The Open University UK

I recently watched the EduCause 09 talk by Brenda Gourley, Vice Chancellor of the Open University, UK.  Very interesting and worth listening to.  The Open University is a purely distance learning oriented university that has been around for some time, since 1969.  They utilize a number of different technologies for teaching: TV, DVDs, internet, even Second Life (though I can’t say I’m a fan, it’s definitely an interesting experiment.)

The few people I’ve talked to about all have had the same reaction: “Oh, so it’s like University of Phoenix?”  Really, though, it doesn’t appear to be.  From a cursory glance, it appears to have a fairly good reputation.  Apparently the academic standards are quite high compared with most traditional brick-and-mortar schools.  I’m not sure on this, but it would be interesting to see some polling data from businesses and other academic institutions.

With their long history, they must have amassed quite a lot of feedback and research on educational technology.  I’ve very curious to see what participation in a course looks like.  There was a short-lived US branch of the university, but it has closed due to what appear to be some funding, logistics and cultural issues.

Olympic Park, Museums and ID

Today we went to the Olympic Cauldron Park, (Memorial Park?, I don’t remember what it is actually called.)  I wasn’t quite sure why were going there in the first place, thought perhaps it was a late semester free day.  But instead Dr. Monson presented us with a sheet containing some guiding questions and instructions to look at the site from an instructional perspective.  It’s interesting to think of instructional design in more diverse contexts than just classroom or online instruction.

Web 2.0

Yesterday in class we had a group do a presentation on Web 2.0 and its implications for instructional design and learning.  The presentation was very well put together and gave an overview of all the “Web 2.0″ buzzwords: wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, etc…  Most impressive probably Brooke’s own use of her blog and google docs to present the topic.

I’m still not a big fan of the Web 2.0  moniker–it seems to try to be an umbrella for so many new and changing technologies that its exact definition is elusive.  I think this would be more acceptable if the coined term didn’t include a label that mimicked a software release.  2.0 implies some defined set of features, a revamp or succession of what came before.  But the term has been thrown around for a while and the process of development of “Web 2.0″ technologies has been anything but a discrete major step.  I’d first heard this term used in reference to Ajax applications (applications that refresh parts of a web page and therefore interact more fluidly, hopefully) but it now seems to have taken on the meaning of collaborative software.  That’s a loose definition of course, as there has been collaborative software for ages, but it seems the central idea is in technologies that allow for dynamic and distributed collaboration.

An interesting side note was how much of the class is using google docs to communicate on projects.  Seemed like more than half.  Google-domination continues.

It will be interesting to see how these collaborative technologies are utilized for instructional development and how many in what ways they will mature or change as what learners expect also changes (evolves?  I was going to say that, but back to Clark and media and methods… I don’t know about that.)

 

Graphing Analysis Documents

The Dick, Carey, and Carey book that we use for the ID class makes a lot of use of charts in modeling analsysis and processes.  We haven’t talked in class though about using tools for building the type of charts in the book.  In our analaysis document for our final project, we wanted to include some of these types of charts for our learning goal analysis portion of the document.  My initial thought was to use Visio, now a part of MS Office and a pretty standard modeling tool.  I’ve used Visio in the past for work and been fairly happy with.  It seems to provide a powerful set of features.  The problem with this is that it is licensed separately than some version of MS Office and none of use had a current license.

However, Kevin suggested that, as we are all Mac users and because he already had a license, we might try to use OmniGraffle–a modeling to for Mac OS X.  It is not free software either, but also not too expensive.   The end product was very slick and allowed us to create charts that looked very much like the examples we’d been looking at in the book.  One note is that on my Mac MS Office tried to open the .graffle files in MS Office, which resulted in an error.  I had to manually tell my machine to use OmniGraffle instead.

I know there are open source (read: free) tools available, specifically for use in software design, but haven’t had the opportunity to use any of them yet.  It would be a good thing to investigate this some more and find a suitable free solution.

