ARRFF MOOCspawn rocks

Posted on 2012/05/09 by Steve

I first saw the ARRFF learning model here… http://change.mooc.ca/how.htm and I thought it was quite neat, moderately useful: (1) Aggregate (2) Remix (3) Repurpose (4) Feed Forward. But the more I’ve worked with it, the more it grows on me. If you’re familiar with the COLLES survey (built-in in Moodle) then you’ll understand me when I say I choose “Almost always” to question 5, “I think critically about how I learn”. I decide to have a period of Aggregation and I don’t even attempt to move on to Remix. This phase could last three days or three months. Then one day I’ll take two index cards I’ve scribbled notes on and push them together, and I know I’ve moved into Remix. Like some people go into rehab, but I go into remix. Re-purpose may follow swiftly, or it may be a long time in gestation. At some point much further downstream there’ll be an article, or a blog post, and I’ll have Fed Forward. Some people I talk to see it as being a bit like spiral development; but for me it’s pretty linear more like the weather map… it’s kind of nebulous (pun intended), and it may trend north or south, but it marches resolutely from west to east. As the last idea exits right, a new system is building in the Tasman. Although I work with a lot of other models for clients, MOOC’s ARRFF seems to entirely cover my own lifelong learning meta-needs.

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Black Arts

Posted on 2012/03/30 by Steve

We heard a lot about Generation Y today. It made me flick through the pages of Peter Sheahan’s book again, reminding myself of his various insights. On page 96 he quotes Linda Botter: “What Generation Y want to know are the intangibles. How are you going to develop me?” Translating that into my speak… they want to be given ownership of the process. They want to plug and play. So I think it may be time that teachers revealed the secrets of their black arts, their pedagogies. I certainly have no problem with that… here are mine… Park 4 Types, Vectors, CLD, MOOC, and of course a test for VARK. It all fits on a side of A4 and can be grasped by a novice in about 10 minutes. Given the process, and encouraged in model thinking, and in critical thinking, and if STEM then in the scientific method, all that is left is to release them into the problem domain. They will find their own way. It’s not so much about what we do, as what we are prepared to relinquish; to not do.

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Involvement vs Engagement

Posted on 2012/03/23 by Steve

I hear a lot from managers about how iPads and video engage the students. Bring on the iPads! Make more videos! I don’t think we should con ourselves into believing that iPads or videos create engagement. I prefer to say, and I freely acknowledge, that they create involvement. Especially if it is the students making the videos, and not the tutor. Engagement is what happens at the start of a rugby scrum when people put their shoulders to the hard task ahead.

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Hidden Assignment

Posted on 2012/03/23 by Steve

Hidden Assignment is a design pattern that may help tutors who have non-Moodle assignments that they would like to include in the Moodle Grades.

Hidden Assignment

Hidden Assignment

The hidden assignment activity “Practical 1″ shown above is of the type ‘Online text’. The student can’t see it, only the tutor can. The student does the practical assignment offline — perhaps a procedure, or an apprentice piece — observed by the tutor. Later, the tutor clicks on the assignment and grades the assignment in the usual way. There is no need for any input from the student, it is possible to grade an empty assignment. The tutor may want to use the assignment text area to make notes. It’s available under Grades.

As described in the paragraph above, the student can’t see the hidden assignment. If you want the student to be able to see the assignment and the grade there is a nifty workaround. Here’s the procedure:

  1. Make an extra topic (if there are 5 topics, make 6)
  2. Drag the hidden assignment to the extra topic
  3. Unhide it
  4. Remove the extra topic (in settings put it back to 5)

The assignments in the now missing topic are still there, you just can’t see them. But they appear as unhidden in both the tutor and the student view of Grades.

I think I was first shown this by Julian Ridden at Moodlemoot 2011.

