Monthly Archives: April 2010

I attended the student Parliament today on behalf of Web Services. We had an interesting conversation about where Guildford Online – our portal and learning environments – are going . Some of the highlights:

• A new GO! upgraded environment will be available in May for trials, and launched for the new school year. This will be a fairly substantial redesign, within the limits of the software we’re using at the moment. The current environment is a bit of a mess, and we’ve been working to redesign it to be more useful and convenient.
• Student email is also a bit of a pain. I wanted to make a point here – you should be able to use whatever email you like, but you should always count on having a good college-based email account. We can always reach you there in case there is a problem with your own provider. If you want to forward your email, no problem. But you’ll always have that resource available to you, and it’ll come with a gig of storage and be linked into the exams calendar and VLE environment. It will be genuinely useful – and it’ll be convenient. No logging in – its just there saying “you have new messages” when you log into go. And its yours for life. You’ll always have an address at Guildford or Farnham that lets you keep in touch with friends.
• Passwords: You’ll have one password. No more of this multiple password stuff. Your network password gets you access to everything.
• iTunes: We’re making lectures, videos, podcasts and course materials available on iTunes. If you want to have a look around while you are browsing the iTunes store, you’ll find Guildford college. You’ll find the same info in GO! It’s just a different way to make the material available to you.
• Facebook: We have an “official” Facebook page for The College’s campuses. You’ll see links to them on www.guildford.ac.uk and www.farnham.ac.uk. We’ll be pushing relevant information out to these pages, so become a fan.

Speaking of facebook – what about unblocking it? My thinking right now is that the LRC and study areas are for just that – studying. You don’t want to be waiting forever for a computer while someone tends to Farmville. So we might restrict access to facebook in research/classroom environments, but if you’re using your own laptop or the wifi network Facebook is open.

We want to be more permissive, but make sure that people who need to use computer facilities for study can. Tell us what you think.

And remember – don’t just comment on this article, comment on all of them! We’re tweaking the look and feel – this blogging service will launch for student groups and staff in the fall. We’ll be offering a series of pre-made templates. I’m working on something a little more snazzy for this site .

Videos from Moodlemoot 2010 are now available on the conference web site:

http://moodlemootuk2010.org.uk/videos/ We especially suggest you look at the following talk:
Professor Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University delivers an inspiring talk about his ‘Hole in the Wall’ project.
The Moodlemoot organisers will be adding more videos, so keep en eye out for new ones as they become available!

At the recent MoodleMoot at the University of London, Ross MacKenzie (http://twitter.com/digitalmaverick) gave a presentation on the transition from a proprietary to an open VLE. His presentation provides a great deal of insight into the planning required and where you can take such a system.

Hi Everyone, Brian here.

It’s day two of  the moodlemoot conference. Its been a great experience so far – met a lot of really interesting people and learning a lot about where Moodle is going and how its use can be improved. This will have a big impact on our own Moodle implementation, and its changed my own thinking on a few of the technical and pedagogical issues when doing enterprise-level roll-out.

3:00pm – Closing keynote/plenary: Geoff Rebbeck, Thanet College

The disarming thing about Moodle is that it makes things appear easy. That’s because its intuitive.  As teachers we need to work out the boundary between the social learning space and the personal space.  In the world of FE they are looking at recording what and where the students learn. Information that college needs to provide its programmes. What are the tools and how to they attach? e-portfolio, VLE and whoops, forgot the third.

Passive teachers. Getting it right and getting it wrong is a skill/craft. You acquire it as teachers by getting it wrong. He means to say that we are on a journey of learning the process.  Maturity isn’t all its cracked up to be. Good ideas come from less mature – they come up with new ideas and have fresh perspectives .20-something generation is the “no fear” generation.  they don’t worry if it breaks.

Technology as a means of saving m0oney.  Careful to say that online learning is fine when its done pedagogically well, with attention to course delivery and content. If it is done for the sake of saving money, it’ll go badly. And students will see that its being done cheaply.

The moodle church is a wide one.  Lots of people from different perspectives and long may it last. Lets not get too married to best practice. There is right practice in the right situation. This is the teacher perspective. There is no one all-encompassing strategy.

