The Tao of referencing

I get concerned that we don't teach students enough about the reasons why referencing is necessary, apart from the fact that we din in their ear about plagiarism all the time. I also get concerned about the fact that we teach students rules of referencing that are not strictly logical, but we still get finicky about the students doing them "just so". I think we're in danger of teaching students to obey rules without thinking about the reason for the rules existing. I think our students deserve better than that; we should always be teaching them to look behind things, and to understand the reason for things - to be active in their learning. So here is my view of why we reference, with a note at the end about the game we play.

I think there are four reasons for referencing.

First and foremost is courtesy. You are a member of an academic community. If you use the work of a fellow member of that community, you owe it to them, and to yourself, to say thank you. As a member of this community you should take pride in observing the practice of courtesy.

Second is to enable your reader (me, in this case) to find the material you have used. I may wish to find out more about it. I may wish to check that the way you have used it is what the author intended.

Third, in assignments, it enables me, your tutor, to teach you better, because I can identify more clearly what is your own work and where you have used somebody else's. That means that I get to know your thought processes more accurately, and I can tailor my feedback better to your work. That means you learn more effectively.

Fourthly, and in my opinion least, it's to avoid any issues about plagiarism. Plagiarism is not an issue for most students. It's a big issue for universities because of the rotten few, and because universities are rightly concerned about protecting the quality of the qualifications they offer.

So that's why, as a student, you should reference your assignments. And be proud of doing so.

There is an unfortunate element of game playing to a degree, which is to do with getting the formatting of referencing precisely right, because there are markers who will condemn you to the outer reaches of hell if you get them wrong, even though it makes no difference to your reader's understanding. For instance, the general idea is that when you use somebody's work you put a brief reference to it in the text, and then a full reference in your list at the end of the assignment. In the Harvard system the text reference is supposed to take the form of (name, date)n e.g. (Smith, 2010). Then the end note reads Smith, J (2010) How To Keep Everyone Happy With Your Referencing, Unimportant Press: Nowheresville.

Now if you only refer to one Smith, it's obvious which end reference it applies to. but you still have to put the date. I know this from my own bitter experience (as a student on an OU course):

Tutor: "You must put the date in all text references."
Me: "But if I only have one text by Mr X, it doesn't need the date because it's obvious which reference it refers to."
Tutor: "But if you don't put the date, how do I know which one it refers to."
Me:  (goes and finds a nice comfy wall to bang my head against)

It happens. Sometimes you just have to play the game. Get over it. To know how it's "supposed" to be done in the OU, read the guide at http://library.open.ac.uk/documents/Harvard_citation_hlp.doc (It's a Word document for download.)

 Now go back to the beginning and remind yourself what the real reasons for referencing are.

Stress management

I was asked for some resources about stress management in the workplace, and I had to think for a while about how best to present them. I could just give a list of links and leave the reader to it. But I don't think that would be fair for a variety of reasons.

Stress management is quite a difficult area for getting the balance right. On the one hand, everybody has some stress in their lives, and it's fatally easy to start concentrating on stress instead of concentrating on the job. On the other hand, it's also fatally easy to ignore somebody's complaints, or somebody's depressed demeanour because everybody has stress in their lives, etc, etc.

There has been some interesting work done on counselling in organisations like emergency services. When a crisis happens, it has become standard practice in many places for counselling to be offered to those, like police officers and paramedics, who dealt with it. Evidence shows that many people are better off without counselling. Counselling after a traumatic event can make them relive events that their mind is healthily working at forgetting. On the other hand, many people need, or at least can benefit from counselling after such an event. So it's right that employers should offer it. But, when somebody says, “No, I don't want counselling”, the trick is to know when to accept that, and when to press them to change their minds.

It's also tricky because stress can be good for you. Every performer and athlete knows that a certain amount of stress before an event can help to get the best out of you. Each person has their own level at which helpful stress turns into unhelpful stress, so the key lesson here is to know yourself. Observe when you feel good and when you feel bad. Get used to it, and you will predict it better and be able to react better to your circumstances.

Another factor is that reactions to stress are usually intensely physical. Often your best strategy when stressed is to go for a walk. It gets you out of the situation, and it deals with the chemicals that your reaction to stress has produced in your body. You will get to know for yourself whether, for best effect, your walk need to be a long or a short one, a hard, pumping, sweaty walk, or a gentle stroll – everybody's different.

For some more detailed ideas about what to do, go to:
"Stress Management: How to Reduce, prevent, and Cope with Stress".

If you Google “stress management”, you will find lots of alternatives. This is one of the best I've found.

There is also: “A Useful Approach to Stress Management”, which goes in to how to manage stress within a working team. It's a slightly odd resource because the pages look as if they're supposed to be passworded. If you can't get into it, it will be because they've finally figured that out. While it's there, use it – there are a lot of good pages there.

The same but different

A few weeks ago I spent three days freezing in a hotel in Bangkok. (They had air conditioning, and they used it.) As a result of that experience, I was invited to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town. UCT runs several courses in the field of Healthcare Technology Management (hereafter “HTM”), and the purpose of my going there was to introduce my company's software, PLAMAHS, to the students, and to do some teaching of generic management skills.

It was the first time I had taught outside the UK, apart from doing conference presentations, so a little bit nerve wracking. I've done the multicultural bit in the UK many times, but never faced a class entirely from other countries. Just before I went, I came across an article about cross cultural teaching, quite up to date, which said that us westerners have to adapt our teaching style because all this interactive stuff doesn't go down well with African students. If the teacher tries to draw learning out of them, they won't accept that they are getting value for money. I won't cite the article because I thought it was a load of rubbish at the time, and my sample of 13 students proved me right. though I did have a back up plan prepared in case I wasn't.

My host was Mladen Poluta, director of the HTM programme at UCT. This is me with him at the Rhodes Memorial.

And this is Mladen with his wife Jean, and they are probably the two best tour guides that Cape Town has to offer. They are so proud of their town, and they love to show it off.

I didn't go with theories to teach, though there are plenty of those. it was more of a practical session, how to do managing. I had my own rubric, forged through years of experience, my own and other people's:

- managers know things

- managers create information

- managers shepherd

- managers solve problems

- managers lead

- managers focus

- managers plan

I also had a little list of what managers don't do, or, more precisely, don't take:

- things for granted

- no for an answer (but see Attila the Hun)

- people in vain

- adversity lying down

The reference to Attila the Hun is to "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun" by Wess Roberts. It's about 20 years old now, and it was a great success at the time. Fashions come and fashions go. There's always a new book, a new package, but the basics of good management don't change.There are just different, more modern, perhaps more zesty ways of putting it. In this case, one of the leadership secrets of Attila the Hun is "Don't fight battles you can't win". As one of my students instantly pointed out, "Sometimes you have to". Yes, sometimes you can't take something and you have to resist even if resistance is futile. But the point I was making is that you never go into a situation like that without having had a good look, weighed up the options,  and taken a deliberate decision.

So we did a series of discussions and exercises on each of the areas in my rubric. 

Next exercise. 

And the next one. 

Getting into it now. 


At one point each group had to choose a presenter without using words. This caused some hilarity. 

