Nature 52
Society 47
Study Skills 27
Technology 24

It’s only 5% of the OU output but the course choices do seem a little odd. I was amused to see 'Brighton Pavilion' be given the status as a course in itself, alongside major topics in history and science. The study times associated with each module seem to be grossly exaggerated. It’s so easy to just state a general activity or question, then count that as ‘study time’. That is a con. Many modules have no more than an hour of reading. Egyptian Mathematics which, according to the author, “has left disappointingly little evidence of its mathematical attainments” has just a few pages of text peppered with a few images and a short reading list. I preferred the Wikipedia entry, which had clearer structure, was better written, and gave more useful academic links and a better reading list.

The Holocaust is 17 pages of dense text with not a single image in sight. How it justifies its 20 hours of learning tag is beyond me. Dance Skills was a hoot – ten pages of text and one short video. Not an image in sight. Truly amateurish.

The language courses are all over the place and are often built around some idiosyncratic video but these are at least useful for many learning French, German, Spanish, with some English and introductions to Latin and Greek.

Open Wallets
The costs of the pilot have been stated at around £5.65 million. That I don’t believe, as it doesn’t include loads of other internal costs. Seems like an awful lot of money for something that is essentially a bunch of documents online with a couple of tools on top. If this had been tendered out it would have cost a fraction of the price. It could have been so much more. The levels of interaction are abysmal and there’s no real assessment. Interestingly, not a single lecture online. Maybe that’s a good thing!

On the positive front, at least one institution is doing something about 21^st century learning. I still love the OU and all it stands for, even if it is dragged down by the desire of its academics to mimic every other university. That wasn’t what Wilson wanted. On the whole, I find Wikipedia, supplemented by other resources such as iTUNES U, TED andGoogle Video to be miles ahead of this approach.

Wherefore art thou M-learning?

M-learning may as well mean missing-learning – it’s is an elusive beast. The problem is that people don’t really seem to understand what they want to do with these devices. Then they don’t know how to handle the ‘fragmented market’ problem – loads of devices with different screen sizes, memory, java issues etc. Everyone may have one but they're all different.

The advantages are clear
Personal, portable, playable

Massive market saturation – everyone of all ages and genders have one (52% of mobile game playing is female)

Open platform – anyone can develop a JME (Java Micro Edition) application and you’re not locked into licensing agreements – just make one and distribute

THE convergent device – mobile swallows everything; voice, texting, MMS, MP3 player, radio and now GPS

Digital distribution – no box or packaging

Troublesome skews
There are loads of screen resolutions from 128x126 up to 352x416, then different memory sizes and processor speeds. Another problem is that although all have Java (literally a little computer in your phone) they all have different bugs and implementation issues.

Good news
The good news is that only 4 brands of phones make up 75% of the market and with some clever coding (tiling) and screen resolution choices (71% of market has just 4 screen resolutions) you can cover most of them if you know what you’re doing . The trick is to have code that is easy to port. If you really want to know what to do on these devices try Affinity Software, Brian Rodway knows more than anyone I know about mobiles and they have a track record in delivering across large numbers of devices.

Video NO, applications YES
One thing seems clear, that video on phones has bombed. Mobile TV has gone nowhere fast. The reason is simple enough. Nass and Reeves did the research at Stanford, and showed that the emotional impact, psychological attention and retention were all substantially reduced on small screens. Don’t do video, do text and graphic applications. Make the applications interactive; a mobile is not a passive, watching video medium. Go for quick, short pieces of standard e-learning, quick retention or assessment quizzes, even paged powerpoint or Java games.

Buzz

When Australia's top tennis player, Casey Dellacqua, was asked what she did for pre-match concentration, after thrashing world champion Amelie Mauresmo, she said, ‘I played Buzz’. This is the strangely addictive quiz show game for the PS2. There are trivia, music, sports and Hollywood versions, packaged with four ‘buzzers’ and it’s from a UK publisher – Relentless Software.

