Is this a surprise??

PRESS RELEASE - Tuesday 8th November 2005

The Open University builds student online environment with Moodle
The OU's expertise in supported distance learning has always meant it being a leader in developing the best technology to support its students.

Now, The Open University's Learning and Teaching Office has started a new programme worth nearly £5 million to build a comprehensive online student learning environment for the 21st century.

The development, which will first appear in May of 2006, and be fully operational for February 2007 courses, will see the largest use of Moodle in the world. Moodle is a free, Open Source software package course management system used by educators to create effective online learning communities.
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Currently Open University students use a variety of software in a network to access their course work, interact with tutors and other students, use the library, submit assignments and handle administrative paperwork. The new development incorporating Moodle will ensure the network is much more user-friendly and uniform.

Dean Taylor, the programme manager of the OU's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), says, "We see the development of Moodle applications, along with involvement of the Moodle Open Source community giving our students a great advantage in e-learning. Plus, the innovations added by the OU will be available to the entire Moodle community. It's a two-way creative street."

Martin Dougiamas, Moodle community leader and lead developer, says he is very proud that the OU has chosen Moodle as the platform for its next generation of internet-based courses. " By joining our community they are recognising the great value of the open source paradigm and the power of a social constructionist approach to both learning and development. At the same time, as one of the largest, oldest and most respected practitioners of distance education in the world they bring resources and experience that will give Moodle development a tremendous boost in the coming years," he says.

The Open University's Pro Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching, Dr Paul Clark, says: "The Open University has always been a leader in developing technology for e-learning, and this new student-centred technology is the next logical step. The OU has the top student satisfaction rating in the National Student Satisfaction Survey in England , Wales and Northern Ireland , and this new student environment we're creating will only help to ensure that people who learn with the OU continue to receive an exemplary educational experience."

I have been following with interest the recent postings on student blogging guidelines as I am currently trying to put together a (hopefully brief) document for students who will shortly be getting blogs on the elgg system installed at Leeds University.

Both Chris Sessums, Guidelines for Blogging, and Kele Fleming, Blogging Guidelines, have reported Anne Davis's entry on her 'Edublogs Insights' Guidelines for blogging. Both Chris and Kele have emphasised the implications for writing reflectively in Anne's guidelines, which is precisely what we want to encourage with our students. We want them to own and be in control of their blogs but at the same time we want to guide them towards using their blogs as a reflective learning tool (as well as anything else they might want to use them for) so that their blogs develop some of the uses and processes of e-portfolios.

To kick-start my own efforts to put some ideas together I have modified some of Anne's list. These are all suggestions that relate to their studies and interests and are geared to promoting reflection upon their learning and the construction of ideas and knowledge by sharing and discussing them with others.

Blog entries you write can have a number of purposes and aims. They can be:

• Your thoughts about what you are learning, what you understand and don't understand, how it extends or contradicts what you already know and understood, what questions still need to be answered, what needs further clarification or what still needs to be demonstrated for you to be convinced.


• Making connections to your learning by exploring what others have written about it on the web


• Contributing your ideas on how particular modules could be restructured or modified in some way to have you excited about and believing that you will actually use the information you have acquired and it is relevant to your life. What's relevant to you and what and why do you need or want to learn?


• Strive to improve your writing and take risks with expressing your ideas and bouncing those ideas off of a much larger audience


• Developing a distinct voice for communicating and discussing ideas - your ideas, your thoughts, your take on things, your enthusiasms and interests


• Expressing your opinion but backing it up with well thought out reasons


• Learning to collaborate in the development of ideas by expressing ideas, sharing information and resources, commenting on other's entries and responding to comments made on your blog entries.


• Asking questions and raising issues that will make a reader think and want to comment.
  
  All suggestions welcome!

  Keywords: blogs, e-portfolios, reflective learning

This article reports on the use of blogs in HE, evaluation and student feedback on their usefulness (the blogs that is).

Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector by Jeremy B Williams (Universitas 21 Global) and Joanne Jacobs (Queensland University of Technology) in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2004, 20(2), 232-247. PDF version.

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1. In addition to commenting on the advantages of using a tool that serves as an online journal encouraging personal reflection, and as a means of encouraging collaboration through the sharing of links to resources and up to date information, Oravec (2002, p. 618) observes that the blog has many dimensions that are suited to students' 'unique voices', empowering them, and encouraging them to become more critically analytical in their thinking. The reason, simply, is that in order to develop and sustain a clear and confident voice of one's own, one has to carefully formulate and stand by one's opinions. Writing a blog assists here because it forces a student to confront their own opinions and contemplate how their views might be interpreted and reflected upon by others

2. The discursive nature of knowledge construction is best addressed by the immediacy and commentary based system of blogging. They observe that there will be a natural tendency for reflection and analysis on the part of the student, given feedback systems are integral to the blogging interface, but also note that the contextualisation of learning through hypertext links to other materials encourages revisiting and revising of learned concepts, enriching the learning experience. Compared to asynchronous discussion forums such as newsgroups and bulletin boards, Ferdig & Trammel (2004) contend that blogs are more successful in promoting interactivity that is conversational; a mode of interaction more conducive to improved student and teacher relationships, active learning, higher order thinking, and greater flexibility in teaching and learning more generally.

