Augmented Reality and my friend Matt

Today I had lunch with a friend, who is working on an amazing project with the InSPIRE Centre at the University of Canberra.  Matt Bacon is working on a project to investigate the educational value of augmented reality (a-r) technologies with a group of equally talented people - Robert Fitzgerald, Anna Wilson, and Danny Munnerly.  Wow.

He's already planted an a-r forest in the foyer of Parliament House in Canberra, and has promised to put something in the corridor outside my office. Augmented reality gives anyone with a viewing device access to information overlays of the world around them. These overlays contain information in the form of images or video or text, e.g. newly created objects or tags made up of data pulled from the Web. The overlays are being created willy-nilly by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons.

So, say you are sitting at a cafe on the campus of the Australian National University, and you want to know if anyone nearby is tweeting. Using the augmented reality viewers on your iPad, you can see where the tweeters are. If anyone has taken photos nearby and made them public using something like Instagram, you can see them using the a-r viewer.

Or ... say you are viewing Canberra from the Mt Ainslie lookout and you are wondering what it looked like before Lake Burley Griffin was full. If someone had built the 3-D image and uploaded it, you could hold your smart phone up, and see this alternate view.

I'm pretty sure we are going to hear more about this.

Oh ... and if you are in the foyer of the Australian Parliament House, and you want to see Matt's forest, you will need a smart phone or a tablet loaded up with the appropriate viewer (Junaio or Layar). Once you have opened the app on your device, search for AR Studio. Let me know what happens if you get there before me.

The scholarship of teaching (as research)

I've long admired Rick Reis's newsletter from Stanford, Tomorrow's Professor. He is alert to important trends, drawing our attention to and providing brief but powerful analyses of key issues. His recent post on "the scholarship of teaching and learning as 'research' " is no different. This issue has been of concern to academic and educational developers for some time, and it is good to see the evidence Reis provides that this concern is seeping into the disciplines.

His latest post draws heavily on the work of Mary Taylor Huber, one of the best-known Americans writing on the topic, but his comments will resonate with Australians who have engaged with the conversations here about the implications of TEQSA and discipline-based standards documents, as well as those who have ever put together portfolios for promotion that include evidence of excellence in teaching, or prepared paperwork that includes written learning outcomes for courses or programs.

Read the full posting at http://derekbruff.com/site/tomprof/. Reis introduces the posting with this:

The good news is that disciplinary cultures themselves have become friendlier to pedagogical concerns over the past twenty years, with scholarly societies devoting more air-, column-, and cyberspace to teaching and learning in their conferences, journals, and web sites. The sciences, especially, have been encouraged by National Science Foundation programs to strengthen science education. But other fields too—sometimes spurred by the drive from accrediting bodies to articulate student learning outcomes—have stepped up to the plate.

In the next 12-18 months, every Australian university will be paying much closer attention to the aligned curriculum, learning outcomes, statements of academic achievement, and every related issue. Will we also see a greater recognition of the time and attention these require when it comes time for promotion?  If not, I can see no way forward except a complete bifurcation of the academic life, with teachers on the one side and researchers on the other. This would, in my opinion, come at the expense of the richness and depth of academic work and of the learning experience Australia provides for its university students.  (That's not to say that at any one point in a person's career there might be a greater focus on one or the other - for example, PhD theses rarely get written by those who are focussing all their attention on teaching.) However, the truly interesting academics (substitute "lecturers" or "faculty" here, depending on your preferred country of residence), in my experience, are those who are equally interested in creating knowledge through their research, and in sharing the impetus for their research, their methods for creating that new knowledge, and the new knowledge itself, with both their peers and their students through both their writing and their teaching.

I think we at risk of losing something very important, so I hope posts like Reis's are being discussed across the country. Fingers crossed, eh?

Reflections on ASCILITE 2011 Hobart

 

Hobart from Mt Wellington



This year’s ASCILITE conference in Hobart was very well attended, with nearly 500 participants from 90+ institutions. I certainly took away at least two new ideas and several other things to think about.