Enthralling in the classroom
But the version I was interested in was the ‘schools’ version. I chaired a Serious Games event and saw a wonderful video of kids in a primary school being absolutely enthralled, excited and educated using this wonderful little game. No teacher or parent could possibly watch this video and not want to get this into the classroom immediately.

Teacher control
The KS2 versions covers the curriculum with questions on Maths, English, Science, History and Geography. It can be played in various modes and has some teacher features. The level of control is quite sophisticated, For example, if you wish to drill down in English, you can present quizzes on specific topics, such as words, sentences, punctuation or books.

No 2 Playstation game
Apart from the odd, Daily ‘hate’ Mail stories, complaining about games being introduced into schools, where they quote religious fanatic and all-round fascist, Jack Thompson (read the profile of this sleazebag on Wikipedia), the game has received great reviews, reaching number 2 in the Playstation charts.

More coming
Look out for the PS3 version, later in the year, with a feature to create your own quizzes. Now that’s an idea that should excite teachers.

Nintendo DS shows educators the future

Consumer e-learning goes global

Over Christmas something quite extraordinary happened. E-learning became a global consumer phenomenon. Nintendo has been THE global success in games this year with learning product. So how did Nintendo do what educators have been trying for eons to achieve (unsuccessfully)? Simple, they went back to some basic principles in the psychology of learning around motivation, goals and spaced practice. They realised that one-on-one content, that becomes addictive for the learner, played a little but often, is the way ahead in learning. In designing a game that appeals to all ages they’ve literally created a massive consumer-led e-learning market.

Brain Training series
Brain Training stimulates your brain and helps train mental awareness and your long-term memory by being used for a few minutes each day, through a series of quick but challenging exercises designed to energise the brain. It is spot on in terms of the psychology of learning in terms of motivation and spaced practice.

There's some pretty nifty literacy product with My Word (16,500 words and definitions using the Official Cambridge Dictionary). Puts you to the test on spelling and understanding adjusting to your improving vocabulary level. You can pit your literary wits against others in your family but, again its main advantage is this view that language needs that slow drip of practice to result in real improvement. Why every primary school doesn't use this stuff is beyond me. To rely on one teacher in a class of 2530 kids for real improvement in vocabulary is madness.

For French, German and Spanish there's e-learning with 10,000 words and 400 phrases, including pronunciation test using the built-in DS microphone. This is interesting because it can test your pronunciation - a real breakthrough. At the risk of boring you, how cool is this as a way of learning a language - gradual practice, games and the ability to speak and be understood. Compare this to the standard classroom French - 3o unmotivated kids mostly lost, who after a few years of classroom French couldn't order a baguette.

Scottish schools study
A project in primary schools in Scotland has shown that these handheld games can significantly enhance learner performance in mental maths as well as having a positive impact on other aspects of classroom life. Three Primary 6 classes took part in a project to show how computer games can impact on and enhance learning in classrooms in a ‘practical, accessible and manageable way’ Watch the excellent video here.

Brain training and brain science
Brain Training had interesting origins. Most commentators though the DS console would fail. Atsushi Asada, a board member of Nintendo, wanted games to reach out to people of all ages. Nintendo had already developed handwriting and voice recognition for the DS and after meeting Professor Kawashima of Tokyo University’s Centre for Collaborative Research on Future Technology, and wiring himself up to measure the increased blood flow to his brain Asada set up a team of 9 people who completed the project in just 90 days. At first the retailers didn’t want anything to do with the product, but a clever sales campaign made them to play it for fifteen minutes; this did the trick.

More on its way
Professor Kawashima’s Maths Training title is about to be released. This has grids of problems and teh same games driven approach to learning - little and often. We can expect a massive interest in educational games and learning in the coming years. Others are playing around in the market, for example, Buzz for the Playstation 2.

