Professor Matt Bower

James Dalziel: Aligning Learning Design and Curriculum Design

Various definitions of learning design:

• A pedagogical meta-model
• Technical specification: IMS Learning Design (2003)
• Software system for managing sequences of content and collaborative learning activities
• A framework/language for describing the structure of teaching and learning activities.
• A repository of teacher-shared “digital lesson plans”
• A community of educators sharing ideas on effective teaching
• A process that describes how educators make decisions about L & T

Curriculum design is about structuring of the content (material being represented) and activities (the activities that are completed and how they are sequenced).

Possible models for curriculum design:

Approach one – More Top Down pedagogical by Individual:

• Open University: http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/ouldi/
• Lookup cards as part of the JISC project (get link from James)
• University of ULSTER pedagogical cards http://viewpointsproject.blogspot.com/
• Learning Designer

Approach two – Use threshold concepts (big questions) and design around that

Liz Masterman – The impact of OER on teaching and learning in UK universities – Implications for Learning Design

Open Educational Resources (OERs): “teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits repurposing and reuse by others”

Changing landscape – Web 2.0, informal communities, mobile technologies…

Teacher identified benefits :

• no copyright issues
• Extra learning opportunities
• multiple resources can tailor to student prefs
• benchmarking own practice

Issues:

• Doesn’t actually save time
• Want to put own voice into the learning experience
• Students want tailor made for them
• Students want activities, not just content

James Dalziel and Bronwen Dalziel  – Adaptation of Learning Designs in Teacher Training and Medical Education: Templates versus Embedded Contact

Teacher Education Lessons

• Lesson 1 – Don’t provide teachers with too many variants of LAMS templates to illustrate a certain pedagogy – one key example of a template is preferred.
• Lesson 2 – TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read): Provide about a half page, or even up to 3 half pages, but they want to be active very quickly.
• Lesson 3 – Building good templates is hard work!

Medical Teacher Education Lessons

• Lesson 1 – It is difficult to encourage Medical Educators to reflect on education
• Lesson 2 – Templates exist at many levels – e.g. PBL can be represented in many ways, and there might be overarching templates
• Lesson 3 – Rather than being given content they were happier to be included as experts in the design process

Also, learning design is not a linear process – iterative / cyclic approach.

Leanne Cameron: Implementing Learning Designs – The last chapter

Final part of the ALTC project “Implementing Learning Designs”. See http://implementinglearningdesigns.lamsfoundation.org .

The planning tool is available at http://planner.lamscommunity.org . Lots of different templates (along with actual examples) such as:

• Exploring Alternative Perspectives
• Problem-based learning
• Project/Case study focus
• Predict-Observe Explain
• Roleplaying
• Web-dilemma
• Webquests
• Digital Storytelling
• De Bono’s APC
• De Bono’s PMI
• De Bono’s CORT

People can add other templates (but aren’t). Could draw upon competition and social networking paradigms to encourage participation. Could encourage by highlighting value of including in eportfolio.

Other links to bookmark:

• http://www.avalonlearning.eu/
• http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
• De Bono “CORT” thinking strategies can be found from http://implementinglearningdesigns.lamsfoundation.org/ or see hhtp://www.cortthinking.com/

Monday

Lookup “Understanding the reasons that academics use – and don’t use – endorsed and unendorsed learning technologies” by Gregor Kennedy et al. Great paper to model the use of surveys to perform factor analysis (grouping correlated survey items together) and cluster analysis (creating profiles of users).

“Classroom communication on mobile phones…” – Shun Leung Lam et al, trialed the Keepad server approach to clickers.

Also lookup the paper “A portrait of evaluation studies of learning technology innovations 2005-2010: Addressing the elephant in the room” by Caroline Steel and Cathy Gunn – great summary for HDR students about what you should and shouldn’t do when performing edtech innovation research.

