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Christopher Douce

Inquiry, Independence and Information (Computing) Using IBL to Encourage Independent Learning in IT Students

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Sunday, 1 Feb 2015, 13:04

This might sound like a confession, but when I was living the life of a computer scientist (and being a programmer in industry) the term 'pedagogy' remained puzzling for me for quite some time.  Of course, I understood the terms 'teaching' and had an interest in the cognitive psychology of learning, but it took me some time to see what became obvious: that pedagogy is all about choosing and making effective use of appropriate teaching techniques (given the tools at your disposal and those who you are teaching).  I then realised that in science, you might share results from experiments.  In education, on the other hand, you might share practice (or stories) from teaching experiences.

This HEA workshop, held at the Salford University Business School on 19 April 2012, was all about pedagogy and a particular pedagogic approach named, inquiry based learning (Wikipedia), a subject that has been explored within the Personal Inquiry (PI) project carried out within the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology.

This blog post represents my own take on the event and includes a number of highlights.  I began the day by knowing only a tiny amount about what inquiry based learning was, and ended the day knowing a lot more (whilst at the same time beginning to appreciate a lot more about the different contexts in which I might be able to use such an approach).

Opening

We (the workshop delegates) were immediately presented with a number of questions, which were:

  • What are the challenges of engaging independent learning?
  • How do we foster independent learning?
  • Information overload: what skills do students require to navigate the labyrinth of on-line information sources?

Assigned to small groups, we collectively came up with a set of answers.  The challenges were considered to be stimulating engagement, developing motivation and dealing with group dynamics.  Fostering independent learning is achieved by exposure to different examples, facilitating access to technology and encouraging reflection.  Finally, handling information overload is achieved be helping students to evaluate (the validity and usefulness of) source materials.

An interesting point that was raised was that students are increasingly equipped with their own technology, such as laptops and smart phones.  The challenge might no longer be the access to technology, but instead how to get the best out of what they have at their disposal.  This connects to the notion of pedagogy and also to the subject of classroom response systems, which has been discussed in earlier HEA STEM conferences and workshops.

The talk bit

Before we moved into the main section of the workshop, Jamie Wood from the University of Manchester gave a short presentation about what Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) is all about.  IBL is a pedagogic approach that emphasises and draws upon students' capacity to construct knowledge.  It is about investigating authentic open-ended questions (and knowledge construction) and helping to adopt practices of scholarship and research to actively explore and develop a knowledge base.  It also encourages peer-to-peer (student and staff) collaborations and creates opportunities to share results with others.  (Jamie references the work of Phillipa Levy, from the University of Sheffield as well as a HEA report entitled Developing undergraduate research and inquiry).

IBL isn't just about the gathering of facts.  It is also about developing and acquiring a philosophy of knowledge and helping learners to ask the fundamental question of 'what' and 'why'.  There are, of course, strong links to employability skills.  Whenever employees start in a new role or job, new territories and domains have to be negotiated and mastered.  IBL also emphasises collaboration and working with others.  Again, this links back to central ideas of scholarship and knowledge construction: discovering new knowledge is more often than not considered to be a 'team' sport.   IBL is also an approach that can help to develop confidence amongst learners and their problem solving abilities.

IBL was compared to another approach, which is known as Problem Based Learning (PBL).  PBL is considered to be more focussed, and had less of the open-ended character.  PBL could be considered as a subset of IBL, it was argued.

Setting context

In computing, what kind of inquiries might we be able to carry out with our students?  Maria Kutar, from the University of Salford Business School gave one example.  Maria's students are faced with the challenge of understanding the data protection act.  One approach is to read through a text book and perhaps have a group discussion about what is known about the legislation and how it might work.  Another approach is to attempt to explore how the legislation can be used to acquire real information.

Maria's students are encouraged to go out and be filmed on CCTV and then explore (or inquire) about how to view the data (or video) that has been captured (Information Commissioner's Office) .  Such an activity firmly 'situates' the legislation in the context of use, making it more tangible (and therefore understandable).  The activity is also about learning about how the legislation works in practice.  In doing so, students can understand more about what is and is not possible and gain a further understanding of the responsibilities of public authorities.

One might be tempted to argue that such an inquiry might place a burden on those who are asked for the CCTV footage, and this might be a fair point.  However, users of CCTV are compelled to adhere to the law.  Furthermore, the challenges of extracting information from an authority can lead to many interesting debates.

Our Inquiry

When we had been questioned, talked to and given some background information by way of Maria's example, it was our turn to participate in an inquiry (this bit was a total surprise to me!)  Our brief was to go out into the surrounding environment of Salford Quays and MediaCityUK (Wikipedia) and answer to the question, 'how do you find out things that you don't already know?'  (a meta-inquiry)  It didn't take long until the true significance of what was being asked of us began to sink in and I began to myself, 'so, does this mean we've got to go outside and ask people who we've never met this question (whilst wearing a badge)?'  I rapidly acquired feeling of dread, mixed with a touch of despair.

With three competitive teams set, the team that I belonged to rapidly devised a research strategy and swiftly dealt with the issue of socioeconomic and geographical sampling.  We then split into two sub-teams and rapidly began to explore the environs beyond the classroom, armed with a notepad, some charm, a mobile phone (with embedded camera) and a small block of post-it notes.

Our learning visit

We set off across Salford and headed towards the Imperial War Museum North, situated on the other side of the Manchester ship canal.  En route we gently asked our first set of subjects: a set of day trippers who were more than happy to help out.  We then went inside the museum and spoke to some of the people at the reception.  This led to a 'snowball effect'; one participant led to another.  Speaking with some of the newer volunteers led us to speak to some of the more experienced volunteers. 

We quickly realised that we were being exposed to some of the techniques the museum used to help its visitors to 'find things out'.  We discovered display exhibits with gas masks, spaces where films could be shown and found opportunities to share experiences and stories with those who volunteer for the museum.

During our inquiry journey, we made notes and took some photographs, documenting our journey and capturing evidence as we went about our exploration.  Our reflection on our data gathering techniques (and whether they worked) was an integral part of our inquiry too.

Our presentation

After returning from our expedition, each group was told to create something, a PowerPoint presentation or some other artefact to represent the discoveries that we had made.  Our group (along with the others) chose to create a 'post-it note' centric PowerPoint presentation, which summarised our key findings.

In our presentation we just didn't concentrate on presenting our findings on how people find things out (the internet is used a lot, and people ask other people), we also considered what we had learnt from the whole experience of 'going out there' and attempting to discover new things.  We discovered that our inquiry was immersive, sensory, simulating and provoking.  By its nature it was non-linear; we used opportunity to uncover new ideas and followed new directions.   Our inquiry took place over a number of different episodes, where the episodes took upon their own character and had their own themes.

We discovered that an inquiry could be social, but also make use of artefacts.  We had been shown physical objects during our visit to the museum and had heard some interesting stories.  On the subject of stories, people who visited the museum (those conducting an inquiry) might be able to help those who worked at the museum new things.

In some respects there was a blurring of distinction between those who set then inquiry (those who were the teachers), and those who returned with results (the students).  All should be considered to be co-investigators and those who set the inquiry should be prepared to be surprised by the new knowledge that is found and the variety of the findings that are uncovered. 

Our presentation ended with a quote from one of our team members (but it can also be attributed to Confucious) which seemed to echo what we took to be an important essence of inquiry based learning: 'Tell me something, I shall forget.  Show me something, I shall remember.  Involve me, I will understand'.

Reflections

Attendance at the workshop made me ask the question, 'is there a set of inquiry-based learning exercises that will work well within IT, computing or computer science?'

I sense that it really comes into play when we are exploring the intersection between people, technology and society (which is an important aspect of Maria's earlier example).  Perhaps IBL might be used to explore the attitudes that people have towards technology and its impact on the lives of the users.  The environment that we may wish to study may be wider than just the immediate vicinity or campus.

There is also a link between IBL and the pedagogic philosophy of constructivism.  Constructivism, as I understand it, is all about creating an environment (this might be physical or virtual) to enable learners to discover facts for themselves (as opposed to them just being passed on).  Through IBL, the facts that are discovered (and then debated afterwards) are 'owned' by those who discovered them.

IBL, however, is a tool and it should be situated alongside other types of pedagogic activity.  The choice of whether to use IBL in a particular learning programme (or learning design) may be dictated by a combination of the needs of a particular subject area or discipline, human and financial resources (which might also include access to a physical environment), as well as pedagogic expertise within a particular institution or community.   I sense that a change to any of these dimensions may necessitate a change to an overall design (including a change of focus in a particular subject area).

Before this event I hadn't given much thought to Inquiry-based learning, even though I have been aware of the term for a number of years.  My own teaching practice is mostly centred upon a small number of face to face sessions and how best to offer support and guidance to students at a distance.

For me, this workshop has achieved two things.  Firstly, it has increased my awareness of what IBL is (although I've still got some figuring out to do about how to best use it in my own subject), and secondly, it pushed me a little bit outside of my comfort zone.  That, I believe, was entirely the point.

Acknowledgements

Our inquiry team comprised of Mik, Henry and Phillip, all from the University of Salford.

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Christopher Douce

Breaking Enigma and the legacy of Alan Turing in Code Breaking, City University, London

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 18 May 2018, 09:08

City University logo

As soon as I received an email advertising a public lecture at City University by Processor David Stupples on 17 April about the life and legacy of Alan Turing, a couple of weeks after finishing reading Alan Hodge's biography, I knew I had to make the time to come along.  This blog is a summary of some aspects of the event, accompanied by a set of thoughts that the lecture inspired.  I should add that I'm neither a mathematician and nor a cryptographer, but the story of code breaking and the history of Bletchley Park (and how it came to be) is one that has and continues to fascinate me.

David Stupples is professor of systems and cryptography at City University.  His lecture is one of a series of lectures that are given at City, but this one coincides with the centenary of Alan's birth.  The lecture also celebrates the creation of the City University Centre for Cybersecurity Sciences (City University website).

David's lecture began at the end, beginning briefly with Alan Turing's death in 1954, before moving onto a number of subjects which relate to cryptography, the breaking of the enigma code, stories about daring plots to capture code books and then concluding by speaking briefly about Alan Turing's legacy.

Before I attempt to summarise (to the best of my abilities) some of the points that David spoke about during his lecture, he also mentioned an interesting connection between City University and the centre of wartime code breaking at Bletchley Park (website).  David mentioned a former faculty member, Arnold Lynch.  Apparently Arnold worked with electrical engineer Tommy Flowers (Wikipedia), helping to design a fast input device to the Colossus machines that were designed with help from the post office research station (Wikipedia) at Dollis Hill, London.  The work centred on the reading of paper tape loops using light as opposed to mechanics.  Colossus, Bletchley Park and Turing are intrinsically linked, but as far as I understand they are different stories.  They are linked through cryptography, which is a subject that David introduces.

Cryptography

What is cryptography?  In essence, it is study that is concerned with the hiding and writing of secret messages.  David began by introducing us all to the Caesar cipher (Wikipedia), a simple 'monoalphabetic substitution cipher'.  Simply put, you take one letter and replace it with another.  Such ciphers are easy to crack because you can eventually figure out which letter is which by looking at the structure of messages and also the frequency of individual letters.

A more sophisticated approach is to encode groups of letters (bigrams or trigrams) as a single code.  This method, we were told, dates back to Napoleonic times.  We were then introduced to the beginnings of the theory of Enigma codes through the Vigenère cipher (Wikipedia), which I had never heard of before.

David added an interesting aside, saying that this cipher was attacked by Lord Byron's daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.  Ada is also known for her work with the Victorian computing pioneer, Charles Babbage, who proposed, designed and partially built different computing engines: the analytical engine and the difference engine.

Returning to the subject in hand, one approach to encrypt a message is to use a book of codes.  A character (or group of characters) are matched with an entry in a code book, which then have a precise meaning.  Using the technical phrases: there is ciphertext (the message that you can't read), and then the plaintext (the message that you can).

One of the biggest challenges is getting these code books to the people who need to read the messages, and this is one of the biggest challenges that need to be overcome.  David hinted at the mysterious but practical notion of asymmetric keys  (Wikipedia), mentioning their application of number theory.

The Enigma and Codebreaking

One of the most interesting parts of David's talk was his description of the different types of Enigma machine that were deployed; different parts of the German military used different variants.  An Enigma machine comprises of plug boards (which I understand to be a character substitution mechanism) along with a number of rotors, and a reflector which passes a signal back through each of the rotors.  These elements, in combination with each other, create cryptographic combinations in numbers that are quite literally astronomical and unimaginable.  Different machines would have slightly different configurations and different numbers of rotors.  The greater the numbers of rotors, the more 'secure' the code.

Another added complexity was that Enigma operators can also use code books.  Code books in combination with plug boards in combination with rotors which have all been used to encrypt messages in another language presents a problem that feel as if it should be impossible to solve.

So, how was it possible to break the Enigma, to recover plain text from cipher text? I have to confess when it came to following some of the detail, I became a little lost.  Understanding codes and ciphers, how they work and their weaknesses requires the application of an energetic amount of mental gymnastics.  Knowing the background and context behind the discoveries is a useful prerequisite to understanding the detail.