PLAMAHS slotted nicely into the part about creating information. We talked about the relationship between data and information, and how information is shaped by the requirements of the user. I then linked that on the second day to the focussing and planning areas, using Key Performance Indicators as a framework. 

Towards the end they got an exercise in interpreting data from a report, which stretched their brains just enough.

There was just time for a trip round some of the Cape with my indefatigable guides, Mladen and Jean, on the way to the airport.

And a final stunning view.

Bignor Roman Villa as a tutorial venue

I tutor a variety of courses for the OU. My portfolio illustrates my claim to be a tutorial jack of all trades. Currently I am teaching AA100 The arts past and present, B201 Business organisations and their environments, and U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world.

My background is eclectic. My first degree was in classics, so when the staff team for AA100 suggested field trips as a possible substitute for dayschool appearances, I thought about doing a villa. Classics is one of eight disciplines covered in AA100 and they go large on villas and leisure in the final block. So I fixed up a trip to Bignor Roman Villa, and went there to do the risk assessment visit. That was in March when the ground was muddy. The AA100 dayschool visit happened in May and was a success. I dressed in a toga (an authentic one by the way, sewn and stitched in authentic Roman Lewes, none of this cheap fancy dress rubbish). See the photos here. One of the students commented afterwards that when they first saw it, they thought it was just a gimmick but they were impressed that I used it as a teaching tool at various points during the day to illustrate how things like dress demarcate social boundaries. The toga is not designed for manual work, so anyone wearing one is marked out as above that sort of thing. Some of the students also tried it on during the day, and came to realise quickly what a pain it is to get on – another factor in it not being a manual worker's garb.

The villa has plenty of evidence about daily life for both the manual classes and the leisured. We had the opportunity as well to consider how evidence survives and is interpreted. What can you tell about Roman society from this pot, sort of thing. We were able to look at how the Romans used the landscape and the way they farmed. Interestingly, much of that area is being repopulated with vines, so we have come full circle as the Romans introduced viticulture to this country. We were able to look at mosaic techniques; I had a small mosaic set for the students to experiment with. We were able to look at manufacturing techniques and I impressed upon them how differently everything had to be done in an age with no electrical or even steam power. We looked at diet (for the upper classes fish sauce in practically everything, yuck) and farming practices.

So all in all an excellent venue for a dayschool. As one would expect. Good coffee and wonderful cake in the café too.

My next move however was serendipitous. I had a problem with the date for a tutorial for my environment class. When this problem occurred the only available alternative I had was Easter Saturday. I knew that all the colleges we use as venues would be closed, so what to do. I thought of Bignor, and we duly held a tutorial at Bignor. This was remarkably successful, although when I booked it, it hadn't occurred to me why it would be. The key factor was that we could look at the piece of land on which Bignor stands and compare two utterly different ways of relating to it – ours and the Romans'. Geologically the land between the south and north downs is very interesting. It is part of the Weald-Artois Anticline. The south downs (a few hundred yards south of Bignor) are made up of the edges of layers of terrain broken by a massive upward thrust tens of millions of years ago. The north downs have similar edges. The bulge in between was worn away and an accumulation of soil has formed rich and flat agricultural land which has been farmed continuously since before Roman times. Apart from minor changes in temperature that have affected our summers and winters, there has been hardly a visible change over two thousand years. So this was a magnificent opportunity to observe how two entirely different cultures and technologies interacted with the same piece of land.

One of the key changes happened not exactly at Bignor but east and south of it. Stane Street is a well known Roman road that went just east of Bignor from Chichester to London. In Roman times it was a very important road. Nowadays this part of it is simply not used. So what caused the change? In Roman times Chichester was an important garrison, and the road was intended to allow for the swiftest possible movement of troops and equipment to London. Since then Chichester has ceased to be strategically important, for two reasons. Firstly a gradual silting of the harbour has meant that access to all but small boats has become impractical. Secondly boats have got bigger. With advances in technology in early modern times warships in particular got so big that Chichester, even at its deepest, became useless – deeper water ports were found along the coast at Portsmouth and Southampton, which is where the main roads past Bignor now point.

It was particularly interesting to look at ways in which people in Roman Britain might have had to look after their environment despite their small numbers and relatively low impact way of life. The population of Roman Britain at the height of the occupation is estimated to have been around 3 million. That's about four times the size of the population of West Sussex today. Plenty of room then. We had a look at the furnace for the underfloor heating (used mainly in the dining room). It was a salutary reminder about conditions of life. While the family were enjoying their three or four hour meal with friends, some slave or low paid farm worker was standing possibly barefoot in freezing mud, feeding charcoal to the furnace. The evidence points to charcoal being used rather than just baulks of wood. Charcoal production itself was a big industry, demanding technical skill on the part of the burner to get the temperature of the cooking wood just right – too hot and you got ash, not hot enough and you got very hot wood, but not charcoal. The amount of heating needed meant that an awful lot of wood got used to make the charcoal, and that meant that the wood growing round about had to be replaced if the workers were not to go more and more miles to find it. So the basic art of coppicing – sustainable management of stands of trees - was organised, and ensured the villa owners a plentiful supply of heat when necessary.

We also considered windows as a key feature in the relationship of people and nature. Having looked at the basic Roman art of underfloor central heating, we considered what happened as far as light and holes in the wall were concerned. The question is what did Romans put in their windows. They did have glass, but it was translucent rather than transparent – it admitted light but not vision. They might have had glass in the important rooms in the house – the dining room - but probably not elsewhere. Shutters were employed, but otherwise it was just open air. People were simply used to much greater variation in their living temperature, and having no, or very little control over it. That kind of thing makes for a very different relationship to nature than what we have now.

I wasn't sure whether taking my business students there would make sense, but Bignor is after all a business, and in fact currently has plans for an expansion of the operation with a new visitor and education centre. (Being private ,it hasn't been squashed by a lack of public money.) So I took them there. I gave them half an hour to look round the site, so that they could understand what the business was, and then we had a presentation from the site manager, Lisa, about the new business plans. We had a discussion about what they had learned and what they could see of the business. The most fundamental part – what does the business actually do – was one of the most interesting. It is easy to think of the villa as a historical site, in other words, its historical nature forms its business. But in terms of what people actually come for, it makes more sense in many ways to think of it as a small part of Britain's very large leisure sector. That alters the way you look at what the business needs to offer in order to be successful, because you look at what sort of things people expect to find when they visit a site. It's about “experience”, not just something to see, which forms the focus, but how people are treated while they are there. That gave rise to some fascinating discussion. It related neatly to the course theme “ways of seeing”.

I was then really cruel. I divided them into groups. I gave each group a theory out of those we had worked on over the previous few weeks, and I gave them the task of applying that theory to the business, and coming up with ideas for business plans based on their findings. (One of the theories was isomorphism - perhaps that was a bit over the top.) They spent about half the tutorial on that, an hour and a half altogether, while sampling the café's delicious coffee and cake. At the end of it, all the groups had some clear and pointed ideas for how to develop the business, but many of them said how difficult it had been to apply the theory. I thought they were right on target. They've been working through a variety of theories and a variety of approaches to the business world and their own experience, and about now is time they were getting into applying theories thoroughly to real cases. It's not easy (it is after all a level two university course), but it does repay effort.



