Professor Matt Bower

Some selected notes….

Neuman, W. L. (2006). Social Research Methods – Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th Edition). Boston: Pearson Education.

• p460: “Qualitative resaearchers form new concepts ore refine existing concepts that are grounded in the data.”
• p460: “A researcher organises the raw data into conceptual categories and creates themes or concepts”
• Qualitative analysis as pattern recognition.
• p. 461 “Open coding: A first coding of qualitative data in which a researcher examines the data to condense them into preliminary analytic categories or codes.”
• p. 461 “Open coding is performed during a first pass through recently collected data.”
• p. 462 “A second stage of coding of qualitative data in which a researcher organises the codes, links them and discovers key analytic categories”
• p. 462 “During open coding, you focus on the actual data and assign code labels for themes. There is no concern about making connections among themes or elaborating the concepts that the themes represent. By contrast, in axial coding you begin with an organised set of initial codes or preliminary concepts. In this second pass you focus on the initial coded themes more than the data…. You move towards organizing ideas or themese and identify the axis of key concepts in analysis.”
• Pg 463: “During axial coding, ask about causes and consequences, conditions and interactions, strategies and processes, and look for categories or concepts that cluster together.”
• Pg 464 “Selective coding: A stage in coding qualitative data in which a researcher examines previous codes to identify and select data that will support the conceptual coding categories that were developed.
• Pg 464: “Selective coding involves scanning all the data and previous codes. Look selectively for cases that illustrate themes and make comparisons and contrasts after most or all data collection is complete”

Saldana, J. (n.d.). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, Los Angeles: Sage

• P. 6 “Hatch, (2002) offers that you think of patterns not just as stable regularities but as varying forms. A pattern can be characterised by:
• similarity (things happen in the same way
• difference (they happen in predictably different ways)
• frequency (they happen often or seldom)
• sequence (they happen in a certain order)
• correspondence (they happen in relation to other activities or events)
• causation (one appears to cause another) (p. 155)”
• p. 7: “Merriam (1998) states, ‘our analysis and interpretation – our study’s findings – will reflect the constructs, concepts, language, models, and theories that structured the study in the first place’ (p. 48”
• p. 7 “Coding is analysis” (Miles and Huberpan, 1994, p. 56)
• As the analysis progresses one shifts from codes to categories, where by initial labels merge or split to form the themes of the study. Often these have subcategories, which may end up being many of the codes [my notes]
• As the analysis progresses even further the analysis progresses towards the development of themes and concepts, that tend towards theory. [my notes]
• p. 13. Thematic analysis: “A theme is an outcome of coding, categorisation, and analytic reflection, not something that is, in itself, coded”
• p. 14. Things that may be coded include: cultural practices, episodes, encounters, roles, social and personal relationships, groups and cliques, organisations, settlements and habitats, subcultures and lifestyles. [not quote]
• p. 14 Other elements include cognitive aspects or meanings, emotional aspects or feelings, hierarchical aspects or inequalities. [not quote]
• P.18 Questions to consider as you code (from Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw (1995):
• What are people doing? What are they trying to accomplish?
• How exactly do they do this? What specific means and/or strategies do they use?
• How do memebers talk about characterise, and understand what is going on?
• What assumptions are they making?
• What do I see going on here?
• Whoat did I learn from these notes?
• Why did I include them (p.146)”
• P. 19 Coder may choose to “lump” and “split” data as needed [not quote]
• Essential: keeping a codebook or code list
• For large or complex datasets use CAQDAS for coding.