The first aspect lies with some work carried out by Polish cryptographers, whose work was invaluable (Bletchley Park has a permanent exhibit which acknowledges their essential contribution).  There was also, apparently, a spy involved, who managed to gather some essential intelligence (which was another part of the story I had not heard of).

The second aspect, the Polish cryptographers also worked on devices that helped to apply brute force to the decrypting of messages.  They created something called a Bombe (Wikipedia).  Their work inspired a new generation of devices (a reconstruction of which can be seen at Bletchley Park).

The third aspect (and there probably are more than just three aspects, of course) is the occurrence of human error.  Enigma operators would make mistakes (as would operators of TUNNY, too), which would convey clues as to how the machines operated and were configured.

Context

Towards the end of the talk, David connected work that was carried out in the second world war to the time of the cold war.  This was the first time I had heard anyone speak about this subject and the connections.  The audience were shown photographs of KL47 and KL7 devices (Wikipedia) that could be considered to be the successors of Enigma.  We were then treated to some spy stories, which reminded us all that keeping (and uncovering) secrets is as much a human challenge as it is a technical one.

Cryptography isn't a subject that is only applicable to the military (although I clearly sense that the military and military intelligence has been the main driver).  It isn't only about keeping secrets safe from spies.  Whenever you buy something over the internet, when the padlock symbol lights up on your internet browser, you make use of asymmetric keys.  (Incidentally, this mechanism was independently discovered by two different groups, but this is totally different story).  

Also, whenever you make a call on a digital mobile phone, encryption comes into play.  David mentioned the situation where cryptography is used from the point when you request money from a cash machine, and the resulting information about transaction is transmitted onwards to other banking machinery.

A really interesting point that I took a note of is that there is a constant battle between cryptographers (those wishing to keep secrets) and cryptanalysts (those who are wishing to break into codes and extract secrets).  This is a battle that is going to run and run, with both mathematics and computing being central tools for both sides.

Reflections

The biographies and Turing, the history of Bletchley Park, and the development of some of the most fundamental ideas within computer science are all intrinsically connected.  With any lecture on the subject, there is a difficult decision to make about what to focus on, what to touch upon and what to leave out.  It was great to hear of references to Turing's theory of computability and his connection with the ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory, as well as his link to the development of the world's first stored-program computer at the University of Manchester.

The history of the code breaking and learning about the social, political and technological environment in which it took place is fascinating.  One thought that I did have was that perhaps Turing, as a man, might have featured more.  But, as mentioned, it's tough to separate out the different elements of a broader complex story.  Code breaking, Turing and computing are all connected.

All in all, a lively and informative talk that presented, for me, a new angle on some very interesting aspects of the code breaking story.  

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Christopher Douce

HEA STEM Conference, Imperial College, London

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Sunday, 2 May 2021, 12:47

If someone had told me that last week I would be hearing anecdotes about the Russian space programme, learning about muscle wastage in zero gravity and discovering that there is a type of rocket engine that is powered by a combination of rubber and hydrogen peroxide, I would not have believed them!

This blog post is all about a recent visit to the HEA STEM conference, held between the 12-13 April at Imperial College London.  STEM is an abbreviation for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  This aims to be a reflective post, to complement a live blog (HEA website) and corresponding twitter feed that was written throughout the two days of the conference.

STEM is a concept that embraces a significant number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through to the physical sciences and engineering.  I should add that I only attended the computing discipline strand (although all delegates were encouraged to be multi-disciplinary and attend others).  What follows is a summary of some of the highlights followed by an attempt (in my own relatively clumsily worded way) to present some personal reflections on what happened during the conference.

Introductions

The conference was opened by Janet De Wilde head of STEM at the HEA.  This was followed by an address by Professor Craig Mahoney (Chief Executive of the HEA).  Craig emphasised the necessity of a skilled workforce and mentioned a recent enquiry in the House of Lords which aims to explore why so many STEM graduates don't end up working in STEM jobs, but industry claims that there is a skills shortage.  Craig's overriding message for the conference was to look forward, be positive and to be creative.

The final introductory address was by Professor Steve Swithenby from the Open University. Steve emphasised the importance of working between and with different disciplines and asked the question of how we might sustain both discipline based and interdisciplinary research?  The answer: talking to people.  This was expressed as an implicit (but important) theme to the conference.

First day computing presentations: morning

There were two parallel computing streams.  To get the best out of the conference I chose what to go to using a heuristic based on interest and familiarity (specifically choosing subjects that I didn't know too much about).  In the morning of the first day I opted to attend the 'innovative practice in teaching and assessment' strand.

The first presentation was by Mark Kerrigan from the University of Greenwich.  Mark's presentation was all about the use of digital tools (such as Skype, blogging tools and so on) and how they might potentially be used through different phases of a programme of study.  Mark's introduced the Google motion chart, a tool that I had never heard of before.  Other resources that were mentioned included the JISC Escape project and Mapmyprogramme.

The second presentation, 'Enhancing small group teaching and learning using online student response systems' was by Harin Sellahawa, who introduced us to the EduMecca EU project.  There are those student response systems that use dedicated hardware and those that use the hardware belonging to students (i.e. their own smartphones); the EduMecca SRS, as far as I understand, makes use of the student's own smartphone.  Some of the challenges of using WiFi enabled smartphones being that some students might not have them, not all classrooms might have WiFi signals (although I'm sure this is changing), and even if they do, there might be reliability issues.  The pedagogic issues are just as important as the technical ones; whilst SRS systems may permit anonymous voting (permitting the quieter learners to more readily participate), the use of smartphones in class has the potential to be disruptive.

Virtual worlds were all the rage a couple of years ago, mainly due to the emergence of SecondLife which enabled users to create their own worlds and environments.  Educators were quick to consider whether such a tool would be useful for teaching and learning, and it was good to see that Colin Allison gave a short talk to bring us up to date on the developments within this area.  Colin's talk covered a couple of key points. 

The first main point is that it seems that open source virtual worlds, particularly OpenSimulator (or OpenSim) appear to be maturing.  One particularly interesting fact was that there appears to be protocol and scripting language compatibility between OpenSim and SecondLife.  One of the biggest risks of using SecondLife for education is that there is the possibility that LindenLabs could change 'the rules of the world' at any time.  Another argument is that you potentially expose students to a myriad of crazy and inappropriate distractions that can be easily discovered in SecondLife.

The other main point was the potential uses of a virtual world.  Colin gave a number of examples.  These included algorithm animation, the creation of learning resources in virtual spaces (such as a 'WiFi island', to convey principles underpinning this particular technology), as well as non-STEM subjects, such as a virtual reconstruction of St Andrews Cathedral.  More information can be found through the St Andrews OpenVirtualWorlds blog.

The morning session concluded with a brief poster session, where each presenter had to give a two minute impromptu presentation about why their own poster was worth a visit.

First keynote: Project bloodhound, Wing Commander Andy Green OBE

I always sense that giving a keynote speech at a conference is a pretty tough task.  A speaker should ideally present a subject that can connect with many of the debates that may occur throughout a conference, pose some challenging questions, and ultimately leave the audience inspired and energised.

Andy Green's fundamental question was, 'is it possible to build a car that runs at 1,000 miles an hour?'   His answer was, in essence, 'there are a bunch of people who are trying to do just this, and I'm going to be the driver'.

This is all very well and good, but how does this connect to STEM?  Andy offers a multitude of answers: designing a car requires engineering (obviously), copious amounts of computing power, a good amount of satellite imagery and a generous application of many of the STEM subjects (such as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and so on).  Much of the connections can be seen through the Project Bloodhound SSC website (SSC being an abbreviation for Super Sonic Car).

Andy asked the audience, 'to make this car work, what problems do we have to solve?'  There was no shortage of answers.  The main one was 'keeping the car on the ground'.  Others were 'how to store the fuel, how to deal with heat, how to stop it, how to build the wheels...'  Many of the problems gave way to a brief presentation of some of the hard technical issues that have to be dealt with.  Computational fluid dynamics was mentioned, along with rocket science and how tough manufacturing challenges were being addressed.

Another question is: 'why do it?'  One answer is that the existing record is currently under threat by other teams.  Another connection question might be, 'why build a car that goes 1K mph when there are other bigger humanitarian problems to be solved?'  This is a fair question, but solving any technological problem requires a degree of design and innovation.  I personally feel that it is not (always) useful to make a judgement about what is a 'good' or a 'bad' problem to solve.  The innovation that occurs in a 'bad' problem might find its way to helping to find a solution for a 'good' problem.

Bloodhound SSC is described as an education project as well as a land speed record attempt.  It achieves this by providing many aspects of the design available for everyone to see.  Another dimension of the project is that on the day of the record attempt, telemetry data will also be provided for followers to see.  Computing is a subject that features from the initial design and operation of the car through to sharing of information about the project and the data that the project generates.

I have to admit that the talk was pretty inspiring.  Am I now more interested in subjects such as materials engineering and the chemistry of rocket propulsion?  I'll be lying if I said that I didn't (I admit to being somewhat more interested than I was before Andy's talk).  The biggest impact of the keynote, for me, wasn't so much the detail about the car, but the idea about the educational aims of the project.  This got me thinking.  I asked myself, 'what kind of project could I be involved with that might inspire people to take up (my special bit) of STEM?'  With this in my mind, I guess the keynote worked a treat.

First day computing presentations: afternoon

During the afternoon I split my time between two sessions, beginning with 'enhancing the employability of computing students' and then moving onto 'innovative practice in teaching and assessment'.

The first afternoon presentation, entitled 'understanding difficulties with generic conceptions of employablity' was presented by Martyn Clark.  The key point that I took away from this presentation was a very important one.  Simply put, different organisations have different cultures; one student may more readily fit into the culture of one organisation rather than another.  This raises the problem of how do we try to prepare students for the world of work when there is extensive variability?

The second presentation in the theme of employability was entitled, 'the inspiring teacher in computing' by Alistair Irons, University of Sunderland.  Alistair's presentation connected strongly with the keynote.  This reminded me of a sub-discipline of computing which can be broadly entitled 'computer science education'.

Being inspiring is, of course, important when it comes to student retention.  If one is not inspiring, learners may lose a lot of their motivation.  Alistair challenged us to consider what 'is not' inspiring.  The bullet point list of items make for an interest read: PowerPoints, lectures that are filled with loads of facts (which may make them tough to understand), lecturers being unprepared, lecturers who talk in monotone, lectures that are boring, lecturers who give the impression that they don't want to be there, and teachers who talk down to the students.

All these points are pretty negative, so how about considering the other perspective of what makes an inspiring lecturer?  Again, I can summarise by presented a bulleted list.  Key points are: lecturers who appear to be comfortable and are enthusiastic, who know their stuff and are willing to help, are friendly and approachable, make good use of humour and make good use of stories.  There was the comment that all these points could be compressed or summarised into three key points.  These are: personality and authenticity, experience, and finally, approaches and methods used.  To me, one point stands out, and that is authenticity and its sister attribute, humility.

A change of session led me to join Thomas Lancaster's presentation about contract cheating.  Contract cheating is where you pay someone else to write your assignment for you, passing it off as your own work.  One advantage of using this approach is that because the work is original (even though it isn't yours), it will not be detected by the usual plagiarism detection systems such as TurnitIn.  Thomas presented an interesting and slightly alarming summary of his (and his colleague's) analysis of sites that offered 'essay writing services'.  It struck me that the university sector has now entered an arms race; universities need to apply ever more sophisticated technology to detect cheating that may be facilitated through new ways of using technology.

At the end of Thomas's presentation a question was asked about whether software might be able to detect a 'step change' in the grammatical and linguistic style of submissions from students.  There are a couple of challenges of such an approach.  Firstly, to do this accurately you need a fairly big sample of texts.  Secondly, the writing style of students is likely to change and develop as they gain more experience.  I feel this will remain a challenge for computational linguists for some time to come.

Karl Stringer presented, 'A googlemaps feedback system implemented with Blackboard'.  Karl described a system where exercises (for a module entitled 'using the web') are mapped onto locations on a Google map, adopting a simple metaphor of a walking trail.  One of the really good points of this approach (ignoring the Blackboard dimension of the implementation) is that it makes use of software that is free to use, and helps students to understand what the current generation of web-based tools are capable of.  It was also thought provoking in the sense that it takes advantage of how we can remember maps through our spatial and visual memory.

The final presentation of the computing strand was by Peter Thomas from the Open University.  Pete described a tool that enables diagrams to be automatically assessed.  This means that a student may draw a diagram using a tool which is hosted within the Open University's implementation of Moodle, and the resulting diagram will then be assessed against a set of pre-defined answer.  Pete commented that the system he presented could cater for many different types of formal diagrams (which could include entity relationship diagrams and spray diagrams) and the marking accuracy was as good as human markers.  He also challenged us to send him diagrams which we thought the system might not be able to handle.

Second keynote: The next small step, Kevin Wong

We were asked to consider the story of Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who led an expedition which circumnavigated the globe.  Magellan began with five ships and 237 men.  Magellan didn't make it back, but eighteen men did.  In the expedition all but one ships were lost, and 80% of the crew, facts which were surprising and shocking.  This emphasised the point that exploration is difficult.  It is difficult for a whole host of different reasons.