You can have a personal experience of Moodle through the social community and contribute towards managing your own learning. We now have to tools to achieve that. It mustn’t be merely a repository, students must enjoy managing their own learning as they go along.

As learning technologists, certain skills to develop.  1 A drive to work flexibly. 2. The ability to adapt technology to purposeful pedagogy. Programmers make assumptions that aren’t necessarily true about learners. We have to learn to make up for this deficiency and bend the software to work. 3. Blend blend blend. Getting the mix right of technology and the classroom. How do we extend beyond the classroom environment? Getting people to stop navel gazing in the classroom and look at the time-specific environments in which students work. We’re still stuck on A4 paper as well. We try to use technology as an extension of paper.  Computers are not simply an extension of an office. This is the greatest challenge. How do we do what we do in a culture that is hostile to what we do? They don’t know what the student is doing and complain that they can’t see it. Vector and JISC have to get people to say if you want to unlock the potential of teachers, then you’ve got to stop measuring what they do using 25-30 year old systems.  We are over-managed and under-led.

He’s feeling a bit fighty now, but long may these events last. And that’s it! That’s a day!

2:00pm – Enterprise Moodle – setting up highly reliable moodle  instances.  Although its a highly technical task,  its vitally important.

There are issues around how servers are set up, whether to use physical servers, what sort of database to use, virtualisation (an issue we are addressing) and how to distribute the server load.

Other topics include community hubs, keeping keys up to date when cooperating on secure inter-institutional moodles (on county council school networks for example) and passing courses back and forth between moodle instances. This is tied to Moodle hub servers in Moodle 2.0 – the course can exist in the hub, and can be downloaded for personal use, or enrolled in remotely.

Schools and colleges are able to share learning programmes and resources. Common cartridge will work with Moodle 2.0 as well – this lets us work with publishers.

In the Q&A Jmailer is a good good way to stress test the load balancer – there is an issue of internal speed vs external access speed. But spreading virtual servers over many machines is a good strategy. You can add more Moodle front ends as necessary to improve performance. There will always be a bottleneck somewhere, the trick is to identify and address them.

1:00pm – Philip Butler  ULCC – Learning Spaces: bridging the gap between personal and professional discourses.

A reflection on where learning is going in the 21st century. They’ve been looking at how learners learn. They shouldn’t have to leern how to use systems. Focus is on personalisation. Personalisation pedadogy – how do we group learners?

Personalisation strategy development – use of institutional and personal tools.  Linking to awarding bodies and national frameworks.

Lifelong learning is a process not a product – this question came up yesterday – when will it be finished? Never!

We are required to understand where learning fits in the learning discourse

This morning starts off with a live Keynote from new Zealand and Moodlemoot 2010 NZ – Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s creator is here via skype!

09.30 – Welcome to day two by Martin Dougiamas

49,000 registered verified sites in 210 countries

- 34 million users
- Columbia just passed Canada in terms of use. US is biggest user, and UK biggest in Europe.

In Moodle 2.0, file storage is all in the database now. Encapsulation and control is now a lot better.

When you upgrade, the 1.9 to 2.0 process could take hours.

Here’s a 10 min video overview of Moodle development:

Beta release is due in a couple of weeks.  Demonstration video of file management. New features include attached license to each file uploaded, either read from existing repository

You can grab files, discussi0ns and google docs. Google docs integrates well with Moodle 2.0 and allows push into the moodle system. There is also a built in portfolio system.

There has been a lot of work in navigation. There have been a lot more changes than planned. Division between creating structure and rendering the structure into something you can see. How it looks and operates can be more finely controlled.

New blocks for navigation and settings.

Settings now appears in one place Course administration appears in each course now – less complicated than before. If you go into an activity such as a choice, you see administration for the choice activity – you can administer from wherever you are. The look and feel of these is very flexible.

Theme design – now much more flexibility since we’ve separated from the code. Making Moodle less of an “ugly duckling” has been a bit of a priority, this has gone well, so we’re happy with it.

Roles and Permissions: New standard roles including manager – for someone who wants to access the course to manage it, but not participate.

