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Owen Barritt

Weeks 14-15

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Still about a week behind on the course at the moment, but TMA02 is now completed and I was able to contribute a bit during the early part of this section and have spent this week catching up with these first 2 weeks.

The very limited amount of time I could put in at the start of these 2 weeks meant that I could give only limited input.

The main thing I was able to contribute for this section was to push for a tighter context, as I was very concerned that the very much more open ended context that was being suggested was going to make the scope of the task too wide for us to manage.  While some of the group clearly shared my concerns from the responses I received, others took some convincing.  I think the challenge I found here was to get my argument across to the whole group without seeming too forceful.

In catching up I've felt a little out of the loop for this part of the task, and certainly been feeling a little lost as to how to add my contributions to things like the forces.

The Google Apps used by the OU a seeming very clumsy at the moment, especially the requirement to use OU accounts rather than existing accounts as it can be quite difficult keep track of which you are using when you are logged into google with several.  Have found today that using the OU APPs doesn't work at all on my tablet.  If I click open my OU inbox and then try to access the google site for the project, it just gives a logging screen.

Also, I'm unsure if there are any issues with the permissions on the files on our site as some of them won't let me edit them at all or give errors.

With the technical issues and feeling a little detached from the rest of the group, I must admit I'm not currently feeling highly motivated with the task at the moment (added to the fact I'm still sorting things out in the house post-move and will need to travel to Scotland for work at the end of the week).  Will persevere though.  Hopefully for the next hangout the group, I can be more in tune with the project and what we're supposed to be doing for it.

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Owen Barritt

Big and Little OER

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Monday, 22 Apr 2013, 13:41

Big OER - Major institutional project in open education such MIT's Open CourseWare.

Little OER - Smaller individual outputs produced as a by-product of everyday work.

BenefitsDrawbacks
Big OER
  • Can easy have backing of major institutions with institutional branding.
  • Can be developed strategically, covering major topics.
  • Can pool resources of many stakeholders as necessary
  • Can deliver a common set of resources for all courses/topics if required.
  • Can target large audiences with potential for detailed planning.
  • Can cover large amounts of materials.
  • Costly, requiring backing of institutional budgets or trust funds.
  • One size fits all model across all individuals' work within institution/department.
  • Range of media presented may be limited.
  • Planning required to ensure materials meet requirements of all stakeholders.
  • Larger topics may be less suitable for reuse outside the organisation.
Little OER
  • Generally a by-product of individuals' existing work.
  • Materials can be developed at any time using any available tool in any style.
  • More adapted to long-tail approaches allowing very special interest materials to be produced for small audiences.
  • Materials naturally produced in a range of medias by a range of individuals.
  • Collectively have potential to reach a wider audience than Big OER although individual audiences may be small.
  • Smaller topics may be more suitable for reuse in a range of contexts.
  • Generally unplanned with no guarantees of audience/use.
  • Unlikely to produce much consistency in style between materials.
  • Needs for general topic materials may be sidelined by more specialised topics.
  • Reputation of materials' authors may not be as clear as for major institutions.
  • Generally only cover a very small section of a topic.

 

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Owen Barritt

Applying Sustainability Models

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Monday, 22 Apr 2013, 13:41

Change MOOC
http://change.mooc.ca/index.html

This MOOC was a research project by National Research Centre of Canada's PLE service and the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute.  Looking through the course, each week was produced a different guest "speaker", not necessarily connected with either organisation with 3 course facilititators co-ordinating the overall course.

This most fits the USU model, being small scale and co-ordinated by a small central team with a number of volunteers providing materials.

There is very little direct information on the site on how it operates in terms of course creation as it is a single course however.

Coursera
https://www.coursera.org

Coursera contains a collection of open courses produced not by coursera in the main, but through partner universities.  The coursera site boldly highlights the fact that the site contains 338 courses from 63 universities.  The site is actively recruiting for a growing team of employees.

In some ways this follows the rice model, in that coursera just host the content and leave co-ordination of the materials to be produced to the universities.  However, as the site isn't open to anyone to contribute and university vendors appear to develop courses in partnership with coursera who provide the technical support in creation, the MIT model may be more appropriate.