Kevin Wong is an astrophysicist and medic who worked for NASA.  Kevin's talk focused upon the challenge of a manned space flight to Mars.  After telling us about Magellan, Kevin then went onto present a concise and compelling history of space flight, firmly situating its history in the context of the cold war.  Whilst talking about the Apollo programme, we were reminded about Kennedy's defining speech at Rice University, 1962.

Kevin presented a number of questions which he tried to answer.  The main ones that I remember are: why go to Mars?  And, what are the main problems that we have to solve?  Other than being a project that is likely to inspire and facilitate the development of new technologies there is the fundamental question of life itself.  If there is no evidence of life, of any kind, on Mars, then this makes our humble planet all the more special.

Moving onto the problems, different mission options were described to us and one of the best options is likely to take two and a half years, with some considerable time to be spent on the surface of Mars.  Spaceflight exerts a huge physiological and psychological toll.   Without gravity, muscle and bone wastage is extraordinary, not to mention the increased risk of cancer due to exposure to radiation.  Astronauts will be confined in small uncomfortable environments for considerable lengths of time without the creature comforts and the luxurious opportunity for social interaction that we have on earth.  Human exploration of space, it is emphasised, is difficult (which, of course, is an understatement).

Kevin's talk concluded with the sharing of an image of a craft that could solve the challenges that weightlessness causes: a structure the size of the London Eye that rotates around 4 times a minute, which is enough to create artificial gravity through centrifugal force.  It could be built with materials that get stronger when they are subjected to stretching forces (if my memory serves me well!)  At the end of the second keynote Kevin was asked the ultimate question, 'if asked, would you go to Mars?', to which he responded, 'I would go to the moon... but Mars is something totally different'.

Second day computing presentations: first session

For the first part of the second day, I attended a workshop entitled, 'embedding employability attributes into the 1st year curriculum' by Paula Bernaschina and Serengul Smith, both from the University of Middlesex.  We were introduced to the CBI employability skills, something that I had never heard of before.  These skills were not specific to any specific discipline or subject.  Key skills related to: self-management, team working, problem solving, application of IT, communication and literacy, application of numeracy, and business and consumer awareness.  We were given the challenge of how to create activities that address each of these points.  More information about these skills can be obtained by viewing a report that can be downloaded from the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) website. Towards the end of the workshop, a question was asked as to whether there were any other employability guidelines that module designers might potentially use.  A personal view is that any skill that is developed within a module (or series of modules) always needs to be contextualised to ensure that its purpose and use is clear and its industrial relevance explained.

Second day computing presentations: second session

The final discipline specific session of the day comprised of a series of four presentations.  The first was by Jose-Luis Fernandez-Vindel and Tina Wilson (from UNED, in Spain, and the Open University respectively).  Jose spoke about the challenges of translating Open Educational Resources (OERs), which is akin to the problem of software localisation (Wikipedia), and connected the problem to the domain of learning (or instructional) design, mentioning a design tool called Compendium LD (Open University website).

The second presentation was by two Open University colleagues, Frances Chetwynd and Chris Dobbyn.  Frances and Chris have been involved with the production of a new first level introduction to computing module, entitled TU100 My Digital Life.  Their presentation, entitled 'consistency v autonomy: effective feedback to a very large cohort' aimed to share practice and experience in relation to developing and enhancing feedback that is given to students.  Since TU100 is a first level module, the issue of skills development is considered to be very important (to aid progression to later levels). 

One of the challenges of teaching some aspects of software design and computer programming is making use of compelling examples that are rich enough to get students to think.  Nicola Whitehead from Swansea Metropolitan University shares the perspective that when it comes to teaching how to create a use case (or a set of use cases), the canonical example of a student information system doesn't really offer too much in the way of inspiration.  Nicola introduces the card game Fluxx (Wikipedia) to her students and challenges them to use it to extract some use cases.  Fluxx is cited to have the advantage that it is unfamiliar enough to facilitate debate, and complex enough to create some sufficiently challenging use cases. 

The final presentation was by Paul Neve from Kingston University.  Paul made a compelling argument that skill development in computer programming is discontinuous, i.e. it happens in 'light bulb' moment jumps, where insight and understanding is suddenly gained after periods of gaining experience and considering different approaches (or 'banging ones head against a brick wall').  Building on teaching experience gained at Kingston, Paul described a web-based system where the student is taken through a series of challenging activities and assignments.  Paul was keen to emphasise the importance of a lecture as an event that 'frames' the problem or describes the tools that are used to deliver programming activities.

Panel discussion

Much of the time left for the panel discussion was given over to the audience to raise points make contributions.  Before this occurred, representatives of 'lunchtime meeting groups' were asked to feedback on key issues that they felt relate to STEM.  I've noted down a number of key themes.  These were technology and its use and how this relates to pedagogy and the sharing of practice.  Other themes were the importance of the student experience and how to facilitate interdisciplinary research and projects.  There were was also comments about wider involvement and engagement, with reference to policy makers and industry.

One comment from the audience jumped out at me, and this related to not only to the theme of student experience but also the theme of pedagogy.  This was that we should feel free to draw upon the experience of education at other levels.  It struck me that interdisciplinary isn't a single dimension of 'subject'.  The other dimension is that of the 'level' of study.  The point being that we should learn the lessons that have already learnt by others to ensure that we can uncover and develop the best opportunities for teaching and learning.

Reflections

This is the first big HEA conference that I have attended.  This is also my first STEM event, where experts in different disciplines come together, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  The computing strand contained some really good stuff, especially the session on what makes an inspiring (computing) teacher; this was certainly very thought provoking.

Two general points come to mind.  The first is that I did feel that there could have been more formal opportunities to meet colleagues from other disciplines.  The second was that there might have been more of an opportunity to share 'war stories', about challenging (or innovative) teaching practices, to learn what went well and what didn't.

I do feel that there is something positive about the notion of STEM.  The shared principle (to me) seems to be the use of knowledge and skills to solve problems and to do interesting things that may benefit industry and wider society.  The challenge (again, this is my own view) is trying to focus attention when members of different disciplines might be looking in slightly different directions (in terms of their own subjects).  This is certainly something that was reflected in the panel session with the comment, 'there needs to be opportunities to find the spaces to have conversations'.  From conversations might become focus and further opportunities to develop further ideas and learn from the experiences of our peers.

All in all, a fun event.  A good venue and cracking keynotes, all coming together to create a thought provoking couple of days.

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Christopher Douce

Creating a positive and workable future for UK games and animation courses: industry and education perspectives

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Thursday, 14 May 2020, 18:34

I recently attended a workshop about the subject of games, animation, education and industrial relevance at the University of Greenwich on 2 April 2012. I have to confess that games and animation isn't my core subject (since I feel that I lie on the more 'computer science' end of an art and design subject continuum), but I do confess to having more of a passing interest in both games and animation.

The main aim of the workshop was about sharing.  Sharing information about what is needed by industry, sharing information about what is taught within academia (and how it is taught), and the sharing of different views and perspectives.

The day comprised of an introductory session, three keynote speeches and a long discussion session. The first keynote presented a perspective from the games industry, the second presented an educational perspective, and the third an animation perspective.  The main points that I managed to gain from the day are summarised below.  Of course, these notes represent my own take on the day; other delegates might have come away with different impressions.

Introduction

The day was introduced by Nigel Newbutt from the University of Greenwich. Nigel contextualised the day by describing some of the challenges that are faced by higher education institutions.  One perspective is that in the world of higher fees students will become increasingly vociferous and may increasingly choose programmes of study will lead to financial and career security.  Considering the industrial perspective is therefore an imperative; industry demands graduates that are employable.  By the same token, academies need to build reputations to ensure that demand for their modules is sustainable.

One of the notes that I've made during the introductory talk is whether there is a gap between academic and vocational education, i.e. learning the principles behind ideas versus learning the stuff that employers in industry needs.  This links to a perpetual (and necessary) tension, the tension between education and training.  This, to me, was a theme that appeared time and time again, often in slightly different guises.

First keynote: future industry directions

Martin Darby gave the first keynote.  Martin works in a start-up called Remode which he co-founded. One of the things that struck me about Martin's presentation is that he touched upon the history of gaming, commenting on how the industry had changed. The principle of a games development cycle connected to the development of new generations of console is being challenged.  Mobile and web-based gaming is a space that is of increasing significance (and one which Remode is working in).

I was introduced to the notion of the AAA game, a term that I had not heard of before. This is a game development which is so substantial that its production has parallels with that of film industry; these are the games which have huge budgets and require teams of developers and artists.

Returning to the theme of the workshop, what do employers within the game industry need?  Martin briefly mentioned a challenging article that was entitled 'Money wasted on uni games courses scandalous'.  Clearly, this is an opinion piece (and the comments posted against the article are interesting), but what are Martin's views?

Gaming is a subject that is intrinsically multi-disciplinary.  There is the need to consider the aesthetics and artistry of a game (art is important), it is necessary to consider the market (business is important), have technical skills (computer science is important), and it is necessary to have the skills to communicate to different groups of people whilst at the same time holding onto the bigger picture.

When it comes to demonstrating competency in these different areas the best thing that someone seeking a foothold in the industry could do is to create a finished project that could be shown to a potential employer.  Finishing something is considered to be very important; this suggests close attention to detail and an ability to grapple not only with technology but also broad concepts.  A demo game that is buggy or doesn't do what it supposed to do, it is argued, makes a terrible impression.

Picking up on the technical skills, Martin said that low level computing skills, such as assembly language, are no longer required.  The reason for this is that much of the low level stuff has been abstracted to other software tools.  Skills such as object-oriented programming and maths are considered to be transferrable to different toolsets.

During Martin's talk (and during the question and answer session), there was some talk about gaming engines, such as  Unity, Unreal and Turbulenz; developments that I had not heard of before.  Relating to the subject of gaming engines, Martin quoted a distinction that had been posed between the 'Masterwork age of games' vs 'founder work of games' (unfortunately I don't have the name of who suggested this distinction).  The argument is that the age of substantial game innovation (the founderwork) is over (ignoring, of course, the different ways in which games are consumed).  Instead, we're in a period where we are gradually improving what we have (mastering our tools and what we produce).

At the end of Martin's talk, there was a chance to share views, opinions and experience. The issue of the multi-disciplinary nature of gaming was emphasised and one of the challenges may be to get different faculties to work with each other. Perhaps there needs to be a balance of modules to enable developers (irrespective of whether they choose to specialise) to gain the big picture. Students, it was argued, should be encouraged to attend conferences and festivals to do just this.

Second keynote: Future of higher education 2012

The second keynote of the day was by Professor Ian McNay from the University of Greenwich. Ian raised a number of issues that were pertinent to the wider sector.  He began by presenting a model of teaching and learning, mentioned the pressures that institutions face in response to increases in fees and the issues of diversity.  During the question and answer session, one question jumped out at me as being very important, particularly regarding the issue of connections between industry and academia. This was, 'should academics consider or be able to take a sabbatical within industry?'  (with a view to informing teaching practice)  The answer was a very clear 'yes, they should, and this would be very useful too'.

Third keynote: An insider's view (industry to education)

For the third keynote, Fraser Maclean shared with us his personal experiences of working as an animator, whilst at the same time connecting his talk firmly to the domains of computing, art and education.  For a mere computer scientist, his presentation was very illuminating and thought provoking.

Fraser began by emphasising the importance of drawing, sharing with us some astonishingly beautiful sketches that I understand to be from his own portfolio. He spoke about the perceptions that some have about sketches and this made me realise that my control of a pencil or paintbrush is one skill in which I am somewhat deficient.  I've noted the words, 'I still maintain that drawing is the most important tool in design'. This strongly linked with earlier discussions about the need to connect the technical disciplines of computing with the discipline of art and design.

Fraser spoke clearly about the commercial perspective, mentioning the notion of a production pipeline where hundreds of different people (and software tool users) may be working on a single production.  Another point that I noted were the words, 'there is only one type of animation, commercial animation'.  All animation costs money; business is just as important as art and computing.

Echoing the importance of attending conferences and festivals as a way to acquire industrial awareness, Fraser mentioned the importance of being aware of and potentially visiting organisations that are important within the animation industry.

Another couple of points from Fraser's speech included his description of how the industry had changed over the years, and how it had resisted change.  A really interesting comment was how animation specialisation might have also changed.  Previously artists might be required to draw one character (or a set of characters).  Due to the application of computer modelling, animation was described in terms of 'puppet manipulation', where the puppet exists within the memory of a computer.  Some animators may be skilled at certain types of movements (or sequences of movements) as opposed to others.

To me, the understanding of multiple disciplines was also an important theme, as was the different ways to link industry with education.  This led us towards discussions about a programme called Dare to be Digital that operated in conjunction with the University of Abertay, Dundee. I have also noted a reference to something called Skillset Accreditation.