To tweak permissions, you’d use overrides. These were overcomplicated. The new approach is more like an operating system like Mac or Windows – hit plus to add a permission, hit minus to remove one

Searches for users now work with Ajax – much faster than before. Its this focus on little things that is the difference in this revision.

Conditional activities – manually or automatically check off tasks

Comments: you can have comments on any page, including blogs. You can have a block with comments on site. Its a good way for students to leave quick feedback and for the teacher to see what pages may be too hard, too easy, too boring, etc. No twitter stream yet, but it won’t be long he figures.

Messaging: you now have complete control over how messages are sent out, using what systems.

Web Services: The API now allows other systems to control Moodle – send information and creating courses and enrolments.

Mobile apps: 2.0 will have a purpose made, secure system for android and iphone that allows you to access select functions.

Community hubs: BIG thing Martin has wanted to get to. At first he thought putting these neat tools into peoples hands would change education. It hasn’t. Most people use 5 per cent of Moodle capability, which is fine. What he wants to do is push examples of best practice. The idea here is that you can publish a course to a Moodle hub. All Moodle sites can be hubs. Its a directory that stores copies of courses that are sent to it. Kind of like an iTunes store. It is now quite easy from within a moodle course to search for an example course,  find it and share it.

Teachers don’t tend to share their courses, true – but it only takes one good course.

Communities of practice – getting teachers together to talk about how they use Moodle to teach. There will be a hub at Moodle.org, but there will be a lot of others as well.

The future: Improving on Moodle 2.0, pedagogy and moving towards reviewing code for security, usability, etc. The new core is stable and long term.  parallel to that we’ll be thinking about Moodle 3.

Martin has to run – they are having a Moodlemoot in New Zealand  and its time for the dinner. Drinky drinky.

Hi all,  Brian here.  I’ll be live blogging the event through the day. I hope I provides a little insight into how we learn about VLE development, both technical and in terms of pedagogy.

1:51 – Dr Ross Mackenzie, Strategic Development Manager, The Open University

Back again, we had a little blog trouble. Second session of the day.

Open university began in 2005 deciding to invest in Moodle.

They tend to contribute t0 main releases. He’s Scottish so tends to name OU Moodle releases after scotch whiskeys. They juddle about three releases together at a time.

What sort of release cycle do we see with OU Moodle? They’ve made over 2000 modifications. They try to keep it as stable as they can. Regular requirements gathering and feedback inform how development works. Regular re-prioritisation.

What has OU learned?

1. NO BETA releases
2. Release early and often – commit to your release cycle
3. Your VLE is never finished – there will always be more to do. Helps to be surrounded with good ideas. Thats what drives Moodle development.
4. Never underestimate the traffic. There will always be a bottleneck somewhere. Students are coming back more and more and spending more time.
5. Keep evangelising.  Tell people what you’re doing, what the system can and will do, and where you’re going. This will allow them to use what they have

Some stats:

• 5330 sites on VLE, 579 live
• 648,000 users in database. 180,000 active
• In 24hr period 35,000 – 50,000 unique users
• Concurrency? Maybe 2000-2500

The number will go up. They always go up.

How to adjust?

• 5 web servers load balanced – 1 for cron activities
• all Linux based
• backed up by 2 parallel clusters NFS
• You can add more web servers, but the real bottleneck at the moment is the SAN

How we structure  development: Development > technical testing > user testing > live production

Google apps for Education – the OU are working with them on this. This is a key thing for Guildford as well. We’ll be looking at this in depth.

A Dashboard is being developed for Moodle as well – allows lecturers to see at a glance central things .

Moodle 2.0

Conditional release of materials will be available .  Localisation is a bit of an issue, especially in terms of moving from 1.9 to 2.0. They need to look at options. One of them is to ignore Moodle 2. Another is to adopt it piecemeal. From a Guildford perspective this is not so much an issue, as we’re starting fresh.

Learning and teaching systems road map used by the OU

• iPhone/Android phone site version
• More cloud-based computing
• much more – see the vide0.

Critical thing – whenever we come up with a new idea, they start working with them to spec what they want to do. Feedback has made for a much better specification.