The keynote speakers were:

• Gilly Salmon, who reprised her books on “e-moderating”

• Simon Buckingham Shum, who delivered an extremely important presentation on learning analytics by videoconference from the UK, suggesting that we need to move on from counting clicks to looking at data that will actually inform – evidence of critical curiosity, meaning making, changing and learning, learning relationships, strategic awareness amongst the students, resilience, and creativity



Mt Wellington viewing shelter doors



• Sharon Kerr, who spoke on the way new technologies and easy-to-use devices like the iPad are reshaping our view of assistive technologies for students with disabilities, and may actually be re-defining our concept of “disability” in the learning context

 

Tasmanian wildflowers



The paper co-authored by our colleagues from CECS – Lauren Thompson, Kim Blackmore and Malcolm Pettigrove – was one of two papers selected as Best of Conference. The paper – Leading change: applying change management approaches to engage students in blended learning – reports on one aspect of the ANU-UniSA Hubs and Spokes Project. The other Best of Conference paper was Linda Corrin’s paper entitled Exploring medical students’ use of technology. The refereed conference proceedings are available online. In the pre-conference workshop I attended, there was considerable discussion about TEQSA, assessment strategies and practices, and issues of curriculum alignment.

Among the other presentations of interest (to me, at least) were these:

1. Kennedy, Jones, Chambers & Peacock’s study examining the reasons academics use – or don’t use – university-endorsed (and unendorsed) learning technologies

2. Ryan, Hinton & Lamont Mills’ presentation of the finding of their investigation into the impact of learning technologies on academic workload, where they found



Yoni Ryan, Leone Hinton and Andrea Lamont-Mills



a. that a distance education model of curriculum design brings with it an increase in academic workload before the beginning of the study session, but often a reduced workload during the semester,

b. that there isn't a clear workload model in the universities they visited that takes account of changing practice in the light of increased use across the sector of learning technologies, and



c. that while academic staff understand that teaching online has become a requirement, they are often unwilling to reduce face-to-face contact because they believe that to reduce face-to-face contact, even when they have increased online contact, they would adversely affect the quality of teaching and learning

3. Karanicolas, Green, Willis & Snelling’s reflections on the relative value added by their own curriculum innovations, including those supported by learning technologies

4. Allen & Coleman’s paper on the ways they are cultivating and assessing creativity with the help of an e-portfolio tool

5. Palmer’s confronting findings that demonstrate that without thoughtful curriculum re-design, when courses are taught online, student satisfaction scores drop significantly; that is, it’s not enough merely to add some online aspect to a traditionally-designed course, the lecturer has to re-think and re-design

6. Lever, Gluga & Kay’s presentation about a University of Sydney curriculum documentation database that will provide reports on curriculum alignment, and the issues that arose during the building of the database

7. Dolan’s moving presentation about the impact of the earthquake on the use of online learning technologies in the short-term and in the long-term at the University of Canterbury, where higher usage – driven by necessity in the early days – has persisted even as the buildings and face-to-face systems have been rebuilt

There were many other valuable papers, I am sure, but of the sessions I attended, these were the speakers who caught my attention.

Shane Evans and Kathy Savige from UNSW@ADFA

This annual conference is increasingly providing a forum for those who are interested in more than online tools. Those who attend are examining changing practice in among university teachers, looking at the ways institutions are dealing with these changes through policies, institutional policies and procedures, and the implications of these changes for the kinds of teacher education preparation, professional development programs, and professional support that universities need to be putting in place to ensure that their teaching staff have not only the discipline knowledge required of a university teacher, but also a thoughtful, informed, reflective approach to their teaching practice.



Alex Knight, Marina Lobastov and Yvonne Wisby
nearly at the top of the University of Tasmania



After the conference, Marina Lobastov from the University of Tasmania gave a small group of us a private tour of some of their new teaching facilities, where some of the more recent ideas about learning spaces are being put into practice.

Then I explored the Huon Valley - what an amazing place that is ...

The backyard for my Huon Valley forest dwelling friends

Dale the Dog decides that swimming isn't for him

Teaching the language of the disciplines

Earlier this week, I attended the launch of a book. The people around me are constantly publishing monographs and scholarly articles. Some of them are good, some of them are mind-boggling boring (to me ... not to everyone). Some of them deal with narrow academic studies, some are the result of years of focused attention on a PhD topic, and some of them emerge from wide, cross-disciplinary thinking. Many are predictable, if worthy. Few are unexpected, if you know the people involved.

This one took me by surprise, perhaps because I didn't really think about what would be likely to emerge from a meeting between an energetic teacher of Chinese and a thoughtful, quiet scientist with research interests in virology, innate immunity and bio-statistics over a cup of coffee in a seminar about university teaching.

