Unfortunately I missed the Kaltura Education Video Summit virtual event a few weeks back due to other commitments, but after a friendly email inviting me in I decided to take a look at what was still available.
The home screen with embedded video and virtual hostess
The first annual Kaltura Education Video Summit has been billed as the most comprehensive conference dedicated to online video in education, learning, and training. It looked at ways to harness video to improve teaching, learning and training and offered those attending the opportunity to network with the world’s leading education video experts, connect with peers from leading educational institutions and enterprises around the world.
Kultura teamed up with InterCall, industry leaders in virtual environments and webcasting, to provide a really innovative virtual event.
The conference is structured round the main hall (home area), which offers links to all the talks, resources and sponsors.
Virtual exhibition hall
You can take a tour around or create a virtual agenda, which will help point you in the direction of interesting sessions.
Blackboards’s interactive Booth
This year’s summit had 3 different tracks:
The Future of Education
Video in Education
Enterprise Learning, Training and collaboration
Sharon Flynn, Assistant Director, CELT at NUI Galway, presenting
Each offered interesting presentations on high-level areas such as open and online education, alongside practical talks on areas such as discussion in the classroom, MOOCs and use of YouTube. Some of the talks are more traditional presentations while others are panel sessions and discussions. As well as attending talks you can take a look around the virtual exhibition hall or sit and have a chat with fellow delegates in the networking lounge. You can then pop all the resources and business cards your collect in to your virtual brief case. And of course everything can be shared via Facebook, Twitter or email. You can even upload your own resources and share these with delegates that you meet.
Networking Lounge
All pretty impressive stuff! Surprisingly next year’s video summit will be a physical event!
I’m not alone in liking a good story, so the Netskills one-day workshop on Exploring digital storytelling appealed. The workshop looked at why stories are a powerful and effective way of communicating with an audience and how the digital techniques suggested can be used effectively for a wide range of purposes; learning, publicity and marketing, community engagement and more.
Wikipedia describes digital storytelling as “a relatively new term which describes the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their ‘story’. Digital stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, they are usually less than 8 minutes long and can be interactive.”
So I’ll say no more about the day but will let my digital story do the talking. This is my effort from the hands-on session, it was created using WeVideo (a collaborative online video editor) and took me a couple of hours to produce all-in. It’s pretty rough round the edges and I did think of starting again and re-recording the sound, but then I decided that it was more important to show what could be achieved in a very short amount of time.
Most of the photos in the video were taken in the workshop using my phone, hence not great quality. The others are from Flickr and acknowledgements are given at the end of the footage.
There were some great tools suggested during the workshop, here are a few of my favourites:
iMovie – doh! Didn’t even realise I had this on my Mac!
Voicethread – great for creating collaborative conversations
Pixton – I’ve used it before but a nice comic making tool with a database of graphics
In January this year I spotted a tweet by a colleague who had decided to try out the Introduction to Openness in Education (#ioe12) MOOC (Massively Open Online Course). The course content sounded interesting and it provided me with a free and easy way to try online learning, so I decided to give it a go.
It’s taken me 6 months to write a post about every module (with a couple of observational posts thrown in):
To get the OpenEd Overview course badge I need to link to all my posts (which I’ve done) and announce my intent to have completed the badge. Which I’m doing now! I’ve also emailed David Wiley – just to be double sure!
Once I get my badge I’ll finish with a summing up post telling you about all the things I’ve learned.
The opening resource for the Open Policy #ioe12 module is a video of Cable Green, Director of Global Learning; Creative Commons, giving the keynote at ALN 2011. Cable is “interested in questioning current policy and seeing if we can do a little better”. Cable makes the argument that everyone in world can obtain the education they require but to do so we need to be open with our education through OER and sharing. He starts with the allegory of a ‘learning machine’ that we could quite easily turn on but we need to break the ‘iron triangle’ of access (the assumption that quality, exclusivity, and expense necessarily go together). During the talk he name checks all of the other open areas discussed in the Introduction to Openness in Education MOOC and talks of their importance.
Cable explains that the biggest issue is that we have in the openness agenda is policy. Those that make decisions on policy do not understand the tools used (such as the Internet) and that they are only making decisions within the framework of the business models that they understand. He suggests we focus on policy because it is ‘where the money is’.
Cable believes that the publicly funded resources should be open resources and we need to move towards a public policy. He goes on to highlight areas of best practice (e.g Holland and the Wikiwijs project). He concludes that only one thing really matters – efficient use of public funds. Policy makers goal is to have the highest return on investments, Creative Common’s goal is that open policy embraced by all.
The talk was inspiring, but Cable’s concerns that the open community still has a long way to go ring true.