All in all, a very interesting talk. Given my involvement in an Interaction Design module with the Open University, one point that Fraser made about storyboarding jumped out at me.  This was when he emphasised that animation or film storyboards only need to convey the essence (and not the detail) of a scene, that it's okay for sketches to be sketchy.  The importance of sketching as a mechanism of communication (as well as animation) was a topic that occupied my thoughts for some time after the day had ended.

Discussion

Fraser's talk led directly onto an open discussion session between all the delegates where industrial and teaching experiences were shared.  Given the number of delegates at the event this 'free form' discussion worked particularly well, but does pose unique challenges when attempting to compose a concise summary (in fact, parts of the discussion section might have leeched into my earlier summary of Fraser's talk).  Instead I'm going to mention some of the points that jumped out at me, necessarily omitting others.

The first point that I would like to share is a link to the Livingstone-Hope skills review of video Games and visual effects (the video that is featured on this page is worth a watch). A notable comment on the video was that a perfect graduate would be one who was skilled at maths, physics and art. 

One of the continuing tensions (and one that I've mentioned earlier) is the distinction between education and training.  Industry always wants graduates who are able to be immediately productive with particular tools and technologies, whereas educators may perceive their role to be more about helping learners to acquire conceptual frameworks and vocabularies that help them to learn domain specific products.  

Each discipline has its set of tools. Digital or computer forensics makes extensive use of tools such as EnCase. When it comes to gaming, there are numerous game engines. For animation there are (from what little I know) modelling software tools such as Maya. Effective on-the-job (or employer led) learning depends on knowing some 'stuff' to enable an employee to quickly grasp procedures and functions which can lead to effective practice and performance.

A part of 'education', particularly with regards to gaming, might relate to understanding the broader social context, i.e. what is gaming for and what is its history, a point raised by Fraser Maclean.  Another perspective is the importance of emphasising the connections between disciplines, particularly the commercial dimension.  Whilst a business might be prepared to train a user to use a particular games toolset (or become familiar with a production pipeline), it may be expected that graduates should be familiar with the broader environment in which an industry operates.  This links back to an earlier point of the importance of external events, whether they are conferences, festivals, exhibitions or visits to known employers (should they have the time and the inclination).

Reflections

One of the reasons why I enjoyed this workshop was that subjects discussed were slightly outside of my own area.  This said, animation and gaming has always been persistent interest; I have to confess that I've been an intermittent consumer of computer games ever since I was around ten and I remember being increasingly interested in the computer graphics of computer animation after completing the final year of my computer science degree; I remember attending a screening of Toy Story (persuading myself that it was due to professional interest).

This event had a different structure to other HEA workshops I've attended.  It had a good mix of thought provoking formal presentations and discussion time.  This workshop has emphasised to me the strong link between computing, technology and the creative industries.

I've been to quite a few HEA events at Greenwich but this was the first event that dealt with explicitly gaming and animation.  As I embarked on my short journey home I caught a brief glimpse of the finishing touches being made to the rebuilt Cutty Sark. This made me wonder how animation and computer technology might be used to share stories about this historic and fascinating part of London.

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Christopher Douce

HEA workshop announcement: User experience and usability for devices and the web

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 13 Feb 2017, 12:40

A HEA sponsored workshop that is to focus on the teaching of interaction design, usability and user experience is to take place at the Open University in Milton Keynes on 27 June 2012.

The workshop aimed to bring together academics and teachers with the view to sharing experience and best practice.  More information is available from the HEA website but the key themes and principles behind the workshop is described below.

Interaction design, usability and user experience

Human-computer interaction (or interaction design, as it is now known) is a subject that touches upon so many different areas of computing; it impacts on areas such as web design, the design of mobile applications, the creation of video games, educational technology and so many others. There are also very obvious connections to industry and commerce, not to mention engineering, where system designers need to create usable interactive systems and interfaces for a range of different users.

Two of the key terms which are often spoken about when discussing interaction design are that of usability and user experience. Usability refers to the attributes or features of a product that enables the users to achieve an intended outcome. User experience, on the other hand, relates to the feelings or sense of accomplishment that might accompany an interaction with a device.

This interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together technologists and educators from institutions throughout the UK who teach interaction design and related subject areas. Its overall intention is to share experiences and expose challenges, such as how to address complex issues such as the design of products for diverse users.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • Approaches and techniques used to teach interaction design
  • Approaches and techniques used to teach the development of web technologies and any other interactive systems
  • Development of mobile applications and tools
  • Understanding usability and user experience
  • Teaching of accessibility and interaction design
  • New and novel pedagogic approaches for the teaching of usability and user experience
  • Practitioner reports (education and industry)

Format

Those who are interested in sharing something about their teaching practice or their research are invited to submit short abstracts.  The abstracts will then be reviewed and those that are successful will be invited to submit papers that are 4-5 pages long which are to be connected to a presentation of 20 minutes.  It is envisaged that there will be a panel session at the end of the day to allow common themes to be identified and to expose some of the challenges that educators face regarding the teaching of interaction design and related subject.

If you are interested in attending, please submit a 300-500 word abstract to c.douce (at) open.ac.uk, using the subject heading 'HEA workshop'.

Key dates

Below is the list of the key dates to bear in mind:

13 May 2012 - Deadline for the submission of abstracts

18 May 2012 - Notification of acceptance

17 June 2012 - Deadline for final papers

Registration information for the event will be made available at least two weeks before the date of the workshop.

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Embedding Self and Peer Assessment and Feedback in Practice - A Principles-Based and Technology-Enabled Approach

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 18 May 2018, 09:06

The first HEA discipline workshop of the year, entitled Embedding Self and Peer Assessment and Feedback in Practice (HEA events page) was held at the University of Ulster on 9 March 2012.  This blog post represents my own reflections of the event.  I do hope they are useful to either the delegates who were there, or anyone else who accidentally stumbles across these notes.

Introduction

Denise McAlister, Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Ulster introduced the day by emphasising the importance of feedback and how it plays a central role in teaching and learning.  The student experience, it was argued, is significant affected by the provision and quality of feedback.  Denise raised a number of challenges: how pedagogic design can offer opportunities for feedback.  The opportunities have to be balanced with the potential risk of over-assessment.  She also raised concerns about group assessment, particularly when it comes to transparency.  It is therefore a necessity, of course, to provide robust processes to ensure that students are treated fairly and equally irrespective of the assessment method (or methods) that an institution may adopt.

Presentations

The first main presentation of the day was by Alan Masson, Head of Technology Facilitated Learning at the University of Ulster.  Alan's presentation was entitled 'Ulster Principles of Assessment and Feedback in learning, background and their use in promoting learning technologies'.  Alan made the point that assessment and feedback is a key part of the student experience; it is an issue that affects student retention and achievement, module and course evaluation and the wider public perceptions of an institution.  Alan mentioned something called the REAP principles (REAP website, PDF). 

Alan went onto summarise a set of seven principles that Ulster use.  These were (in essence): clarify good performance, encourage time and effort, deliver high quality feedback, provide opportunities to act on feedback, positive encouragement, develop self-assessment and reflection, and encourage interaction and dialog.  More information about these principles can be seen by visiting the University of Ulster Assessment and Feedback website.  During his presentation, Alan also directed us to something called the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy, which was something I had not heard of before.

The second presentation of the day was by Rebecca Strachan, Northumbria University.  Rebecca's presentation was entitled 'Peer Assessment for Formative Feedback - it's Good for You'.  Rebecca introduced us to something called the Learning Pyramid, from the National Training Laboratories, which emphasises the notion that highest levels of retention (or perhaps understanding?) may arise when one student is asked to teach something to someone else.  We were also directed to the Ripples model of learning (Phil Race's website) which presents 'seven factors underpinning successful learning'.

Rebecca presented a number of challenges regarding the subject of formative peer assessment.  It is necessary to provide a motivation for the students, define the rules of engagement, and implement a system where by the tutor or instructor could offer (or provide) a moderation process.  Finally, it was considered that the process of providing feedback is as useful as the feedback itself.

Two presentations about WebPA followed.  WebPA is a web-based peer assessment tool that was developed at Loughborough University and was funded by JISC, building on earlier work.  Keith Pond presented an outline of the WebPA system through his presentation 'WebPA - Multi-disciplinary peer-mark moderation of group work'.  This was complemented by presentation about teaching practice by Neil Gordon, entitled 'Experiences and practice of using WebPA to support self and peer-assessment in teaching'. 

What I liked about Keith's presentation was the summary of the history of the project and particularly the emphasis on feedforward comments (i.e. comments to help future performance, as opposed to reflections based on existing work that has been completed).   What I liked about Neil's presentation was that he emphasised the importance of group work for software projects, speaking to an important industrial perspective that can be easily lost.    More information about WebPA can, of course, be found by visiting the WebPA project website which is hosted at Loughborough.

The final subject specific presentation of the day was by Luke Chen who compared student perceptions of self and peer assessment by using two case studies: a masters module (advanced web technologies) and a undergraduate module (advanced interactive programming).  One approach used Blackboard whilst the other used a paper based system.

Student voices

A couple of weeks ago I attended an inclusive learning conference at the Open University.  One themes that struck me from the conference was the importance of the student voice and the role that it can have in helping to inform educational practice.  It was great to see that student voices (or student views) were also brought to the fore at this workshop.

Following on from Luke's earlier presentation, Steven McComb, a postgraduate student, gave his reflections on peer assessment.  This was followed by a presentation by Tanya Fisher, a final year interactive multimedia design student, who also volunteered useful reflections.  It was great to hear such positive assessments of the assessment process.

Activities

After lunch, we had the opportunity to participate in a curriculum design activity that was based on the JISC funded Viewpoints project (University of Ulster).  We were asked to tools from the Viewpoints project to consider: standards, best practices, assessment and feedback principles, implementation ideas and the role of technologies.

The tools we were given comprised of a large laminated sheet which represented an empty module, and cards that we could stick to various parts of the module.  I interpreted the tool to enable curriculum designers to consider different alternatives or to help to facilitate communication between different designers.

Although we didn't get much time to play with the tools, the use of cards which encapsulate aspects of curriculum design as a way to facilitate design of modules is one that is compelling. 

HEA presentation

The closing presentation of the day was by Mark Ratcliffe, Discipline Lead for Computing at the Higher Education Academy.  Mark spoke briefly about the various workshops that were scheduled throughout the year and also told us about the different funding opportunities that were open to individuals as well as institutions.  Opportunities range from small grants to enable delegates to travel to workshops through to large multi-institution collaborative projects.  More information can, of course, be found by having a dig around in the HEA website, or by contacting the HEA directly.

Reflections

Feedback is a really important subject.  My own personal view is that it is something that takes a lot of skill and experience to do really well.  One thing that we can every easily overlook is the feelings that our students experience as they receive their assignments or exam results.  We need to be mindful of presenting encouragement to ensure that learners are in the right frame of mind to accept any future altering feedback that we may take time to compose and present.  Peer assessment is one way to enable learners to develop critical thinking skills whilst at the same time enabling students to engage with the concepts and theories that may be the subject of an assessment.

Pedagogy, however, remains very important.  Peer assessment, in my opinion, is likely to be an especially powerful tool if it is used in subjects where having the skills to constructively criticise is especially valued.  During the workshop, the use of group work within software teams was something that was mentioned.  Peer assessment is, of course, an invaluable tool in creative subjects, such as design.

All in all, a useful and successful workshop.  Thanks Ulster!

Before I go, I have to confess that this was my first trip to Belfast and I really enjoyed it.  One of my regrets is not having taken the opportunity to take more to explore the city and the surrounding area a bit more.  Heading home to London I made a personal 'note to self' that I am most definitely going to return and do exactly that.

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Christopher Douce

Exploring Sense

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 24 Mar 2014, 14:13

Last weekend I attended an event known as a Sense development session, hosted at the Open University in the South East offices in East Grinstead.  Sense is, of course, the graphical programming language that is used to teach the fundamentals of programming in a new module entitled TU100 My Digital Life

Whilst TU100 discusses a whole range of issues (such as privacy, mobility and ubiquity) and allows different skills to be developed, programming remains an important subject and one that some students find difficult. 

The main objective of the event was to enable associate lecturers to get together to share their experiences about using of the Sense software.  Before the main Sense session, another tool was demonstrated and discussed: Jing.

Jing

The Open University provides and supports a number of different digital tools, such as its Moodle based virtual learning environment, synchronous discussion tools  and image sharing software (such as the kind of software used on TU100, as well as other modules such as U101 Design Thinking and T189 Digital Photography).  Sometimes, however, it is possible to make use of freely available tools that are just 'out there' (on the cloud) to facilitate teaching and learning.

Jing is one of those tools.  At the start of the session, Graham Eaton demonstrated how Jing (Techsmith website) can be used to create simple and effective demonstrations to show students how to make use of different applications.  One of the really nice features of an application such as Jing is that it also allows you to make voice recordings: you can talk through how you use something.  When you are done, you can also share your digital recording to others by uploading the results to a shared website.

Graham went further than just saying that 'Jing is a tool that allows you to quickly make screen casts'.  Using MS Paint, a graphics tablet and Jing, Graham demonstrated that it is possible to create customised 'chalk board' animations which can be used to explain simple mathematical principles.