Initial Learner Skills and Abilities

Last week I was called in by the local English Skills Learning Center to substitute teach for a basic computer skills class at a local refugee community center.  The request was simple enough:

“We have several newly- arrived refugees who are not very familiar with computers and need help learning the basics of email, internet searching, and possibly applying for jobs and other skills.  They are in separate ESL classes, so their English is good enough that communication shouldn’t be a problem.”

Seems straightforward enough; go to the computer lab, help out with basic computer skills.  However, as is always the case, things aren’t as simple they initially seem.  There are two key problems that quickly arose upon my arrival at the class: 1) Learner skill level. 2) Task breakdown, and

It’s very difficult to get an understanding of what the learners initial skill level are.  In addition, some learners are familiar with some basic tasks, some more advanced, and some may have differing selective skills–being familiar with chat or you tube, but not with email.  Getting an initial understanding each learner’s particular skills and what their needs are is necessary before any actual instruction can begin.  It would be better to have a learner profiles, but in this particular situation the learners are there for informal instruction and might come from differing backgrounds.

Dealing with learners of differing levels presents quite a challenge.  In an informal setting it is possible to help each out individually or group them together as needed, but being able to present a generalized instruction is difficult.  Over time, with more familiarity and a chance to build more of the subordinate skills for all the students would allow for future more generally appropriate shared lessons.

Tied to learner skill levels is the question of subordinate and entry skills.  Teaching “how to send an email” might be a fairly straightforward set of steps if the learner has an entry skill level to handle the subordinate tasks required; however, depending on  the learner’s initial skill level, the level of detail may be much higher.  Perhaps I will discuss this later in light of some of the task analysis reading we have been doing in class.

Misunderstandings and skills, assessments and hierarchies

I came across the following passage in our textbook, The Systematic Design of Instruction:

“The kinds of misunderstandings that students might have will indicate the understandings, also known as skills, which they must have” [emphasis in the original]  (Dick, Carey 64).

I really like this quote and found it to be an interesting and positive view of learner assessment.  The idea of misunderstandings being a view into needed understanding also caused me to think about how this misunderstandings could be mapped to nodes on a hierarchical knowledge or procedural tree.

It is interesting to consider what mistakes learners might make, and how cataloging the errors can be both a means of focusing future instruction.

One could implement an assessment aligned to a knowledge or procedural hierarchy.  In this assessment model a test would be devised for each node in the hierarchy.   Testing then would be given in a bottom-up approach, starting with the most basic skills at the bottom of the hierarchy (the “leaf-nodes”), with failure on a particular node indicating a limiting prerequisite skill for all “parent” nodes further upstream in the hierarchy.   The failure nodes and all parent nodes could then be targeted as learning goals.  After successful instruction the assessment would be repeated and the assessment of composite higher level tasks in the hierarchy completed.  This provides a sort of adaptive map for learning in increments the sub-learning goals of the larger learning goal expressed by the hierarchy as a whole.

It would be interesting to show the learner and instructor a graphical tree view of the hierarchy and thereby provide a visual roadmap of instruction and an idea of what skills are to be obtained at different levels upstream in the hierarchy.  Having such a view may either daunting if too large, but could also be a motivator as it provides a visual summary and statement of learning goals.

Google Groups as a Collaboration Tool for IDET Projects

Carter, Kevin and I have been using Google Groups to manage our group communications for a couple of projects so far; first, for our audio media presentation, and now for our ADDIE project.  I’m not sure that the entire “Groups” paradigm, however Google intends it (marketing (or rather Google’s characteristic lack thereof) seems a little fuzzy to me here), but there are two aspects that have been extremely useful to us: discussions, and file sharing.

It is interesting that in this world of “Web 2.0″ collaboration (don’t ask me to get started defining that), the most useful things to us are at their core two of the oldest internet technologies: mailing lists and FTP.  The difference between a tradition mailing list and the way Google implements it is that a group by default comes with a list and various actions (editing or posting a new document or “page”) can spawn a new “Discussion” (i.e. email thread).   File sharing isn’t implemented over FTP, but the concept is the same, at least as far as we’ve been using it.