“Marcus Messner and Jeff South and Learning with Social Media at VCU  – Teaching, Learning and Technology” – Virginia Commonwealth University Centre for Teaching Excellence. [Available on iTunes]

• Ran a course that combined US and Iraqi students to create a marketing campaign for Not-For-Profit organisations and implement that (with feedback from around the world
• Social media as a medium we cannot control – students can contribute whatever they want on Twitter etc and we may or may not know. Backchannel to our teaching.
• Social Media as software that we can comment on, build upon the contributions of others. Critical feature is that they enable community building.
• Grey boundaries. Is Youtube Social Media? Interestingly, Twitter don’t feel that they are Social Media – they think they are a headlines service.
• Need to get purpose right. Who is the audience? What is the message? Not about most friends but best impact.
• Obvious need to teach students about how to negotiate Social Media in their field – avoid establishing a profile that could cause self-harm. Understanding how to manage privacy settings. How to access information and professional communities with Social Media. But also how to use Social Media positively, to establish a positive image on the web, and sell their Social Media savvy which may be valuable to employees.
• It is impossible to know what Social Media will be relevant in two years, so it is critical to teach students the principles of working with Social Media rather than the platforms.

Also check the following article:

Charlotte N. Gunawardena, Mary Beth Hermans, Damien Sanchez, Carol Richmond, Maribeth Bohley & Rebekah Tuttle (2009): A theoretical framework for building online communities of practice with social networking tools, Educational Media International, 46:1, 3-16. To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523980802588626

This presentation is available from iTunesU as part of the “As We May Teach: Educational Technology, From Theory Into Practice” series by Dr. Ruben Puentedura (http://itunes.apple.com/au/itunes-u/as-we-may-teach-educational/id380294705). It provides an overview of the TPCK model and also discusses Puentudura’s SAMR model. The SAMR model describes four levels of technology usage:

1. Substitution
2. Augmentation
3. Modification
4. Redefinition

Technology links that I found interesting included:

• “How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school”, Bransford et al http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853
• The visual complexity website at http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
• The netlogo visual programming tool at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
• The Southern History Database for collaborative historical knowledge development http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/SHD/
• The Sloan Consortium of online education leadership and innovation http://sloanconsortium.org/

Some interesting educational technology reference materials from iTunes:

• Views of educational technology 2012, Gary Ackerman (free)
• Tap the screen: Technology interaction in our students’ lives, Matt Fuller (free)
• Technology how to, Jeol Dietz, (free)
• Understanding technology integration to prepare millennial students for 21st Century education, Prince Hycy Bull ($17.99)
• The technology toolbelt for teaching, Susan Manning, ($38.99)
• The Classroom teacher’s technology survival guide, Doug Johnson ($24.99)
• Ideas for technology integration for teachers, Mark Page Botelho ($4.99)
• Creative genius in technology, Greg Wientjes ($14.99)

Collections worth considering for subscription:

• Blue Valley School District has an ipads in Education [for useful ipad apps]
• Educational Technology Services at Penn State University [great HE topics]
• Technology in K-12 Lesson Plans [range of How To videos]

Rob Manson – BuildAR for Geolocation AR

• Need a copy of LayAR on your mobile device to detect.
• Can have triggers based on proximity, for instance start playing a sound.
• In LayAR once you have a dev account you can trick your phone to think that you are in a different location, for debugging and off-site production purposes.
• Limitations with the accuracy of geolocation, particularly inside. Also problems with altitude as you need line-of-site to three satelites. Often gets more accurate over time as the location becomes more specifically determined. Over time this accuracy will improve (e.g. 2-5yrs).
• Can pull Flickr feed into BuildAR (including geotag data) so images can be part of an AR experience – then could do something like an excursion where students take photos, upload to a Flickr feed, and then photos automatically added to a geomap (and rich media triggers etc can be added later)
• IEEE run a conference called ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) around October – last conference Scene Reconstruction using a lot of different libraries Moving Average Reconstruction. Can lock the underlying 3D model and then impose movement as a different layer.
• “Slam” also takes feedback from sensors and the environment and enables 3D reconstruction
• Kinect has lots of possibilities, but also USB devices that you can plugin to computer and use haptic input.
• KinectFusion is going to release as a set of open source libraries that make Scene Reconstruction possible and then apply physics engine over the top to have simulated objects interacting with the environment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzb_RQWrt6I
• Photosynth is a system that is drawing together social networking images (eg on Flickr) and reconstructs 3D models from it http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html
• Rob Manson is undoubtedly a world expert in this area.