There are, of course, some drawbacks: cost.  The demo version (which is free to use) doesn't permit editing and has a limit of five minutes.  These five minutes, however, may make the difference between understanding a principle and not understanding a principle. 

An important (implicit) point was that we have different tools at our disposal, and it's up to us to find a blend of the different tools that we may feel comfortable using.   Educational practice sessions such as these may inspire us to consider investigating and deciding upon our own blend of tools (and allow us to think differently about new possibilities).

Introducing Sense

The Sense part of the day was facilitated by Diane Brewster and Michelle Dewey.  Diane kicked off the first activity to try and answer the question, 'what were the problems of teaching programming to novices?'  From three groups we arrived at a number of answer, which I'll do my best to summarise.

Firstly there were the broad skills, such as thinking algorithmically and being able to 'abstract' the essence of a problem so it can be translated into code.  This was connected to the challenge of looking (and understanding) the logic of problems.  The issue of syntax was also mentioned, along with the acquiring the knowledge (and understanding) of different programming structures and how they might be used. 

Knowing how (and where) to look things up was considered to be an important skill, as was techniques (and strategies) for testing and debugging.  A final general point that was discussed was that some students who had learnt how to program using one programming paradigm (Wikipedia) might find it difficult to learn a programming language that uses a different paradigm.

Diane took us through a presentation that aimed to answer the question 'why has Sense been developed and what is its pedigree?'  We were told about the Scratch language (MIT), a programming language called Alice (Alice website), and a microcontroller called the Arduino (Wikipedia).  Sense is, of course, a version of Scratch that the Open University has modified.  The differences being is that it has a small number of different programming constructs, and can also be interfaced with some Arduino based physical hardware.

Towards the end of this first session, we were then assigned into mixed groups and asked to consider how to write a small program using different coloured post-it notes.  (Some of us were programmers, others were not!)

Playing with Sense

Before we were allowed into a lab filled with computers, we were introduced to a number of other Sense concepts, such as the notion of 'broadcast', or sending messages from one component of a Sense program to another.  There was some discussion about the stage metaphor, and a presentation of a simple maze game.  In keeping with this metaphor, something new for me was the idea that a sprite (a graphical object on the screen) can have different costumes.

The final part of the day was dedicated to about an hour of 'tinkering'.  It is felt that Sense is one of those things that you can only get to grips with properly if you spend a bit of time 'messing around' with.  By messing around, this might mean creating new programs, or changing existing programs.

Not having had much time to tinker before (and being a former software developer), some of the constructs (and graphical palettes that held these constructs) soon became familiar to me.  What was apparent was that I had to do quite a bit of looking and searching, but by the end of the hour, I roughly knew where I needed to look (and what colour of programming construct to look for) to do the things that I wanted to do.

Final points

I took away a number of things points this session.  The first was a reminder about how the teaching and learning of programming is not just about programming itself.  It is all very well knowing about different programming constructs and understanding what they do but it is a whole other challenge to know how to decompose a problem into discrete steps that a computer can execute. 

Researchers who have studied the psychology of programming have explored the notion of a programmer's cognitive strategy.  As well as a programming strategy there is also the conception of a programmer's tactic, which can be considered in terms of something that a programmer might do to help them understand or get to grips with a problem, or understand what a computer is doing when faced with a buggy program.

Teaching programming isn't only about teaching the constructs, but also about exposing and sharing (or even 'bootstrapping', to take a computing analogy) these tactics.  I clearly remember a discussion about using something called the Plan Do Check Act, or PDCA cycle (Wikipedia) to help users of Sense understand what needs to be done.

Another important point (and one that I've mentioned before) is the need for both students and tutors alike to find the time to 'tinker', to explore what is possible within a programming language or environment.  Tinkering facilitates the development of strategies and tactics.

My own view is that programming isn't something that is just about making sets of instructions to get a machine to do stuff; it is also about facing up to the sometimes difficult challenge of problem solving.  Programming is an intrinsically creative activity, and this is something that is easily forgotten.  To be creative, we need to find the time to play and tinker.  This is something that is easily forgotten too.

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Christopher Douce

Inclusive Learning in Further and Higher Education

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Wednesday, 22 Feb 2012, 22:38

Photograph of the Open University

I recently attended the 2012 Inclusive Learning in Further and Higher Education conference (NIACE website), held at the Open University on 16 February 2012.  The conference had the subtitle, 'innovations in research, practice and learner engagement'.  I had a number of reasons to attend.  The first (and perhaps the most pertinent) is that I tutor on an Open University module, H810 accessible online learning (Open University website), which is all about creating on-line learning experiences that are as accessible as possible.

The second reason is that a conference such as this one would provide both interesting and useful food for thought for my main role as a Lecturer/Staff Tutor.  Events such as these create a space and an opportunity to explicitly consider equality, inclusion and surrounding issues.  The final reason relates to personal interest, having worked on an EU funded e-inclusion project called EU4All a couple of years ago (there is an animation which illustrates some of the broad principles behind EU4ALL; the different shapes represent different materials which are chosen to meet the needs of individual learners).

The aim of this blog post is to present a broad summary of the event and to present a personal reflection of the key messages and points that I took away from it.  I begin with a summary of what I took from the keynote speeches, followed by a description of the two workshops that I attended, concluding with a set of reflections.  I do hope that this might be useful to both some of my fellow delegates and for others who may discover it.

Introductions

The conference was sponsored by three organisations, LSIS, the Learning and Skills Improvement Service, The Open University and NIACE, The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education.  The conference was kicked off by an address by Will Swann, director of Students at the Open University, before leading onto two keynote presentations.  Will spoke about the principles of the Open University, the changes within the higher education sector and emphasised the point that university support for students with disabilities is not going to change.  He then made reference to a recent government green paper, entitled Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability (pdf), before summarising the themes of the day, namely, learner voices, curriculum teaching and authority and policy.

Provision for Disabled Learners in an Age of Uncertainty

Peter Lavender, NIACE Senior Research Fellow, began by stating that the provision for learners with disabilities is an area that is neither generously research nor funded, and stated that he was more concerned about provision that is made in further education than that of higher.  Peter immediately referenced the 1996 Tomlinson report entitled, 'Inclusive Learning, report of the FEFC learning difficulties and disabilities committee'.  The abstract of this report states that the report 'is the result of a three‐year enquiry into the educational needs of and provision for adults with disabilities and/or learning difficulties in England'.

Peter emphasised two points, namely that the quality of learning opportunities is poorer for learners with disabilities, and the rate of participation is lower.   It was then later said that the impact of lower participation can lead to societal effects.

During Peter's talk, I also made a note of the phrase that parents, carers and learners were often unaware of the opportunities that were open to them.   Peter also made a reference to some research by the Learning and Skills Council entitled Valuing People (NIACE website).  We were also directed to further work, entitled Through Inclusion to Excellence (PDF, LSC website), where the findings from this report, the development of a national strategy (p. 1 of document), was emphasised.

Finally, a well known book, The Spirit Level, by Wilkinson and Pickett (Wikipedia) was mentioned, along with the comment that economic and social equality has the potential to benefit all.

Inclusive Learning in FE and HE: Real Progress or Impossible Dream?

The second keynote was by Lesley Dee, formerly Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.  A number of points from Lesley's presentation jumped out at me.  Firstly, there was explicit reference to the social model of disability.  Secondly, there was a reference to the importance of the learner voice, the role of self-advocacy and the point that disability is a part of the identity of a learner.  Lesley also spoke about the concept of inclusive pedagogy, and the question of what is 'special' about special education, and the fact that different types of teaching actions can be placed on a continuum.  (I understood this metaphor in terms of teachers making decisions based on personalised teaching and learning for the individual, and shared teaching and learning for everyone).

Another point that Lesley made (that jumped out at me) was that good teaching for a student with disabilities means good teaching for all learners.  This led to me thinking of a connection with the use of digital learning materials and an important point mentioned in H810 accessible online learning; the application of both participative and universal design methods. 

Workshop: What is reasonable adjustment?

The first workshop I attended, facilitated by Julie Young from the Open University, explored the concept of reasonable adjustment.  Julie shared with us a way that this term could be unpacked and applied.  Universities have a legal obligation to ensure that learners can participate in higher education by making adjustments to how teaching is performed or learning materials are delivered.  The fundamental challenge lies with the ambiguity of language, i.e. what is meant by 'reasonable?'

To understand what is reasonable, one should consider whether a student is likely to be at a substantial disadvantage, whether it is fundamentally possible to provide an adjustment, whether an adjustment can be provided through something called the disabled students allowance, and finally, are there sufficient finances available to make an adjustment?

Julie helped us to explore the notion through a series of case studies or scenarios.  It immediately became apparent that the provision of an adjustment can be facilitated through a series of negotiations; information about both the learner and the learning objectives (or the module) were necessary to make effective and appropriate decisions.  It was also apparent that different people within the organisation are in a position to do different things: those writing module materials have different responsibilities than people who may deliver the materials to a student (an associate lecturer, for example).  It struck me that negotiation is necessary between different parts of an organisation to ensure that the needs of learners are met effectively.

A related issue that Julie exposed is the subject of organisational responsibility.  The bigger the institution is, the more difficult it is to determine who might be ultimately responsible for adjustments.  The principle that was uncovered is a simple one: if someone is in a position to make a decision (with regards to the provision of alternative resources, for example), then that someone is responsible.

All in all, a very thought provoking workshop.

Securing Greater Accessibility (SeGA)

Although individuals play an essential role when it comes to facilitating and providing inclusive education, individuals, of course work within the context of organisations.  The second workshop, entitled Securing Greater Accessibility (SeGA), facilitated by Martyn Cooper and Anne Jelfs described an Open University project that is intended to further embed accessibility within the fabric of its organisation and to widen the awareness of the need to always consider the diversity of students.

SeGA was acknowledged as being ambitious.  Its aims are to ensure pedagogic quality and meeting the needs of students, increasing student satisfaction, enhancing organisational knowledge, managing costs and identifying where responsibility should sit within the institution.

Accessibility, it was argued, exists at different levels.  It needs to be considered with respects to pedagogy (teaching and learning) as well as at a technical or media level.  Technical might mean the application of tools such as a virtual learning environment.  When we consider media, we need to consider the different modalities (i.e. visual and auditory) to ensure that learners can gain access to any teaching points that are made.  A key point that was emphasised was that the university has a responsibility to be anticipatory; a point that was also addressed in the earlier workshop.

The SeGA presentation drew our attention to a number of standards and guidelines which has the potential to be useful to the university.  From a technical perspective, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (W3C website) was considered to be very significant.  We were also directed to a British Standard BS8878:2010 (BSI), and section 3 of the QAA code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education: disabled students (QAA website)  (QAA is the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education).

During the presentation, questions were invited from the participants.  Two key challenges became apparent.  The first was how to best address the issue of teaching mathematics with people who have visual impairments.  It quickly became apparent that there are several ways to address the difficult issue of mathematical notation.  This discussion reminded me of a presentation by Alistair Edwards at the 2011 Psychology of Programming Interest Group workshop (PPIG website). During this earlier event, Alistair shared with the audience some of the research that he has carried out into this area. 

The second challenge that was exposed was with a subject such as chemistry, which also has its own notation system.  One comment was that there is a long history of producing physical models of chemical structures, but when one starts to move towards the discipline of biology, the practicality of adopting such an approach rapidly diminishes due to the immediate complexity of the structures that learners have to contend with.

The SeGA workshop was all about embedding accessibility within an institution and establishing a programme of work to enhance and further understand inclusion.  Whilst SeGA is simply a project, it is envisaged that it is a project that both informs, embeds practice and facilitates continued implementation.

Panel discussion

Any summary of a panel discussion is fraught with difficulty; one cannot easily (or practically) describe fluid discussion whilst at the same time giving equal treatment of all the issues that were raised.  What I will try to do is make a quick note of the points that jumped out to me whilst I was listening.  Other listeners would, of course, have their own perspectives.

Lesley Dee emphasised the importance of sharing information (expertise and practice) between different sectors.  Peter Lavender echoed some of the points that he made during his earlier keynote.  These included the need for a public strategy, the need to drive up participation, the necessity to increase quality, the importance of working together, and addressing (or blending) of issues from both the further and higher education sectors. 

Liz Marr mentioned the importance of universal design (Wikipedia) and the OECD publication, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice (OECD website).   Deborah Cooper asked up to reflect on the importance of a learner voice, particularly in relation to self-advocacy (Wikipedia) and the importance of placing the learner at centre of planning and curriculum decisions.  (These comments reminded me of the concept of 'user centred design' in human computer interaction, which is a parallel with user centred pedagogy and the question of how to best personalise learning experiences, technologically driven or otherwise, for the benefit of all learners).

John Stewart offered some very complementary comments who said that if the learner experience is poor, it affects both health and confidence.  John also emphasised that it was important to ensure that any support services that are offered are adequate, appropriate and of sufficient quality.

Reflections and summary

After the panel session had finished, I made the following note in my notebook.  'Inclusion is as much about making space (where learning can take place) as it is about developing and providing opportunity (to access institutions and to gain support)'.  Squinting through my poor handwriting, I also see the words, 'it is about creating a facilitative culture within a classroom that can be transferred outside'; this echoes Peter's point that inclusion isn't just an issue that is about individuals, it is also a matter of importance to society as a whole.