Only last week the Daily Mail published an article entitled ‘Open access’ move puts thousands of UK jobs at risk. I probably don’t need to explain the detail here as the title gives it away but the Daily Mail is arguing that by providing much of Britain’s academic output online for nothing the £1billion publishing industry that employs 10,000 people here and in its overseas operations could go under. Not only that but researchers in China and elsewhere in the Far East will have access to our research. [In his talk Cable actually states that we need to move away from “not invented here” to “proudly borrowed from there”].The article lacks any exploration of possible business models (discussed in the open business module or by various journals and academics around the Web) or understanding that a mixed model is the one most likely to happen. There is a response from SPARC that makes effort to correct the inaccuracies. SPARC Europe is an alliance of European academic and research libraries, national libraries, library organisations and research institutions. It does feel like we are banging our head against a brick wall a little…
I think it is worth mentioning here current open data policy – in the US the data.gov and in the UK open.gov.uk.
So to end with some words from Cable Green: “The opposite of open is not closed, the opposite of open is broken.“
So that’s it!! I’ve finished the Introduction to Openness MOOC! It’s taken me 6 months and a big pocket of determination. My next post using the ioe12 tag will be a sum up of what I’ve learned (about openness in education and about taking a MOOC). Time for a celebratory coffee!
At first sight the penultimate Introduction to Openness in Education #ioe12 module on Open Business Models looks like one of the drearier ones, no videos to kick off with and just a long list of papers written by John Wiley and friends.
Business isn’t really my thing but I am generally interested in ‘how stuff gets paid for’, from the Internet and public services, to shops and music festivals. If ‘how it gets paid for’ make sense then it is more likely that it is sustainable and will be around for a while. I’ve tried to stop myself betting on ‘how long it will last??’ every time a new shop opens up in town – recession bingo? Anyway I’m sure that one of the first questions asked whenever the ‘open’ word is used is “so if it’s ‘free’ who pays for it?”.
The answer is naturally very complex but some key points are worth noting:
Firstly, there are many business reasons for making products (e.g. resources, courses, books, software etc.) open and freely available.
“Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction” Cory Doctorow
Making courses available online can increase the number of students registering at an institution.
OpenCourseWare programmes can be conducted in a financially self-sustaining manner.
Authors can find that book sales increase when books are available as free downloads.
Free access can have a positive effect on a nation’s economy through scientific progress.
Online texts are often have reduced overheads.
However for all these points one could also add “but it is not always the case”.
One not so positive example given is that of Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoon strip. Adams, wrote of his disappointment with readers after he released one of his older books for free online:
“My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel [which was newly available in hard copy]. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they e-mailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.” Rich, M. (2010, Jan. 22). With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don‘t Need to Sell. The New York Times.
The key seems to be both audience and timing of release.
Secondly, licences have a key role to play in ensuring that the ‘right people’ have free access to resources. For example we are a lot happier about students having free access to e-books than we are about companies taking free e-books and publishing them for commercial profit. Licences help with mixed market approaches in which companies publish free e–textbooks or resources and supporting then with commercial initiatives. Also many companies are utilising the “fermium” pricing strategy in which some goods are given away for free, while premium services are available for a price.
So these points are interesting but don’t necessarily explain the business model for ‘open’. It seems to me that many companies take the loss leader or freemium approach and hope that money can be made elsewhere. Some use advertising to support products while public sector institutions receive public funding which allows them to share resources. However as Anderson, 2008 puts it in the Wired article Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business “although ‘free’ is an alluring adjective, it is not always a good business model“. There are many risks involved and those after sustainable models need to continue to think in an innovative way about approaches. Whatever the situation it is clear that the Internet has allowed people to be more open about business models and create ‘open business models’.
I began the #ioe12 open assessment module by watching the Badges for Lifelong Learning: An Open Conversation YouTube video. The video is a snappy introduction to the concept of open badges with endorsement for them from a number of senior educationalists/academics and CEOs.
“Digital badges will make the accomplishments and experiences of individuals, in online and offline spaces, visible to anyone and everyone, including potential employers, educators and communities.”
OK, sounds good…but what exactly are open badges?? And what do they have to do with open assessment?
When people talk about open badges they are usually referring to the Mozilla Open Badges project. The project is making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web, through a shared infrastructure that’s free and open to all. Badges can be issued by anyone (educational institution, work place, online learning organisations) to anyone. These badges can then be displayed publicly on a digital (or non-digital) space (blog, Web site, Facebook, email signature, CV etc).
In the Launch of HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation DML Competition 4: Badges for Lifelong Learning YouTube Mark Surman from Mozilla talks about how they are building an open badge infrastructure system. The first building block is a backpack system where users can store badges (a set of APIs for users). There is also the DML badge competition.