The toga seemed suitable attire for teaching B201

One of my students overheard a visitor say to his partner, "Hey, there's a bloke in a toga!!" which gave rise to some discussion about the sales potential of dressing up....

So there you have it. One venue. Three entirely different groups of students, three entirely different subjects. And all found something of value. And great cake.

Bignor Roman Villa

It was a glorious day for an AA100 dayschool at Bignor Roman Villa.





That was lucky because the toga is not the warmest of garments.





Looking good, though the glasses are a bit of a giveaway.


After sending the students round on a tour by themselves (difficult to do a guided tour with the whole group because the rest of the punters can't get past), we spent some time looking at the details of archaeological method. Bignor has a nice little photo album showing how dedicated archaeologists are, with a number of people in wet weather gear digging away in the middle of winter. They reminded me of all the OU tutor-in-a-kagoul videos that we know and love.

The we looked at what sort of deductions we could make about daily life from the evidence we had in the villa. And I pointed people to Lindsay Allason-Jones's book "Daily Life in Roman Britain", which is a very accessible read. I also pointed them to Sheppard Frere's article on Bignor, which demonstrates the kind of academic endeavour that underpins a book like Allason-Jones's. The Frere article is 60 pages long and carries a minutely detailed record of the excavations at Bignor, and is therefore largely indigestible unless you're really determined. But without that kind of work we wouldn't get books like Daily Life in Roman Britain. (Sheppard Frere, C. M. Kraay, Francis Grew, Dorothy Charlesworth, B. R. Hartley, M. G. Wilson, Martin Henig, Christopher Salter, The Bignor Villa, Britannia, Vol. 13 (1982), pp. 135-195. Accessible via the Open University Library.)

I gave the students as exercise to do on continuity and change. Looking at what has changed and what is different is a good way of getting to grips with what life was really like and how it works. One very tiny example is the lack of buttons and zips in premodern times - the way clothes work is completely different now. On a larger scale we looked at Stane Street, one of the principal roads of Roman Britain which passes just east of the villa on its way from Chichester to London. It's almost entirely out of use now. There are roads between Chichester and London, but they are by no means the most important in the country. So the question I asked the students was why. The answer is a variety of things but one of the key ones is that Chichester functioned as a very good port in Roman times and hence was a good place to garrison. As the harbour silted up (so now it does a very good trade in pleasure boats) and as ships got bigger, so the natural places to go became the deeper harbours of Portsmouth and Southampton further along the coast.

We had a look at a map of the whole Roman Empire in my trusty atlas of world history, so we got a good look at how trade functioned to unite the empire and to provide ways of funding the imperial apparatus.

Then we had a few goes with the toga.




This is me doing a bit of open air oratory.






This is Miles, one of the students, looking very senatorial. A purple stripe along the edge signifies a senator. Miles already knows that his name actually means "soldier" in Latin, hence "military" etc.

We had a good look at the theme of leisure and work, given that part of the block material in "Place and Leisure" is about leisure in the Roman villa. One of the issues I wanted to get across was the whole idea of someone's leisure being someone else's work. Supplying food and heat for the owner and his family was a full time occupation for quite a few people. This is nicely illustrated by the furnace outside the winter dining room that supplied the hypocaust. While the family were entertaining inside, some poor sucker was outside, probably barefoot in the mud, feeding charcoal into the furnace. (No photo of that, must get one next time I go.) That issue alone organises a lot of the economic and social structure of Roman imperial times, and to be honest, any time that doesn't have electricity. The daily business of life takes up a lot of effort on somebody's part. The Romans were a highly organised society, with a great ability for large scale and accurate engineering works like roads and aqueducts, and they had a very capable bureaucracy, able to keep the empire functioning for hundreds of years. But nearly everything still worked on muscle power, either human or animal, which makes their achievements all the more remarkable.

Our final activity was a quick look at mosaics; I have a little kit. We looked at the process of making the tiles, then constructing the mosaic. Again one of the issues is the time it took to do everything manually. They reckon that the whole of the long corridor (about 50 yards altogether, of which we can see about half) would have taken six people six months to lay, and the much smaller but more complicated box mosaic, would have taken a person eighteen months. Nice work if you could get it, I suppose, compared to being outside feeding a furnace.

A pretty good day altogether, I think, and thanks are due to Lisa and Karen at Bignor for helping it to happen.

How seriously should we take Avatar?

This is cross posted from my other blog. This is the first time I've cross posted, but I just couldn't decide where to put it. Film goes in A Comfortable Place, stuff about learning goes here. And there are also issues about nterpretation and critique of works of art which will probably bore my AA100 students to tears. So it's here as well as there.

"Avatar" is on my list of all time favourite films. I don't think it's the greatest film ever made, and to be honest I wasn't very taken with the 3D effects. But you don't need 3D to be immersive.There's been a lot of stuff around in education recently about immersive worlds and what they can or can't do for education. The less reflective writing tends to assume that places like Second Life are unproblematically immersive and other environments are equally unproblematically not immersive. But SL isn't immersive if it doesn't engage you. You can be there, and your avatar can be stunning and you can be talking to and interacting with other people, but you can still be aware of the world outside the computer, and you can still be bored, and you can still be checking when the tutorial is going to end, and it is not being immersive in the slightest. By the same token a plain bog standard class in a plain bog standard classroom can be totally immersive if the teacher gets it right. People seem to forget that.

By the same token I found Avatar a totally immersive experience, and that was without the 3D specs on most of the time (because I found them uncomfortable). I thoroughly enjoyed it. I forgot the passing of time. I identified with the characters. I didn't want it to end, and I felt slightly bereft when it did, just like I always used to feel as a kid when I walked out of a cinema.

This is partly about fit between film and viewer. As a viewer, I am very happy to be entertained. I don't need to be thought-provoked in order to enjoy a film. I don't need a deep message. My ever shifting and ever expanding top one hundred contains a lot of films that would make other people wince. They're not in my top one hundred because I think they're great films, but because I like them. I think there are two reasons why I like Avatar. The first is the special effects. Everything works beautifully. Interestingly, the world of Pandora and the Na'vi works better than the rude mechanicals - the diggers, helicopters and firepower - which you might think would be easer to model. And the second reason is the story. Stories don't have to be big and complex in order to succeed In fact very often the simpler the better. And here we have two very simple stories interwoven - boy meets girl and culture clash. Boy meets girl is the simplest of all. Boy meets girl, boy conquers obstacles in the way, boy wins girl. Culture clash is marginally more complex but not much. Boy meets alien culture, boy is attracted by good side of alien culture, boy confronts bad side of own culture, boy and aliens unite to defeat bad side. And that's all there is to Avatar. The green message is there but it's part of the conflict that's there to make the story work, not because James Cameron had a message. So for me it's great entertainment and the right people win.