The web site for MoodleMoot 2010 can be found here: http://moodlemootuk2010.org.uk/

10:15 -Professor Geoffrey Crossick, Warden of Goldsmith College and Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of London.

And we’re off!

The university of London adopted Moodle as their VLE as it was a unique solution. Goldsmiths College was part of the early community of users. They needed to develop a VLE that meet challenges for the future. They shared their experiences with others, which was considered a very valuable exercise. They have 6000 users accessing 12,000 courses accessing 6 million pages a month

4 Proprietary and 2 open source solutions were considered. Pedagogical issues were the winning consideration for Moodle. Integrating it with student services, assessment services. Students value the VLE at goldsmith – which is encouraging. They ask for more.

Educational studies – interacting with schools and between students. Case study resources. Excellence in teaching broadcast reward given. VLE is basis of collaborative working. Psychology tutorial in plagerism to encourage good practice. Moving into educationally disadvantaged backgrounds.

Goldsmith has embraced Moodle, and its changed the way in which teaching and learning is developed.

Radical changes in education were inevitable before the crisis. The expanding model of education is unaffordable. Expansion from 8 per cent in university to 43 per cent in university. Either big increase in resources, or more differentiated model of higher education.

We will see a much more highly differentiated HE/FE sector. Private commercial providers will take on a bigger role as funding gets lower and fees get higher. Governments will encourage it. HE will expand, but in a more affordable way. Work based-learning, accreditation will take more precedence.

For the rest of society, online learning will not take place as an enhancement, but as a key mode of delivery. VLEs will become crucial. The challenge will be how to maintain the current momentum of learning enhancement when the key driver will be the attraction that it seems to be cheaper.

Individualisation of Information.  Does this mean private learning? Caution is advised. Every generation believes that its technological change is epochal – what people do is appropriate technology to their social purpose.

The character of education has not changed – people will continue to meet to exchange knowledge. The quality of knowledge will become key.

Distopian vision for learning. Content will in theory be available anywhere. But how do you make money form it? A future in which so much info is available, but not made available as there is no money to be made from it .

The future of access to learning can be very problematic. Whatever happens,. Moodle and VLEs will be crucial to that future .

10:27 – Professor Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University

He’s a Physicist. As a political scientist, I quite like this. Technical delays, please stand by….

Professor Mitra is behind the book “slumdog millionaire” and is possessed of impressive sideburns.

Everywhere on earth, there are places good teachers won’t go.  his project is called the hole in the wall.

Its hard to have good computer teachers because they tend to gravitate towards high paid teaching job.

So what happens when you put a computer in a slum, outdoors? We figure a laptop would last 20 mins in London, outdoors.

He put a computer and a touchpad in the wall, and bricked it in. Like a large ATM. What will happen? Steal it? break it? In 1999 an 8 year old boy was teaching a 6 year old girl how to browse. Cut to video. So whats going on here? Someone might have stopped and showed them – if only for a few minutes. Did this happen? Lets put it in a place where no support is possible. Northern Indian village. Put in local school. No English, no English teacher. Very very rural. New video of results. Translation: after three months 12 year old boy and 3 year old girl – asked for faster processor and better mouse.

How do you know all this? They said, you gave us a machine that worked only in English, so we taught ourselves English. If you teach them the language they will learn to use the machine. the child uses positives to get it done .The Adult says why they can’t.

We teach learners that they need teachers .

23 villages in a funded project. India was a good place for this – lots of ethnic diversity, climates, made for a good sample size. Took five years to do this .

Conclusions: groups of children can use the Internet to learn on their own, irrespective of who or where they are. The charts show a straight upward curve. An office secretary would get a 42 per cent score on a windows machine. The kids got 40 per cent. posh school in New Deli under same conditions in traditional schooling produced the same results. This embarrassed him a little.  What are teachers for? Providing the computer in the school didn’t help. It put them on guard. If you put it in public, make the screen big and visible to passers by (open to all) then all misuse is controlled by society. much better than using software to manage behavior.  In a public space there were no problems.

