E-portfolios: Models and Implementations: Idealistic whys versus Pragmatic Hows

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Personal Development Planning, Technology , ,

As promised, here’s the next report from the Blackboard Users Group conference. E-portfolios and “Personal Development Planning” have something of a chequered history in Higher Education. While there are many enthusiasts for the idea, it’s probably fair to say that students haven’t in general embraced the idea with any noticeable implementation.

Tim Neumann from the Institute of Education at the University of London gave us a brief account of the history of e-portfolios. He started by reporting that there had been a sudden increase in the number of academics asking about e-portfolios, although there appeared to be different drivers in different parts of the Institute.. In fact e-portfolios can have multiple functions, – they can provide personal development records, be a vehicle for assessment, a reflective space, a personal document repository, a basis for career development, or a simple documentation of personal achievement. In many respects the process of creating a portfolio is as important as the end product, but the multiple purposes that they can be put to, seems to cause as much confusion as clarity. As Tim rather drily noted, some staff in the Institute may not have had a fully developed understanding of the nature and purpose of an e-portfolio, for example the doctoral course team wanted it to provide an online record of doctoral meetings (which actually struck me as quite a good idea), the team teaching the MA in ICT in Education wanted the e-portfolio to contain a bibliographic management system, and the Master of Teaching course wanted to skew the e-portfolio to open source tools. All these are worthy things, but they’re not exactly the prime purpose of building an e-portfolio.

Nevertheless they did pilot a number of e-portfolio software tools, largely with a view to making comparisons between them. Among those they looked at were something called Avenet E-folio, Chalk and Wire, Digication, Interfolio Elgg, and Pebble Pad, (I have to be honest here and say I’ve only heard of the last two. Tim was quite candid about the fact that they were looking for tools that were available at little, or preferably no, cost. They also found that students were reluctant to use Pebble Pad, but unfortunately he didn’t give us any indication of why this was the case.

That said, they are currently trialling a tool called Learning Objects LX expo, a Blackboard plug in, (which we have ourselves, although have yet to investigate fully ) This is described as a personal website builder, rather than an e-portfolio tool, although, I suppose a personal web site is a sort of portfolio. In fact, it’s more of a social networking tool, not unlike Facebook. Anyway, Tim felt that this had been the most successful of the tools they had evaluated so far, in that it had met most of their objectives and provided all the functionality that they required. We should perhaps follow their example and have a further look at LX expo.

Applying Laurillard’s conversational framework to blended learning, blogging and collaborative activity design

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology, Virtual Learning Environments , ,

This presentation was from Rose Papworth, now at the University of York, (and who some colleagues may remember as a member of the Computing Sciences department in Hull.)

One of the criticisms levelled at virtual learning environments such as Blackboard is that they tend to be used more of a repository for content than as an environment in which students learn. This kind of approach has been criticised by many scholars, in particular Diana Laurillard, who sees learning as a conversation between teacher and learner, in which conceptual understandings are constantly revised. A criticism of this argument though is that while it is well suited for small groups or one to one teaching, it is not really very practical for large group teaching.
That said, the technology does exist to facilitate large group conversations, and Rose’s presentation focussed on developing Blackboard sites to facilitate learning as an active process, a social and collaborative cycle which contained intrinsic feedback to students. The sites were based on 2 3rd year undergraduate case examples, a small cohort in English & related literature and a large cohort in Environmental studies

Both course had a clearly stated idea of what they were working towards which Rose described as “scaffolded teaching and learning” The aim was to extend structural work with discussion time and improve the quality of discussion. In English, they used a blog as a repository for a weekly critical analysis in which the students were asked to consider the relationship between two texts. All members of the course had to read other members analyses and leave at least one comment. In English the intrinsic feedback came from the comment features, where the tutor started the process by making comments on early posts, and this started a cycle of where the students took action (posting their blog entry), received feedback, (from the tutors, who for example, directed learners to reading that may foster emerging interest in themes), reflected upon that feedback, posted revised comments and thus revised their understanding of the topic. In Environment and Health, they experienced some problems in getting students to engage with the process and as well as blogs they used a wiki an which groups published reports. In evaluating the project they found that there was less generic agreement about the value of the process but they did conduct entry and exit surveys with this group and they found that the process of engagement definitely promoted a wider conceptual understanding of the topic.