Tested in Moodle 2.2

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Three generations

Posted on 2012/02/18 by Steve

Anderson and Dron describe three generations of distance learning: cognitive-behaviourism; constructivism; connectivism. They note that other researchers have described these “three generations” in terms of the technologies that were used to deliver them: postal service; broadcast – television, radio, podcast, web page; and social media – blogs, wikis, facebook, twitter. It strikes me their model is useful, and their paper worth a read.

Anderson and Dron three generations summary

Anderson and Dron three generations summary

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron (2011). Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning Vol. 12.3 March – 2011
www.irrodl.org…  article

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Mobile uses: lecture capture

Posted on 2011/12/12 by Steve
Mobile uses: lecture capture

Mobile uses: lecture capture

Who can take in stuff like this on the first pass? Not me. But if I can go and sit in the shade and run through it again in my own time… A wee trick: photographing off a laptop screen you can get a nasty moiré (interference pattern). Rotate the camera about 10° left or right before you press the button.

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Anomaly detection

Posted on 2011/12/12 by Steve

Week 9 of the ML-Class and I’m full of excitement over this week’s topic: Anomaly detection. I spend hundreds of hours studying stuff (AI, AL, ML) that’s cool, but I can’t see how I personally will ever get to use it. I mean, I’m never going to build a diesel-engined robotic dog that can carry a 250kg payload while autonomously avoiding or negotiating obstacles and programmed to gain its objective or self-destruct. But I can see how I would use anomaly detection in student user modeling to authenticate online examination candidates.

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Privacy Issues

Posted on 2011/12/12 by Steve

“I so try to encourage tutors to confine their online exchanges with students to Moodle’s forums and messaging. I explain that should a complaint ever be made against them by a student it will be so much in their interest to have access to a record of those exchanges. However, many continue to communicate in unaudited channels like personal email, facebook, twitter… do you know I’m probably just old-fashioned, suspicious… even paranoid.” This was my comment, reflecting on some “Important questions to ask…” in a recent posting by Matt Bury on LinkedIn

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Causality paradox

Posted on 2011/11/23 by Steve

I’m trying to introduce the idea that we make (at least some of) our eLearning offerings free-and-open to showcase our mainstream programmes. This essentially is what Stanford have done with their ML-Class and their AI-Class that have attracted huge numbers, in what must be the biggest online learning experiment ever. Back to us… it’s one thing to be obsessed by making money (not to be hugely profitable, simply to survive), but it’s something of a leap of faith to think first of creating value and trusting that it will convert. I haven’t seen it better put than on John Langford’s blog Machine Learning (Theory): “The hard nosed will want to know how to make money, which is always a concern. But, a decent expectation is that if you first figure out how to create value, you’ll find some way to make money. And, if you first wait until it’s clear how to make money, you won’t make any. ”

I’d welcome any ideas for good arguments in favour of free (no fees) and open (no enrolment). Please do leave your comments.

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Blended in real time

Posted on 2011/11/11 by Steve

I was privileged to sit in on JF’s NZ Dip Bus Contract Law class, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. This is blended learning in real time: delivered across two campuses mediated by video conferencing; Moodle lesson activity references the big text book the students all have; JF works through the lesson clarifying key points, answering questions, flagging up hazards. After the class there’s an asynchronous component: JF encourages students to share solutions in their Moodle blogs, and she posts model answers. This is really turbo-charged revision, as the students prepare for their final assessment.

Jottings: blended in real time

Jottings: blended in real time

The whole class runs like a dream (these are highly motivated students). I realise the camera has zoomed in on me, so I introduce myself. Voices are clear, though for the rest of the session the camera remains zoomed out and rather static (a tutor assistant/camera operator would be a great asset here). Is the session suitable for recording for later replay? Possibly not… though it works very well indeed in this synchronous phase of the delivery. The lesson activity is a step through, with a review question in there somewhere. Maybe it would benefit from a review question for each section, but one must be realistic about preparation time for these things… JF reckons she is already full time + 30%. The students voice their approval of the Moodle component. Why don’t other tutors make more use of this, they ask. Self-effacing, JF replies that some subjects lend themselves to it better than others. From the institution’s perspective it makes the small cohort at the remote campus viable. One can see an opportunity — where the subject matter is sufficiently generic — to deliver a course like this to students across several campuses simultaneously.