We’ve tried to use the Pages feature, which seems to be some version of Wiki, but have not had the greatest success.  At one point Carter was making updates to a page, had a notification that someone else was updating the page and ended up losing all his edits.  (Not sure on the details of the scenario exactly, but at some point Google had said it was “autosaving” and still tracing back we failed to find any revisions stored away).  Instead of using “Pages” we’ve been using “Files”, which as I said is more akin to traditional FTP.

I’ve used google groups before to collaborate on some software projects and it seems that in their recent updates they’ve replaced the “Wiki” with “Pages”, perhaps to be more friendly, or perhaps to move more toward an MS-Word model of collaboration as they push their own online document technologies in the future.  However, for our purposes now, I’d prefer to have a Wiki, or at least not have a Wiki that is branded differently.

Anyway, the Discussions (email list) and Files (file repository) aspects of the Groups system have been extremely useful to us and I would recommend groups for this reason alone.  Perhaps in the future we will utilize more features (calendaring, maybe?) and see where that leads.

In summary, I would recommend starting a Google Group as a collaboration tool and experimenting with it, but do believe that the overall presentation of the product isn’t entirely user friendly, nor “slick”.  I will probably have more comments on this in the future.

Thoughts on our (the) first Media technology presentation.

I have formed a group with Kevin and Carter, now known as the Mighty Group C, to work on projects over the course of the semester.  I am pleased with our personality match-ups and think we work well together.  Both Kevin and I come from a software technology background and Carter brings a tremendous value from his experience teaching in the classroom; overall a good mix.  However, I have to say that Kevin’s technology experience is directly related to the field of education… so maybe they compliment each other well and I just balance us out by not making us seem too proficient so early in the program.

We selected Audio (and by selected I mean yelled out the other options we’d wanted too late to get them and so were left with Audio by default) for our media type.  Initially, this was a little disappointing on two fronts.   First, Audio seemed to be the least interesting of the group.  Or perhaps a better way to describe it would be that it is the most gentrified, and least interesting of the available options.  Compared to something with all the buzz of “Web 2.0, ” definitely loses on the sexy factor.  The second issue is that the Audio presentation was slated to given first, i.e. in one week from the initial assignment.  Dr. Monson was kind and/or cruel enough to allow us a lot of flexibility by not setting strict guidelines on what to expect.

However, my initial unease at these two problems — a) Audio is passé and simple and therefore uninteresting to build a presentation on, and b) we are the first to present and have no precedent for what is expected — turned out to be unfounded.

I believe the initial reaction that Audio is uninteresting or outdated stems from its having been available as an instructional technology for so long, as well its use a sub-component of other seemingly more rich multimedia formats.  However, as I thought about my own use of audio–pure audio, just listening–I realized how untrue this is.  Audio is ideal for a number of uses (some of which we elaborated on in our presentation) and is really still a highly engaging and developing media.  In fact for news and current events, second language learning and various forms of radio documentary it is the format I use the most for self-education and also one I find to be most convenient and enjoyable.  I can’t recommend Radio Lab enough for great production and educational and interesting podcasts.  Any educators in the class that might read this should really consider whether using pieces of the shows would be useful.

As for problem b), being the first to present: turned out to be a good thing as Kevin, Carter and I were able to work together well.  We all went over the text, had a few discussions and organized and divided our work around a few areas we would each focus on.  Coordinating audio formats, PowerPoint versions did not however work so well, but I believe our delivery was decent and we were able to present the content at least somewhat sufficiently.  I don’t need to note the irony that we had problems working with audio in our presentation on audio, but I just did.  Anyway, we have now finished our media section and are now free to work on the other assignments.  One project down, wax.

Hello ID World.

This is the blog for Carl Montgomery’s thoughts and responses to EDPS 6430.

This course will be an interesting experience for me as I explore and discover my own particular interests and motivations relating to Instructional Design.