Rose then presented some findings from the evaluation. There were frequent log ins and wide experience of sharing ideas between students. Everyone agreed it complemented the class based learning and there were lots of positive comments from students and from tutors. One reservation expressed by teaching staff was that it was quite a challenge to give feedback without it sounding like it was the last word on the topic. Students are used to submitting a piece of work, and receiving feedback, but are much less used to the idea that they should respond to the feedback . They also found that it was important to model commenting so that students knew what they were doing.

Lessons learned
It remained difficult to assess group contributions, even with the wiki. Tutors in Environmental studies found that there was a need to make it explicitly clear that students need to do all their work in the wiki so that the tutor can see who has contributed what.
Students also found it rather daunting to be asked to write in public, and there were some examples of group politics, where students deleted each other’s work. Of course, the advantage of a wiki is that all the edits and deletes are preserved, but there is a need to ensure that students have group management skills before embarking on this kind of process.
The final lesson was around scalability. They used adaptive release with postgraduate teaching assistants for large groups but there was some variation in their understanding of the requirements of the wiki and blog environment. In future iterations of the programme they feel they need to more adequately brief the postgraduates about what needed to be done.
Even with these problems this does seem to be a more effective use of Blackboard than simply posting course materials. It

Has E-learning lived up to its early promise?

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Higher Education, Technology, Uncategorized, Virtual Learning Environments , , ,

After the rather bitty liveblogs from the Blackboard conference, I’ve started to write up the other presentations where I took notes with a pen. (Now there’s a reliable, resilient and portable technology!) Hopefully, they’re a bit more reflective and readable. Rather than try and write up the whole conference in one post, I’m going to release an account of each presentation as a single post. This one’s probably the longest!

See the slides at http://connections.blackboard.com/files/edccbd7423/andy_r_reality_check_durham_09.ppt

The first keynote presentation which was from Andy Ramsden, head of e-learning at the University of Bath, who set about exploring whether e-learning has lived up to its early promise. In one respect he showed that it has, by using an electronic voting system throughout the presentation which would have been very unusual a few years ago, and did lead to quite a lot of interactivity in the session. He started by reminding us that those of us involved in e-learning were actually small cogs in big institutional machines, but that didn’t stop us from doing quite a lot to bring about change. In the first electronic poll he showed that at least 25% of the audience had been involved with virtual learning environments for more than 8 years, (including, it has to be said, your correspondent!) which led to the unspoken conclusion that if e-learning hadn’t lived up to its promise, we’d no-one to blame but ourselves!

He then presented the results of a survey at Bath, which found that 51.7% of academics didn’t post their lecture material before the lecture, and that 21.9% didn’t do it afterwards. In fact 10% of academics at Bath don’t engage with learning technology in any shape or form! Even those that do, tend to use things like PowerPoint, or even OHP transparencies. That said, there was some encouraging use of newer technologies like Twitter and videoconferencing. So, it appears, on the face of it at least, that the newer technologies have not changed teaching very much. But as Andy indicated, that kind of conclusion didn’t sit very easily with the array of technological gadgetry sitting on the desk in front of him, and he also noted that most people do in fact share things like web resources quite a lot. But there was another question about how they did this sharing, and we had another poll this time using a service called Edutext (I’ve got us a free trial by the way I’ll post here when the details come through) This time we all texted in the ways we shared information with colleagues. Predictably e-mail was by far the most common communication method in HE. (By a very large distance indeed.) So, there are at least two technologies, e-mail and the web that have very much lived up to their early promise.

What might explain this phenomenon. We were introduced to something called the 4-Es model developed by Collis & Moonen, (Which I shall be stealing, ahem, referencing for my ED thesis). This states that an individual’s likelihood of making use of a technological innovation for a learning related purpose is determined by four factors

• Educational effectiveness
• Environmental (that is, institutional) factors,
• Ease of use
• Engagement.

