David’s WebLog

On Monday the 25th of August I am meant to be giving a talk that attempts to link complexity theory (and related topics) to the practice of leadership of learning and teaching within a university setting. The talk is part of a broader seminar series occurring this year at CQUniversity as part of the institution’s learning and teaching seminars. The leadership in L&T series is being pushed/encouraged by Dr Peter Reaburn.

This, and perhaps a couple of other blogs posts, is meant to be a part of a small experiment in the use of social software. The abstract of the talk that goes out to CQUniversity staff will mention this blog post and some related del.icio.us bookmarks. I actually don’t expect it to work all that well as I don’t have the energy to do the necessary preparations.

Enough guff, what follows is the current abstract that will get sent out.

Title

Some alternate foundations for leadership in L&T at CQUniversity

Abstract

Over recent years an increasing interest in improving the quality of university learning and teaching has driven a number of projects such as the ALTC, LTPF and AUQA. One of the more recent areas of interest has been the question of learning and teaching leaders. In 2006 and 2007 ALTC funded 20 projects worth about $3.4M around leadership in learning and teaching. Locally, there has been a series of CQUniversity L&T seminars focusing on the question of leadership in L&T.

This presentation arises from a long-term sense of disquiet about the foundations of much of this work, an on-going attempt to identify the source of this disquiet and find alternate, hopefully better, foundations. The presentation will attempt to illustrate the disquiet and explain how insights from a number of sources (see some references below) might help provide alternate foundations. It will briefly discuss the implications these alternate foundations may have for the practice of L&T at CQUniversity.

This presentation is very much a work in progress and is aimed at generating an on-going discussion about this topic and its application at CQUniversity. Some parts of that discussion and gathering of related resources is already occuring online at
http://cq-pan.cqu.edu.au/david-jones/blog/?p=202
feel free to join in.

References and Resources

Snowden, D. and M. Boone (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review 85(11): 68-76

Lakomski, G. (2005). Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning, Elsevier Science.

Davis, B. and D. Sumara (2006). Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching, and research. Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

A new introduction to OASIS was delivered in a 90 minute session today to a collection of CQUni staff from a number of campuses. The 100+ slides and accompanying video provide an introduction to all aspects of OASIS which are covered in more detail in separate slidecasts available from the main OASIS page.

The PLEs@CQUni is being driven, in part, by a range of external factors around the practices, availability and affordances of information technology, especially those associated with Web 2.0 and social software. We’ll be looking at this means for the use of educational technology within universities, not to mention the practice of learning and teaching.

Obviously these same drivers are going to have some interesting implications for the practice of the broader problem of how to IT is supported within organisations. There’s sure to be much work in this area and it will be important to keep an eye on it for what they find and subsequently work out what it means for the PLEs project.

Susan Scrupski drops a few hints about some research she is involved with and provides a link to a video commentary from one of the US news/business programs talking about one aspect of the problem. The problem talked about in this commentary is one which faces how universities practice of e-learning.

Of course, there will be some argument about all this being just the latest fad being beaten up by various academics and commercial consulting firms. But I’m not sure that this is a fad, it seems to be a key shift in IT and one that will need to be addressed. Accompanied, of course, by a good dose of cynicism.

For example, I’m not sure that the broad generalisation of “younger workers” used in the video is broadly true. Do all young workers really want that? Do all CQU students really want that?

The real questions become, just how do you address this problem, provide the type of resources that they younger workers expect within the constraints of existing organisations, especially in terms of resources? For example, at my institution there seems to be growing concern about the cost of Internet usage. Usage is growing, it is costing more and this at a time when minimising cost is important.

The following is step 2 in getting organised for a trial of VoiceThread as part of the PLEs@CQUni project. The background was given in a previous post.

This post tries to summarise what’s been found about create a presentation in Voice Thread. It’s more a work in progress and a way of saving what I’m finding, rather than any particular use for anyone else.

It appears that a presentation (i.e. like Powerpoint) might be one approach to support the development of an online research poster. Much of this information is taken from the VoiceThread Tutorials example on VoiceThread Presentations.

The example is a nice example, includes the talking head and some doodling.