I’ve been involved with a company called Caspian Learning here in the UK who are unique in having a 3D ‘games and learning’ engine that allows such games to be developed quickly. We’re working on a raft of games in learning projects for education and training (corporates and government departments). You really do get that 'buzz' in e-learning when you're in these games, in a way that the traditional flat e-learning doesn't often deliver. I have absolutely no doubt about this being a huge boost for learning and e-learning over the next few years.

Some boring but astonishing numbers
Worldwide Nintendo DS has sold 64.79 million units, and the Wii 20.13 million. In the UK, Nintendo DS was the best selling hardware of any kind (home console or handheld) in 2007 and now has a UK installed base of over five million units. The Wii was has an installed base of over 2 million units, surpassing the installed base of Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Combined sales of both of Nintendo’s Dr. Kawashima Brain Training titles in the UK have now passed two and a half million units and were the top two selling software titles of 2007.

Plagiarism – blame academia not students

Professor Tara Brabazon (Media Studies!), at my local University of Brighton, has banned the use of Google and Wikipedia by her students. This is utterly stupid and banal. I assume she hasn’t banned them from her website with links to Amazon to buy her books (including the academic masterpiece ‘Ladies Who Lunge’ – read the extract and weep). Incidentally, Tara seems to have made that classic cut-and-paste error in her own online piece on Google; repeating paragraphs twice!

Educate, don’t ban
Academics like Brazabon have a cheek bleating on about plagiarism. If her students submit banal, cut-and-paste essays, she should be the person we blame. Tens of thousands of pounds for a University degree and we all we get are academics who inspire this kind of reaction from their students!

She needs to think more about educating her students than banning the media of the age. The easy and efficient access to knowledge is a good thing, and quite separate from how things are learnt. It’s not the medium that’s at fault, it’s how that content is mediated by students and their teachers. These are two entirely different things.

Address the cause, not the effect
Well constructed, exemplar essays are precisely what a student needs as course material. That’s why they pay sites like UKessays.com. If academics got to know their students better and used on-going formative feedback as part of their jobs, then the lazy ‘set and submit’ essay model wouldn’t allow or encourage plagiarism on any scale. Ask students to submit an outline, then a short form essay and finally a full blown piece of work. Get them to blog. Speak to them. Don’t just set the task and mark the results. That’s not teaching, it’s simply assessment, and bad assessment at that.

What’s happening here is simply the old guard not understanding how newer forms of knowledge dissemination work. Has this academic banned her researchers or lecturers from using Google? I doubt it. Students are smart and are simply reacting to a tired old system. The customers are just puzzled and tired of the old higher education model (I hesitate to describe it as pedagogy).

Lectures, lectures, lectures
It’s a wonder that students learn at all with such little face-to-face teaching – three dull lectures a week, usually by researchers with poor presentation skills and a deep desire to avoid teaching. They are literally stuck in the rut of this medieval mode of teaching. If they were any good they’d at least record the stuff for review by students. They don’t, of course, because it’s often pitifully bad. See my previous post on lectures.

Poor guidance
Inadequate guidance is the norm in higher education courses, that’s why students clamour for past papers – it’s often the only way of finding out what you are expected to cover in the course. Most lecturers don’t understand even the basics in the psychology of learning and need for clear structure, formative feedback and support.

A reading list is to a course
Then there’s little or no adequate course material. Little is prepared in any structured fashion for students. They are literally abandoned with a library card and a reading list. These reading lists are often idiosyncratic so it would be much better to let the student do the research BEFORE having these fixed, recommended texts. This has been exposed in institutions with VLEs, where the published guidance for courses is woeful. A reading list is not a course!

Legitimise plagiarism
Differentiate between search and research through the use of citations. Google and Wikipedia have tons of citations, and when there’s controversy, there’s the ‘history’ and ‘discussion’ tabs. Teach students how to do research and give plenty of support on constructing the piece of submitted work.