Without going into more detail this explains why people are perfectly happy to post word documents purporting to be the “course handbook” but less happy to spend time designing and posting on-line quizzes, learning how to use text messaging to promote interactivity in a lecture, developing multimedia etc. etc. Essentially if you want to get a technology adopted (the “success threshold”) you have to balance all these four factors. Take the example of the course handbook. The institution encourages the posting of these things. ||It’s easy to attach a document to a file (well, it is for most people). It’s information students need, so it’s educationally effective. (Actually, I think that’s questionable, but I take the point that it meets a need that students believe that they have.). I’m not all that convinced that it’s all that engaging, but course handbooks are something that people are familiar with. You can see that quizzes don’t really tick the same boxes, and you might say the same about some of the other technological floribunda, that grow in the e-learning garden, such as Second Life, blogs, wikis, and so forth. (They’re often engaging, but not easy if you’re new to them, nor are they institutionally encouraged, (well, OK, they’re not discouraged, but setting up a wiki isn’t an obvious route to academic advancement) and their educational effectiveness is, to date at least, unproven.

One of the things that we can do is to try and lower the environmental factors. If we can do this, we should be able to push the success threshold down.

The second strand is concerned with ease of use and engagement. Most obviously the network must be sufficiently robust to allow users to do what they want to do. Engagement does of course cover things like the relative attractiveness, ease of navigation, and other attributes, but it can also be encouraged by modifying the environmental factors. If, for example, posting high quality interactive materials was seen as a route to career progression then it is quite likely that more people would be inclined to do it. (That, of course, is precisely the argument we’re making for the deposit of material in the institutional repository.) The fact is though that Universities are in general rather more geared up to running relatively simple teaching and learning activities than they are to operating riskier programmes that have higher level learning objectives.

So, how might we change the situation.

Well, at this point, Andy went into a discussion of QR codes. Careful readers of this blog (and if you aren’t, may I ask why not?) may remember these being discussed in a previous posting about mobile technologies. A QR code is a variant on the bar code that can be scanned with a camera phone. Once it has been scanned it can link to a web site, send an SMS message to a phone, transfer a phone number, or simply provide more text. They are appearing in posters and advertisements in our larger cities, (although I haven’t noticed one in Lincoln yet). There are all sorts of potential educational and administrative uses, including campus tours, Library catalogue information, (although I wasn’t clear how this would work), they can be appended to printouts and the user can scan them for further guidance, and more exotically they can be used in Augmented Reality Gaming (Again, I hope you’ve been paying attention, – I wrote about this back in June – it’s a project at Manchester Metropolitan University where they send the students off around the city to find these QR codes. Not that I’m exactly sure about the wisdom sending students into some parts of Manchester flashing expensive technology around, but I guess it’s their city and their project!)

There is no suggestion that QR codes are the solution to lowering institutional barriers. Andy was using them as an example of the way of thinking we need to adopt if we are going to keep on developing technology. We need to ditch large scale workshops, and focus more on specific projects, which we might lead, but ensure all the team delivers on. We should prioritise profiling at meetings, (i.e. who does what, what are people’s capabilities) and produce short frequent publications reporting on our projects, and we should do it in all media. The point is there’s a long term commitment to be made, and it involves a change in the way we think about educational development.

Blogging in a photography course.

Julian Beckton Blogging, Virtual Learning Environments , , ,

Well, I’ve recharged the batteries, and I’m now listening to Paul Lowe, photography lecturer and photojournalist is telling us all about how the London College of Communication is using blogs in their MA photography course.

(http://eflections.edublogs.org. for more detail)

By the way, Paul’s use of PowerPoint was the best I’ve ever seen at a conference. Obviously Paul has the advantage of being a professional photographer, but I’ve always thought that this is exactly what PowerPoint was designed for. Here are the slides. (I guess it take’s some practice to have the confidence to do this though)

Course about building their repertoire – giving photographers an appropriate skill set. So what’s the point of reflection

(So far this a summary of the work of Schon)

In the real world, professional practitioners of photographers are keeping blogs (as are other professionals.) So students who want to keep up with the industry should do it. And bloggers tend to match the demographic profile of potential postgraduate students.

Assessment
Very much about the process. Blog used as a primary source, but the students write a critical analysis of their work at the end of their course, drawing on the data in the blog.

But some students are very comfortable with the blog and they do use the blog itself as the vehicle for their critical report.

Shift from the download to the upload culture.

course uses several platforms – Wimba live classroom. (Synchronous delivery), A CMS where students can upload their pictures for discussion, a NING site, for social interaction, and finally they use the blogs.