3. It would appear from a review of the literature on the subject and of current practice at universities that blogs and academic discourse are natural allies.

4. Students have long learned as much from each other as they have from an instructor or a textbook - it's just a question of finding an appropriate vehicle for facilitating this learning.

We will shortly be finalising the pedagogical and technical specification for an institutional VLE. One possible outcome of our review will be that we put the specification out to tender. If this happens I imagine that large commercial providers will respond. The question is, how do we include or enable open source systems to take part in this tendering process? Are there consultancies out there that do this sort of thing (a business idea here for someone?) or does a different sort of process have to be put in place alongside the normal tendering process? One idea might be to have a project team of some sort to locate and communicate with OS system users and developers and put together some sort of quasi-tender to put into the ring with those that come from commercial vendors.

I would be very grateful for any ideas on this or experiences you are able to share.

I wonder if anyone else has got embroiled in this issue? At the moment the project and evaluation installation we have of Elgg has been modified so that only logged on users can comment. Entries and resources at the public access level can be read by anonymous guests but they can't append comments to entries. I can't go into the technical details because I don't know them but I understand the main problem is allowing anonymous persons to change data held on a University server. Apparently the JANET (government funded provider of UK HE internet infrastructure) AUP does not allow this.

In a few weeks time I will be giving a presentation to PGs in my Faculty (UK meaning of 'Faculty', that is!) on wikis and blogs and the examples of PG student blogs I will be using have been successful and useful not least because guest commenting has contributed enormously to the discussion of ideas, sharing experience and pointing to useful resources. The conclusion of my presentaion will be to encourage them to register for and use our Elgg system but the logic of what I am telling and showing them implies they should be starting blogs off-campus and externally hosted. This is an issue for all students if they wish to, say, use their blogs to keep in touch with parents and friends and use them for their own 'owned' purposes.

Has anyone else had this problem with an in-house blogging system? If you have one, do you allow anonymous commenting?

I have been experimenting with recording podcasts (I haven't published any yet!) and two things have worried me so far. What is the advantage over giving students lecture notes, and why do I sound as if I've just emerged from a heavily drugged sleep? Some answers are emerging.

As Joan Vinall-Cox said in a recent communication "I think that actually hearing someone's physical voice affects the way we "hear" their writing voice". I thinks there is a lot in this. I know I have a much better notion of someone's 'telepresence' if I can put a voice to their writing. This is not new. I hear my old professor Zygmunt Bauman's voice reading to me when I am reading one of his (numerous) books. When I read colleagues' emails to me I can hear them too, although they are not always very articulate! I know writing is not the same as speaking but text-based communication, more so in blogs than emails, is a sort of 'say-writing' to use a phrase coined by, I think, Robin Mason from her research into computer mediated communications in e-learning.

In addition I think that a voice can, sometimes and perhaps not always, add a dimension of explanation that text doesn't. I am thinking here of the way, for instance, Shakespeare made a bit more sense to me when I heard it spoken than when I tried to understand the text, although this may not be a good example. Some of the sense is conveyed by the voice as well as the words. Also, if a podcast is given to students (i.e. those who missed the lecture, distance learners, or to replace a missing lecture) rather than detailed lecture notes, they have to engage with the content in order to make decisions in their note taking. Making a podcast available is not the passive spoon feeding that is giving a transcript. Podcasts can, given an MP3 player, be listened to on a walk, in the bathroom, whenever you wish

Anyway, these are my thoughts so far. Better probably to look at what has been written by people that know what they are talking about! Brian Lamb, in his blog Abject Learning, has posted an entry Because the revolution's here - podcasting in education on an article by Gardner Campbell There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 6 (November/December 2005). Brian is obviously very enthusiatic about this article and in conclusion says "Even if don't you think you care about podcasting, you should read this piece". There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education is also available as a PDF file.

For those of us new to podcasting and the process of making and publishing them I have found the How to Podcast to be very useful. It covers the whole process from working out objectives, scripting, recording (using the free Audacity utility with video tutorials on editing, mixing in music, exporting etc.) and publishing. Links are provided to all software needed. I still need to find out how to turn CD audio tracks into MP3s.