The question arises of how seriously to take the film. I have to say I don't take it very seriously, though in some circumstances people are right to take it more seriously (see below). James Cameron himself is quoted in the Telegraph: "It's about how "greed and imperialism tend to destroy the environment," he said in a recent interview. "It's a way of looking back on ourselves from this other world."" But this should not necessarily be taken at face value. It is a press interview with a man who knows all about putting bums on seats. I don't believe he really takes the politics of the film all that seriously. And neither do I. It has a "green" message, but the message is there for plot functionality and because it resonates with the market demographic.

I'm now finding other people's reactions to the film very interesting, and wondering whether I need to re-evaluate simply because of the number of people it has upset. The first upset is, I think, badly founded, and based on a misinterpretation of what happens. Progressives are upset at the racist subtext that shows a "primitive" tribe needing a white man to save them. You could read it that way if you wanted to, but I don't see it. What I see is our hero Jake growing through his contact with the Na'vi in such a way that he becomes a different creature. The hero who returns to lead the Na'vi is a synthesis of the best of Jake with Na'vi beliefs and ways. So it's not about western capitalist superiority at all. If anything it's about its limitations. I had a similar dispute once with someone over Tootsie. It's surprising what a ding dong we got into over such a slight film. (It's not in my top one hundred; it would probably be in my top three or four hundred.) The story is difficult and currently out of work actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman to land a short part in a soap, is surprisingly successful, so they extend his contract, leading to the dilemma of how to get out of it, which is eventually resolved. My friend thought it was deeply sexist because it showed a man being more successful as a woman than women could be. I thought it showed that becoming a woman made him learn about the female viewpoint, confront his own masculinity and anger, and emerge a better and stronger person. Hence again it was not "being a man" that made the difference. It was "learning about the opposite". So, although, quite a lot of people have picked up on this idea of Avatar being racist, i don't buy it.

I'm more impressed by the fact that Avatar has upset the American right, the Chinese Communist party, and the Vatican. Any film that can upset those three must have something going for it.

The American right don't like it because of fairly overt references to both the Vietnam and Iraq wars in the context of asking the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of" - John Podoretz, in the ABC News link above. OK, but if you're going to get upset about it, try being a little less imperialist when you do go to war in places like Iraq.

The Chinese don't like it because the theme of forced migration is too close to home for a regime that regularly shifts people off places it wants to dam up or build on. I don't know if the film has actually sparked protests, or just that they have moved pre-emptively to ban it. They've been quite clever though, taking it out of 2D cinemas while allowing it to remain in 3D. That way they can say they haven't actually banned it, just that it wasn't doing well in the 2D cinemas. I assume that there aren't that many 3D cinemas and they are located away from potential trouble spots. It's a very good illustration of the dance of power that the Communist party in China is constantly engaged in with its own people. While remaining quintessentially authoritarian, in fact downright repressive in outlook, it is realistic enough to know that it can't upset too many Chinese too often.

And finally the dear old Vatican. Some headlines say the Vatican hates Avatar. Here is what Osservatore Romano actually said: "It has a great deal of enchanting, stunning technology, but few genuine or human emotions.... Its significance is in its visual impact rather than in the story, and in its messages, despite the fact that they are hardly new... The plot descends into sentimentality... and "a rather facile anti-imperialist and antimilitarist parable which doesn't have the same bite as other more serious films." But it ended by saying the spectacle was worth the price of a cinema ticket. All that from the Telegraph. There's not much there that I would disagree with, apart from thinking myself that there's nothing wrong with going to see a film just in order to be entertained. At least they haven't ordered the flock to boycott the film with missionary zeal as they try to turn the world back the way they think it should be - medieval. So basically the Vatican isn't being as reactionary about Avatar as it is about many things.

My favourite links in the OU

I'm only allowed 20 :-(

April fool: a lesson for all my students

I got this via Mediactive. Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) tweeted on April 1st 2008: "What I like about April Fool's Day: One day a year we're asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365."

Doing things to women's bodies

In pictures I mean. We've had a bit of a debate in AA100 this year about the relationship between art and reality, focussing particularly on male artists' treatment of the female form. Nowadays that sort of concern focusses less on painters and more on photographers, and their ubiquitous use of Photoshop.

This was very well illustrated lately by Hacker Factor, who went into the technicalities of how you could tell when something had been Photoshopped, using an illustration from the Victoria's Secret catalogue highlighted by "Photoshop Disasters", in a post entitled "Body by Victoria". It's a very instructive read from the point of view of seeing how it's done.

It also raises important issues about what women are and what we are trying to make of them. Much of the Photoshopping was just tidying up (depending on what you think about nipples showing through clothes). But Hacker Factor demonstrates that they lightened her skin tone. The unanswered question is why.

It's also instructive to compare how the owners of the images react. Victoria's Secret reacted openly and fairly. Following the exposure by Photoshop Disasters and Hacker Factor, they revised the image. They left some of the Photoshopping in but it wasn't as bad as before. See also "Still A Secret".

That is in stark contrast to the behaviour of Ralph Lauren, when found by Photoshop Disasters to be indulging in similar behaviour - they slapped a DCMA take down notice on them. You can't see it there any more, but you can see in on Boingboing. So Ralph Lauren are saying they can make women look any way they want, regardless of the woman's real shape, colour, or anything else.

It's interesting that the Liberal Democrats' recent campaign on Real Women was derided in the usual quarters as meaningless. But when photographers and companies are routinely doing this kind of thing to women's bodies, there must be serious implications for gender and power issues. And those impications must be taken into account when studying those issues in book 1 of AA100. (And I note that a couple of weeks ago the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Olay advertisement featuring Twiggy, which was one of the targets of the campaign, was indeed misleading.)

Employability

Following my last post about what's the point of studying the humanities, and the issue of employment skills, this video makes my point for me nicely.



It's worth watching all the way through, but - health warning - it has a vibrant sound track. The relevant bit starts at 40 seconds in, and discusses how jobs are changing. We don't know what jobs we will want skills for in ten or even five years time. So what the economy needs is people who can think and who know how to learn what they need for new jobs. Sounds like good OU graduates to me.

(There's an update by somebody different at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8 but it's not so relevant for my purpose and the theme tune isn't nearly so funky.

What's the point of studying the humanities?

This is a much rehearsed question, particularly in the light of research that suggests that arts graduates are less successful than any other discipline in turning their qualifications into high salaries. In fact it is estimated that some arts graduates would have done better to start work at 18 or even 16. E.g. Male arts graduates may never recoup degree cost.

The problem bothers me a lot as I teach humanities, and is brought into focus by starting out with this year's batch of AA100: The Arts, Past and Present students, most of whom are at the beginning of their OU careers. Should I counsel them to give up their degree now, and go and work in a call centre? Lovely mates, flexible work, meet interesting people, annoy them intensely... No, of course not. But what's the point? How can our humanities students get the best value from their degree, in whatever sense we mean the word value? Particularly when starting with AA100 which has such a wide variety of disciplines. (It's designed to introduce the student to all eight disciplines within the faculty - classics, art, literature, history, history of science, religious studies, music, philosophy.)