Remember that the web contains hundreds of thousands of texts, textbooks and books, many which are now out of print and not found in individual University libraries. They are quick to access, allow text search and save time and money.

In any case it’s rather easy to catch this sort of plagiarism by running the content through a check engine. If she had checked she would have seen that the University of Brighton is registered with the JISC Plagiarism Service and Turnitin. Is the Professor just too lazy to use them? This is the real world. Google, Wikipedia and the web are not going away. They’ll be around long after these luddites have retired. I suggest we simply accelerate their exit from the system.

Training magaZZZZZZZZZZines

What is it with training magazines? I used to ditch tons of them, still in their plastic wrapping, unopened and unread, into the rubbish. Why is this?

Last year I got a call from the Training Journal. They wanted to use something I had written on my blog – ‘no problem’ I said. But there was a problem. They could only publish it a letter! I wasn’t happy as I have never sent a letter to the Training Journal, or any other training magazine and a ‘letter’ is not a ‘blog post’. They can’t cope with anything beyond their 19^th century format.

Dullsville
And why are they so dull? First they rely on advertising for revenue, and press releases for content. This means avoiding controversy and padding out issues with lots of flannel. You can't bite the hand tat feeds you, so you have to flatter your audience and never criticise anything or anybody. The problem with the advertising modeal is that the circulation figures include all of those still sealed, dumped, copies. Their conservatism means there’s nothing that actually plays any intelligent and critical role in the market. They reinforce old models and contribute to holding the market back.

Blogs have filled this vacuum. They are much more useful, informative, interesting, interactive, accessible, controversial and readable than any of the magazines. Yet there’s no cross-over. They don’t report on or get the bloggers involved. The web, in general, has become a much more exciting source for information on learning and training.

Face off with facebook

Facebook – a time waster?
Youngsters have some neat TXT acronyms on messenger for intrusive parental behaviour - POS and POMB (Parents Over Shoulder & Parents On My Back). As HR departments fall over themselves to ban Facebook, it begs the question as to whether they should ban it or build on it in organisations. It’s a little sad that supposedly, people-friendly HR departments are now seen as the social-police. But they may have a point which is the possible drain on productivity.

7 types of added value
What organisations want to know is the added-value to their organisation of social networking. First we have to distinguish between open and closed social networking. A closed network, like a Facebook corporate network only allows members to socialise with other employees. Given this distinction, what are the benefits:

1. Recruitment – using networks to find and assess candidates is becoming common.
2. Induction – what better way to familiarise new starters than real-people social networking across the whole organisation.
3. Optimal operational networking –optimal teams/networks in an organisation are rarely the people you sit beside. Social networking widens and optimises the network, especially in multi-site or international organisations.
4. Training – using such sites to distribute knowledge and viral learning seems sensible. Use what people use, not what the IT department prescribe.
5. Home workers – reduces isolation and increases teamwork.
6. Happy employees – social networking is successful as it makes people feel valued and part of a social community. Happy employees are more productive employees.
7. Links with people outside the organisation – useful in terms of contacts, sales, client relationships, finding suppliers and so on.

Midday spike
There’s a midday spike on the internet as social networkers, news hounds, gamers and ‘video snackers’ chillout from their daily grind. So the productivity slump is, I suspect, a mirage.

PS
Giving a talk on this and other social networking issues - legal problems etc at Learning Technologies on Thursday 30 Jan at 11.30.

2008 predictions: The geeks shall inherit the Earth

As Glen Hoddle once said ‘I don’t do predictions, and I never will’. That was before he found God (what a pass that must have been). He’s now predicting the return of Jesus and the Apocalypse. Standing on the shoulders of the giant Hod, I’ll start by saying I won’t do predictions for learning and e-learning (well maybe just a couple), but I will for Technology.

