Thought I’d share what I mailed earlier today and ask for your feedback…

I think it’s important to realise that activating the students is often a challenge, for all of us. Sometimes, my students can’t get enough and don’t want to stop working. Sometimes, it feels like I’m talking to bags filled with sand. The important thing is to keep trying: falling back in old, safe habits is not a solution – it just hides the problems.

A talk with the students on why they don’t engage can help, but can also turn into a pseudo-psycho-analysis that gets you nowhere.

We train students from age 6 to sit still, be quiet and listen. Those who do well at that in schools end up at the university. And then we wonder why they are not active

My main point: don’t think this is easy or always works for anyone. Keep trying. That’s much better than not even trying…

What do you do to make your students participate actively? Or, if you’re a student, what makes you engage?

Deadline for applications: 30 June 2013

From the official text:

We are looking for a candidate with expertise in applications of computer science in digital humanities. A successful candidate will already have obtained excellent research results in the area of applying computer science techniques in research applications in the digital humanities. For the applied computer science techniques, examples could be data mining, or archiving or disclosure of information from large e-archives, or human-computer interaction, or visualisation techniques, or e-learning. Concerning the applications domains, examples could be the Arts, or the Social or Instructional Sciences. Research experience with the application of multiple techniques from computer Science and/or with multiple application domains in the Humanities or Behavioral Sciences are considered are a strong added value of the application.

The official announcement gives more details…

Feel free to contact me for additional details!

One of the reasons why I liked the session is because it was more a working session than a presentation. After a brief re-cap, participants brainstormed in small groups on things one might want to measure in a learning analytics context. Slide 18 below summarises the results.

In translation:

• environment, light, carbon dioxide, oxygen,temperature, colour, weather, air quality, space, familiarity, background noise
• experience, involvement, stress, boredom, well being, fear, emotions, motivation, feeling of being competent, experiencing success, compliments from teachers and other students, security, bullying, acceptance
• duration of instruction, attention, learning effects, learning time, measuring every 10 mins whether you get through, best moments for instruction, before or after break, visual or auditory, result
• physical condition, sleep, eating, brain activity, heart rhytm, movement, teacher and student, breathing, voice, conductance, palm humidity
• web sites (related to learning or not), search activity, how long, relationship with domain being learned, facebook, alertness, thinking steps, brain activity
• social, pairing good with less good students or friends, gender, age, talking, keyword extraction, English or Dutch, space, quantity, interaction, between teacher and student,
• teacher behavior, walking around, interaction, patience, voice, compliments, humour, choice of words, volume, duration, clothes

OK, so this is isn’t perfectly structure, but, obviously, a group of 20 teachers can identify more relevant characteristics in 20 minutes than we will know how to measure, analyse and visualise in the next 20 months

Maybe you have some additional suggestions for things we could also measure?

Someone recommends something to someone else

So, they will design, build and evaluate an application that enables one person to suggest a book, a movie, a course, etc. to another person. Incidentally, it would be interesting to hear about your experiences: how do you typically give or receive recommendations?

(No, we’re not considering software generated recommendations – this is about one person making a recommendation for another person.)

We’ve also started to experiment with badges - as another student tweeted:

Being 'rewarded' with badges is really motivating and on the other hand just fun! #chikul13

—
Sander Voeten (@SanderVoeten) March 02, 2013

This is still a bit in the early stages, but we’re quite excited to experiment with the mozilla open badge system…

So far, students have done brainstorming sessions and developed storyboards. Next Tuesday, we will evaluate paper prototypes in think-aloud tests. You’re very welcome to leave comments on their blogs (or here) if you want to influence their work!

Is this a MOOC? Well,

• I don’t think it’s “massive” by any meaning of the word: there’s about 30 of us at the moment;
• I do think it’s rather “open”: students work together and communicate with each other and the team through public blogs and twitter;
• It’s kind of on-line: we do use blogs and twitter (and diigo soon) to communicate, but we also do face-to-face “studio sessions” most Tuesday afternoons;
• I guess it is a course allright

So, I guess it’s more of an MOoC? Anyway, you’re welcome to join!