Jorum
http://www.jorum.ac.uk

Jorum is a site where educators share materials and can find other shared materials.  As such no co-ordination on the materials is undertaken by the site itself, it is solely a hosting platform.

As such Jorum very much follows the rice model.

The way Jorum works is very clearly outlined on the front page of the site.

OpenLearn
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/

The Open University's OpenLearn platform publishes a number of courses and materials produced by the Open University for open access.  The aim is to publish a selection rather than the full open universities collection of courses.

This therefore fits the USU model, where a small team from the organisation helps to produce and publish a small number of courses per year.

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Owen Barritt

Key Issues in OER

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3 key issues relating to Open Education Resources are:

  • Financial Sustainability
  • Intellectual Property
  • Student Support

Financial Sustainability

Many of the current projects concerning OER's have been funded by foundations such as the Williams and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Atkins et al, 2007).  However, as Smith and Casserly (2006) highlight these "foundations are unlikely to maintain their support over long peroids of time".

The question is then raised as to how these types of projects can finance themselves in the long term and what the incentives will be to organisations to create and maintain them.

Some possible business models that have been suggested include:

  • Loss leaders for organisations that sell content where they place some of their content available for open access to increase sales and revenue for the premium content (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
  • Professional associations taking responsibility for development and maintainence (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
  • Stewardship funds from colleges using the materials on fee-based courses where they pay a small amount to the creator to maintain and upgrade the materials (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
  • Membership base consortia sharing the upkeep costs (Atkins et al, 2007)
  • Institutions maintaining OER as part of their general courseware as a marginal low cost derivative (Atkins et al, 2007)
  • Using students to create and enhance resources (Atkins et al, 2007).

Intellectual Property

The majority of existing education content is released under traditional all rights reserved copyright laws where "any piece of work not affirmatively released from copyright by its creator is automatically copyrighted upon production" (Smith and Casserley, 2006).  This directly restricts reuse and adaption of OER material unless they are specifically licenced for such use.  In particular, it requires institutions to "scrub material to be sure that materials licensed for use in their formal community" are not released to the general public when materials are made open (Atkins et al, 2007).

Some solutions to this issue that have been applied are:

  • Use of creative commons licences to free materials "from the automatically applied copyright" (Smith and Casserley, 2006) and "specifically grant some of their rights to the public".
  • Applying concepts of "fair use" from the copyright laws.  This is however, legally untested, with questions on whether Google Book Search's "displaying of excerpts of text... constitutes copyright violation" (Atkins et al, 2007)

This is, however, a complex issue that will require further investigation.

Student Support

Removing the "human teacher makes [OER c] different from the normal course delivered in a classroom or at a distance" (Smith and Casserly, 2006).   As such any course following this model would require "tools to guide and support" learners.

Some solutions that have been proposed or used for this include:

  • Question sets, help buttons, review materials and assessments with feedback (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
  • Communication tools to help learners communicate (Smith and Casserly, 2006).  This could enable the establishment of "self-educating communities" (Burbules, 2006).

Other possibilities may also arise as pedagogies develop alongside OER.

 

References

Atkins, D.E., Brown-Seely, J. & Hammond, A.L., (2007). A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Burbules, N. C. (2006) "Self-Educating Communities: Collaboration and Learning Throughout the Internet," in Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader, Zvi Bekerman, Nicholas C. Burbules, and Diana Silberman-Keller, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 273–284.

Smith, M.S. & Casserly, C.M., 2006. The promise of open educational resources. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(5), 8–17.

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Owen Barritt

Flavours of Openness in Education

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Saturday, 6 Apr 2013, 11:43

Having just moved house I'm now a few week's behind with H817, but finally in a position to get going again...

Here's my prezi for activity 3.

This looks at some of the flavours of openness currently in education and considers digital scholars.

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Owen Barritt

Why I'm Studying the Open Education Course

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I'm currently studying H817 of the OU's MAODE, which includes the Open Education course as one block of the course.

I currently work in e-learning, producing and managing distance learning wine courses for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust in London.  One of the main drivers behind my study is therefore to get an insight into developments within e-learning including the latest innovations and open courses to feed into my own practice.