It’s that hard a process, apparently includes the following steps

• Create the presentation file.
  VoiceThread suggest that the presentation file should be PDF and 1024×768 or larger with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Powerpoint, at least on the Mac, has it as an export option.
• Upload it to Slideshare.
  This seems a fairly simple process, need to set the options. The 1 minute VoiceThread tutorial gives a good introduction.
• Set some options - collaboration
  Has the ability to invite people, make it public, moderate comments and include the voice thread in public list. Will need to include this in a screen cast.

• Record the narration.
  Using voice thread’s 5 methods of recording.

Comments on VoiceThreads appear to require that you have a VoiceThread account. This will be a bit of a limitation when it comes to having visitors to the research poster session comment on the posters.

Interesting that Slideshare does offer a “guest comment” facility that requires you are able to read a captcha, rather than login.

This post describes some very early thinking about a trial that forms part of the PLEs@CQUni project. The trial seeks to support the use of Voice Thread to allow students to share research posters they prepare as part of the CQUni course PSYC13021, Special Topic in Psychology. The aim here is to summarise the project and describe the first steps.

What is voice thread?

According to them, Voice Thread is

..online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. They can even be exported to an Archival Movie for offline use on a DVD or video-enabled MP3 player.

The most interesting aspect of what VoiceThread is, in terms of this trial, is encapsulated in the following quote

A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

The following embedded voice thread is the example.

How is it going to be used?

The existing assignment for the course is for the students to prepare a research poster. The type of poster traditionally seen at academic conferences. A poster summarises a research project, usually in the form of a couple of posters, and is then presented in a poster session in some big hall. Conference attendees file past, stop and view those that interest them and talk with the poster presenters.

The special topic course, this term, is looking at the topic “Public health: A psychologist’s playground” and the offering’s synopsis is

The health of an individual constitutes a central foundation of what this person can achieve. Yet, everybody’s health is influenced by the environment and society in which they live. Public health is described as the art and science of preventing disease and promoting health through efforts focused on individuals, local communities or entire nations. Many efforts aim at (1) changing individuals’ and groups’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, (2) at providing interventions to support individuals and groups in preventing disease and promoting their health, and (3) at providing the evidence base for the need and efficacy of any Public Health activities.

Psychological theories and tools form an important part of Public Health and psychologists are called to continually contribute to the development and improvement o f Public Health measures. This course will provide an introduction to Public Health, critically examine key issues in Public Health, and explore the roles and remits of psychologists and other professionals in this field.

Why use VoiceThread?

Well 89.7% of the students in this special topic are external students. They are likely never to set foot on a CQUni campus. Traditionally, external (AKA distance education, flexible learning) students would prepare their poster, probably as a powerpoint, and submit it for marking. There might be some audio narration attached.

The only feedback the students would get would be from the markers. In fact, the markers would become the only folk who ever see the research posters.

The aim for this offering is to use VoiceThread to host the students’ posters so that people out on the Web will be able to see the posters and hopefully comment on them. It’s also hoped to run a session on the Rockhampton campus of CQUni later in the year and invite local psychologist to view the research posters. The posters will be shown on stations that will allow the attendees to view the VoiceThread posters and also to make comments on the posters.

Hopefully this will increase the feedback the students receive on their posters and perhaps provides greater motivation.

What needs to be done

We need to provide some support to the students about how to use voicethread to share their research poster. To reduce the perception of difficulty and wasted time they will initially perceive this approach to have. To help them see that we’re not simply using technology for technology’s sake.

Simple, eh?

The PLEs@CQUni project is attempting to figure out how/if social software, web 2.0 etc can be effectively used at CQUni to improve learning and teaching. I’m part of a group attempting to figure out how we can do this, figure out what works, what doesn’t and get these technologies/ideas used effectively.

As part of this process we need to think about the principles that underpin these technologies and identify how they can used, what problems they will pose and how we can investigate further what they mean for the students and staff of CQUni. This post is, hopefully, the start of a gathering of and perhaps some reflection on what others have already written about these principles.