One example from the ioe12 resources is the Mozilla run School of Webcraft in which you can obtain badges. This is through the Peer 2 Peer University, a grassroots open education project that “creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education”. They leverage the internet and educational materials openly available online and so enables “high-quality low-cost education opportunities“.
On closer examination there do seem to be other badging systems, such as the Global Kids system within the Hive Networks system in the US. Their paper Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning gives an overview of how they badging system works:
Badges as an alternative assessment – This is the idea that assessment can take the form of ‘validated accomplishments’ instead of tests
Gamifying education with badges – The games based achievement system has it’s origins in the Xbox 360 game score system – qualifications filtered through achievements.
Badges as Learning Scaffolding – Badges, as a form of scaffolded learning, reveal multiple pathways that youth may follow and make visible the paths youth eventually take.
Badges to Develop Lifelong Learning Skills – By offering names for their new competencies and supporting communities.
Badges as DML Driver – Badges support digital, media and learning practices.
Badges to Democratize Learning – Some badges change who does the assessment and allow learners to shape the content of their badging system and perhaps even the structure itself.
It’s a really interesting area, and seems to be very much ‘taking assessment to where the students are’. New and different approaches always face challenges and I didn’t feel there was enough on this in the ioe12 module. I expect some of the key problems are around validation of badges, the ease with which badges can be created and standards. Also by focusing on badges I think other ideas around open assessment (such as e-assessment, portfolios/diaries, PLEs, self-evaluation, learner created content) were sadly missed.
The Open Teaching module is a strange one in that it reflects on the process of open teaching (and learning) – something that I am participating in by taking part in this MOOC and writing this post. It starts out with a Keynote given by David Wiley at 2009 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Wiley starts off with a story that highlights the challenges posed by the move to teaching and learning online (comparing water polo and horse riding polo). There are different tactics and challenges for each, caused in part by the rate of change.
The six key changes are:
Analog > digital
Tethered > mobile
Isolated > connected
Generic > personal
Consuming > creating
Closed > open
Wiley introduces the idea of book-ification of TV, originally coined by Lawrence Lessig, basically TV on demand. This can obviously be applied to our on campus courses – “why do I have to be in a room at 10am to hear you give that lecture” (see my recent post on flipping lectures). All this applies to education because the historic monopoly institutions have had is being challenged on almost every front. Students can now go to other places for their content: Opencourseware, Wikipedia, Public Library of Science, Arxiv.org, Google Scholar, Flat World Knowledge etc. and for their support services: ChaCha, Yahoo Answers, RateMyProfessor, email, IM, Twitter etc. and for their social life: Facebook etc. However institutions believe they are the only place students can get degrees, but what about technical credentials – MCSE, RHCE, CCNA?
It seems that everything that a University provides is being offered by someone else. Institutions aren’t even cheaper. Institutions have to innovate and change. E-learning is not enough – it may be digital and mobile but isn’t necessarily connected, personal, creating or open. Openness underpins many of the values that e-learning is missing, need to be able to access courses and be able to modify them, you need to be able to be creative. Wiley goes on to advocate MIT Open Courseware and other open projects he’s been involved with (such as getting students to write on blogs). He explains that there is a role for OER in the classroom. By being open you hope certain things will happen but in reality different things happen that you don’t even expect. Wiley is making moves to be even more open and this course ‘Introduction to Open Education’ is one example of this. He talks about the self-management process of getting students to comment on each other’s writing. [Personally I haven’t found that that has happened much but I’ll talk more about that when I reassess the course at the end]. He also mentions that students were keen to get certificates at the end (which led to a newspaper writing that “professors print their own diplomas, who needs Universities”!). Wiley has also explored using gaming in teaching
The keynote was given in 2009 so a little dated but Wiley sees the future as being disaggregation, while people will consider what is the value of integration (through institutions). HE needs to move away from using policy to defend tradition (as the music industry are doing) and to change. “Don’t innovate to avoid the Doomsday scenario, do it for the students”. It still seems a pertinent warning given the current climate in HE here in the UK.
Other notable resources on the module are Wiley’s article Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit but Not the Effort which looks at practices like encouraging student blogs and their effect on the quality of outputs. The article concludes with an interesting question, one that may split the academic community
Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so?
I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley
The MOOC model takes a look at research gaps and future directions explaining that the model is so new that it has been subjected to little research so far. oherent research agenda would help assess both the overall viability of the model and the conditions under which it might achieve its potential. Some specific pedagogical issues and questions given are:
How can a MOOC support deep enquiry and the creation of sophisticated knowledge;
What is the breadth versus the depth of participation;
Can participation extend beyond those with broadband access and sophisticated social networking skills;
What are the processes and practices that might encourage lurkers, or “legitimate pe ripheral participants”, to take on more active and central roles;
What is the impact or value of even peripheral participation, specifically the extent to which it might contribute to participation in the digital economy in extra-MOOC practices;
What strategies can maximize the effective contribution of facilitators in particular and more advanced participants in general;
Is there a role for accreditation, if any, and how it might be implemented.