Jottings: Moodle references the standard text

Jottings: Moodle lesson references the standard text

The Moodle lesson references the course’s standard text, and also references some govt. websites. Could this be a real world application for the QR-Code bookmarking? One can see also an application for the electronic Smart Board here, with the tutor’s notes going straight down to Moodle.

Posted in Approaches, Course setups, Emerging pedagogies, Socratic arts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Massively Parallel Education (MPE)

Posted on 2011/10/30 by Steve

While education around the world moves forward each schoolday, nothing moves forward quite so impressively as a class with 140,000 students. It’s worth just reading this article about Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun teaching in Stanford’s open classroom environment.

Posted in Emerging pedagogies, Macro designs | Leave a comment

Werewolves

Posted on 2011/10/25 by Steve

I have been advising clients to resist the temptation to extend and hack; stick to ‘Moodle out of the Box’ I say. In some cases I have had to defend my position quite vigorously. Way back in 1986 Fred Brooks wrote a now-famous essay No Silver Bullet. “Of all the monsters who fill the nightmares of our folklore,” he writes, “none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, we seek bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.”

And when I read this posting on migration to Moodle 2 werewolves were invoked: “Do you know if there’s been any movement with Google integration with Moodle 2. Our 1.9 is integrated with Google and I can’t move until that’s sorted.” —David

Werewolves take on many scary shapes, among them:

  1. Documents lost in the labyrinth;
  2. Proliferation of unversioned documents;
  3. Insufficient resourcing to create question banks;
  4. SCORM page turners;
  5. Making twenty-five new user accounts between breakfast and start of class…

All have invoked their silver bullets, namely:

  1. Google Integration;
  2. SharePoint Integration;
  3. Hot Potatoes;
  4. Hacking the SCORM Module;
  5. Integration with Artena…

While I suggest the real solutions are:

  1. Moodle 2′s own repository feature;
  2. Moodle 2′s own repository feature;
  3. The GIFT format (built-in);
  4. Avoiding SCORM altogether;
  5. The manual creation of accounts by Student Services.

Well, it’s just my opinion, but that’s what a blog is.

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Khan Academy

Posted on 2011/10/20 by Steve

Thanks to Matt Bury for introducing me to the Khan Academy. Especially useful for me on maths topics, but much much more on there too. A truly awesome free and open resource. The format is Captivate-style video with Voice of America-style instruction. Just excellent.

Their intro reads:

Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free. With a library of over 2,600 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 210 practice exercises, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

Posted in Emerging pedagogies, Open Learning | Leave a comment

Electrical pre-trade

Posted on 2011/10/16 by Steve
fritzing.org

Interactive PCB Design

We presented to eleven Electrical pre-trade students, and it’s always interesting, because students never want what we think they want. Student surveys (that we do, anyway) always seem to point to students being conservative, assessment-driven, and really just wanting the shortest possible route to the qualification. Their message: Don’t muck about adding value… stick to core business!

We showed the students: Moodle; Fritzing; iCircuit.

Moodle

Of 11 students surveyed:

  • 9 wanted revision questions
  • 7 wanted simulations and visualisations
  • 5 wanted general discussion
  • 2 wanted industry links

Fritzing

Of 11 students surveyed:

  • 2 thought they would use it heaps
  • 5 thought they might use it
  • 3 thought they would not use it

iCircuit

Of 11 students surveyed:

  • 4 thought they would use it heaps
  • 5 thought they might use it
  • 2 thought they would not use it

Moodle is available anywhere, on any platform; Fritzing runs on the PC; and iCircuit runs only on the iPad and iPhone. It should be noted that Fritzing is well outside the scope of this pre-trade Level 2 course.