200-300 children can become computer literate in 3 months with 1 computer. That’s astonishing. Its a good story. Day 1 – big rush of kids ,lots of fights, then bullies take over. Thankfully bullies can’t figure it out and give up. Then the 8 yr old hackers take over . Then the 10-12 year old girls invent administration and management. The whole structure is designed for kids of a certain age – construction sets it up so only small hands and short kids can use it. The cost is about 3 US cents a day. The change in the culture is irreversible and profound. He could monitor the computer from New Delhi and put a note above the computer saying so. In 10 years hardly any computer was damaged.

So what happens if you give them more than a hole in a wall? In 2002 in Hedroba in southern India, where private schools for the poor were widespread. They promise to teach good quality english. knowing english makes a big difference. They cannot get native English speakers. The teachers speak Telegoo (Can’t spell it) this accent is very hard to decipher, and makes getting a job harder.

He gave the kids in this school a computer and a speech-to-text translator. You have to train the computer in your own accent. He trained it to British neutral and blocked the training feature out. Brought it to them and told them to speak into it. It produced gibberish. You have to make yourself understood. They asked “how”? He said “I don’t know”

They managed to train themselves.

Children in self-organised groups can take on self training, art and maths on their own, if you give them basic equipment.

He took on a question- can groups of children complete their schooling on their own? If they can’t, lets see it not happen. Let’s do an experiment where we should there are things children cannot teach themselves.

Question: Can Tamil speaking children learn biotechnology in English on their own?

So he put in a hole in the wall computer in Jan, 2006 in Kuppan. Parents are illiterate, many dead after tsunami.  Downloaded material on biotech from internet and get 26 children aged 10-16 and told them it was quite difficult and they probably wouldn’t get it . He then left. two months later he came back. He pre-tested them beforehand.  asked what they learned – they said nothing. How many times did they look at it?  Answer: everyday. One little girl said, aside from the fact that improper replication of DNA causes disease, I learned nothing.

pretest – 0-30 percent in two months. Tamil speaking, impoverished village

post test 1 – 25 per cent

post test 2 – 30 percent

30 over cent is STILL a fail. So what would it take to make them pass?

So he got a friend to use the grandmother method – just encourage them, say how impressed you are. Two more months and they got to 50 per cent. The same as the schools in New Delhi.

So he went to the most remote place from home he’d been: Gateshead.

He took 32 ten year old and asked if they could make themselves into groups of 4. Each group can use one computer only. You can switch amongst groups, you can spy on other groups and claim it as your own. Y0u can cheat. He gave them 6 GCSE questions and said go to it. Then he left. Best group got all 6 questions right in 20 mins. The worst in 45. They did it effortlessly. They were all native English speakers.

Teacher said “so what?” They copied it from the net! He tried it again two months later and said you can not use computers or share results. They still got it right. The teachers haven’t been teaching the stuff – but the kids kept talking about it.

In Longbenton he asked what do you want to be when you grow up? Initial answers – footballers and fashion model. Entertainers were heroes. They don’t see anything that isn’t from TV. He then showed them www.ted.com and 8 different talks. They’d watch the film form their own groups of 4, with one boffin (just in case). Then they’ll log into one computer in groups of four. They’d invent methods to find things. After 8 weeks they’d changed their answers on what they wanted to be. Lesson it takes very little to change the3 ambitions of children.

Self organised learning environments. Hyderabad and Maharashtra and Newcastle. About 26. The holes in the wall have a little quiz with GCSE questions. he tells them its the most boring part. They go nuts for it and start Googling for the answer. We’ll see the result. It will get us to 30 per cent, but not to pass.  We need a mediator.

Whoops, he didn’t write the book, he was just the inspiration.

He asked for grandmothers who had an hour to spare a week in a guardian article. He got 200, working by video link to India. Mediator is projected as a full size image. This became a socially acceptable system. He has a grand cloud he can beam in. They love the word beam.

Lesson: fault-tolerant tech, high speed broadband, self-organised learning as part of timetables. Curriculum based on questions. Clouds of mediators as part of faculty. Change in assessment. What is schooling? If a 10 year old can pass GCSE, what is learning?

That’s the end of t he first session. My fingers hurt. We’ll pick up soon. Conference gifted Moodle for 7-12 year olds to the professor.

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