I'm unsure whether open courses may be directly applicable to my practice, but I suspect there will be ideas from them that can be applied.

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Owen Barritt

Bugscope

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 19 Mar 2013, 21:58

Following on from Seely Brown and Adler (2008) looked into the bugscope.

Looking at the website at http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/ the project certainly seems still very active and according to the site itself has run over 300 sessions for over 200 schools.

The site mainly discusses work with primary school, and it looks very much like use has generally been focused at primary schools with up to 3 sessions running through the week (presumably there are limitations of staff time to run these plus available time on the microscope when it's not needed for other uses).

While the main focus looks to have been with schools in the US, the map on the site does show it to have had sessions all over the world (including 3 primary schools here in the UK).

One interesting thing I found on the site was that one school recently accessed using guest access and the archive of their session is publicly accessible here, which gives a bit of an insight into what happens in some of these sessions.

There also looks to be some discuss of the use of this tool in education searching through the OU library for articles including this from Korb and Thakker (2011) where they look at a group of 6 grade students using it Pennsylvania (judging by the conversation in the accessible transcript above the session then was also arranged through Korb).

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Owen Barritt

TMA03

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1000 words isn't very many for 12 questions.

It's like doing one of those answer in less than 100 words things 12 times.

Can't believe anyone could even get close to less than 500 words.

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Owen Barritt

Frustrations When Things Don't Work Properly...

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Another lesson in the frustrations when technology doesn't quite work the way it should when you want to use it for learning.

Much as I've found elluminate useful in the past, and tonight's was no exception in that respect, it becomes very difficult to follow when it keeps cutting out and then catchs up at a million miles an hour.

I felt a bit outside the conversation tonight as a result, and not really as much of a part of it as I have done with previous sessions.

Still useful to help me think about things, but there were several times where I felt where I was in the conversation was a couple of steps behind the rest of the group and I was playing catch up the whole time.  I was never really entirely sure what I had been mentioned in the discussion as a whole (especially as the connection cut out completely at one point, so I didn't even get the fast forward catch up), and didn't feel as able to contribute to the discussion as a result (although I still tried to throw my thoughts into the mix).

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Owen Barritt

TMA 02

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Done!

I wasn't really sure in places how much weighting to put on learner choices vs practitioner choices vs my own experience in the activities.

I found the last part quite hard at first, as it wasn't entirely obvious what "learner experiences" could be looked at above and beyond those that had already been covered.  However, given recent experiences with offering our courses to Chinese students and their differences in expectations from the online course, this seemed like a good option to look at and easily gave me 500 words.

As with TMA01, the main problem with the TMA seemed to be keeping to the word limit given the amount of papers we have looked at to discuss, plus the fact they encourage us to include references to forum posts and also wider reading (using the magic extra time we can all summon up from nowhere).

Finding relevant forum posts to include with this one was a lot harder than TMA01, as the forums have been a lot quieter in this block.  There were some useful points raised in a recent elluminate session though, which I included.

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Owen Barritt

Starting TMA 02

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Just about to start the first section of TMA 02 looking at the activity on blogs.

Have been through the TMA01 feedback and am going to attempt to include subheadings within each activity.

There seems to be 3 obvious sections for each:

  • Learner Choices
  • Practitioner Choices
  • Personal Experience

Looking back at TMA 01 feedback, I need to be more forceful in my suggestions for improvements to the activities and need to include a few more quotes from the forum posts I cite as examples.

 

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Owen Barritt

Measurability

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Friday, 25 May 2012, 22:16

In our elluminate session this evening, Bill expressed a lot of concern about being able to measure the educational benefit of certain tools (such as the blog).  This bothered me in a way as I think it misses the bigger picture to an extent.

In the courses we run at work, the measurable effect we have on our use of technology is the fact that since introducing it the pass rates and retention rates of our distance learning students have massively increased.  Also, we've gone from getting feedback highlighting a feeling of isolation to generally appreciating the fact that they can learn as part of a group in spite of being so spread out.