Tuesday

Keynote excellent (recorded so can hopefully access), on Learning Analytics:

• http://solaresearch.org
• An interesting conference on learning analytics http://lak12.sites.olt.ubc.ca/
• http://learningemergence.net/tag/technology/
• De Liddo, A., Sandor, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (in press). Contested collective intelligence…
• De Liddo, A., Buckingham Shum, S. Quinto, et al (2011). Discourse centric learning analytics, 1st international conference on learning analytics and knowledge
• Lookup work by Simon Buckingham Shum.

Great presentation for web-based student response system called OWL:

• Lookup http://sites.google.com/site/openweblecture/
• Site login to http://www.els.qut.edu.au/innovation/emerging/owl/ using session code 33409
• I need to try using Moodle for mobile.
• Requires teachers to abandon old approaches!

Paper: “Teacher engagement in Web 2.0 world: Developing your online teaching and learning Community of Practice”, Edward Flagg, Diana Ayling (excellent)

• Merging ICTELT with CoP
• http://tlcommunityunitec.ning.com/

Wednesday

Sue Gregory gave a great presentation on theVirtualPREX project – engaging pre-service teachers in virtual world professional experience. Using role play and soon bots to develop pre-service teachers’ classroom management capabilities. Has a great list of student caricatures (tapper, cant sit still, etc). Great for distance students to practice their classroom management.

“An investigation of the learning styles and self regulated learning strategies for Computer Science students.” Al Alharbi, et al. Great talk about Silver-Felderman learning styles and self-regulated learning styles of computer science students. But didn’t really relate to student performance.

“The surprising truth about how metaphor motivates e-learners” Nagel et al. Metaphor: Embodies a concept, compact, vivid, describes the unknown, describes abstract, indicates emotion.

Authentic Learning Symposium – Helen Farley, Gregor Kennedy, Barney Dalgarno

Authentic learning: – personally meaningful, situated learning, authentic tasks (ill structured and open ended.

Gregor: Interested in these 3D rich media skins – why do we do this “People learn better when they are situation in the context in which their knowledge and understanding will ultimately be applied”.

Godden & Baddeley (1975) – people can learn better if they learn within the context in which they will need to apply the knowledge (wet learn and wet recall vs dry learn and dry recall). However does this relate to authentic learning as opposed to just recall.

Gregor: Have we as designers, taken the meaning of “situated in the context” too literally? Is the effort of developing these virtual worlds actually worth it?

Helen: Virtual Worlds on the surface are the perfect place for learning – can learn anything anytime anyway – learn nursing without killing patient. Consider four dimensions:

Types of skills and nature of knowledge to be learned – authenticity depends on types of knowledge to be learned – OK for learning language visiting France, but not OK for learning surgery.

Authenticity of the environment – for instance how many people in the environment (eg for a mass crowd gathering either religious or concert) so it is not just about the representation of the physical space.

Availability of information/sufficient complexity of the environment – Eg hospital patient in virtual world may only have typical symptoms of one disease at a time.

The learner experience – lag, slow hardware, internet dropout, navigation difficulties.

Me: Use virtual worlds when:
* Involve navigation or creation of the space, but not to develop actual motor skills
* Bring people together in a physical space that replicates actual world interaction, but not to develop their physical communication competencies

Ie use virtual worlds when we are trying to develop concepts relating to space and interaction, but not

• Personally meaningful learning – motivation intrinsic – suits students with low extrinsic motivation
• Situated learning – motivation extrinsic
• Authentic tasks – motivation intrinsic

Transfer of authentic learning is possibly quite good, though Kirschner, Sweller & Clark 2006 may disagree.

Peter Goodyear from audience: Need to consider the type of knowledge of the task. Declarative knowledge is very different to tacit knowledge (to read situations is an important aspect).

Gregor: People respond to different cues differently. May want to emphasise certain cues in a virtual world in order to support learning.

Engage individuals on an emotional level – suspend disbelief

Jan Herrington: Authentic learning is a pedagogical approach that can develop conceptual thinking as though they are a surgeon (e.g.). Kirschner et al took a huge swipe at “unguided instruction” by saying it had no support, but it must, says Jan.