All the presentations that were presented during this conference had a firm campaigning voice and it was one that was good to hear.  I was reminded me of the two presentations that I attended as a part of Disability History Month (blog post) back in December 2011.  Whilst the campaigning voice was certainly one that was stronger, I did feel that it might have potentially been slightly stronger: voices of those who are involved with the provision of inclusive education need to be heard alongside the voices of the learner..

A number of years ago I attended a conference called Education for All conference (blog post).  The conference keynote was one of the presentations that stuck in my mind.  It was primarily about practice, about how inclusive education can work not only for the teacher, but has the potential to benefit every student in a class, irrespective of additional requirements.  I remember this example where the students were helping each other to interact within the classroom.  By doing so, it not only helped students to develop an increased awareness of the subject matter (by applying the technique of 'teach this to other students'), but also had a role in developing the communication skills and confidence of all those concerned.

During the conference I also thought of the possibilities that technology could provide learners, and the way in which peers could (potentially) generate their own materials for each other, based on the original materials that are presented within a module.  Creating and sharing different types of materials (whether it be audio or video), has the potential to benefit all.  Through the application of technology, some students who may not be able to attend class all of the time (for whatever reason), may be able to make effective participative contributions.  The challenge, as was mentioned by one of the keynote, lies with both developing and sharing effective pedagogic practice.

Whilst I did feel that there was more scope to explore and discuss what inclusive learning might mean 'in practice', there were other very pertinent issues that were exposed.  One of them that stuck in my mind was the tensions between policy, qualifications, measurement and practice.  There is the risk that rules and regulations can potentially restrict, whereas they should ideally guide and facilitate.

Another reflection relates to the necessity to understand the institutional perspective and acknowledge the role that organisational structures (and the individuals who play key roles within them) can play a role in supporting learners.  This theme of the conference (which connected strongly to the topics of policy and legislation) reminded me of the later sections of the Open University H810 module, which emphasises the point that responses to accessibility exist at different levels: individual, community and institutional.

My final reflection is a personal one.   I have to confess that my 'home discipline' is that of computer science.  Whilst I remain (primarily) a computer scientist and I also retain a strong interest in how to create technology that is accessible to all.   It's really interesting to attend events such as this one since they sometimes extend the boundaries of the subjects of which I am familiar.  I'll take away a slightly deeper understanding of the broader issues that surround inclusion and accessibility, and I leave with a feeling that it is an imperative to continue to campaign for increased levels of inclusion and participation in education.

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Disability history month

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 9 Dec 2011, 10:40

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The second UK disability history month has run (or is currently running, at the time of writing) between 22 November and 22 December.  During this month I managed to attend two events.  I'm going to summarise both of them within this short post with the hope that it could be of interest to someone.

There are a number of reasons why I wanted to play a small part within the week.  The first is that over the last couple of years I've been involved with a research project that has been exploring how technology might be able to be used to make a difference to the lives of people with disability.  Secondly, I tutor on an Open University module that explores some of the strategies and approaches about how to best use technology and to make some aspects of learning and teaching as inclusive as possible.  The third perspective is one that is personal, since I am afflicted by a condition that can be considered as a disability under current legislation.

The first event I attended was held at the TUC headquarters in London.  This event was subtitled 'why we are failing disabled people' and addressed the subject of disability hate crime.  The second event was sponsored by the UCU, the University and College Union that represents the interests of lecturers and teachers within further and higher education.  I couldn't 'attend' this second event in person due to work commitments, but the event was recorded by the Open University.  (You might be able to access this presentation, but I'm unsure whether you can do this from beyond the boundaries of the university systems).  This second event was more about contexualising disability history and celebrating their civil rights achievements.

SCAPEGOAT, TUC headquarters, London

The main speaker for this event was Katharine Quarmby, a journalist who has done extensive research into disability hate crime, publishing a recent book on the subject entitled 'Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people'.  Katherine gave a powerful and shocking account of incidents of disability hate crime, a small number of which I remembered from media coverage.

During her research, she reported she studied over 100 cases.  Some of the crimes were perpetrated by people who were considered to be friends with a victim, so called 'mate crime'.  Katherine connected her presentation to both contemporary and historical issues.  The historical issue being the way that disability has been perceived, the contemporary relating to the perception towards enabling benefits, such as the disabled living allowance.

One point stood out for me, and this was that the reporting of this type of hate crime is on the increase, but another view is that perhaps those incidents that have been recorded may well be the tip of an iceberg.

The other main speaker of the day was Stephen Brookes, who is co-ordinator of the National disability hate crime network.  Stephen began with a definition which is 'disability hate crime is any criminal office which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a persons disability or perceived disability'. 

One slide that Stephen used, entitled 'we are not...' stood out for me.  It contained the words, 'more vulnerable than everyone else, so don't label us', 'the problem', 'in the way. It's not our fault for being there!'.  Stephen went on to present a couple of specific cases, and then emphasised the point that tackling the issue is the responsibility of everyone and many different authorities and organisations.

Stephen also mentioned a report that he has been involved with, which is entitled Inquiry into disability related harassment, which can be found on the Equality and Human Rights Commission website.

Towards the end of the day there was an hour long plenary session where members of the audience could address each other and the panel.  One of the points that I clearly remember is a delegate who introduced the term, 'disability hate incident' (I think I have remembered this correctly).  These are incidents of subtle discrimination through maliciousness, ignorance or carelessness.  It was argued that the incidence of these events are significantly higher than that of crimes, which are, of course, considered to be under reported.

This point really got me thinking about my own experiences, how it relates to the social model of disability (wikipedia) and how to facilitate change either within an institution or wider society.  Other issues that were raised were equally important, such as the issue of employment and the role that prejudice may play.

I won't say this event was one that was enjoyable, since that wouldn't be an appropriate word for it.  I would say that it was challenging, and from this perspective, it was entirely successful.

Celebrate Disability History Month

The second event that I attended was recorded.  As mentioned earlier, I was able to access a recording of a presentation by Richard Reiser, co-ordinator of the Disability History Month, made at the Open University on Monday 28 November 2011.

Richard gave a very clear presentation about how disability has been perceived throughout different periods of history.  Richard spoke about the time of ancient Greece and Rome, moving onto medieval period, towards the Elizabethan period, through the Enlightenment to the present day, whilst speaking about the Nazism and the role of asylums and associated legislation.

Richard then moved to present a powerful exposition of the disability rights movement.  Richard also made explicit reference to the notion of language, with a view to how the choice of language relates to perceptions throughout society.

Exploring and choosing appropriate language is related to education, and suggested that more needs to be done, especially if eight out of ten children who are disabled report bullying.  Richard concluded by saying that we need disability history month to provide a focal point to help us to understand common ground and to facilitate the change the perceptions.

Reflections

There was a lot packed into these two presentations, and credit must go to the organisers.  The first thing that struck me was the extent of union involvement, and the number of union activists that participated.  The materials that were distributed at the first event, were impressive, i.e. a booklet about the use of language, a booklet entitled 'a trade union guide to the law and good practice', and another booklet entitled, 'representing and supporting members with mental health problems at work'.

A number of different themes (over these two presentations) jump out at me.  The first is the notion of 'struggle'.  I remember a number of different metaphors being used to describe both the experiences and situation, such as 'the tip of the iceberg', and that people are involved in a 'flight' for equality.  Such words, I believe, are very apt, and reflect a relationship between disablism and other civil rights movements.

On the subject of metaphor and words, an important theme is, of course, is language and its use, purely because of the implicit meanings that innocuous words and phrases may convey.  The third and final issue relates to that of responsibility, responsibility in the terms of being able to challenge inappropriate views and behaviour of others.

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Christopher Douce

Computer Forensics Workshop

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 21 Jan 2019, 10:56

This is a short blog to summarise my visit to the 7th Annual Teaching Computer Forensics Workshop that I attended on 10 November.  The event was held at the University of Sunderland, a university that I have never visited before.  In fact, my first real visit to the Tyne and Wear area was only earlier this year, and was also one that was very brief, so I was travelling in unfamiliar territory. 

If someone were to tell me that I would be taking two trips to 'the north' this year, I wouldn't have believed them.  During this most recent trip not only was I able to learn more about the domain of computer forensics, but I was also able to experience my first journey on the Tyne and Wear metro: this was a fun experience for someone based in London who is overly familiar with the rigours of the tube. 

Introduction

All delegates were welcomed to the forensics workshop by David Blackwell, Assistant Dean for student experience.  David's welcome gave way to an introduction by Alistair Irons who outlined the objectives for the day.  Alistair played the key role of chair and master of ceremonies throughout the whole of the workshop. 

Rather than to summarise everything in sequence, what I'm going to do in this blog is to connect the different talks by themes (and hope it makes sense!)  I call for the organisers' forgiveness in taking this liberty.  This said, I'm going to break this plan the moment I've introduced it by starting with the first presentation, which was all about geo-positional forensics.

Geo-positional forensics

The first presentation of the day was by Harjinder Lallie from the University of Warwick.  Harjinder introduced geo-positional forensics, the subject of a book that Harjinder has been invited to edit.  The subject is an interesting one.  Given the title, I originally imagined smart phones which contained GPS devices which were used to collect data, but like so many things, there is so much more lurking under the surface.

Geo-location data can be extracted from satellite navigation systems, for instance.  Location information might also be obtained from mobile telephone networks by identifying which base stations a mobile phone used to connect to a network.  Another route to location might be to make use of techniques to identify the location of devices that are physically connected to the internet, such as routers.  The more you begin to think about this subject, the more you begin to uncover.  There are, of course, important legal issues that relate to the gathering of location evidence (legal issues being one of the themes that are exposed later on during the day).

If you're interested, or would like to find out more about Harjinder's book, there is a web page which you might find of interest.

Teaching forensics

The second presentation of the day, and the first of a bunch of presentations that relate to the teaching of computing forensics, was by Michelle Govan, Glasgow Caledonian University.  Michelle's presentation had the title 'Developing active learning in digital forensics'.  I liked Michelle's presentation since it referenced both a learning strategy and a method that is important to digital forensics at the same time: the making of notes.  Notes, it is argued, can be used as a reflective tool that can help to facilitate learning and improve comprehension and understanding.  When it comes to digital forensics, notes are an essential tool to help record how, for example, how evidence was secured (the use of contemporaneous notes, as it is known, features quite extensively within the Open University M889 module).  Michelle also referenced something called Pendley's lego exercise which I had never heard of before.  This led to a discussion about the extent to which notes, within a real forensic environment, are used.

Another interesting aspect of Michelle's presentation was that she covered a significant number of different pedagogic approaches in what was a very short time: experiential, reflective, inquiry based, problem based, critical exploration, constructivist, action, and so on...  I also was introduced to a new term: 'nintendo forensics'.  Whilst the forensic analysis of gaming consoles is likely to be a subject in its own right, the term refers to tools where buttons are pressed and results are gained with relative ease.

Xiaohua Feng, from Bedfordshire University gave a talk entitled 'Incident response teaching strategy'.  She presented what is known as the DRRP security model.  DRRP is an abbreviation for Detect, Respond, Report and Prevent.  Frameworks and models have, of course, the ability to represent the essence of useful ideas which might be able to either affect practice or develop further understandings.  We were also introduced to something called the BERR 2008 report.  Aspects of Xiaohua's presentation reminded me of some of the themes from a postgraduate information security management module, M886, which covers an international standard that offers structured guidance about how to protect information systems.  Security and forensics, I sense, are very easily spoken in the same breath.

Craig Thurlby and Caroline Langensiepen from Nottingham Trent University presented a very compelling way to teach one of the most fundamental aspects of computing forensics, which is, how to effectively seize digital evidence.  The essence of their presentation lies in its title: 'use of a crime scene house to enhance learning'.  Nottingham Trent University own a former student house which has been kitted out with a set of hidden video cameras.  These cameras record how students gather evidence from a 'crime scene'.  We were treated to a small number of clips where students were shown to be rummaging through arm chairs (on multiple occasions) looking for mobile devices and puzzling over whether a couple of laptops were turned on.  I can clearly see how the use of video material can be used to facilitate reflection and learning: one's own mistakes can be laid bare for all to see!

The discussions that followed were really interesting.  I never knew, for example, that some universities have their own mock law courts (but on further reflection, perhaps I ought to be surprised if they didn't!)  This exposed some of the difficulties that many subjects face, namely, the issue of interdisciplinary and how to get different people from different subjects working together, such as Computing and Law, for instance, to share resources.

Forensics projects

What makes a computer forensics project?  This was the question that Diane Gan and David Chadwick from the University of Greenwich asked.  Diana and David described a number of postgrad projects.  These included a flash memory tool to extract data from volatile memory (a utility that was written in Perl), a prototype for investigating GPS devices (which nicely links back to Harjinder 's earlier presentation on geo-positional forensics), a system that helps students to understand the ACPO guidelines (Wikipedia), and an analysis of attacks on a honeypot.  Regarding the honeypot project, my understanding is that honeypots are computers that can be used to uncover the ways in which hackers may attack systems.  Forensic methods are necessary to determine what has been done to them and potentially uncover how attacks may have been perpetrated.