I discussed this recently with my students and tried to relate it to the skills they're already learning as they go through book 1. The course is quite well organised in that each chapter has learning outcomes, and the alert student can track their skills as they go through the book. I try to get all my students to anchor their learning by returning, at the end of each chapter to the beginning and analysing what they've learned against the stated outcomes. (Do they all do that? I don't know, but I have my doubts.) The task here is to set the chapter learning outcomes in the wider context of the overall purpose of the course.

Asking the students why they're studying is too wide a question. Twelve students will give twelve different answers, and I wanted to finish by lunchtime. I focussed the question by pointing out that everybody here, even those paying the full retail price, was supported by other people's money in the form of the grant the OU gets from taxes. So I asked them how they could justify spending other people's money on this course. I instantly got the answer from several that they had paid taxes all their lives, and were just getting back what was rightfully theirs. That didn't change the question, just turned it round. If someone is a net tax payer, then what is the justification for somebody else taking their money to enjoy themselves doing AA100.

They got the first answer relatively quickly - it improves employability. Several were intending new careers. We left aside for the moment what exactly they will get from this course that will make them more employable. They got to the second answer a bit more slowly and hesitantly, but eventually they argued that in some way they would be better as people. I became Socrates at that point. "But what do you mean by that?" My answer to that is that people become better citizens. I know that that is very disputable, but to me it's the best way of making the purpose concrete. I think that in saying that I'm not parting company with the liberal tradition of education in the sense that it's something people use for their own purposes. I do part company with the misuse of liberal tradition that implies that education for its own sake is essentially purposeless.

A word of definition before I go further. I'm aware that "good citizen" is a weasel phrase. It can mean anything to anybody. I know that in government speak a good citizen is a compliant one. But in Rob speak a good citizen is a critical one.

The idea of education for its own sake is a fine one, and one to be upheld. But I'm not sure if I can justify spending other people's money on it. I'm also suspicious because some, though by no means all, of the roots of liberal education are class based. They come from the days when leaving the ruling of Britain to largely uneducated landed gentry was no longer sufficient, and what was needed was an entire class of relatively well educated gentlemen. (Note the lack of women.) Knowledge of the classics became one of the markers that distinguished gentlemen from the rest, and enabled us to expand the machinery of government so that it was capable of managing, first of all the great unwashed of these shores, and then the even greater unwashed of the countries we colonised. There's a whole history of the mechanics of imperialism hidden in there which I lack the wherewithal to unravel, but it leaves me uncertain about anybody's right to pursue education for its own sake at somebody else's expense without any other sense of purpose.

So, having established that in my opinion there must be a sense of purpose, here we return to how that purpose is to be expressed in learning. I think here that humanities programmes in general have a lot to answer for. I'm ready to be corrected on this - my smapling is purely happenstance - but my impression is that far too many arts graduates leave university without having a really good idea of what they can do. When an employer asks you what you can do for the company, the answer, "I can read Latin and appreciate Mozart" doesn't really cut it. It used to, for running the empire, but we live in a different world now. So what can arts graduates actually do?

I think that the skills and qualities for being a good worker and for being a good citizen are pretty much the same thing. The issue is how to develop them and how to articulate them. In one way AA100 students are lucky - they have a wide range to choose from. Each of the eight disciplines has its own core skills and concepts, all of which can contribute to the student's development as a critical thinker and problem solver. Philosophy - understanding the structure of an argument and the ways in which language can deploy meaning; history - the organisation and evaluation of documents (and in particular the ability to understand what is not said); art - understanding visual representation and how people react to, and position themselves in relation to, social and historical movements; etc, etc.

At a more detailed level, let's take the learning outcomes for one of the chapters in book one of AA100. I call them learning outcomes, but actually only chapter 1 gives you learning outcomes as such. All the other chapters outline the aims of the chapter, rather than the outcomes for the student. I don't know why. It makes a useful learning exercise though: I get the students to translate the chapter aims into learning outcomes.

From p198 of Waterhouse, H (2008) The Dalai Lama, in Moohan, E (ed), Book 1: Reputations, Open University: Milton Keynes:

"This chapter will enable you to:
l explore the development of competing reputations
2 consider the role and reputation of the Dalai Lama
3 study the past in the light of a religious worldview
4 engage with the beliefs and practices of a non-western religious system
5 use visual and documentary evidence."

I'll miss out the intermediate stage of translating this into actual learning outcomes. All of these can be subsumed into higher order outcomes, ultimately emerging as skills, concepts and qualities that enhance the student's ability to work well or participate well.
- understand how selective representations can be, and hence the need to gather different points of view and understand their motivations
- understand group dynamics and group representation
- understand how cultural differences influence people, and the way they think adn react to other people
- evaluate visual and documentary evidence in all sorts of situations
and so on.

At an operational level they translate into "transferable skills", and we see a slight parting between employability and citizenship. But it is still important that students can turn the study of the Dalai lama, Cézanne and Shostakovich into transferable skills. Some of the skills are more generic, are not mentioned in the chapter summaries, but are equally important for both spheres:
- being able to search for and evaluate information, electronically as wella s physically
- being able to set out an argument in writing and use supporting evidence
- being able to meet timetables and deadlines
- being able to work with other people - which we do in tutorials, both face to face and online.

The books are less help here, because of the lack of relevant learning outcomes in the chapter summaries, which makes it more important that students are aware of what they are developing for themselves. Emerging with an OU degree demonstrates that you have the skill and the ability to organise yourself and achieve goals. There are still some benighted employers who think an OU degree is worth less than a brick one. Fortunately more nowadays realise that putting yourself through a part time degree means you have just the kind of self discipline and commitment they are looking for. These attributes are not specific to humanities degrees, but sometimes humanities students forget to articulate them.

That's why, when one of my students, badly behind with assignment one, asked if it would be all right to leave it and go on with assignment two, I said that was a bad idea/ I said it was their choice (I always do - I don't dictate to my students unless the rules say I have to, and sometimes not even then). But I said I wanted to see the assignment. They did complete it and hand it in, and it was good. Now they're working on assignment two, and they are also, because of making themselves do that task, a step closer to getting a decent job.

In the sphere of citizenship there is a different emphasis. The ability to assimilate complex information is crucial as in employability. People need to be able to work out for themselves who they believe on issues like climate change, terrorism, international relations and so on. The ability to make complex moral judgements is also salient. Questions like what should our policy on recreational drugs be need to be debated and answered on the basis of values as well as evidence. These abilities tend (I simplify greatly here) to emerge more from the fine arts, which deepen the ability for self knowledge and reading your own and other people's emotions. This cannot be taken for granted though and neither can the assumption that a finer knowledge of yourself and other people will make you into a better sort of person. I think that there are still remnants of that view around largely for historical reasons. It used to be taken that knowledge of the classics and the fine arts unproblematically translated itself into being a better person (or in the language of the time a gentleman). This understanding was rudely shattered in a single historical moment not that long ago. At the end of the second world war Allied armies liberated the concentration camps. The liberating armies were largely conscript armies, containing numbers of officers and men who had had a liberal education and fervently believed in its benefits. They had to confront the dreadful reality that they were taking into custody German officers who would do the most unspeakable things during the day and then go home and read Goethe and listen to Beethoven in the evening. Some people have found it very hard to accept that basic truth that any moral development requires a choice. That , I believe is one reason why arts students still leave universities relatively ill equipped in terms of understanding what they have achieved - some of their teachers still believe that it ought to be taken as read, when in fact it cannot.