Notes from Rob Manson presentation:

• Rob Manson is an AR expert at the Inspire Institute at UoCanberra. See http://mob-labs.com
• Azuma’s definitions of AR (spectrum I used in my blended reality paper)
• Billinghurst released the first ARToolkit released in 1999
• FLARToolkit released in 2009 (took ARToolkit into Flash) – still marker based, but enabled  AR to reach a much larger audience
• ARStandards Workshop in Seoul 2010 presented a framework for web-based AR.
• JSARToolkit released in 2011 – Javascript version (works well)
• See Google’s Project Glass video. See http://g.co/projectglass , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4 ,
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZczX6qleV4Q
• See Thad Starner and Augmented Cognition who has recorded all his conversations etc through a camera for about 20 years
• “Pervasive Computing”
• See https://buildar.com/ for the latest AR approaches.

Stephan Barrass

• ABC Pool provided a layAR back end for a “My Tribe: Cross-Media Journeys Through GOAD” for Indigenous story creation (http://pool.abc.net.au/projects/my-tribe-cross-media-journeys-through-goad )
• Students used Google Fusion used to create the HTML5 content.

Hawker College iphone app

• Student programmed school app with QR readers for events, assignments, attendance,
• [Student, Josh, presented the app and streamed his iphone to appear within his presentation!!]
• Used Aurasma as the Augmented Reality platform
• Propsectus contains augmented reality videos that embed – turns the text and images into a multimedia documents
• Possibilities for not only having teachers create augmented reality environments for their students, but also having students as creators of augmented reality environments
• Student had little programming experience but still programmed the Hawker School App in about 6 weeks.

Graham Cassells (Copland College)

• ICT Curriculum should be project based and not content based. For instance, using Unity3D to have students as designers of games. So The syllabus needs to provide flexibility to teach content that doesn’t yet exist – eg AR.
• Students are teaching themselves how to create AR using Youtube – doesn’t require much understanding.
• It was suggested that could even be used at Primary school level.
• They use Unity and String as their platforms.
• Working towards incorporating sound, touch, etc
• See http://www.poweredbystring.com/showcase for the different possibilities.

After lunch Aurasma session with Matt

• Took a video on the ipad and then used Aurasma App to create augmented reality channel and AR overlays.
• Aurasma studio online can get people up and running with AR (http://www.aurasma.com/).
• Can also register for a developer account at Aurasma, allowing people to do everything that they was being done on an ipad. So could take photos and upload to the web account using a browser (note that photos are better than scans because it captures the lighting conditions).
• If you had a statue and wanted to play a video then you could use a geolocation trigger rather than multiple marker (image) triggers, that way the video would not be triggered for each image.
• Can also take greenscreen videos and then save out as flv so that your image could play out in location when triggered.
• Web Aurasma enables easier management of resources and channels.
• Web Aurasma account also enables to save as an App for the itunes store or Android Apps store, so that you could create an excursion app for your school – can essentially do for free (except for itunes store upload fee, but free for Android Apps store).
• Web Aurasma allows creation of different buttons to press in order to get different information.
• Can also do deeper level coding using Xcode or Objective C.

My ideas:

• An augmented reality research strand at Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre
• Checkout Createworld technology innovators conference e.g. http://auc.edu.au/createworld/about/

How to effectively teach two cohorts of students at once using rich-media synchronous technologies?

Issues:
* People who are face to face receive all information from the teacher, but    potentially not the view that the remote students are receiving.
* People who are remote but do not potentially receive all of the information in the remote room.