It was interesting to see that some of these project required students to write software as opposed to just performing an analysis of digital media, such as hard disk drives.  This connected to the broader debate of whether or not forensic analysts need to be able to write software, and the extent to which the understanding of software development might help investigators in their roles.

After Diana and David's presentation, a discussion emerged that centred on the question of 'what makes a good project?' and whether different institutions might be able to share project ideas.  This reminded me of a debate in an earlier HEA workshop where participants were discussing the possibility of sharing forensic images (which can be quite time consuming to create).

Keeping on the theme of projects, Maurice Calvert from Leeds Metropolitan University gave a presentation entitled 'Final year projects for computer forensics students'.  Maurice outlined four different types of products: the forensic analysis of storage media, examination of media to determine what artefacts different types of software leave behind (which is an important skill to understand how things work), investigate security issues and considering incident response plans, and finally, design some kind of system that is relevant to computer forensics (which might mean implementing a system of some kind).

Maurice highlighted a number of different issues that (broadly) relate to the teaching of digital forensics.  These were (according to my notes): is the traditional computing project suitable (for forensics students), and to what extent might we need different project guidelines?  Also, should digital forensics be separate from computing (or computer science)?  The issue of employability was also raised (but more of this later).

Legal Issues

The law is one of those subjects that is fundamentally important to digital forensics.  It is so important that some of the necessary nitty gritty technical issues are almost secondary.  There are two points that were clearly underlined from this workshop.  Firstly, if you don't capture evidence in a way that is appropriate and in line with good practice, your evidence may be inadmissible in court.  Secondly, digital investigators need to be aware of legal issues since the actions that they take during an investigation may potentially open themselves up to prosecution.

Rita Esen, from the University of Northumbria, gave a very clear presentation about the importance of different types of legislation.  Rita outlined the different laws that that digital investigators need to be aware of, such as the fraud act, data protection act, computer misuse act, sexual offenses act, police and justice act, human rights act and the regulation of investigatory powers act (I'm sure there were others too!)  Rita also told us about a very new development, which was the UK government's ratification of the cybercrime convention (wikipedia).

Other perspectives

Richard Overill, from King's College London introduced us to a term known as the CSI effect (wikipedia), which is about how high profile TV shows influence broader public perception of forensic science.  In his presentation, which is entitled, 'the inverse CSI effect in digital forensics' Richard considers whether 'the effect' might change the behaviour of cyber criminals.  Richard's talk reminds me of the term 'anti-forensics' that I discovered whilst studying M889.

One of the last presentations of the day was by Ali Al-Sherbaz from Northampton University.    Ali directed us to an interesting web page which is entitled, The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook which has a really nice graphic.  (Digital privacy is one of those issues that is addressed on an Open University module called TU100, My Digital Life). Ali also introduced us to a pedagogic tool called Dale's cone of experience.

Forensics and Employability

Alistair Irons gave the final presentation of the day on the topic of forensics and employability.  Employability was one of those workshop themes that featured almost continuously throughout the day; it is something that is certainly on everyone's minds.  One thing was clearly apparent: digital forensics is a very popular subject amongst students, but there are not enough vacancies in the industry for the number of graduates that the university sector is providing.

There was, therefore, a really important question that was asked, which was: do digital (or computer) forensics students end up in a position where they can do other jobs?  There seems to be a consensus that this certainly seems to be the case.

I remember having a chat with a psychology lecturer a number of years ago.  He was ruminating on a very similar question, i.e. how many of his students ended up being employed as professional psychologists.  There is a difference between doing something as a career, and choosing a subject which gives you general skills that can be used in other areas.  Psychology, it was argued is a fabulous subject since it enables students to gain a firm understanding of scientific method, learn how to think critically about evidence, gain skills dealing with statistics and enables students to hone their writing skills.

Similar things can be said about digital forensics: it enables students to gain a detailed technical understanding of computing devices, allows students to begin to grapple (and understand) the intricacies of legal frameworks,  appreciate how to solve problems and assess (digital) evidence, and learn how to communicate their findings in a clear and effective way.

All these important benefits of a forensics education relate to a very important issue: the difference between education and training, and the extent to which a university level education should equip students with the precise needs of industry.  This issue is particularly important since the needs of the digital forensics industry are continually evolving due to the relentless march of technology.  Industry requires well trained people who can do particular jobs, whereas universities provide fundamentals that enable learners to become quickly and effectively trained in particular roles.  Education can facilitate training, but there is, of course, frequent cross over between one and the other, and debates about what universities should be doing and what industry expects will run and run.

Connections with other workshops

Throughout the day I could see clear connections to a number of other HEA workshops.  One of the most obvious one was with the recent BotShop that was held in Derby.  There was a connection in the sense that some robotic systems are embedded systems.  Devices such as smart phones and Satellite Navigation Systems are embedded devices.  You need similar skills and tools to both extract data from (and to debug) embedded systems.

Another connection that I could make (apart from the recent distance education workshop that was held within the OU), was to the e-learning workshop that was held in the University of Greenwich.  During the Greenwich workshop, there was also a reference to the use of peer assessment .  Technology can has the potential to enable learners to comment (and learn from) the work of others. 

Summary

One of the most interesting comment from the day was along the lines of, 'seeing that video of the crime scene house has got me thinking about what I might be able to do it my own class... obviously I don't have a house, but perhaps I might be able to do something similar in the rooms that I could use'.  This comment clearly shows the benefits of getting people together to share ideas and practice experience.

Rita's presentation, to me, emphasised the fact that digital forensics is very much an interdisciplinary subject.  Not only is law is fundamentally important, but so are domains such as software development and embedded systems.   When it comes to social networking systems, social science disciplines have the potential to play a role too.

One of the biggest themes of the day was, of course, employability.  Although I am very much an outsider to the world of digital forensics (although I do remain a curious computer scientist), I certainly have the sense that it's a subject that equips students with a broad range of skills.  Debates about the extent to which software development should feature are likely to continue, along with the extent to which university level modules should explicitly support the needs of industry (particularly when it comes to commercial tools such as EnCase, FTK and mobile phone tools).

All in all, an expertly organised, fun and interesting event that had a real buzz about it. It was great to recognise a number of familiar faces and also to bump into my former Open University forensics tutor.  My interest in digital forensics remains as strong as ever.

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Christopher Douce

Supporting students with dyslexia

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 18 May 2018, 09:04

On Saturday 5 November I attended an Open University in London associate lecturer staff development event, held in the OU's offices in Camden.  I attended two sessions.  The first session was all about developments to the virtual learning environment, and the second event was all about how to best support students with dyslexia from a tutor's perspective.

This blog post is an edited set of notes from the second session.  I'm mainly blogging this event so I can share some of the themes with my H810 Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students group, but I also hope that these notes might be useful for other Open University associate lecturers who might accidentally stumble across them.

The supporting students with dyslexia session was facilitated by Lyn Beazley who works in the South East region, she also tutors with the university.  I also understand that Lyn is also a full member of an organisation called PATOSS which is an abbreviation for 'the professional association of teachers of students with specific learning difficulties'.

Introduction

Lyn began the session by setting the scene.  She introduced what dyslexia is by pointing us to a number of definitions.  The first one was by the British Dyslexia Association, which is, 'dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty which mainly affects the development of literacy and language related skills' and that it is 'present at birth and is lifelong in its effects'.  This definition gave way to a bit of debate, which is likely to echo some of the debates within dyslexia studies itself.

The second definition was from someone called McLoughlin (cited by Tonnessen) who define developmental dyslexia as 'a genetically inherited and neurological determined inefficiency in working memory ... It has particular impact on verbal and written communication as well as on organisation, planning and adaptation to change'.

One of Lyn's slides entitled, 'a social model of dyslexia' echoes one of the topics within H810, namely, the different models of disability.  The key points that Lyn made was that the social model takes account of human diversity where difference is emphasised as opposed to deficit.  Furthermore, materials that are dyslexia-friendly are likely to be user friend (which echoes a research finding which says that accessible technology is technology that is also easy to use).  A final point was people who have dyslexia also have particular strengths.

Some of these strengths were considered to be visual thinking, entrepreneurial skills, vision, creativity and lateral thinking.  People with dyslexia face difficulties whilst studying, these include writing assignments, that it takes longer to process information, reduced confidence and self-esteem, concentration, reading effectively, writing (and also the structure of documents) and spelling.

Assessment

An important question is: what happens if you think a student might be dyslexic?  One thing that you can do is discuss things with a regional advisor who can offer some advice about what to do next.  This may initiate the process of dyslexia being formally diagnosed (or assessed, as it is otherwise known).  Assessment is something that is done by a trained assessor who is able to determine whether someone is dyslexic or whether there may be other differences that might have to be taken into account.

Lyn told us that during the assessment process, assessors measure IQ and study strengths and weaknesses of personal performance.  There are, of course, financial costs associated to assessment.  If it is done privately, the cost can be between three and four hundred pounds.  If a student is receiving financial support then the university may be able to cover the cost of some (if not all) of the assessment.  

Being recognised as dyslexic enables students to access to a range of different resources.  One part of the assessment process is to determine the nature of the difference (or its characteristics?)  Another part is to determine what technologies or support might be best suited to an individual student.  After determining whether a student is dyslexic a student may then be eligible for something called the Disabled Students Allowance (or DSA).  The DSA enables students to receive finances to enable the purchase of a computer which may be then used with assistive technologies, such as text to speech software, for instance.

One thing that I didn't know was the extent that students can be offered one to one personal support with a specialist dyslexia tutor.  Another point worth mentioning is that students might be able to make use of the alternative formats the Open University provides.  One of the most popular alternative format is the use of comb binding.  Comb binding is where the materials are bound in a slightly different way, allowing coloured overlays to be more easily put on top of each of the pages.  Also, comb bound study materials can be more easily scanned using assistive technologies, enabling the textual materials to be manipulated.  Another alternative format might be the provision of the materials in audio form.

One thing is certain: the assessment process takes time.  It can take quite a while for the Disabled Students Allowance to come through.  If a student starts the assessment process at the same time as starting a module, there is the potential that a student might not be able to keep up with the pace of study.  Even if assistive technology arrives on time students still have to master the practicalities of working with the equipment and developing a repertoire of learning strategies to most effectively make use of the technology.

This wasn't something that was mentioned in the session, but the Services for Disabled Students team do have a solution to this impasse, which is the provision of loan items.  If a student is working through the assessment process, it might be possible to loan some assistive technology items as an interim measure.

Debates

Lyn's session gave way to a number of debates, some of which relate directly to H810.  One of them linked to the notion of reasonable adjustments.  I also remember a reference to the recent Equality Act (institutions, of course, have an obligation to respond to the needs of students).  I also have memories of a short conversation about that more and more Open University materials are being made available only on-line.  Whilst this might make accessibility difficult in one sense, technology may enable materials to be potentially accessible to a wider audience.

Another interesting debate centred around the sharing of study and writing skills.  It was concluded that tutors should feel free to give guidance about how to structure documents and compose paragraphs.  Sometimes, it was argued, that sharing things that are obvious can really help people to get a better grip of what they have to do.  Such advice isn't only useful to students who have dyslexia - it can be useful to all students too.  General guidance about how to present arguments, compose paragraphs and structure essays has been incredibly useful during my own Open University study.

Summary

I've been attending Associate Lecturer staff development on and off for what must be over six years.  I still remember attending my first one, where I was overwhelmed by seeing so many people who collectively help to present a myriad of different subjects.  I sense that they try to do two key things: to give useful information and encourage you to reflect on your own practice and think about how you engage with those who are taking the module you are helping to present.  This event was no exception. 

When I was leaving the VLE session I heard someone say, 'I always get something out of these events'.  That is certainly the case.  When it comes to the second event, I've taken a note of a number of resources that some members of the Open University might be able to access (depending upon their own access permissions).

The first is a set of web pages entitled: tutor resources for disabled students.  We were also guided to a really useful document which is called Associate lecturer's guidelines for marking the work of students with dyslexia.  I had not seen this document before; new things are added to the tutor guidance pages all the time. 

Another useful link is, of course, the Skills for Study website (which can be found through the Teaching and Learning link on Tutorhome, which you will have access to if you just happen to be an Associate Lecturer). 

All in all, the general Associate Lecturer development day was useful as well as being fun and friendly.  It emphasised, to me, that there are many different types of resources that both tutors and students can draw upon to help the journey of studying.

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Christopher Douce

SD4ST: Drama for Staff Tutors

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Thursday, 6 Mar 2014, 16:36

Whenever I visit a new place for the first time I'm always a little anxious about whether I'll be able to find it okay.  My first visit to the OU Cardiff centre was on 1 November.  I shouldn't have worried; the moment I left the train station and turned right I could see the Open University logo.  I even manage to find my destination without having to resort to a googlemap.

My reason to visit Cardiff was to attend what would be my second SD4ST event (staff development for staff tutors).  I blogged about my first SD4ST event a number of months ago which took me all the way to Gateshead where the focus of the two days was research (and how to fit it into the role of a staff tutor).  This event was all about motivation and inspiration.