Why?
The educational, pedagogical, training theorists and practitioners ran out of steam a long time ago when they decided it was OK to hang on to 50 year old theorists (Gagne, Bloom, Rogers, Maslow, Kirkpatrick), dodgy theory (learning styles, right and left brain, NLP) and poor practice (classroom, break-out groups). And by the way, has anything even remotely useful come out of all of that EU research into e-learning. This side of the input equation is all washed up and eing pulled into the 21st cetury by the technology and consumers.

It’s the technology stupid
What has driven e-learning IS technology. The deep driver is, of course, the internet with Google (in the widest sense), Wikipedia (wikis in the widest sense), mobiles, laptops, iPODs, P2P, video sharing, social networking and dozens of other smart things on the web that have made all the difference. But it’s consumer hardware and software that’s winning the IT war. Users are buying it, using it at home, bringing it into work and corporates will have to respond.

Belated 10 Predictions for 2008
Education will continue to stagnate with enthusiastic amateurs doing the best they can in their schools and colleges, moodling away

Training will produce oodles of ‘vapid developed’ content continuing in that grand tradition of giving learners exactly what they say they don’t want

More ‘open’ and ‘free’ technology and apps on the web as we shove more and more stored data online

iPHONE type interfaces become commonplace

Cheap, flash-memory laptops will go mainstream

Social networking will aggregate

Brain Training-like consumer software will proliferate

Breakthrough for non-Microsoft office software

Bought two solar panel chargers for my kid gadgets (£25 each) – they actually work, so I hope for their sake that this technology becomes dirt cheap

Death of at least one Rolling Stone

Big screen – big brain?

Bigger is better
I remember the first time I saw a 42” Sony Bravio screen. It blew me away, even though I knew the shop demo was an HD DVD. I bought one and never looked back - I couldn't it's had me hynotised! TVs have become larger but the room size houses remains the same, and in modern houses is getting smaller, so the whole balance between screen and room tips towards the dominance of the screen. Your lounge becomes a cinema.

The optimal viewing distance for a 42” TV is around 14 feet or well over four metres (3.5 times diameter of screen). The TV is therefore scanning the whole room like radar, sucking you in. DVD, HD and CD quality sound make it even more alluring. Only someone who doesn’t really like TV would now buy a small screen or those annoying people who are so very snooty about TV, games, the internet and anything else that comes through a screen (except the cinema - which they'll bore you on for hours).

Big screen – big brain?
What’s interesting is the increase in ‘suspension of disbelief’, which is tangible, especially when watching movies. Interestingly, it also affects memory. In research by Nass and Reeves at Stanford (The Media Equation, Nass and Reeves, Cambridge University Press) 125 adults viewed segments showing a variety of scenes, on two different screen sizes. They concluded that picture size does affect memory. The bigger the screen the better the retention. Interestingly screen size also affected levels of arousal and their evaluation of the content, the larger screen eliciting more positive evaluations.

Big screens for e-learning?
What’s interesting here is the possibility that larger screens may significantly enhance the effectiveness of e-learning. It also has some interesting consequences for mobile learning, as the effectiveness of the learning, conversely, is likely to be considerably diminished. I notice this when I view pop videos or YouTube clips on iPODS or mobiles, they are nowhere near as watchable or funny on the smaller screen.

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

Founder of ‘The Tinkering School’, Gever Tulley regrets the over-zealous child safety regulations e.g. warnings on coffee cups telling you that coffee is hot. As the boundaries of the safety zone get larger we increasingly cut out exposure to risk.

1. Play with fire – basic and necessary – intake, combustion and exhaust – a laboratory.
2. Own a pocket knife – powerful and empowering tool – extended sense of self – keep it sharp, cut away from body, never force it.
3. Throw a spear – our brains are wired to throw things – visual acuity, 3D understanding – analytical and physical skills.
4. Deconstruct appliances – don’t throw out the dishwasher – take it apart first. Figure out what the parts do and how it works.
5. Drive a car. Let them drive with you in control. Find a big empty space. Fun for the whole family!

Love it.