(Or you could join LAK13, which is more like a MOOc, I guess…)

“When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker – I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity.”

In the spirit of the topic, I thought I would share my thoughts here and ask for your feedback and comments…

Open standards

It is often tedious, terribly political, takes way too long and I think much of the standards work is too self-centered and misguided in proposing separate standards for learning, rather than just acknowledging that ‘the web is the platform’. However, I do think that adopting open standards is key, in order to avoid lock-in and to enable learners and teachers to use the tools they want in their own Personal Learning Environment.

My favorite example is … plain old email: I mainly use gmail and apple’s Mail client, but can send emails to my students who can use their mail client of choice (hotmail is back with the young crowd!). Very few of use need to worry about SMTP, IMAP and the like. Yet, without these standards, we’d still be stuck in our own islands of email – very few of you will remember how hard it could be to send an email to someone on AOL…

Now, imagine that we could do the same for learning environments: if one of my students would like to use Blackboard and another one would want to use Moodle and I would want to use neither. (In fact, I think both are very broken…) Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all use the tool that we like and still learn together?

Open content

One of the reasons I got started in open standards was to enable the ‘share and reuse‘ of content. The basic idea made a lot of sense to me in the 90′s and it still does: why would each of us start from scratch to author new content? Why do we not make use of what others have already done before us?

This idea has arguably been widely adopted, through the Open Educational Resources movement, though I again worry a bit that this movement has erected walls between ‘learning content’ and ‘the Internet’ and may have actually made it harder for many to make use of the abundance of content on the web.

I often use youtube videos, ted talks, slides from slideshare, photo’s, etc. from the Wild Web. I link to that content. I think that’s fine. I don’t think I should only use Creative Commons licensed content? And I’m a bit at a loss to understand why so few of my colleagues leverage the abundance of Great Stuff out there…

Open to the world

The much deeper and more important part to openness for me is the one about teaching in public, without barriers between ‘the course’ and ‘the rest of the world’. My course sites are wikis, my students communicate about their work through blogs, etc. Some of the MOOCs I participated in had a very similar attitude.

This approach creates very valuable opportunities for serendipity: ‘strangers’ make comments on student blogs and trigger unexpected conversations. This is a Good Thing and something students should learn anyway. My students are mostly engineering students and I think it is important that they learn to interact with society.

This open approach can also help to overcome the feeling that many of my students have that what they do in class is totally disconnected from The Real World. By solving authentic problems, internal motivation gets unlocked. BTW, we have a demofest next Friday to showcase the results of a course on multimedia programming. You’re welcome if you want to join us – we already have five outside guests who will participate in assessment of their work. (As an aside, the students also get to assess me – that seems kind of Fair Game to me…)

What do you think?

This is still a bit rough, but I hope it summarises my thoughts on ‘really open learning’… I’d love to get comments - preferably here, but email, twitter, facebook or google plus is fine too…

BTW, this section of the report will be part of the “freewheeling section”… Not sure what that says about how the report will position really open learning

(The context: trying to identify a bit of ‘flipped classroom’ pre-session material for a session with Gerhard Fischer on ‘cultures of participation’…)

Technology evolves fast. (Right, this should qualify me for the platitude-of-the-week award). Decision makers want to develop policy based on preparatory study work (which takes time) and for a certain time (during which technology has already developed further). The result is that plans are often obsolete by the time they are ready.

I’ve been asked by my university to help prepare policy on how we can deploy technology in education, so I’m kind of sensitive to this problem at the moment. BTW, I’d appreciate pointers to policy plans on ICT in education from other organisations. Or information about the process that lead to these plans…

One thing that often strikes me in this context is how little use is made of technology to develop such plans: most of the discussions and preparation work are Plain Old Face-to-face meetings and reports.

That is where the announcement below comes in the picture: it is part of a program I’m involved in to help prepare future decision makers. If you have a few days to spare in January, you may want to participate in the first session?