In all our courses, I can see how much an individual student is engaging with the activities, and there are tasks included to assess their progress through the course, so we can see how they're getting along.  We can also see how well students are engaging with particular activities and tools in general.

It's not always possible to see evidence that each individual task has benefitted each individual student.  However, my aim is to get them through the course as a whole rather than each individual activity in turn and I can track progress for that.

OK, if you wanted me to demonstrate the educational benefit of each individual tool and each individual activity, I would struggle, but I could do it for the course as a whole.

What I look for in the courses I design is that students are generally engaging with the activities and demonstrating progress through the course ready for the exams.

I have my ideas for the intended aims for each individual task and tool, but at the end of the day, if a student uses it in a different way, which they feel is of benefit to them and still clearly demonstrates progress through the course, I can suggest other ways they might like to look at things, but I'm not going to complain they're not doing things my way.

For a tool such as blogs, we use Moodle like the OU does for our VLE, so providing these doesn't cost us any extra, the students that use them seem to enjoy using them and find them useful, but they're not actively assessed on them.  I couldn't tell you how educationally beneficial they were in comparison to other tools by themselves, but they're part of a course that demonstrably increases students knowledge and skills to analyse issues within the wine trade.

While the students I have that are in the trade or want to join the trade are at least in part taking the course to be able to demonstrate they have some knowledge and skills relating to the industry, the students that are just interested consumers with no aspirations to work in the industry are just looking for something that's fun that will help them learn a bit about wine.  The course has to cater to both needs, it's got to be both educational and enjoyable.  While you would never want to design a course that was boring, the fun bit becomes all the more important when students become more like paying customers.

In short, if a tool is clearly being used for a purpose that the students feel is useful and enjoy and they are clearly progressing through the course itself, how important is it that you can clearly measure the educational benefit of the individual tool/task for each individual?

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Owen Barritt

TMA2

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Saturday, 26 May 2012, 10:57

Made more of a start at thinking about TMA2 this evening (still have activity 4 from weeks 13/14 to look at, but I think that is now going to wait until next week).

At the moment I'm aiming to look at:

  • Week 10 Activity 5 - Blogs
  • Week 12 Activity 5 - Face to Face vs Online Tutorials
  • Week 13/14 Activity 3 - Wikis

Spent this evening skimming through the relevant readings from the activities and jotting down ideas for learner & practitioner choices.

Also went through the relevant forums for each activity and the recent elluminat session and added some notes from them, plus a few from some of the other readings from blocks 1 and 2.

The result of which is 3 entirely illegible sheets of paper with lines going everywhere.

Think there may be a way to go before these turn into a submittable TMA...

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One Month Later...

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 23:09

So, having said I'd kick-start his blog into life to help with my studies after the Week 10 activity on blogging, we're now one month later and I haven't posted anything.

Best laid plans of mice and h800 students and all that.

In going back into the other activities, I must admit during the week's, while there were occasions where I though "oh yes, I must post some thoughts to that blog", most of the time I just completely forgot about it.  Even at the points I did think about it, I was in the middle of doing another activity.  Then you get to the end of the activity, stop and hey presto the intention has got burried alive by other thoughts.

In H808, there was more incentive to blog as you needed to demonstrate reflection for the assessment, but also I think (although this may just be my memory of the course being wrong) that there were more activities suggesting things to blog about.

This was one of the things I mentioned to Shaun in the forums, in that personally I would find it easier to blog on here if there were occasional prompts of ideas to blog about.

With a lot of the activities on the course, they give you points to think about, and we all write down our thoughts as posts in the forums.  At which point the vast majority of my thinking has already been written about either in my initial posts or in the replies on there.  If I have anything more I feel I need to add, I tend to add it to the forum.

I've just been relistening to the elluminate session we had the other week to get some thoughts out of it for the TMA.  Most of the discussions there are things that we've discussed in the forums, but with Shaun raising thoughts and questions it gives you another prompt to rethink in the light of.

The main reason I've come back to the blog now, is because I've had a prompt to rethink how I've approach the blog in the form of TMA2 without this I think it would have probably continued to sit here collecting dust for a bit longer.