How do they work in practice.
The blogs are about mapping the learning journey. Very much about personal experience – getting a whole person view of the learner. Gives the tutor an insight into the mind of the student which would not be possible in the short time you are with them in a tutorial. What movies have they seen, what exhibitions have they attended and what did they get out of them?

Also it’s about writing for an audience – and getting feedback from the audience. You can also mash and mix it up with other resources. You can tag your thoughts, which then becomes searchable.

Blogs offer room for emotion and play – they’re very informal.

Give a fantastic insight into how learners learn. What have they gone out and done to meet the assessment criteria.

Notion of e-e learning. (Experiential e-learning) . Blog is like having an open brain (Latest advance on open source)

How do they use blogs on the course

Firstly they replace the sketchbook/reflecltive journal,
Also become a real time archive.
Most students prefer to host their own blogs rather than the university owned ones. (Though they’ve just set up a WordPress farm (whatever THAT might be!) within Blackboard) But they use it to talk about what they’re doing in their assignments. They’re often quite critical of the course, and this is more effective than other ways, not least because the lecturer can respond quite quickly.

Blog is also a way of keeping tabs on students who might be away for a long time on a project.

There is an interesting concept of “blog buddies” – Groups of 4 who make a committment to read and post comments on each others blogs on a regular bases. Quite a lot of mutual support is derived from this practice

There’s a bit of a worry about lurkers – but this isn’t really a problem. Even if you don’t post comments on a blog you can still get something out of reading it.

Some ethical issues – they set out ground rules about netiquette and the level of public access at the start – about two thirds of the students do make them public. They have had a couple of experiences where bloggers had have adverse reactions from those they have blogged about, and while this is part of learning to work for an audience, they do now raise these issues with students at the beginning of the course. “They’re beginning to navigate what it means to be public and what it means to be private” Professional not confessional is a nice catchphrase.

Feedback from students has been generally very positive. But there are some issues

Staff time – has to be managed well. Set up RSS feed via Google Reader. Read the blog in advance of an online tutorial session. Nor are these academic essays
Quality – Some entries are better than others. But that’s true of any educational activity
Language – not the problem they thought it would be – you have to have good English to do a masters course.
access points

Benefits

Brilliant at building a sense of community
Because they’re warts and all, you get a much better idea of what’s going on.
Good way to organise thoughts of students
Always on – view of the students daily lived experience is authentic.
Informal, so truthful
And of course, they form an archive. So you can go back to them and do something with them.

Liveblog from the Blackboard Conference!

Julian Beckton Virtual Learning Environments ,

I’m sitting in a lecture theatre in Durham University’s very impressive Calman Learning Centre waiting for the session where Blackboard tell us what they’re going to do over the next few years to start. However, the conference organiser has just written “No sign of anyone from Blackboard yet” on the lecture theatre’s whiteboard!

So, as this is the second day of the conference I’ll start by briefly reviewing yesterday, which began with a thought provoking Keynote from Andy Ramsden who is head of E-learning at the University of Bath. Andy drew our attention to something called the Collis & Moonen four Es model of technological learning…

Ah, the Blackboard staff have arrived… I’ll return to the keynote later

They are about to reveal the brand new strategy – which apparently hasn’t been revealed to the rest of the company. You can hear breath being baited!

They’ve rebranded the academic suite as Blackboard Learn. – because they feel that it defines the products by what they do rather than by which market they are in. They have a large market in FE, Schools and corporate training and “academic” isn’t appropriate”

The suite also contains Blackboard Connect and Blackboard Transact – a messaging and an e-commerce suite – not yet available in the UK, but Connect is a multi modal messaging system, and there’s a lot of work to be done in negotiating agreements with mobile telephone companies

Showing a word cloud slide – Blackboard brings out three words in the cloud. Learning, Student, and Experience. No surprise there then!

Bb very aware that there are what they call spikes of use acxross most institutions. In other words it’s patchy, but BB are confident that students “love it”. Well they would say that wouldn’t they!

In 3 years they’re forecasting that there will be more use of Blackboard, (predictably) but they are also forecasting replacement of some physical sessions, and the development of better on line pedagogy. Indeed the speaker has just referred to having visited an FE college which has a new building that has been designed so that you can’t do traditional teaching.