Web 2.0

In this Slideshare presentation ???? lists the following principles of Web 2.0 (no references)

• No products but services - “There are no products, only solutions”
  Which seems to focus on simple solutions to customer needs identified through a problem solving approach. This has some implication for the processes to be used, a sense-making, adopter focused approach could be argued to be more appropriate.
• Customisation
  Allow the user to choose, don’t force them to use what you have made. Allow them to incorporate what we provide into their “home” in a way that they choose. This is exactly the opposite of what happens in traditional IT divisions where the focus is on providing one way to do things as that is cheaper and easier to support.
• Focus on the “long tail”
  Don’t focus on just the majority, look to all of the folk. Look to leverage customer self-service?
• Harness collective intelligence
  Make use of network effects, wisdom of crowds etc. Make the results of that collective knowledge available to the user. Try to encourage participation, easier said than done because only a small percentage of folk will contribute. Implications about openness and trust which may prove challenging in an organisational setting.
• Specialised databases
  Claims that every significant Web 2.0 application has been backed by a specialised database (e.g. Google, Amazon, eBay etc.). Potential connection here, the specialised database for PLEs@CQUni would be the CQU specific data: course content, discussions, staff and student knowlege about the learning experience etc.
• Who owns the data
  A particularly interesting question in this context where information sharing isn’t typically near the top of the agenda.
• Perpetual beta
  No more version numbers. It’s always being improved in small ways. This has interesting implications when an organisation is using traditional project based development approaches. i.e. where the developers only get to work on specific projects selected by their management. An approach that generally has to have version numbers.
• Software above the level of a single device
  Move away from the computer focus, support different devices, allow use on any.

The honeycomb approach Gene Smith has taken identifies seven building blocks for social software. Those seven are:

• Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
• Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
• Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
• Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

The problem

The unit I work with is responsible for helping staff (and to some extent students) of CQUniversity with their learning and teaching. This is traditionally a fairly difficult task which is made more difficult at CQUniversity by a number of contextual factors. Perhaps the largest is the fact that staff and students are spread across at least 9 Australian campuses spread across almost the full length of the Australian east coast, a couple of overseas campuses and partners and throughout the world via distance education.

Face-to-face support sessions, either one on one or in groups, is somewhat difficult when our small unit is entirely based on one of the campuses. We have to look at using technology and other strategies to address this geographic distribution. We’ve been slowly developing our website using a Wiki and other Web 2.0 tools. This post talks about our early attempts at using Slidecasts - simple powerpoint presentations with a narration. In our case designed to be short and sharp and focus on a particular need.

In some vague, nascent and emergent way this work also links into and aims to continue the growth of our PLEs@CQUni project which seeks to develop insights into how CQUniversity can effectively make use of the increasing number of social media services available out on the net. We hope, that if this approach proves useful, we will develop much simpler and easier ways in which CQUniversity staff and students can make use of this sort of approach.

What we’ve done

Our initial experiments with slidecasts have been around the use of CQU’s online assignment submission system - OASIS - and have been implemented using Slideshare.

The slidecasts that are in place at the moment cover the following topics

• Configuring OASIS,
• Collecting and marking assignments with OASIS
• Uploading and moderating assignments with OASIS

How we did it

The process currently being used involves the following steps

1. Prepare a powerpoint presentation with an emphasis on showing what happens.
2. Use the “record narration” facility of either Powerpoint 2007/2008 to “deliver” the session in a room.
   This is currently done
   • Using a simple usb headset/mic in my office.
   • Without linking the audio files (this makes sure that Powerpoint creates a separate wav file for each slide - which is important for following steps).
   • On a Windows box - the times I’ve tried this on my Mac Powerpoint has cut arbritary lengths of audio off the end of each slide’s narration.
3. Save a copy of the presentation (without audio) in Office 2004 format and upload it to Slideshare.
4. Unzip the Office 2007 version of the presentation (with audio) and create a single MP3 file containing the whole narration.
   This is done using the following steps (on the command line on my Mac)
   • Rename the audio files for the first 9 slides
     Powerpoint names the first 9 slides audio1.wav audio2.wav etc. This throws out the order of the slides. i.e. echo audio*.wav - results in the following order of files: audio1.wav audio10.wav audio11.wav……audio2.wav audio20.wav audio21.wav. Which is not good when you want to concatenate the files together in slide order. I do this with a simple shell script

     for name in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
     do
       mv audio${name}.wav audio0${name.wave
     done
     

     Appropriate use of sort could probably achieve the same thing, but I’m not keeping the unpacked files, so no problems here.