This pair are both committed teachers. Their book came about because of a discussion about how the scientist might best teach the language of his discipline to his students, and because there was a very practical problem to solve. Brett knows the language of his discipline, but was having trouble teaching it to his students. Felicia knows how to teach languages, but didn't know the language of Brett's discipline. They set about learning about each other's areas of expertise. Felicia attended every class Brett taught for a whole semester. Brett spent hours learning about the language teaching techniques that Felicia uses.

Dr Felicia Zhang, the teacher of Chinese, suggested to Dr Brett Lidbury, the scientist, that he incorporate language teaching techniques and practices in his biology classes. Then they brought in Dr Alice Richardson, a statistician, to check the results. They invited a whole raft of other people to think about the issues and to contribute their tips and tricks ... and came up with the script for the book.

It seems like a pretty good idea to me. After all, one of the first things that discipline novices have to conquer is the language of their new discipline.  If you don't sound like a physicist or a biologist when you talk about physics or biology, you probably aren't one, right?

from left to right: Dr Brett Lidbury, Dr Felicia Zhang, and Dr Alice Richardson

Take a look. The book is full of concrete suggestions about how to teach the language of science. I'm pretty sure most of the ideas could be adapted to other other disciplines as well.

Zhang, F., Lidbury, B., Richardson, A., Yates, B., Gardiner, M., Bridgeman A., Schutte, J., Rodger, C., and Mate, K. (2011). Sustainable Language Support Practices in Science Education: technologies and solutions. US: Business Science Reference. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sustainable-Language-Support-Practices-Education/dp/1613500629. 

Isn't it great when the people you know teach you something unexpected, unexpectedly?

Pessimist or realist?

Maybe it's just because it's the festive season, and maybe there's a change in the air, but this week I have come across two articles dealing with similar issues - one serious, one very silly. Both gave me comfort.

I have long lamented the tendency among those of my tribe who proselytize, touting the bright-shiny things in a firm belief, unquestioned and unqualified, that more technology in education is the thing. These colleagues are people I love dearly for their passion and their knowledge about the detail of the code and the finickity specifications of the widgets. These colleagues know, deep in their hearts and in every atom of their being, that they hold the key to better student engagement and much higher quality learning - and that the key is digital technologies in teaching and learning.

I'm not so sure. I'm the one on the side, asking questions like "Is there another, simpler way to achieve the end? Is this new bright-shiny absolutely robust and reliable? Where do the less confident go if they can't figure out how to work it?" and "Which is the best tool for the task I have on the table right now?".

Now I have a label for myself.  Neil Selwyn calls me 'pessimistic'. In defining the term, he writes: "... pessimism ... is not "a dogmatic blanket negativity towards education and technology", but while it "allows room for an acceptance that specific things are getting better", the "pessimistic educational technologist ... accepts that digital technology is not bringing about the changes and transformations that many people would like to believe".

And so it is, here in the world I live in, embedded as I am in an academic organizational unit that is responsible for teaching the business disciplines in a research-intensive university. That is why I am sometimes perceived to be anti-technology: I do not adhere to the belief that increased use of digital technologies in education is automatically followed by an improvement in quality in teaching and learning, even if the technologies are wielded expertly. I would call myself cynical rather than pessimistic, but the idea is the same.

Selwyn writes:

"Surely, there is nothing wrong with attempting to develop realistic and honest ways of working with digital technologies in education that involve thinking the worst (rather than the best) of them. Of course, that would mean reorienting the educational technology mindset so that it is accepting the social world as it is and is comfortable in its inability to offer definite technological answers to what are indefinite problems. This would therefore mean refocusing the imaginations of educational technologists away from some of the wilder 'science fictions' of their particular areas of education, technology and society."

Fabulous thinking. His editorial is in the latest edition of the British Journal of Educational Technology (see below for the full citation).

The other academic piece that has made my day is Jon Baggaley's article in Distance Education: "Flexible learning: a Luddite view" (full reference below). Tongue in cheek, he writes:

"... I confidently look forward to the day when inflexibility, and its by-products IL [inflexible learning] and OM [obduracy maintenance], will be lauded as redeeming educational solutions. In anticipating that future, it is recommended that educators should celebrate the inherent inflexibility of their colleagues rather than lamenting it, and should stimulate inflexibility in teaching and learning by the development of IL centres, intervention programmes, journals, profeissional associations, and events."