BB have also noticed that there is a bit of a contrast between initial investment and long term gain. We all want to get our courses up and running, but how to develop this over the longer term. That’s pretty much where we are now, I’d say. And they’ve also pointed out that institutional missions change and that was often out of our hands.

He’s just mentioned the words “credit crunch – quite good that they resisted using them for 15 minutes I suppose”

But BB are driven by economic uncertainty, and global connectedness. At least that’s what driving the company’s strategy – how do we engage diverse learners with diverse styles in and beyond the classroom”. I’m quite pleased to see that they’re accepting that learning occurs everywhere now, testing the classroom centred model

But technology can play a big role, ifyou can manage it, measure it, rely on it, it will solve tomorrow’s problem, as well as todays, and it comes from experienced sources that are going to be around for a long time. (I predict that we’re about to hear that Blackboard are just such a source!)

Bb think that engagement is key to recruiting and keeping learners, and central to that is the learning experience. And that includes the social experience of learning. Interestingly Blackboard seem to think assessment is important, and needs to be integrated into daily teaching and learning practices and they have a plan to centralise and integrate all your assessment initiatives.

Now this is interesting – they’ve started talking about delivering through an Open platform. – They haven’t used the phrase “open source” yet, but they do acknowledge that it is a useful way of developing very rapid innovation. – THey see their role as vetting the tools to see that they a) are fit for purpose and b) to integrate any such tools properly into the Blackboard suite. . They’re also talking about opening up content, not only produced by academics, but also by students. This has to be done in a secure and sustainable way, and they see the way forward as being through the development of well documented APIs

Just changing presenters – time for a short rest from typing.

    Next generation product strategy

Version 9.0 is now known as NG. (Not every innovation will be released at once though)

Doesn’t look all that different from current functions. Modules can be moved around much more easily via drag and drop. Course pages also appear to have acquired modular home pages. You don’t have to go to the control panel to build a course – all the tools are in the instructor view. There’s also a link to the community system, so you can integrate links to communities inside courses. There are tools to assess individual discussion postings. There are additional forms of assessment (safe assign, a self and peer assessment tool and an extended range of assessment types. Hmm this is questionable – he’s just given the example of a question hot spot. Which isn’t new at all!

Now showing the grade centre – which does look quite intuitive. They’re also providing a lot more opportunities for feedback – They’ve found that students and academics have a different understanding of what they mean by feedback – so Bb have introduced tool by which academics can tell students what they need to do to improve performance.

They’ve also created something called “social learning spaces” (sounds pretty much like rebranding comnunities to me – as I say though, they have added a tool where stuff in communities can be incorporated into courses) – And now we have the inevitable link to facebook, You can access your Blackboard work via facebook, There’s also a link to Merlot (Actually these links look like they’ve just created tabs, which contain web links – It looks as though sites can have their own tabs, although I might have misunderstood that)

Scholar (the social bookmarking tool) is now incorporated, but when a user signs up, they keep the account for life – even if they leave the institution – good way of keeping in touch with alumni.

They’ve also introduced a tool to manage digitised resources- so when the CLA people come round and ask what’s been digitised, and who’s using them, you can just ask Blackboard. They implied that this is free in v.9.0

They’re working on a Blackboard interface for the iPhone, and a variety of other mobies. They’re also developing Blackboard Sync for iGoogle and My Yahoo. Actually that does look like quite a cool application.

We’ve moved onto questions now. First one, is “Not much of this is actually new, is it?” (Beat me to it.) And the answer is that it is new to former WebCT users. Hmm.

Second question is will there be a UK english language pack, as there are currently three versions of US English. Again, I thought we were using UK English.
Ah, now somebody’s asking about Blackboard Sync – their technical people wouldn’t install it because of the risks of authentication. Sounds familiar and a lot of other people are asking that. But there are no usernames and passwords passed to Facebook (or any other clients).

BB do store the passwords, but use them to create protocols for a 3rd party client which then uses some sort of single sign-on tool. This discussion is getting a little technical (even for the BB staff, and they’re now arguing that institutions should talk to their TSM about this matter because there is no single generic answer. Which seems sensible to me.

They’ve also developed what they’re calling an “outcomes system”. You create a map of your instititution and against each faculty, and department, you post their change management initiatives, and measure progress against them. Not sure that this will have wide immediate appeal across academia!