   • Concatenate the individual wav files into one using SoX
     Very simply using “sox audio*wav all.wav”
   • Convert the wav file into mp3
     SoX should be able to do this, but I haven’t had time to nut it out (busy, busy) so I’ve fallen back on the approach I know that works - iTunes.
5. Upload the mp3 file to a public website
6. Use the audio linking slidecast facility on Slideshare to link slides to the corresponding bits of the audio
   The command soxi gives information about individual sound files. I use that to identify the end of each individual slide audio which helps make using the Slidecast audio linker quicker.

   for name in *.wav
   do
     echo $name
      soxi $name | grep Duration
   done
   

Long term aim

Much of the above process can be automated. I can see a process by which someone gives a presentation with the narration feature of Powerpoint turned on. They then upload the complete (and usually very large) file to a CQUniversity web site (the size of the file and the specific requirements for CQUni would require an institutional system). The CQUni system could then extract the audio, produce the mp3, upload to a public website, upload a version of the presentation to Slideshare and connect the audio with the slides.

Perhaps the current major limitation with this idea, at least the last time I checked, is that the Slideshare API doesn’t/didn’t appear to provide support for providing timing data for the slides so that the MP3 audio synchronisation could be automated.

The other major problem is whether or not this approach is actually useful, usable and used by staff and students.

What, if any, is the difference design research, design-based research and design theory? How does your answer to these questions modify your practice and understanding of design research? Answers to these, and other related questions, are important, at least to me, and perhaps a broader community. This and subsequent posts are related to a paper I’m trying to write that has the working title “The dimensions of design research”.

So all of this is a work in progress.

The premise of the paper is that there are number of very different answers to the question of what is design research. These differences create a number of difficulties.

People interested in design research, particularly early researchers, find it difficult to understand what it is, how to do it properly and how to determine if a piece of research work is an actual contribution. This leads to “wars” between different camps about the validity or otherwise of a particular understanding of design research which leads to wasted time arguing about, rather than doing.

A design researcher can find it very hard to explain to a non-researcher what design research, or at least the form practiced by the researcher, is and what value it provides over other approaches. I’m involved in a project at the moment that claims to use design research. In fact, the unit I work with claims to draw on design research as its primary research method.

In a recent interview panel, looking for someone to be involved with design research, some of the non-researchers wanted an explanation of what design research is. In the short time available, the best answer I could give (typical academic) was that “it depends”. If you are from the education discipline you might give one answer, from an information systems you might give another answer and a more general design research may provide another answer.

And the beauty of involving academics in this discussion is that for each of the “discipline” based answers link above, each discipline will likely have a 100 more.

The aim of this paper idea then is to make use of (my very limited) understanding of perspectives from the philosophy of science, informed by the writings of my esteemed PhD supervisor (the very respectable Professor Gregor) and the broader Information Systems discipline to develop a description of the dimensions/understanding of design research which in some way makes more clear the variety of different approaches currently being practiced.

The hope is that mapping out these different approaches will help address some of the problems identified above and elsewhere around the practice and understanding of design research.

I’m late to the last lecture meme. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take some time (76 minutes) out of your life and watch Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture on achieving your childhood dreams.

One of the comments on YouTube suggest that there is nothing new in the lecture. Perhaps, but it’s the type of thing we all need to hear from time to time to put a bit of perspective on our own experience and perhaps to spark a rethink.

Yesterday I gave a presentation at CQU titled “The Ps Framework: Mapping the landscape for the PLEs@CQUni project”. The slides are on Slideshare and the video on Google video and are embedded below.

The presentation is meant to help in the writing of a paper for ASCILITE 2008 conference (one of the reasons for the title). The purpose of this post is to reflect on the presentation and anything I didn’t cover which I need to.