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iPad Automotive Simulation

Posted on 2011/10/12 by Steve

dnsturrock David Sturrock #ntlt11 (NMIT) tweeted some valuable points:

  • now at presentation on ipad use for automotive blended learning course at weltec
  • blended principles = collaborative, activity based, authentic & challenging tasks, lots of feedback, focus on electrical concepts
  • tech use as support to effective learning – not driver. increase access and flexibility, use simulation (iCircuit app)
  • students could work on equipment then switch to ipad simulation to test ideas then back to equipment, in small groups
  • particularly good for complex circuits as sim shows issues clearly that take long time to identify in real circuit
  • weltec looking at eBooks for nxt yr – include some interactive elements, links to LMS etc. iCircuit app for ipad and android
  • probs – no flash supprt – youtube app has limits but def not captivate flash animations, no avi video support, incompatibilities
  • ipads supplied by itp in class – have issues with students not able to take home. team suggest going with android pads if startup

“iCircuit is the easy to use electronic circuit simulator and editor – the perfect tool for students, hobbyists, and engineers.” —http://icircuitapp.com/

We now have iCircuit installed on our iPad for anyone who wants a demo… Ross, Paul, Kelvin? Integrate it with your Moodle page?

Posted in Emerging pedagogies, Mobile, Simulations | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

ML-Class 70K students on day one

Posted on 2011/10/10 by Steve
ml-class 70K students

ml-class 70K students

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ML-Class world distribution

Posted on 2011/10/10 by Steve
ml-class world distribution

ml-class world distribution

To go to the Google map, click here. Looking at this distribution, I find myself asking myself why so few in Oceania? Or is it in proportion with the population… without working it out, probably it is.

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Stanford ML-course induction

Posted on 2011/10/01 by Steve

We’ve had a nice long lead-in, a period of induction. The course starts October 10th, but we’ve had access to materials for several days now. That’s about a fortnight to get up to speed. I’m making good use of 18 introductory video lectures totalling nearly 3 hours. Topics include an introduction, linear regression with one variable, and linear algebra review (optional). I have opted in. The general discussion forum is busy too as people try to put together study groups. I’m interested to note that I am not rushing to join a study group. What I am getting from this is just how useful this long period of induction is.

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Uncluttered interface

Posted on 2011/09/30 by Steve

—Online students have enough stress without wading through masses of unnecessary guff on their screens. If a lazy online tutor leaves a pile of default blocks in the wings the inexperienced student will have to look at all those wondering if they represent tasks they ought to be doing. Keep it to the bare bones minimum I say, and even then strip something out. Look at the interface for this Stanford University course that has 60K students… no, I’m not exaggerating… that’s 60,000 plus. It’s deceptive, of course — consider the video server alone.

uncluttered interface

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The Forums of Darkness

Posted on 2011/09/27 by Steve

New Zealand is the new Mexico. That’s not New Mexico, it’s old Mexico. I laughed when I heard someone say Kiwis might be Mexicans with cellphones, but we just don’t have the coverage. I thought I’d share this Moodle support response which I sent to a student who comes from the rural sector that is 90% of our country…

It sounds like your location is on the edge of coverage. Positioning of the vodem can be fickle. I use a longer USB cable than the one provided which also has the health advantage of getting the modem away from your body. Otherwise you just have to download what you need while you are in town, and then work offline at home, and upload what you have done next time you’re in town. Now the weather is warmer and the evenings lighter can you drive a km or two down the road to a place where there is better coverage and do your study in the car? You wouldn’t be the first. They say that New Zealand is the new Mexico.

One of our contracted tutors was working on a project down at Macrae’s Flat, near the gold mine. He had to drive up the road in mid-winter to a place where there was something that passed for coverage and sit in the car responding to posts in the forum. They say that good eLearning tutors are forged in the fires of the forums-of-darkness!