 

 

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Podcasting

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 11 Jan 2009, 16:03

Podcast

http://www.switchpod.com/users/ob735/feed.xml

http://media.switchpod.com//users/ob735/podcast.mp3Audio player: podcast.mp3

A brief discussion on tagging and sharing, their use in popular websites and how they carry accross into elearning.

Reflection

Installing all the recommended software was straightforward (already had Audacity installed, so only needed to install Juice in the end).

Started with subscribing to a few of the podcasts recommended in the course webpage and the podcasts that were already up from the other students to get an idea of what to record on.

Spent a while trying to figure out why Juice wasn't finding any podcasts to download on any of the RSS feeds I'd added.  It turned out to be that my laptop was trying to go through the proxy server at work, but I was at home.  Switched it off when I realised and everything worked perfectly.

In recording the podcast, as with any presentation, I planned what I was going to say first and then recorded the audio.  I did the recording in stages stopping during the natural pauses, relistening and possibly re-recording each few seconds.

I did wonder whether this would make it a bit jumpy, but listening back to it, it doesn't seem  that noticable and allowed a process of reviewing while creating (as  I would normally use in a blog post).

There is unfortunately a slight hum on the recording, which I suspect is down to the quality of the microphone.  Given more time I would have experimented with audacity to see if there was a way to filter this out, but suspect it would be impossible without cutting some of my vocal sound.

It would probably have been beneficial to have spoken loader and closer to the microphone to make the audio clearer as my voice is quite quiet in places.

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Definition of Learning Technologist

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Learning Technologist

Technical expert whose role is to influence the use of technology in the curriculum by gaining insight into the curriculum and sharing own technical expertise with academic staff often as part of a broader role (Oliver, 2002).

 

They can just apply educational recipes using "off the shelf" products (Lisewiki & Joyce, 2003), but the more effective practitioners will be pedadogically driven (Oliver, 2002).

References

Lisewski, B. and Joyce, P. (2003) ‘Examining the five-stage e-moderating model: designed and emergent practice in the learning technology profession’, ALT-J, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 55–66.

 

Oliver, M. (2002) ‘What do learning technologists do?’ [online], Innovations in Education and Training International, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 245–52.

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Learning Technologists

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Sunday, 30 Nov 2008, 22:10
I have just finished reading the paper by Oliver (2002).

It was strange reading this as it the general descriptions generally seemed to fit my current job, although I've never really heard the term used before.

I currently collaborate with the teaching staff I work with to develop the curriculum using technology. Educational value is the main focus of what I do. Although I have little authority over the curriculum we use, I have influence through technical knowledge.

I've been in this role for around 3 years (although it has changed a lot in that time and I have had some influence in how it has developed) and have been working for the WSET for around 4 years. I am in the 25-35 age range and am not involved in lecturing.

My role is broad and includes providing admin support for distance learning students as well as collaborating with other members of staff to develop technology use in distance learning and classroom based courses (we have just invested in interactive whiteboards and I played a role in the selection of these and am collaborating with teaching staff to develop activities to use with these).

Until I recently persuaded my boss that it would be beneficial for me to have more time to devote to other things, I was also the librarian.

Recently I have been gaining more of a managerial role for the elearning we do, so perhaps that represents me broadening out into more of an 'elearning professional'. It will be interesting to see how these views change as I read the other papers for this.

References


Oliver, M. (2002) ‘What do learning technologists do?’ [online], Innovations in Education and Training International, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 245–52.
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Personal Preliminary Definitions of Profession, E-learning and E-learning Professional

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Profession

Based on the definitions by Sockett (1985), Perkins (1985) and the traits of Millerson (1964) (all cited in Warrior, 2002). I define a profession as:

A highly skill occupation based on theoretical knowledge, intellectual training and education, which performs a crucial social function.

Elearning

Based mainly on my own practice, I would broadly define elearning as:

Education and training performed at a distance using IT resources.

Elearning Professional

Based on the 2 definitions above, I would define an Elearning Professional as:

An individual skilled in facilitating education and training of others, at a distance, using IT resources, based on their theoretical knowledge, intellectual training and education.