He goes on to remind us of the motto for the new Society for Inflexible Learning: non inflexibilitas sed constantia ("not inflexibility but regularity").

I like it. I plan to order a badge for Christmas.

References
Baggaley, J (2011). Flexible learning: a Luddite view. Distance Education, 32(3), 457-462.
(Thanks to Tony Bates for mentioning this one in his regular blog at http://www.tonybates.ca/.)

Selwyn, N. (2011). Editorial: In praise of pessimism - the need for negativity in educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(5), 713-718.
(Thanks to my colleague James M. for bringing this one to my attention.)

As 2011 comes to a close

Well, here I am at the end of November, and I really don't know where the second half of this year went.  Still, the year has gone well. Back on the home farm (in the university that buys most of my time), we've made some useful progress, tidying up our curriculum documentation and spreading ideas of clear learning outcomes and alignment with assessment. Some of my academic colleagues have been lucky enough to work on their lecturing skills in the lecturing as performance courses run by the wonderful Amanda Burrell of Captivus. It looks as if she will be working with a couple of new groups next year, which is fabulous news. I had some success in introducing blended and flexible ways of teaching to the academic community in my hometown in a range of different ways, sometimes by pretending I'm going to run a training session on Moodle and surreptitiously sneaking in ideas of learning design and task sequency, and sometimes by focussing on the bright-shiny things that come labelled "Technology".

This three-pronged approach to the support of university teachers in my part of the University has prompted me to think about the current divides that exist, at least operationally, in most Australian universities: the divides between those who teach face-to-face and those who teach online, between the academic developers (often employed as academics) and the educational designers / developers (often employed as general staff), between those who attend the ASCILITE conference and those who attend the HERDSA conference ... and between - well, fill in the gap with your own example here.

This divide, it seems to me, is particularly obvious - and damaging to progress - in the Australian research-intensive universities. I haven't yet been able to think of a way to break down those barriers, but perhaps tomorrow, when the world has evolved, someone will find a way.

Most of the university teachers I encounter are so flat out working on their research that they barely get time to think about their teaching. If they do find time to think about their teaching, they don't know if they should be interested or good at it; if they are good at it, they don't know if they should be proud of the fact; if they are proud of their expertise, they don't know whether they should tell anyone or keep quiet about it for fear they'll be perceived as dilettante researchers.

That's a great shame ... and I suspect would come as a considerable shock to most parents of undergraduate students.

In the meantime, in the interests of getting on, I've prepared my draft operational plan for 2012, which is looking good.

I'm off to the ASCILITE conference in Hobart next week, so should have some new and exciting ideas to report from there - at least one or two, anyway.

I've started to build a Moodle site with some very practical ideas for unviersity teachers, but that hasn't progressed very far, so I have little to report on that. That should be available quite soon, but not just yet.  Access will be available on request, as I will need to create the user accounts and send interested parties a password. There's something very empowering about being Queen of my own Moodle nation, with the power to issue passports / passwords. If you want one, just ask.

I have a half-written paper on university teachers and professional judgement ... that will have to be finished next year now.

There are a few other things in the oven, too. More of those later.

A new project

This week I’ve started working with a new group of Australian academics. As always, the first couple of days has been spent learning who they are, what their research interests are, what they think about teaching, and why they do the work they do.

As always, the group is fascinating.

This particular group is working on moving one of their face-to-face graduate programs online. They are working through the issues associated with changing the mode of delivery from a traditionally delivered blended model to an almost-completely online model.  To make things really interesting, they are doing this in the middle of a change of institutional Learning Management System. They have been using a vendor-supported, fairly mainstream LMS, and are in the process of moving across to one of the open source applications.

So … the group is learning how to use the new LMS, working out how to move their teaching artefacts from the old LMS to the new one in the most efficient way, and at the same time exploring the advantages and constraints of a new mode of teaching.

Fortunately for all of us, they are – by and large – open to new ideas, willing to discuss their concerns and expectations openly, and very intelligent.

The real reason I work with teachers, particularly in the higher education sector, is because the brains come in one size – hefty. Of course, along with the immense thinking power often comes the outsize egos … but that just makes life more interesting.

This project will give me an opportunity to try out some of my new ideas on a new audience – and a chance to refine my approach and my own teaching materials. I’m looking forward to it.