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Stanford Machine Learning course

Posted on 2011/09/24 by Steve

This is set to be the biggest and boldest experiment in open elearning ever. Stanford University are offering three courses in their OpenClassroom: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Introduction to Machine Learning; and Databases. Tough choice, but I have chosen Machine Learning with Andrew Ng because it is the best fit with the current state of my computer science studies.

1.1 The welcome video

1.1 The welcome video

There are 30 students in the Real Life class, and there are 61,420 in the OpenClassroom. I’m one of them, and I’m getting quite a buzz from it. It’s my plan to document not only what I learn, but also the methods by which I learn it. Can mass open elearning like this possibly work? If it does, I suggest it marks a waypoint in education reform. The plan is roughly this: we get to see 30 video lectures by Prof. Andrew Ng; we can ask questions which get aggregated and then turned into a FAQ, presumably using machine learning algorithms; if we get to the end, then we get a statement of accomplishment. Something like that, I’m sure it will become clearer once we get started. The start date is set for October 10th. How do I feel? Pretty charged up. This is epic, and I’m excited at the prospect of being a part of it. I expect it to be a long haul — 30 lectures at this level in 8 weeks — and I’ll be managing my energy and my time from the start.

Posted in Emerging pedagogies | 1 Comment

An eportfolio’s purpose

Posted on 2011/09/22 by Steve

A small note in Craig Eves’s documentation for myportfolio.ac.nz answers a question I had in my mind for some time… “An eportfolio’s main purpose is to document informal learning such as work experience, interests, talents, performances. Formal assessments are suitable for capturing with a learning management system”.

To document informal learning

  • work experience
  • interests
  • talents
  • performances

 

Posted in E-portfolios, Emerging pedagogies | Tagged | Leave a comment

Social constructionism rules

Posted on 2011/09/20 by Steve

You have got to see this early video of  Seymour Papert it’s awesome.

Ida Brandão left this pertinent comment: “A precious video for the history of the introduction of computer in children’s learning and a tribute to Papert as a great innovator. Looking back to the machines of that time and the iPads and notebooks of today, a big evolution took place, it’s a pity that the learning strategies of constructivism have not spread at the same rhythm.” idabrandao 2 months ago

Posted in Emerging pedagogies, Explicit pedagogies, Implicit pedagogies, Socratic arts | Leave a comment

Adaptive technology

Posted on 2011/09/13 by Steve
Kobo plus dog

Found a use for the Kobo

At last I have found a use for the Kobo, keeping a real book open at the right page! People don’t always use technology the way you’d expect: I have been working with X who says she doesn’t want any students to access her Moodle course; and Y who asks can a tutor grade their own assignment? (they can, and why not, I say) and Z who unenroled himself from his own class.

Note: That tutors want to use Moodle as a virtual staff room or common filing cabinet is actually quite a good idea. That Moodle supports a user in multiple roles in the one course is actually a very useful feature. On more than one occasion when teaching at the coal face I have stormed out of my own class! I mock them not.

Caption competition: What is Poppy whispering in my ear?

Posted in Approaches, Commentary, Course setups, Emerging pedagogies, Macro designs | 1 Comment

Candidate architectures

Posted on 2011/09/09 by Steve
Moodle architecture sketch

Moodle architecture sketch

Inside the box… IT look in the Active Directory (AD) and create Moodle users and courses. The users are automatically attached to their course, and the appearance of the course is defined by a template (T). In blue… course materials tutors prepared in advance in Moodle (dev) were backed up, and now they are restored into the new empty course. That’s the obvious way. I say ‘obvious’ only because it’s the way I first thought of.

Outside the box, on the right… the course tutors prepared earlier is sitting waiting on Moodle (prod), defined as a meta course. When IT make the new empty course complete with its users we make it a child of the meta course and voilà — we inherit the automatically generated users. We can either use the automatically generated course as a home page, as an entrance portal, or we can simply ignore it. This is the way I’m exploring just now.

Note: If you were not aware… in Moodleland parents inherit from their children. It’s wacko, but it’s true.

Moodle Docs: Metacourses

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