Right. They’re summarising now, so I’m going to stop now, and save the laptop batteries.

Open Sim practice

Julian Beckton Uncategorized
Lincoln's first virtual site
Lincoln's first virtual site

There’s an interesting proposal afoot for a project to develop a virtual front end to Blackboard, so I thought I’d have a go at building in a Virtual World – It’s a lot harder than it looks, but I did manage to create a reasonably convincing picnic site – the idea is you’ll be able to click on things and be taken to appropriate bits of the VLE. Fortunately, (for the users) I won’t be doing the design but here’s my first stab at it

Even More Repository Advocacy

Julian Beckton Repositories

Today, along with Paul Stainthorp from the library I attended another Repository Advocacy meeting, this time at the University of Northampton. Regular readers might begin to think I don’t do anything other than travel to exotic locations as my last post was on the same theme. In fact that’s all I have done about advocating our repository, and today’s session was really useful in that it convinced me that we really ought to get moving on this. We’ve spent a lot of time (and quite a lot of JISC and the University’s money) on establishing the Lincoln Repository, and we need to do a lot more about getting it on to people’s radar.

The first two presentations were slightly technical in nature. Firstly we had Les Carr from the University of Southampton talking about repository statistics, and how they can be used to illustrate the success of an e-print once it’s in the repository. While I won’t reproduce the whole talk here, (essentially he reviewed a number of statistical services including Google Analytics and IR stats) I do want to note the point he made that once people start to link to an e-print, the number of hits it gets can grow exponentially, especially if it becomes an external reference on a wikipedia page. And of course if bibliometrics are going to be used in the next Research Assessment exercise, that becomes a very good reason to deposit your paper in the repository, as you’re likely to get lots of citations. (And no, you can’t just edit Wikipedia pages to add your links. That would be spamming and Wikipedia has ways of preventing that.)

Les was followed by Stuart Lewis from the University of Aberystwyth who talked about ways of making your repository useful to search engines. There were some things that really ought to be obvious, such as ensuring that your title is spelled correctly, and that your title contains the words people will use to search for it. I was also interested to note that “funny” titles tended to get lower hit rates. He also drew our attention to sitemaps which is a useful tool to help webmasters get search engines to pay more attention to their sites.

Something else that is recommended is to make full use of the infrastructure surrounding repositories, such as OAISter which is a sort of union repository and Ethos Again, I don’t want to write an overly long post, but if anyone wants more details of either of these presentations, I can supply some notes I took in the session, and as I did with the Bradford day, if the slides and notes are made available I will add a link to the site here.

As far as presentations were concerned that was practically it. We then had a lengthy discussion about what constituted a successful repository, from the point of view of a researcher, a repository administrator and a university manager, and of course there were as many points of view as there were people present. The general feeling was that a successful repository was a tool that enhanced a researchers’ career by making their work available, but without requiring too much work on the part of the researcher, that did not require huge amounts of the time of repository staff to be spent either on training colleagues, or on depositing material, and that a senior manager could show off as a sort of “shop window” for the university.

While all of this is true, and very relevant, it brings me to the point of this blog post. None of this will happen if people don’t know about the repository. We must make a huge effort raise awareness of the repository among colleagues. I came away convinced that we do have to produce some high quality publicity material, and have a high profile launch. (Northampton had had a very successful launch party, even featuring a “repository cake” Click here for more information on the party!)

We then spent an interesting hour reviewing the various advocacy materials people had brought with them. Some of these were professionally produced, others done in house and a variety of tools were used – newsletters (we really MUST get something in Contact), posters, photographs, web sites, Flyers, Frequently Asked Questions lists and so on.

Of course, these things in themselves won’t bring about a vibrant community of repository users. On the other hand, not doing them, seems a guaranteed way of condemning the repository to a quiet existence on the sidelines of the university’s information environment. They are a first step to making the repository a sustainable part of the academic process, and they are high on the “to do” list that I made as part of the last exercise. The day being a very practical sort of day we all had to do this, and it was quite interesting to compare mine with Paul’s. One thing we both had on our lists was to create a presentation on the repository for use in staff development sessions. So that’s another thing I’ve got to do. But I’ve also got lots of other things to do, including finding some money for a few brochures and so on. But there’s also things like finding out what’s happening with installing our own IR stats package, seeing what is happening in relation to the repository at the Research Policy Steering Committee, looking at what if anything, I can do with the CERD web page and portal sites to promote the repository, and seeing what we can do to get more involved with the national infrastructure.