Me: Boils down to quality of thinking represented, inspired and shared in the learning environment. To some extend the media rich skin doesn’t matter except for the degree of motivation. A few possibilities to utilise features of virtual worlds that can’t be replicated in the real world. Trade-off is constraints of using technology.

The Australian Research Council Linkage Project Scheme provides funding for joint research projects between universities and industry partners. The ARC will fund up to the amount contributed by the industry partners. While up to 80% of the partner contribution can be in-kind, at least 20% must be cash.

It is possible to partner with individual schools, however for a coordinated project with several schools in the NT South region it would be logistically most feasible to partner with NTDET. Critical to these projects is that NTDET is an active and true partner, not only contributing funds but also involved in the implementation and decision making processes. The outcomes of the project should focus on achieving research objectives that are important to NTDET, so that once the project is complete they can autonomously utilise and draw upon results. This should extend to influencing educational policy.

Note that there is the potential to build an APAI PhD scholarship into the project (although this requires extra funding from the partner organisations). If the grant involves more than $40K per year for three years then in the past Macquarie has provided an MQRES scholarship for a PhD student to work in a related area. This can be used to fulfill the training obligations of the project.

The 2012 Linkage Project Funding Rules are available from http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/lp/lp_fundingrules.htm
The Eligibility Exemption Request process is outlined at http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/lp/lp_eligibility.htm however it is rare that Government departments will receive exemptions because they have financial resources to draw upon (on the other hand individual remote schools could possibly be deemed as eligible).

Charalambos Vrasidas (Pambos) is Head of the Centre for Advanced Research and Development in Educational Technology in Nicosia, Cyprus. He is a charismatic and energetic dynamo who started the Centre with no funding or support from his university (only permission). CARDET now receives more grants and funding than the Department of Education at the University of Nicosia. He applies several clever strategies in order to make his Centre hum, including cherry-picking the brightest young talent, offering 3 month internships with bonuses for high performers as a way of evaluating potential employees, building in 10% redundancies for under-performing employers, and using the Centre’s NGO status to attract pro-bono personnel support.

He has several interesting philosophies about life and education, and recommends the following:

• Design Thinking For Educators (http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/), released by the IDEO group who are rated as one of the world’s most innovative firms (http://www.ideo.com/)
• Xplane, specialising in visual facilitation (http://www.xplane.com/xblog/)
• The book Killing Time by Paul Fayerabend, who writes about making the most of one’s life.

Keynote Mark Guzdial

• Computing is key to many disciplines and we aren’t producing the number of people required
• Mark’s advisor was Elliot Solloway! He made all of his students read the book “The two cultures and the scientific revolution”. More recently the book Denialism.
• Estimates are that in the US by 2012 there are 3 million professional software developers and 13 million who never studied computer science.
• Gimp and Adobe Photoshop are now scriptable, and there are many people who are learning computer programming on the side to make what they need to happen happen.
• How can we help people who don’t want to be CS majors?
• Need #1: Match or tailor context to make sense to students.
• Need #2: Given a piece of code, suggest CS concepts and examples, or productive/appropriate search terms.
• Need #3: Help students learn programming using less time spent programming.
• Georgia Tech requires all undergraduates to take an undergraduate programming course. Overall failure rates about 78%. Failure rates of women was almost double that of men in some semesters, and students from more arts-oriented courses often have failure rates of more than 50%.
• Margolis and Fisher – excellent book that recommends alternative pathways
• Georgia Tech created three CS1 courses: a Python, a Mathlab, and a Media Processing.
• The Media Computation: do all of the matrix, indexing, algorithms, linked lists, in contexts that are interesting to students.
• For the Media Computation course much higher proportion of students passing, in some cases more women than men, and students from the liberal arts having much higher pass rates, even some students admitted programming after course admitted.
• Media Computation CS1 students are more likely to be passing future courses (Beth Simons).
• Georgia Tech created CS2 that covers data structures, and again 70% felt the media computation approach improved their engagement.
• Only 23% of schools in Georgia offer (Alabama only offers 2%).
• US NSF wants to create Computer Science Principles schools (called CS10, see http://www.csprinciples.org ).
• Today we only have 2000 CS teachers and NSF wants 10000 by the year 2015. How to accomplish? For these sorts of numbers can only be in-service. Approach requires a substantial online approach to teaching computer science teachers.
• See:
  • http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial
  • http://home.cc.gatech.edu/csl
  • http://www.georgiacomputes.org
  • http://www.csprinciples.org
  • http://mediacomputation.org