References

Warrior, B. (2002) ‘Reflections of an educational professional’ [online], Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Education, vol. 1, no 2. Available from: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/hlst/documents/johlste/0030_warrior_vol1no2.pdf (accessed 27 November 2008).

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Perkin 1996 and Professional Society

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 25 Nov 2008, 15:31

Perkin's (1996) views on society are interesting and I can see some truth in what he describes. Modern industries are consolidating into larger companies through Mergers and Acquisitions (Baldwin et al, 2001), which will obviously lead to Executives and professionals gaining more power, with industries having a wide range of influence on government policy and society as a whole. For example, the current influence of the oil industry (Baker Institute Energy Forum, 2007) and drugs companies (Smith, 2005).

As Perkin highlights this will require greater demand for expertise, which is demonstrated clearly in the UK with the government's push to get more young people through higher education (Labour Party, n.d.).

Although professionals play a large role in shaping modern society, modern information technology and social networking also play a key role as proposed in the Information Society and Networking Society models (Wikipedia, n.d.). Perkin does take these into account to an extent by discussing the need for professionals to develop these technologies, but clearly does not consider them to the extent they have grown in the 12 years since the paper was written.

References


Baker Institute Energy Forum (2007), Strategies and Influence of Emerging National Oil Companies on World Energy Markets, Available from http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/nationaloil/docs/PECNOCstudyprotocolfinal.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Baldwin L, Camm F, Morre N, Appendix C: Industry Consolidation Trends in Federal Contract Bundling, Rand Corporation, Available from http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1224/MR1224.appc.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Perkin, H. (1996) Chapter 1 of The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Labour Party Website, http://www.labour.org.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2008)
Smith R (2005) Curbing the Influence of the Drug Industry: A British View. PLoS Med 2(9): e241, Available from http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020241&ct=1 (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Information Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Network Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
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Week 8

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Week 8 was basically the TMA.

I felt a little lost as to what was expected with this.

Part (a) was about the drivers and asked us to discuss these in a context familiar to ourselves. The context I know most about is wine education as that's what I do. However, there isn't really a strong drive to use eportfolios, so the discussion felt a little artificial. Some of the generic drivers were applicable though, but it was hard to put them into the context.

I'm not sure whether it would have been easier to choose a different context, but that would have involved a large amount of research as it would not have been familiar to me.

Part (b) was the reflection. I was unclear as to what contributed "one" piece of evidence. This blog, for example, is mainly a continuation of the reflections from activity 2.2, so I used a few excerpts as "one" piece, but it did feel that these should really be counted as more. However, they seemed a good way to show progression.

I tried using MyStuff to compile the evidence and essays, but the rtf output lost the tabulation in the wiki pages and the html output didn't open properly on my XP machine, only showing an xml file and no html files. I've tried it since and the problem seems to be with XPs compressed folders as my linux machine shows all the html files and folders. Discussing this with Robin, it seems that WinZip also opens them fine.

However, as a result I resorted to cutting and pasting into word and zipping them up manually for submission.

Results have since come back. I got 78%, which is frustratingly close to the 85% distinction boundary (compared to the 40% fail boundary). In general, for his comments, it seems Alan felt there was too much breadth and not enough depth to my discussion, which seems fair given my points above. The breakdown was 76% for the essay and 80% for the reflection, which also seems to match my feelings about the exercise.
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Week 7

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I've now got a bit behind with this blog, so here's an attempt to catch up a couple of weeks.

Week 7 was looking at multimedia and once again we did the group tasks on the wiki. This time I setup the page at the beginning of the week and suggested using a table to show rate our competencies.

I started by putting a few obvious ones in and left space for other members of the group to add more. I also put a space for discussion at the bottom.

This task seemed to work better then some of the previous group based tasks and most of the group contributed at least details of there own level of competencies.

Unfortunately, the deeper discussions seemed to be limited to just myself and Colleen. I'm not sure how to get the rest of the group more involved. Perhaps it was mainly a matter of the TMA being just around the corner. I also got the impression that some members of the group were still doing the work from previous weeks. Perhaps it's just a matter of allowing more time for these tasks.

The second part of the activity was to record another multimedia item. I was intending to record a popcast of my reflections, but by the time I had been able to get to the shops to buy a microphone it seemed sensible to move onto the TMA.