I’d like to reflect on these questions more after I’ve finished the course.
Last week I tuned in to JISC/HEA Video in Teaching and Learning Webinar series for an Adobe Connect session on Flipping the lecture. I’ve mentioned the flipping lecture idea before and was keen to hear more. The webinar was presented by Carl Gombrich, a lecturer at UCL. Carl, a self proclaimed ‘late started’ when it comes to technology talked about the Echo 360 lecturecast ‘Five Steps to Successful Flipping’ he gave at the HEA assessment event in UCL. The lecture cast and notes is available from his blog.
Carl Gombrich webinar
Carl basically used a Web cam and Echo 360 http://echo360.com/, a Leader in blended learning and lecture Capture Solution, to present a lecture. Carl also invested in a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet which allows the lecturer to draw on ppts, write mathematics formula etc.
Carl approach is to record the lecture in advance then ask students to view the lecture before the time table slot. Getting them to do this can be problematic but he encourages them to watch it by asking them to write 3 questions relating to the lecture. They also need to jot down when in the lecture (the timeslot) the questions arise. Doing this not only ensures students watch but reflection on the questions is a learning process. As Carl explains “one of the most important things in learning is asking the right questions”. The questions are then uploaded to a community space (wiki, VLE etc.) and then there is a poll allowing students to select their top 10 questions. These questions are addressed in the face-to-face timetabled lecture slot.
Working in this way not only allows more reflection and engagement but it also helps teaching get back to more personal relationships.
Carl then shared some thoughts on the good things about working in this way: students get their questions answered, there is better engagement, submitting questions is part of the formative assessment, time is freed up. And the bad things: there is always a worry that the kit won’t work, some lecturers are self conscious, it takes extra time (but don’t we owe it to them – they pay for teaching – later on you can reuse sessions).
It was really refreshing to hear someone who “just doesn’t care about the technology” but cares about the reaching talk about how the flipping lecture idea could work in reality. Over 60 people attended and the moderator declared it the highest attended JISC/HEA Video in Teaching and Learning webinar to date.
There were a few technologies mentioned in the chat of the session that I intend to follow up including Presentations2go, which lets students write comments on the timeline directly, then discuss them.
“A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” Open Knowledge Foundation
The opening TED talk by Tim Bernes Lee is primarily an advocacy talk for open data. Tim talks about how the community feel that was around at the start of the web is similar to the community feel now around open data. While people he asked people to put their documents on Web many years back he now wants people to put their data on the web. This is primarily because “you can do all types of stuff with data” and you can link it up – linked data. He explains that the more things you get to link together the more powerful it is. Tim ends by encouraging a communal shout of “Raw Data Now!” because “data is about our lives“.
It was an enthusiastic talk but lacked depth: no discussions of what exactly it is and the reasons why people might to or not want to be open with their data or the challenges that they face in doing it.
The Wikipedia entry offers a better overview exploring the roots of open data (e.g.Mertonian tradition of science, the open movement), the lack of an agreed definition, commercial issues and the ‘reluctance’ to put licences on data – which causes uncertainty. The arguments for and against open data are contextual and often depend on the type of data and how it can be used. I see the two key arguments for open data as being the use of public money to fund research (i.e. we paid for the data) and the advancement of science through collaboration. The arguments against open data are less clear but centralise around safety, commercial and reputation incentives for controlling data use and the cost of preparing data for publication.
One of the more interesting resources for the module is the data.gov Web site and their open data community section. This is the US government Web site which was launched in late May 2009, part of the process of “rebuilding confidence in government and business” (Aliya Sternstein). The site was a forerunner for the uk data.gov.uk one which appeared in beta version in September 2009 and went live in January 2010. The open data community section of the data.gov site is primarily a series of forums and blog posts looking at international governmental data sharing.
There was also the Open Data Commons which comprises of a set of legal tools to help users provide and use Open Data. This includes licences (additional licences to CC) and dedications. The site was set up by
Jordan Hatcher (who I actually worked with on the JISC PoWR project) and was
transferred to the Open Knowledge Foundation in January 2009.
Other resources include a list of where to find open data on the Web (e.g. CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), Infochimps, OpenStreetMap and more) – very handy. The comments add a lot of good resources too. There are also details of the New York Times linked open data work and a link to the Linked data site which provides pointers to resources from across the linked data community. Good to see a list of tools there including tools for publishing and consuming linked data and for end users.
The whole ‘open data’ movement is becoming so huge it was almost impossible to give a snap shot by just a few resources. I still feel there is so much to learn and then there is also so much discipline specific data/tools too. Phew!