But, a very good and useful day, and thanks to JISC and the organisers (Miggie Pickton from Northampton, and Jenny Delasalle from Warwick)

Repository Advocacy

Julian Beckton Repositories ,

Just returned from an interesting day about repository advocacy hosted by Bradford University. This is relevant to us, because having set up a repository, (at considerable time and effort and expense) we want people to use it. I’m not going to regale readers with a long account of the day, rather to pick up on some useful themes that emerged.

If you want more details the slides from the presentations and notes from the breakout session are now available.

Firstly, what constitutes a successful repository? Well, one with a lot of stuff in it, obviously, but it also needs to meet user requirements which will of course vary according to who is using the repository. One of the presentations was from Julie Allinson and described how the repository software in use at York was meeting a very specific need, in this case, effectively digitising their slide library. Not every repository meets a specific need and one measure of success might be that there are more people using it and in doing so generating more funding. The challenge here is that researchers may be using content in the repository to generate bids, but not really acknowledging it, or even understanding that’s what they are doing. Ideally a successful repository should be deeply embedded in university structure. Another presentation from Shirley Yearwood Jackman explained how Liverpool University had created a role of repository editor and given this to fairly senior academic staff in the various departments. She admitted that this hadn’t worked everywhere, but where it had it had certainly raised the profile of the repository.

We will return to what constitutes effective advocacy later, but there was quite an interesting theme running throughout the day about what the barriers to a successful repository might be. Most of those present thought the very word “repository” itself was unhelpful, and were changing the name of their repository to something like “digital library” Personally I’m not totally convinced by this argument. I think pretending something is something other than it is can be counter productive in the long term. I do agree that the word repository isn’t all that familiar to many users (and sounds slightly medical) but “digital library” can have lots of other meanings, and in any case Lincoln already has an E-library. So if anyone’s got a better name, I’m listening. I suppose the main difference is that the repository is more a library of material produced by the University, whereas the e-library (at least at Lincoln) is mostly made up of things we’ve bought in.

But, that’s perhaps the least important barrier. Rather more to the point is the perennial lack of time, money and staff. There is a continuing need for the repository team to ramp up its efforts, be more structured for example be realistic about the resource that is likely to be required. Rachel Proudfoot from the White Rose Project (a collaboration between three Yorkshire Universities) reminded us that advocacy is much bigger than the project. So, what can we do to get started. One common approach is to mandate deposit, which essentially means that the University makes it a condition of research that material is deposited in the Repository. Rachel thought that this might have some benefit but a there was a danger in setting up a mandate before the university was ready for it. Mandates needs foundations or as she put it you have to have a mandate ready landscape. And you can expect some harrumphing. (At Leeds university about only about 70% of academic staff agreed that they would comply willingly, but equally only 8.5% said they would flatly refuse. A mandate might not lead to a huge rush of deposits, but she gave the example of Glasgow university where it has led to more demand for advocacy work – explaining what it’s all about.

The recommended strategy is to develop as many allies as possible, continue to use multiple routes, be clear about the benefits the repository will bring. Having some sort of demonstration package is worth a great deal. The key seems to be to finding evidence of the repository’s potential and using that to sell it to stakeholders (e.g. the repository as a marketing tool) Find out what pushes the stakeholders buttons. For example, it’s widely accepted that departments within a university have different needs, but so do researchers themselves. End of career researchers might be expected to be less interested than beginning researchers although there is some evidence that some see the repository as an excellent place for storing their academic legacy! But it is a good idea to work on the research students, and find ways to embed the repository into the research management process, even if this does fall short of a full mandate.