Technology for Decision Makers
 
Join renowned specialists such as prof. Gerhard Fisher (U Colorado-Boulder), leading expert in human-computer interaction and computer-mediated learning; dr. Jos Delbeke, director-general for Climate Action, European Commission, prof. Hans Bruyninckx (KU Leuven), coordinator of TRADO, the Flemish policy research centre on transitions for sustainable developments, and many more in a three-day workshop that explores how societal challenges can be matched by cutting-edge technological developments.
 
The workshop is the first in a series of three workshops preparing the new Master of Science in Technology for Decision Makers (MTD) that KU Leuven will launch in January 2014. Participants will get a taste of the new master’s cutting-edge approach of teaching professionals the fundamental drivers and new developments in key technology domains, but also how to embed innovations in a wider ecosystem of markets, organizations, sectors, governments and ultimately societal change.
 
Participants will get the opportunity to interact with experts from academia, business and government in an innovative learning environment.
 
The first workshop will provide an overview of societal challenges, unravel the fundamentals of a key enabling technology such as ICT, explore the dynamics of global energy systems and investigate how our transportation and logistics systems are using state-of-the-art technologies. It consists of three days of lectures, high-level guest seminars, discussion sessions, and workshops:
 
Wednesday 23 January: From societal challenges to the drivers of global energy systems
Thursday 24 January: Energy system scenarios and the fundamentals and outlook of ICT
Friday 25 January: The transportation system of the future
 
Practical details 
Time: Each day starts at 9.00 h and ends at 18.00 h
Venue: Leuven (exact location will be given at a later stage)
Participation fee: 200 Euro (for 3 days, 3 lunches included)
More information: Please contact Erik Mathijs, MTD programme director (Erik.Mathijs@ees.kuleuven.be) or
Alain Smolders, coordinator (alain.smolders@set.kuleuven.be).
Because of the highly interactive approach, the number of participants is limited!
 
Registration: Register before Friday 14 December 2012, by email to Alain Smolders (Alain.Smolders@set.kuleuven.be), including all contact and invoice details.
 
To learn more about the new Master, visit our website: http://set.kuleuven.be/technology-for-decision-makers

This led to a bit of a debate (both in more ‘serious’ newspapers as well as in more tabloid oriented papers and on-line), with most public reactions quite negative.

If you don’t have the patience to read on: I’m rather on the school’s side.

My main reasons to support such an initiative:

• I believe that it is a mistake to keep technology out of our schools: we need to make sure that people learn how to use technology to their advantage. Schools are learning places, no?
• Technology can help to make learning more flexible and fun. By automating what can be automated, teacher time becomes available for doing what people do well and technology doesn’t.

I admit there are some reasonable questions about such an initiative:

• Many raise the issue of price. I think it would be informative to look at the complete picture, including costs saved (less ink on dead trees…). The school in question mentions that they have carefully considered costs and it is reported that ‘No pupils will be left out. Parents who need to can call on a special fund to pay for the ipad’.
• Some mention the danger of lock-in: why only iPads? Why no other tablets. I have great sympathy for this issue – and I have spent much of the previous 15 years in trying to build standards that make technologies from different vendors work together, so that we all have more choice. But the reality is that there are only two tablet platforms at this moment, iOS (i.e. iPad) and Android. Working with a mix of both is not very realistic at this moment for a school.

I also discussed this topic with some real experts – my kids. Not surprisingly, they were not in favour of iPad’s in the classroom.

• They mentioned price – see above.
• They were worried that there are not enough good quality apps. They have kind of a point. I am not sure that everything can be taught with iPads only. But I am sure that there are many things that can be learned in ways where iPad’s can improve the process.
• They worry that kids will no longer learn how to write. Or draw. I doubt that the school experiment is that drastic. More fundamentally, I am not sure that writing or drawing, without keyboards or iPads, i.e. through ink on dead trees, is a skill we need to preserve.

In any case, paper and ink is a technology. It is certainly not completely obsolete yet. But it is much less dominant than it used to be, and, if it were to become obsolete, then why would we continue teaching kids with it?

More fundamentally, my kids assume, like many do, that disturbing the status quo is dangerous. I don’t. Current learning in schools is not all that great, so there is plenty of opportunity for improvement. Everybody seems to want more innovation – but you can’t innovate if you give in to Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.