Several of my AA100 students are reading this, I hope, and this last piece is addressed to them. All that above, the need for a sense of purpose, the reasoning behind employability skills, and the reasoning behind citizenship skills, are why I want you to be working at two levels.

"By the end of this chapter, I will be able to use some technical language used to describe and discuss music" (chapter 6 of book 1) and

"by the end of this chapter I will be better able to understand and deploy the technical language of any field I have to familiarise myself with; hence I will be better able to adapt myself to any new situation".

That way at any time you will be working on the skills of the moment and also aware of how those fit into the larger picture of what you will get from this course and from your degree. I will welcome comments from anyone on this piece, and particularly from my students. If my students do comment, please remember that, unlike the group forum, this is a public place.

Successful learning

This is the first meme I've ever done. Not really a meme because I didn't get tagged. So I don't really know what to call it, but Pat did this on her blog, and challenged her readers to answer these questions. So I have.

What is the most important thing you do to grow yourself as a learner?
I work on learning all the time, not on the knowledge or concepts of what I'm learning - I work on *how* I'm learning, how I can do it better, consciously and continually. I teach a lot of level one university students, and whether they've been in learning recently or not, I find that this is often the most difficult thing to get across - they need to consciously learn about learning as well as learning about the subject matter.

What do successful learners do that make them successful?
It's a very personal thing, different in every case, I think. The thing they have in common is that they have found it. I just keep plugging away. And I set great store by learners taking charge of their learning, especially when they're my students. I actively teach basic student skills, like how to fillet a book for the assignment answer. And I teach them that it's all capable of being fun. And if it isn't then, get interested. That was a lesson told to me by my Latin teacher when I was 13. He told all of us if we weren't interested in Latin to get interested. Possibly the only lesson I really learned when I was at school. I found that it worked.

What do successful learners do to maximize their efficiency?
Again it's a question of what works for you. many people go for walks, limit their time at their learning, leave it at a good stage. Some - not enough in my opinion - keep a journal. I'm quite lazy about that. I've kept journals over the last fifteen years or so (ever since I became a teacher) but it's haphazard. I'll keep one going for a few months, then leave it for a year. In the last couple of years, this blog has served that purpose, but there's a lot of more personal stuff that I wouldn't put down here.

What hinders your success as a learner?
I get bored very quickly. Some of those who know would put that down to spending too much time online, but that's not the case. I've always been like it, especially when I was at school. If were fifteen now, I would probably have been labelled ADHD by now. I'm actually a slow learner. I imbibe facts and stuff at a fairly fast rate, but then I have to wait while I make sense of them. making sense doesn't seem to be something I have much control over. I need to wait while it kind of composts down, and then I can go to a place where I'm not going to be disturbed for an hour or two and sketch it out on a piece of paper. the best places for doing this, I find more and more nowadays, are cafés. There's enough clutter going on in the background to absorb the butterfly part of my brain, and nobody is going to interrupt me because nobody knows I'm there.

What do you do to get over that obstacle?
I have learned to pace myself and to be patient with the times when everything is whirling round in my mind with absolutely no shape or form.

What do successful learners do when they are not motivated?
Get really ratty.

What do successful learners do when they do not know the subject well?
The first thing I do is find out if there's a Dummies book on the subject. I go for something really simple so that I can get the whole picture, and then go for the details.

How does your attitude affect you as a learner?
I've learned persistence. I think that's the most important attitude I have; I just keep going.

To what do you attribute your learning success?
Am I successful? I'm 57 and my learning journey is nowhere near complete. In terms of certificates, yes, I am successful, but I know I am nowhere near the soul of the things I have been examining. I'll keep learning till the day I die. And maybe there are libraries in heaven.

What I got from elearn

What have I gained from this conference? Lots of things that still need to be articulated - things to do with online and blended learning mostly. A lot of thinking about informal learning. The insight that the dichotomy between informal and formal learning implies that students learn differently in the two situations, which I don't think is true. I've been chucking the idea back and forth with lizit for the last couple of days and if anything I'm more confused now than I was before.* But, wherever my thoughts are taking me I think it's worth probing a bit more. I'm concentrating on what the literature says people do when they learn (which is the context of the wildfire activities stuff, which is how I got interested in it). I want to look at how that relates to formal learning contexts and whether and how much we could change formal systems to make more effective use of that.

And I have the germ of an idea about how to blend informal and formal learning contexts, which will remain mysterious for the time being while I work on it.

*That's not to imply that lizit is a bad teacher, far from it ;-)

And I got to meet a beautiful city.


Reflections



Local transport. I didn't have the opportunity to try one.



Houseboats



The Lost Lagoon



Locals

Elearn Friday

Oh dear, feeling crap today. Still haven't got over the jetlag. I wake at four every morning. I have survived well so far, but last night was awful. Now I am supposed to be presiding; which means paying attention. As it turns out I presided two really good performers.

James Helfrich - Leveraging Interactivity to Increase E-Learning Effectiveness.
It's about effectiveness - many definitions of interaction, two basic approaches computer centric, and user centric. User centric categorised as observe, choose, perform - each broken into sub categories. Technology centric - toggle select, many select, text, voice, immersion - also subcategorised. Under Observe, pace is much more effective than watch - students take much better notes, and notes result in better learning. Mayer 2003 observed that just having a continue button to press resulted in better performance, because it gave the student control.

Gagne taxonomy of learning objectives. Puzzling result "watch" is better for higher level problem solving than "do". Suggestion is that "do" allows people to skip important things. Students believe voice feedback more than written feedback. (I wonder if I could do assessment summaries that way.) Taxonomy is amalgamated from Schwier Sims Burgon.

M.R. (Ruth) de Villiers, University of South Africa, South Africa - Applying controlled usability-testing technology to investigate learning behaviours of users interacting with e-learning tutorials' UNISA sixth biggest university in the world. Question was what is added value of usability testing. Real enthusiasm about the process of finding out what students actually do. Some pie charts showing difference of time spent on different tasks; same marks. One was really haphazard, but it worked. The point is that, whatever the pattern, it works for them.

Part of testing was to get people to think aloud - this didn't work well, participants were inhibited. So got them to work in pairs or groups, and they talked to each other. Could still assess time on task for individuals. Student P5 was the real test - he just wasn't an elearner. No general conclusions yet about learning, but a promising method.

Ben Daniel, Virtual Learning Community Research Group, Canada; Richard Schwier, University of Saskatchewan, Canada - A Consideration of Learning Processes in Virtual Learning Communities. Two broadly defined learning variables, intentional and incidental. Really good presentation that I'm still digesting. I went to the conference site to download the paper, and the link pointed me to another of Ben Daniel's papers. A very interesting one but not the one I wanted. But it's available at vlcresearch which is a website worth bookmarking.