Finally there are some technical issues to consider. Metadata is essential to a successful repository but is not something that grabs the attention of many researchers. As Julie said, many academics believe they don’t need or want it but THEY DO! There was some discussion of commercial products such as Symplectic, but nobody present had actually implemented them (I have to admit I hadn’t actually heard of them before, but their web site does look interesting).Another issue that few of those present had been able to address was interoperability with other Campus systems. Ideally, a researcher should be able to add something to the repository from Blackboard with a single click but we are some way away from that yet. Finally, there is the issue of preservation. Most of us are happily using PDFs for our documents but there’s no guarantee that this format will last any longer than any other digital format has done, so although we claim that the repository is a permanent home, for research materials we need to ensure that we have addressed this issue if our advocacy is going to be credible. There was some inconclusive discussion about whether we should adopt the PDF/A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A) format which is designed for longer term archiving.

A very useful day, which if it didn’t provide any instant solutions, probably on account of there not being any, did focus my mind on the fact that while we might have completed the JISC project, the work is really only just beginning.

More thoughts on Educational Development

Julian Beckton EDUs, Research

Just finished reading Ray Land’s 2004 book “Educational Development: Discourse Identity and Practice” which covers a lot of the same ground as I’m covering in my doctoral thesis. (Wish I’d found it a bit earlier!) Anyway, if I’ve grasped his argument his theory seems to be that educational development is extraordinary complex and multi faceted activity and there are orientations to educational development, which rather than being personal attributes of individual developers derive from a combination of stances towards change in organisations which in turn is heavily influenced by the strategic terrain in which they operate. That’s echoed by the work of David Gosling too, and does form (pretty much) the basis of what I want to say in my thesis. Though I am rather tempted to part from Land over the exact nature of some of the orientations he identifies. At the risk of being overly picky I don’t really feel that a “managerial” orientation and a “professional competence” orientation as he describes them are all that different. That shouldn’t be taken as implying that the orientations are not valid. I think my own unit has moved from a very managerial orientation to a much more entrepreneurial approach.

Further, my own findings, (and I accept that this is still a little tentative) suggest that educational development is much less of a modernist project than it might have been when the book was written. I found most of the developers I met were quite comfortable with the idea that there are shifting cultures within the organisation, and had become quite adept at playing organisational politics, and moving through shifting cultures. They also seemed to be quite comfortable with the ideas of liminality and troublesome knowledge, accepting that they were working near a border across which (to parphrase mediaeval cartographers) “there be dragons”. It may be that there is a thirteenth orientation, which I am tempted to call “pragmatic-holistic”, which seems to derive from a much more post-modern attitude to the University as an organisation. To some extent, I think that’s my own orientation so I’ll have to go over the findings with a fine toothcomb to ensure it’s not just coming from my own personal preference.

There is a theme running through the book which seems to see developers as primarily responsible for innovation. I found that they certainly saw themselves as an important locus for innovation, but they also saw themselves as playing other roles, for example a bridge between the respective cultures of the senior management and the faculties, but they also took their support role very seriously (Land’s “Romantic” orientation). In fact if anything they saw themselves as supporters of innovation by others rather than innovators themselves.

A great deal of food for thought anyway.

Great Expectations of ICT – JISC report 2008

Julian Beckton Research, Technology, Uncategorized

Just read this very interesting report on what students expect in terms of ICT provision when they arrive at university.  I did think the methodology was a little questionable in that an on line survey and discussion groups is, by default, going to pick up on students who are inherently more enthusiastic about IT, but bearing that in mind there were some intriguing findings. Not least that

  • Students are fine with Web 2.0 tools as long as they are in control of the environment – they don’t in general want lecturers leading their use of these tools.
  • Students generally are very comfortable with VLEs which do pretty much what is expected of them.
  • There is not much apparent interest in mobile learning
  • Students place very little value on virtual worlds (so my trip to Nottingham last week might have been a bit of a waste of time!)
  • There seems to be a desire for universities to provide training in thinking about the implications of different technologies, than just providing access to different technologies, and training in how to use them.

None of which is all that surprising I suppose. In some ways I think the first finding is the most interesting because it raises some issues about control of the learning environment. When you think about it it fits with the way of thinking that argues that learning is better when the students produce their own learning, rather than consume it.  Although another interesting finding was that relatively few students knew what a wiki was, let alone how to use it, which rather supports the argument that there is a need to think about what you do with information, rather than just how to retrieve it. Haven’t got time to write a longer post about this now, but I might well return to this topic – For the time being the full report is at

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/jiscgreatexpectationsfinalreportjune08.pdf