There is a Catch 22 in operation here. If they receive all of the information in their environment and in the face to face environment, they receive a complete but may miss some of it due to the extra amount of information being processed (cognitive overload, split attention). But if they don’t receive all of the information from the ‘other’ environment then they may miss crucial information. The challenge is to either a) not broadcast the ‘other’ environment but make sure all pertinent information is transmitted through the common environment being used, or b) broadcast the ‘other’ environment but make sure that the pace and focusing strategies reduce cognitive overload to a manageable level. For a), adaptive strategies may be required by the teacher in order to ensure that all information is transmitted through the shared channel – for instance, by repeating questions asked by students in the face-to-face environment into the mediating technology.

Possible recommendations: Face-to-face students should have access to the teacher’s view of remote students, and what is happening in the remote spaces. Remote students should have access to the communicative tool, and ideally to a view of what is happening in the remote environment.

The demands upon the teacher needs to be considered for both paradigms. For a), the demands of ensuring pertinent information is broadcast can be great. For b), the demands of processing and appropriately responding to all of the information in both environments can be great. This would be an interesting test to run. I suspect that it is better to ensure that both environments are broadcast to both groups. I also suspect that using a ‘window’ approach, where the environments are butted up against each other as though they are conjonined, continuations of each other. This is in-line with the net-meeting approach.

Q: Why would you have remote and face to face students collaborate in a group if you could choose that people in the same situation could be put together?
A: Perhaps they are in groups, and some members choose not to attend face-to-face.
Q: What are the strategies that you can adopt to enhance blended synchronous learning?
A: Ask questions of and expect questions from both groups regularly, and encourage questions and responses from groups that aren’t participating. Reiterating information that is potentially not being accessed by one of the cohorts so that they do receive it. Highlighting relevant elements within the environment so that peoples’ attention is on pertinent aspects of the learning episode and their working memory is not overloaded.

In reflecting upon what makes for a good Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and how to innovate in this already rapidly developing frontier, an integrated design set occurred to me. It involves the following elements:

1. Prescribed readings
2. Short multimedia lecture presentations on the different topics, the shorter the better, up to a maximum of 15 minutes (Youtube, or similar)
3. Tutorials run through LAMS sequences embedded in Moodle – this has the advantage of offering synchronous MOOC activities
4. Extra support sessions (live) run through a web-conferencing system such as Adobe Connect
5. Course run through Moodle, with enrolled Macquarie students in one instance and non-Macquarie self-registered students in another instance
6. Forums and chat for each topic to enable troubleshooting support
7. Twitter feed running continually
8. Facebook sister site
9. Exam run through Moodle/LAMS
10. Non-Macquarie self-registered students  can choose to pay (at any stage) and hence have the assessment elements marked and have completed the subject (non-award or OUA?)

A range of Marketing, Business, Finance, Legal and Enrollment issues to consider. Also need to consider scheduling – how to offer the synchronous learning experiences to a large cohort of potentially internationally located students.

Coveritlive is a synchronous multimedia based microblogging tool with a great deal of potential for education. For instance, text, image and video can all be incorporated into the one live chat session. An example has been embedded below, for people to try…

http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php/option=com_altcaster/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=e5507cf3e6/height=550/width=470

Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is an established methodology in health psychology, and is growing in application in education related areas. It is underutilised in educational teachnology research (Cilesiz, 2010).

IPA interviews aim to have the interviewer to enter the interviewee’s lifeworld through the participants’ recollection of their experiences (Smith et al., 2009). Other key references include Mayes (2006), Hefferon and Ollis (2006) and Shaw (2010). It provides a structured approach for examining recounts of a particular phenomena, and should be further explored as a methodology for our field.

• Cilesiz, S. (2010). A phenomenological approach to experiences with technology: current state, promise, and future directions for research. Education Technology Research and Development. Online early: DOI 10.1007/s11423-010-9173-2
• Hefferon, K. M. and Ollis, S. (2006). ‘Just clicks’: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of professional dancers’ experience of flow. Research in Dance Education, 7(2), 141-159.
• Mayes, T. (2006). LEX: the learner experience of e-learning: Methodology report. Glasgow Caledonian University.
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearningpedagogy/lex_method_final.pdf
• Smith, J. A., Flowers, P. and Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: theory, method and research, London: Sage.