The fundamental idea or argument of the presentation is that the making of decisions around the implementation of educational technology within an university is really, really hard. The quality of the decisions that guide implementation will have a direct impact on the quality of the implementation. The Ps Framework is proposed as an aid that can help improve these decisions. The Ps Framework is introduced and illustrated through some thinking about the factors that need to be considered in making decisions about the PLEs@CQUni project.

Video

Slides

How did it go?

Given the time constraints the presentation went much smoother than I thought. Some nice comments from folk that were there. The topic seems to strike a chord and be somewhat relevant. Putting the presentation together did help improve the quality of some thinking around the Ps Framework.

What follows is a collection of comments and reflections on the presentation which need to be factored into the writing of the final ASCILITE paper.

The comments include:

• More work on some of the Ps components
  One of the fundamental foundations of the argument in this paper is that these decisions involve huge amounts of information. This was illustrated by simply not being able to cover all of the Ps components to the same level of detail. The Ps components of Past Experience and Pedagogy were not covered at all in the presentation and this was a 50 minute presentation. An ASCILITE presentation is likely to be not much more than 20 minutes. Some decision will need to be made about the depth and coverage of the Ps components.

  Perhaps focus on those which are not commonly considered. For example, Pedagogy may not get coverage in the paper because so many folk have already talked about it. Similarly, I need to not concentrate too much on process as I’ve covered it many times before including a 2007 ASCILITE paper.

• Better representation of the Ps framework
  Currently the Ps Framework is represented by a collection of inter-connected circles as shown below.
  

  It’s a bit sad. Need a better look. The honeycomb approach Gene Smith has taken for social software (adapted from a user experience honeycomb by Peter Morville) offers some possibilities.

• Better description of pre-implementation decisions
  One of the directions the paper took was to emphasise the problems associated with pre-implementation decisions. The idea being that this might be where the Ps framework can be useful. Need to give some thought to whether this emphasis is valuable and meaningful or not. If it is, then it needs to be explained and justified more clearly.
• More pushing of the view that decisions made are not rational, more than just based on instinct.
  Slide 7 of the presentation makes the core point about why something like the Ps Framework is required. i.e. that most of these decisions are not rational, not informed. The current discussion isn’t strong enough, I feel.
• Need for a definition of each Ps component?
  The presentation became more of a description of the thinking around the PLEs@CQUni project than an explanation of the Ps Framework. In particular, the description of each component of the Ps framework wasn’t always clear. There’s perhaps also a need to clearly summarise the perspectives of the Ps component considered.
• Need a better quality video of “basketball passing”
  The basketball passing video used in the presentation didn’t have sufficient quality to be perfectly visible across CQU’s video-conferencing. Need to find a better quality video.
• Should coverage of students and academic staff be separated?
  One of the key points under the Product component is that all participants are learners. i.e. that there is not a great deal of distinction between students and staff in the notion of a PLE. All participants have a PLE, it will be unique to each, but it should work fairly similar, they are all learners. Having made that point the People component then treats staff and students separately when there is great commonality.

  When talking about academic staff a lot is made of the fact that they are knowledge workers. One of the comments made at the end was that students are knowledge workers, just like staff. There are definite overlaps. Treating them separately may not be all that appropriate. Just how far we take this similarity.

• More coverage/mention of professional staff and their impact.
  As part of the People component, little or no comment was made on the nature and influence of the growing cadre of professional staff which play an important role in educational technology.
• Better integration of the ateleological ideas around purpose.
  Ateleological design is something I’ve written before and fits well with the purpose section. Need to cite myself a bit more and also work in the ideas, which is obviously more important.
• Add the SLURL for the CQU Second Life island
  One of the slides uses the billboard from the CQU Second Life island. Need to point folk to it.
• Probably need to more strongly critique the “best practice” movement.
• Which may lead to an emphasis on the internal understanding of place rather than on the external aspect of the place component.
  The current Place component starts with some fairly traditional comments about the broader societal changes. To some extent this tends to continue the over emphasis on external factors at the expense of institutional factors. Which is a common downfall of many decision makers. Need to ensure that the Place component makes this point explicitly and implicitly in its design.