Rachel Cardel Oliver: Harnessing software metrics to support novice programmers

Excellent use of JUnit4 to provide students with test cases for their code. Integrates with BlueJ.

Rachel.Cardel-Oliver@usa.edu.au

Paul Denny: Understanding the syntax barrier for students (CodeWrite)

Excellent system (CodeWrite) where students create problems and see each other’s solutions. Have to create test cases. Student compiles are captured. Excellent analysis of student data – excellent project and paper worth looking up. Codewrite is free online (see http://codewrite.cs.auckland.ac.nz/create.php).

Note: for nifty programming assignments see http://nifty.stanford.edu

Note: Paul Denny is also the person who wrote the PeerWise collaborative question authoring system (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/)

Robert Marmorstein: Open Source Contribution as an Effective Software Engineering Class Project

• Much of computer science coursework does not accurately emulate development in the real world
• Open-source projects as a way of overcoming this divide – students have access to high quality code, can rub shoulders with experts

Here are some notes about WordPress designing:

• Themes that I like: MistyLook, Twenty Ten
• to be updated over time…

WeScheme: The Browser is Your Programming Envinronment (Danny Yoo et al)

Excellent Middle School enrichment program using a browser based programming environment by Danny Yoo et al. Check:

• http://www.wescheme.org
• http://www.bootstrapworld.org

Habits of programming in Scratch (Mordechai Ben-Ari, et al)

• Study of two classes of students, devised a new programming taxonomy for computer science based on Anderson & Krathwohl and SOLO (see her paper in ICER 2010).
• Habits include:
  • Bottom-up programming approaches
  • Extremely Fine Grain Programming (EFGP)

Test of creativity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Paul_Torrance#Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thinking_.28TTCT.29

Keynote Ulrich Schroeder

• Sail – M analyses mathematical proofs and provides intelligent feedback
• L2P project – analytics of LMS use
• go4IT! Generate interest in CS for girls – for 10 to 14 year olds using LEGO robots in schools, have developed a simulator so students can do from home, even on iphone.
• Uses Scratch for 5th and 6th grade students
• Creating a Lego Turing Machine for Year 11 and 12 students

Checkout MITs new “Processing” language that helps write graphics programs very easily: http://www.processing.org/

Hon. Adrian Piccoli, Minister for Education

• Prioritising Indigenous education, remote and rural education, special education, K-3
• Not supporting teacher bonuses
• General impression: seems well intentioned, intelligent, although disagreed with some of the policies

Mr Patrick Lee, Chief Executive, NSW Institute of Teachers

• ACDE has indicated that they would like an accreditation process based on outcomes rather than an inputs, and Patrick supports this.
• Shouldn’t just be about increasing the number of placements, but also about improving the quality of placements in teacher education courses and schools

Prof Toni Downes, President, Australian Council of Deans of Education

Current work at school education level:

• National accreditation of teacher education programs
• Digital Education Revolution
• Completion of some of National Partnerships Programs (Centres of Excellence) which are being evaluated
• Indigenous Education Strategies (ECE and School Education)
• Teach Australia, Teach Next etc (exploring alternative pathways to teacher education).

National Higher education development

• indexation from 2012 onwards
• Review of base funding
• Uncapping UG, tightly managing PG load
• Standards (TEQSA/AQF); ALTC Standards Projects
• Social inclusion; teaching and learning
• Research quality
• Indigenous Teacher Education/Indigenous Education