I'm still intending to do this, but as it's holding back the rest of my reflections I shall just write this transcript for now and record the popcast over the weekend.
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Owen Barritt

Week 6

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:13
Having not really used an eportfolio before this course, it was interesting to look at some of the alternatives to MyStuff.

I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.

PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.

FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.

In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.

The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.

I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.

I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.

And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...
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Week 5

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:07
Week 5 seemed a little lighter on the workload for the compulsory topics, so allowed me some time to go back, add some references to the eportfolio items from the early activities, test the revisions feature of mystuff, post a few reflections to here and get up to date with other people's blogs.

I've now set up a feedreader to read the blogs of the other students on the course. It a shame more students aren't blogging, but then not everyone has the time or the motivation to do so.

It was interesting to see some of the tutors comments about how the course is going, particularly Robin's comments about the first group activity, in which he seems to have felt it didn't go as well as it could. As I've already said on here, I found it quite enlightening, so a very useful activity even if it didn't (in fact because) it didn't run smoothly. I posted a comment to him to let him know.

The needs analysis grid was a useful task to get an idea of self-assessment and setting objectives. I posted some reflection on this task as a separate post here.

I was interested in contributing to the supplementary activity for this week and collated a lot of the points from the needs grids that were shared on the wiki. Once I'd done this, the other students who had contributed appeared to stop (possibly because they'd moved onto the next section), which made me question whether I should continue as it wouldn't really be a group task if I did it myself and it seemed less useful to do the task on my own. However, Helen did point out that it was worth perservering with anyway and adapt to any collaboration that comes along.

I've now reduced the list slightly myself and will have another look at it later. All collaboration welcome, if anyone wants to revisit this activity, the overall list is on the wiki at:

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Skills%2FCompetencies+list+for+PDP+Grid
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Week 4

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 10:50
I started the activities for week 4 quite late, because I wanted to do the reflection activity from week 3 first.

The reading for this section was quite daunting when I looked at the first paper, which appears to be 27 pages long. It turned out the main part of the paper was only 16 pages and the rest was appendices and references and the other 2 papers were much shorter.

My aim is now to start the reading at the beginning of the week for sections with large amounts of research in order to allow more time, even if the actual activities wait until later in the week.

The activities this week included a brief "online discussion" activity where we posted what we found out to the discussion forum. Although there were some interesting things shared and it was interesting to see what Mitchell picked out from the same paper I read, the discussion was very much everyone making a blog-style post to the forum and no real discussion around it, which seems a shame.

I am now trying to get into the materials earlier in order to reply to people when they first post these comments in order to actually have a discussion on the topics which arise. We all seem at the moment to be working individually with very little discussion of our ideas.

The criteria was interesting to put together, as part of my work I reused the Penn State examples, because I felt it was important to include good and bad examples. Alan has suggested that I go back and replace these with my own examples to show greater understanding, which I will probably try to do over the coming weeks.
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OU URLs

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Tuesday, 21 Oct 2008, 11:08
I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the URLs the OU tools use. Surely, it would be beneficial to make these more user-friendly?

If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.

To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.

Blog

Main blog page:

http://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=ob735


I already have a unique username given to me by the OU (ob735), why do I need a separate number for the blog? Is the backend for the OU blog really limited to using numbers for usernames?


Surely

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=ob735

would be a lot more obviously mine and easier for others to access.


MyStuff

Item for Activity 2.1:

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/portfolio/index.php/mystuff/itemsview/1/____display/itemId/iddfcf7249ef6f0ec429e81ca29533586a


This isn't very obvious what it is or who it belongs to. There is no way I could post a link to this with going to the item and copying the URL.


This is probably very dependent on the backend, but might be worth feeding back to the developers and bearing in mind when other choose eportfolio platforms.


Wiki

Alan's Tutorial Group Page

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Alan's+group


OK, this is semi-friendly as the pages are referred to by name. Would it not be easier if the id was the course code instead (ie H808+08I). Again is the wiki id really limited to numbers?


http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group



Further Tidying

These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.

eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group

These would be much easier to work with.


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