Valerie Greenberg, Darlene Carbajal, University of the Incarnate Word, USA - Using Convergent Media to Engage Graduate Students in a Digital and Electronic Writing class: Some Surprising Results - blogs twitter SecondLife - reshape how we exchange experience. Forces tutors to revisit instructive interaction. Study on 13 students, 8 male 5 female. Blogs anchored collaborative learning - shared perspectives, common goals and knowledge, and opinion and interpretations. Provocative assignment was around SecondLife - had very strong emotions about SL. Woznitsa on emotions. Why was she surprised that students didn't like SL? I asked her thatand she didn't answer (she answered a different question. Just like students do sometimes.)

It's the afternoon and I'm now stuck listening to two presentations I'm not interested in. I offered to preside, but the one I was interested in has cancelled and been replaced by another one.

Today's fact I didn't know before: Ebbinghaus proposed the curve of forgetting in 1885.

Kui Xie, Mississippi State University, USA; Fengfeng Ke, University of New Mexico, USA - Understanding Deep Learning in Asynchronous Online Discussions - does it occur and how do we know? Learning as acquisition; learning as participation. And how do you test it? Scardamalia - learning as knowledge construction. Table from p3263 of this presentation may be useful for marking scheme for collaboration. One to keep an eye on as they are just beginning antoher phase of their research.

Elearn Thursday

I have officially designated this the no show conference. The number of presenters not turning up to give their presentations is quite shocking. There was one session today, fortunately not one I wanted to go to, where three presenters were booked for the hour, and none of them turned up.

Martin Ebner, Graz University of Technology, Austria
OLPC (one laptop per child) primary school children using, e.g. ReckonPrimer for number learning - one aim to pilot for roll out in developing world - that struck me as instantly a very diffcult aim, especially when he went on to say that one of their biggest problems had been connectivity. If it's a big problem in Austria, what's it going to be like in the developing world. I dont' have any doubt about the OLPC model, but I have serious misgivings about the way some people think they can set about implementing it. It's the same problem as elsewhere, an assumption that we can unproblematically export western technological models to other places. To be fair to this speaker he made the problems of cultural export clear, but he did seem to be making easy assumptions about the technological model.

Reuben Dlamini, Ohio University transforming the walls of the classroom - the three paradigm change for FutureMinds Initiative. He described the fundamental ideas underlying the initiative (e.g., mindset change, invention process, broad stakeholder ownership, consensus-building process, and participatory leadership), and the strategy by which the FutureMinds Initiative operates. This seemed to me to be at least partly about recognising the fact of informal learning and its power; and about the massive changes needed within the school system in order to engage effectively with it. This pushes me further into thinking that "informal learning" is entirely the wrong phrase for what it refers to. It means what learners actually do regardless of the formality or informality of the situation. Interesting how you see things through your own lenses - I'm thinking a lot about informal learning at the moment, so I see it everywhere.

Zehra Akyol, Suleyman Demirel Universitesi - Design Tips for Online and Blended Learning to Develop an Effective Community of Inquiry. This was based on teh Garrison model - social presence, cognitive presence, teaching presence, back to Athabascaaaa. Research on how this all developed in online and blended learning context. The big issue taht came out is that every COI is different, therefore needs effective design before start


Michelle Scribner-MacLean, UMass Lowell Graduate School of Education, USA; Heather Miller, Walden University, USA - Online Team Teaching: Strategies for Success for Creating an Online Learning Community
Students demanding and needing immediate feedback. We're being paid to facilitate course content, but reality is students bring their admin needs. Team teaching helps here. I was hoping to compare this with my experience on AA100, but I rapidly realised I couldn't call it team teaching because we don't actually do that. It's cluster teaching in which a certain amount of co-operation goes on, but it's really three different groups in the same space, not a team approach at all. I expect some clusters will develop a team teaching approach but it's not mandated.
Elements of a successful team -
- open to the approach
- similar educational philosophies and styles
- strong technology background, esp within course platform
- instructors see benefit of suggestions to improve their teaching

Syllabus is online, instructions are online; dso it's all there for the students to get on with - but teaching is still active.

DIfficulties
- if there is not clear communication between teachers (could do more of that)
- if one teacher is feeling more burdened and taking additional responsibilities for the course
- if students' assessments are being evaluated more quickly by one teacher. (This is apparently a big issue for the students.) Also need to keep interventions roughly equal.

Strategies
- reach out by phone calls or emails, especially at the beginning
- provide a lot of initial support
- set up personal pages with resumes etc

Building assessment criteria together; with rubrics and checklists; is very important. That doesn't work because of the division of labour on AA100. The mods do it on T183 and TT280; can we blend that with tutoring responsibility? Of course we can - that's what they have done.

Dina Kurzweil, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, USA - A Missing Link - instructional design. Or I should say on instructional designers. It's all about relationships; workign *with*. Status issues, teamworking issues, etc. One designer in the audience is introduced to each new faculty, spends a whole day with them, and team teaches with them, so isn't seen as "the tech person" any more. If you consider yourself as a peer, people respond to that.

Renata Vincoletto and Hawa Sydique, Camfed International - empowering young women in rural area in Zambia - through education to university or to business. Introduced new technology a year ago. Goal to train 200 girls in skills like IT, business, etc. A very interesting facet was online mentoring - allowing the women to be mentored by successful entrepreneurs in the UK. There was no electricity supply. Entire system with 18 terminals, 2 servers, projector, printer, modem - less than 1500 watts - less than a kettle. They started with a generator, but are now moving to solar power. First alumnae are now managers in the centre.
Phase 1 introduces concept of entrepreneurship, leadership, lots of games; second phase putting skills into practice; phase three same as 1 but more advanced. They taught them how to use Twitter. http://twitter.com/camfedzambia
Goldman Sachs award "hungry to learn across the world".

Beverly Leeds: Demystifying Reusable Learning Objects - unpackaging objects to change for local context or to repurpose. Good example here of speaking to your audience. Objects intended for teachers so "Evolution" put them into lesson plan format - tasks with objects as drop in resources. Resources developed as mini presentations - enhance ppt using Adobe Presenter. Any block can inform - assess - apply. And any block can be exploratory, enquiry based, directive or diagnostic by moving the objects around.
Evolution materials depository at employability.org.uk. All zip files. All SCORM compliant.
glomaker - for creating multimedia learning objects that can be added to ppt files. She mentioned glo maker: but the site is not currently responding.


Hsin I Yung, National Taipei University of Technology - Integrating the pedagogical agent with eye tracking system to measure extraneous cognitive load - very important to track learners' attention - you can see what they're actually doing (referring back to the thread about informal learning). Key issue is to avoid extraneous cognitive load; split attention effect is negative impact. I wonder if there is a possible negative in terms of being so focussed that you detract from people's learning creativity. Interaction is crucial - the more you have the more you learn.
Yesterday's speakers were telling us Chinese people follow the master. Hsin calls her pedagogical agent tool Confucius, which adjusts instruction level to previous answers. They have another one called Socrates Dialog. Story telling activities.

Marvin LeNoue, Ronald Stammen, North Dakota State University - Building Online Learning Communities with Web 2.0 Tools - LeNoue, works from Knowles basis - andragogy etc. While saying that he thought learning was the same whatever people were doing it. I agree with him, which as far as I can see means I disagree with Knowles. Ho hum. Sociability aspects of web2.0 are so good; ideal for courses. Their work is centred on social network tools, especially ning. Quotes Boyd and Ellison 2007.
Students can customise their personal page (private to the class) - and are very quick to do this. They are ESL students, but they have no problem with basic functions even if not good at writing about it. They try to design pedagogy that takes advantage of this space.
Key issue here is this is flat network, not teacher or institution dominated.

Joan Thormann, Lesley University - Use of Synchronous Conferencing to Help Build Learning Communities - using Skype; has Skype Out ($3 per month) ready to use for any students who are unable to use Skype. Groups of 3 or 4. 1/3 of students reported technical difficulties - but she didn't report on how much this put them off.

Hasan Cakir (pronounced checker), Gazi University, Turkey; Omer Delialioglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey - Factors Affecting Student Engagement in a Blended Learning Environment. Student engagement defined as effort on educationally purposeful activities. Elements of engagement - time on task, contact between student and faculty, co-operation among students, active learning (learning is not a spectator sport), giving prompt feedback, communicating high expectations, diverse talents and ways of learning.

Cisco's CCNA programme - Cisco provide all materials and assessment material. 40% ftf 60% online. 51 junior pre service teachers 33% female. There was a lot of discussion about the impact of gender on engagement. Turkish woman says they are directed towards things other than maths and science. Some research findings show girls engage less but get higher grades. Perhaps they are better at self directed work. The other speaker for the session did not turn up, so several of us used the spare time to stay around and have a general group discussion about gender and technology, and about learning and improvement.



Hasan



Key issue for definition of informal learning is what is actually being described - are we describing the fact that everyone learns differently. If we looked at the different definitions offered, could we find common themes which afford a different definition e.g. will we find that they all say that students learn differently.

Richard N. Landers, Old Dominion University - Using Social Networking and Learner-Centered Measurement in Automated Social Mentoring Systems. He was motivated to look at inexpensive ways of delivering training to avoid cuts in hard times - I like it. Starts with automated assessment system; then adds mentoring system. Assesses students on 7 point scale from newbie to grand master, different permissions for different levels - grand masters can set up own tutorials. This is well thought out, provides for both collaboration and motivation. This is the kind of thing that really makes me feel I'm not being creative enough - a guy who is doing just the same job as me, and has created a complete environment to encourage his students to learna s well as they can.

Fumihiko Anma, Toshio Okamoto, The University of Electro Communications, Japan - Development of a Participatory Learning Support System based on Social Networking Service "University of Electro Communications" sounds really retro, and a touch goth. Something you might find in a Terry Gilliam film maybe. The speaker wasn't though. Problem: participation in learning communities is necessary but difficult. Many of the easterners here read their ppts. For some it may be better than trying to speak off the cuff in English, but others have good command of the language.This was about using a social networking model to assess cumulatively how well students learn by aggregating their interactions - I think - I'm not at all sure. It's very mathematical.

Elearn Wednesday

My presentation went well - small audience, but enthusiastic applause, and a bit of decent networking.





Joël Fisler, University of Zurich on eLML and OLAT open source tools for production of learning material; has aa demo server, which will be fun to play with if I ever get any time again.

Marius Dieperink, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa - on failing to connect. How technology can be best used in S Africa to encourage learning. Black students often alienated in class. 80% not English mother tongue. Use of computers and English learning programme positive effect on unmotivated students. The key thing that came out was the big digital divide - should they continue at their own pace or should they try and import technology and ideas from elsewhere. He mentioend specificaly importing ideas from the developed world. I felt strongly and said so, that that would be a big mistake as Africa was developing so differently, e.g. the ascendancy of the mobile phone. He pointed out that many have low tech mobiles, but we discussed the use of texting for teaching. He is currently examining bulk sms as a possible vehicle.

...Another no show - I wonder how many people got the ticket to Vancouver paid and are now enjoying a week off....

Mark Salisbury, and David Olson, Western Oregon University, USA on innovative learning organisations - organisations need to find new and innovative ways to maintain old knowledge and create new knowledge, which means building into work processes a window for new and innovative ways of doing things.

We need to move tacit knowledge into the explicit zone
metacognitive (expert advice)
procedural (examples)
conceptual (instructions)
factual (documentation)

Technologies to support this innovative learning
moodle - only works on Linux
sharepoint - has to be paid for
dotnetnuke - this looks really good
Salisbury's book on ilearning probably worth a dip into.

They're presenting very basic things but in a persuasive sort of way. I don't think they said anything I wouldn't have thought of, but they have the experience of using the three platforms mentioned above. Much food for thought for my other job.

Panel session on cross cultural design
Today's travel tip: take off your shoes before entering a Malay household. A tweet in response to mine about this suggests you can geenralise that to most of Asia. Content: make sure you represent all races, and religions. Another speaker noted Canadian literature tends not to represent Canadian aboriginals.
Research on teaching and learning as uniting tribes of students and tribes of teachers by belnding cultures. Cultural connecting point will be key to open the connecting door. One finding so far for international students is trust is very important.
The 20 Rs
Wei - female and male culture. Also across colours. Cultural barriers intertwine.
Okhwa Lee - trained in western culture. frustrated when returned to Korea. Lot of Korean instructional content is video or media rich. Western is text oriented. In portraits western are face or upper body focussed not often full body. Oriental portraits usually full body with rich background material. Asian viewers focus on background as well as foreground; wetsern focus on central object and often ignore background. Space in west as series of individual objects; in east as inter-relationships between objects. That might blow a hole in the thinking I presented. Are wildfire activities as described by Engeström culturally specific: eastern cultures are taught to learn from the master? In the west speaking develops thinking; in east truth is out there, and speaking is means to express understand - if you know more you speak less. They don't respect people who speak a lot.

Ashraf of Sussex University - his students didn't ask questions in class, so one day he suggested they text him with questions - and they did. So eloquently that he used some of the texts as assignment questions.

Bjorn Pederson - Reflectii - web based video reflection for trainee teachers with friends etc

Joanna Muukkonen - networked model of action, using Activity Theory as a framework.
The aim of the project is to promote active citizenship through open learning environments. Several factors hindering the development of Sense of Community or at least "Sense of Network" have been identified... This is very interesting - it focusses precisely on one of the nodes of the AT triangle. And the project it comes from is about promoting more active and more effective citizenship.

Luke Lecheler - Confetti, online text annotation tool. Looks very nice. Creating a place rather than a space - space is the world, place is your home. My basic question is what does this do that diigo doesn't. - integrates with sources of free texts e.g. Gutenberg. And may integrate with Adobe buzzword. So it does have advantages. But do the advantages justify the extra cost ? Perhaps they do. As this tool develops, it will come to have a great deal of functionality that Diigo doesn't have - and if that functionality enables people to learn better (big "if"), then it will have been worth it. It's a gamble, as all software development is, but this looks like quite a good punt.

And that gives rise to a second question - is there a kind of hierarchy of usability, or maybe a progression. Teachers could try using tools like diigo - public andf freely available, and if they like them could move on to harder stuff, or put a case for developing a bespoke product (is there a market niche?)