I was particularly attracted to this event since I remember reading that it would involve some theatre.  A number of years ago (either three or four - I forget!)  I attended an associate lecturer development event that was held by the South East region.  I remember being ushered into a very large room where the chairs were arranged in a circle.  I have memories of being taken out of my comfort zone by being presented with drama workshop exercises which included words like zip and zap.  The overwhelming feeling that I left the East Grinstead workshop was being a little puzzled about how on earth I might be able to use some of the stuff I had just witnessed to add a little more 'zip' into my own tutorials.

The Cardiff SD4ST event was being partly organised by the same tutor who ran the associate lecturer staff development event, and I was looking forward to it.  Just like my last SD4ST post this one is intended to act as a simple record of what happened during the day, but it might be of interest to my fellow Open University staff tutors.

Good tutorials

The first session of the day was very traditional but it set the scene very well for the rest of the two days.  We were asked to split into equal groups and asked to consider the factors about what made up a good tutorial, writing our views on a big piece of paper.

Our group came up with a set of words and phrases which I managed to quickly scribble down, both on the flipchart page and in my notebook.  These were: student centred, friendliness, knowledge of module, good structure, enthusiasm, flexibility, ability to connect things together, personal approach, supportive atmosphere and clarity of expression.

After the groups returned, there was a quick plenary discussion and each sheet was blu-tacked to the wall to act as physical reminders of our discussion.

Forum theatre

After a short break we were led into a room that had a configuration that I remembered my AL development event several years ago: the chairs were arranged in a circle!  We were told that three actors would act out a scene from the start of a telephone tutorial that went badly wrong.  I have to admit, it was very bad... Not the acting, I mean; that was very good!  What we were shown certainly didn't create a very good impression and if I had been a student I would have been suitably bewildered.

When the scene had come to an end it was replayed where we were then asked to stop the scene and take over the scene to offer a correction.  An illustrious education staff tutor from the London region took up this challenge!  Other staff tutors were then encouraged to jump in to the tutoring seat to lead the tutorial to a successful conclusion whilst at the same time reflecting carefully on what was happening.

Towards the end of the first session we were given a further question (or challenge) to think about, which was: how to make a good tutorial better and generate a 'palpable buzz' (a phrase that generated quite a bit of debate towards the end of the two days).

Elluminate

The next session of the day was all about Elluminate.  It very soon became apparent that there was a big difference in how this asynchronous tool is used by different module teams.  For some modules it was compulsory, but on others it was not.  After a bit of discussion we were then treated to recordings of two different Elluminate sessions.

The first recording was from a sports and fitness module, and the second was from a languages module.  My own reflection on this was that there were very big differences in how the different sessions were run, and some of the differences come from the differences in the subject matter.

One of the most powerful elements of Elluminate is its whiteboard.  It enables you to create very visual activities and share concepts that would have taken a thousand words to explain.  The language activity that we were shown was truly multi-modal: learners could listen to other students speak to the words that were on the whiteboard and connect different words and phrases up using lines.

Other Elluminate tools, such as the polling function, can be used to quickly gather opinions and relate to materials that may be presented on a whiteboard slide.  One of the challenges lies with making activities interactive especially when the connection between the Elluminate moderator and the participant is distant and the emotional bandwidth afforded by tools such as Elluminate is lower.  I remember some discussions about barriers to participation and the use of the emoticons to assess 'happiness' (or should I say, whether participants are fully engaged).

One of the biggest 'take home' points of the day lies with how Elluminate might be used in a team teaching scenario.  One of the things I've heard about Elluminate it is it is very hard work to keep track of everything that is going on: there's voice, text chat and (potentially) stuff being drawn on the whiteboard.  If there are two moderators, one can be taking care of the text chat (or some of the other tools), whilst the other can be responding to the audio channel.

I remember from my own Elluminate training in the South East region that Elluminate moderators are more producers than tutors.  Moderators are producers in the sense that they produce a session by choosing an appropriate mix of the different tools that Elluminate offers.  The notion of a producer remains firmly stuck in my mind.  For me, it's an analogy that makes sense.

Creativity in face to face tutorials

On the second day David Heley gave a similar version of the workshop he prepared for regional associate lecturer development events.  I'm not going to describe it in a lot of detail since I won't be able to do it justice.

A couple of thing stood out for me.  The first was how the physical space of the room was used.  Space can be used to identify different opinions and present different characteristics.  The idea of a 'spectrum line' can be used to enable participants to think about where they stand on a particular opinion; two sides of the room being opposing views.  We were then asked to use our imagination by imagining a map of the world on the floor of the room, and then asked to stand at various locations.  It was very thought provoking: kinaesthetic learning is both fun and engaging (in my opinion, but perhaps that might be a reflection on my own learning style).

One thing that stood out for me was the idea of using 'broken powerpoint', i.e. you ask participants what is on a series of imaginary powerpoint slide as opposed to simply giving your own powerpoint.  This seemed to work really well and I've been wondering how I might be able to use it in my own interaction design tutorials.  Another related thought that can to my mind was to have a my tutor group create their own powerpoint which might be helpful for both revision purposes and also for those who may not be able to attend a particular session - I've not tried it out yet, but the 'broken powerpoint' activity has certainly got me thinking!

David made the point that the aim of his workshop isn't to encourage participants to use everything but instead to consider how to use parts of it, or even to use some of the ideas it contains as sources (or vectors) of inspiration.  That was exactly how I used it when I attended a couple of years ago.  As a result of attending David's session I gradually managed to incorporate a small amount of role play.  Doing this wasn't easy and certainly took me outside of my comfort zone, but I think that was a good thing.

Forum theatre

After some lunch and a preparatory discussion we returned to our drama room and were then presented with another semi-improvised vignette which seemed to be about poetry.  There was some discussion about the kind of feedback that might have been offered, after which the episode was then replayed.

Towards the end of the day we were paired off and given a role play challenge which related face to face tutorials. I won't say too much about this other that it was quite good fun: I certainly learnt a lot from that exercise. It was really interesting to see so many different topics of debate emerge from a series of short scenarios.

Summary

A couple of years ago I attended an accessibility and human computer interaction event (please bear with me with this: there is a connection!)  The aim of the event was to introduce a science council project to 'the public'.  I mostly expected to get more of an understanding of different technologies and how they might be applied, but I was surprised to see how drama was used to teach students to understand the perspective of users of interactive devices (such as phones and computers).  It was a really interesting approach. 

During the day, we were given a premier of a short film (just in case you might be interested, the video that is mentioned in this earlier post can be viewed through a YouTube link).  At the end of the film we were able to ask the actors some questions (who remained 'in character') about their experience of using technology.  All these goings on reminded me of some aspects of our SD4ST event.

For me, there were a couple of things I got out of the event.  The first was the principle that there are so many different ways of doing things.   I sometimes get into a habit of using technology to help to do stuff.  Whilst tools such as powerpoint and the digital resources that you can create using them can be useful in terms of sharing information with others (through digital spaces such as the VLE), a face to face tutorial offers a richer way to explore and engage with module material.

The other point was the use of drama emphasised the importance of considering and carefully thinking about different perspectives.  I like the connection that theatre encourages practice reflection, and at the same time can permit the exploration of different topics, themes and subjects.

I mentioned technology, and this is the third 'take away' point: the use and mastery of asynchronous tools such as Elluminate (and how to connect their use to module materials in an effective and engaging way) will undoubtedly continue to be a subject for further discussion and exploration.

Congrats to the organisers, Janet Hanna, Annette Duensing, Martin Rhys, David Heley and the three forum theatre actors. All in all, a fun (and useful) event!

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Christopher Douce

Higher Education Academy BotShop Workshop

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 18:46

I think I must have been about 10 years of age when I first heard about the magical device that was the Logo turtle (and the mysterious notion of turtle geometry).  Fast forward two decades and about ten years ago I managed to find a copy of Papert's book Mindstorms in a second hand bookshop in Brighton (a part of me things that it must have been owned by someone who studied cognitive science at the nearby University of Sussex).  I had these two thoughts in mind whilst I was travelling to the University of Derby on the 28 November to attend the HEA BotShop.

This is a quick summary of my own views of the day along with my own take on some of the different themes that emerged.  In fact, there was quite a bit of commonality between this event and the HEA Open University event that was held a week earlier, but more of that later.  In case you're interested, Derby produced a press release for this event which highlights some of the areas of interest, which include neural networks, embedded systems and artificial intelligence.  We were told that this was pounced upon by the local press, proof that mention of robots has a constant and wide appeal.

First Sessions

The day was introduced by Clive Rosen and Richard Hill, subject head for Computing and Mathematics at the University of Derby, jointly welcomed everyone to the workshop.  The first presentation of the day was by Scott Turner from the University of Northampton who gave a presentation entitled Neurones and Robots.  Scott uses the Lego Mindstorms hardware to introduce some of the fundamental concepts of neural networks, such as how learning takes place by the changing of some of the numerical values that are used within a network.  Some of the applications of these robots include following lines, getting robots to follow each other and getting robots to avoid obstacles; seemingly simple actions which enable underlying principles to be both studied and demonstrated.

One of the questions to Scott was, 'what does using a robot add?'  The answer was simple: it can add enjoyment and engagement.  Although similar principles could be studied through the application of other tools, such as Excel spreadsheets, simple robots add a degree of immediacy and physicality that other approaches cannot.  These discussions made me consider whether there is a pedagogic dimension (in terms of educational tools) that has emulation on one end and physical devices on the other, and the extent to which we may wish to consider a balance between the two.

Scott's presentation was followed by Martin Colley from the University of Essex whose presentation was entitled Embedded Systems Teaching.  Having been a postgraduate student at Essex I found Martin's presentation especially interesting.  Although I didn't have direct exposure to the robotics labs during my time at Essex I remember that some of my peers made good use of the research and teaching facilities that the University provided.

Martin gave a quick history of robotics and embedded systems at Essex where he talked about the design and evolution of different devices which culminated in the development of a kit.  The design of the kits had changed along with the development of processors.  Early kits (and robots) made use of the Motorola 68k processor (famed for its use in the original Apple Mac) whereas the current generation of kits made use or ARM processors which are, of course, commonplace with mobile phones and other embedded devices.

One aspect of Martin's kits that I really liked was the range of different input and output devices.  You could write code to drive a 160x128 colour display, you could hook up a board that had light and ultrasound sensors, or you could even connect a memory card reader and a digital to analogue converter to enable students to write their own MP3 player.  Martin also touched upon how the hardware might be used to explore some of the challenges of programming, which includes the use of C and C++, how to work with a real-time clock, the use of interrupts and direct memory access buffers.   Debugging was also touched upon, which, in my opinion is a really important topic when 'students get down to the muddy later between the hardware and software'.  Plus, all these interesting peripherals are so much fun than simply having an embedded system to turn an LED on or off.

All in all, a really interesting presentation which gave way to a discussion about the broader challenge of teaching programming.  One comment that it isn't programming per se that is the main problem.  Instead, it is development the skills of algorithmic thinking, or knowing how to solve problems that represents the biggest challenge.

Using bots to teach programming

The third presentation of the day was by Mark Anderson and Collette Gavan from Edge Hill University who described how the broad idea of robotics has been used to teach fundamentals of programming and how some students have learnt to build their own devices.  Mark and Collette had a surprise in store.  Rather than having to do most of the talking themselves they brought along a number of students who shared with us their own experiences.  This was a great approach; personal accounts of experience and challenges are always useful to hear.

Mark and Collette's slot covered a broad range of technology in what was a short period of time.  They began with describing how they made use of Lego Mindstorms kits (using the NXT brick) with Java, used in the first year of study.  During the second year students move onto Arduino kits, where student negotiate the terms of their own projects.  I seem to remember hearing that students are at liberty to create their own input controllers, which might be used in collaboration with an embedded arcade game, for instance.  There was reference to a device called the Gameduino which allows the Arduino controller to be connected up to a video display.  Not only can I see this as being fun, I can also see this as being pretty challenging too!

Towards the end of the session there was a question and answer and answer session where another introductory to programming tool called Alice was mentioned.  There were two overriding themes that came from this session.  The first was that learning to program (whether it is an embedded device or a computer) isn't easy.   The second is that it's possible to make that learning fun whilst developing essential non-technical skills such as team working.

Micromouse

One of the really interesting things about robotics is that a broad array of disciplines can come into play.  One of the most important of these is engineering, particularly electronic and mechanical engineering.  I guess there's a 'hard side' and a 'soft side' to robotics.  By 'hard side' I mean using the concept of robots to teach about the processes inherent in their design, construction and operation.  The 'soft side', on the other hand, is where robots can be used to teach problem solving skills and introduce the fundamentals of what is meant by programming.  Tony Wilcox from Birmingham City University, who is certainly on the 'hard side' of this continuum, gave a fabulous presentation which certainly gave us software engineers (and I'm talking about myself here!) a lot to think about.

A micromouse is a small buggy (or autonomous robot) that can explore a controlled maze (in terms of its dimensions) and figure out how to get to its centre.  It was interesting to hear that there is such a thing as a micromouse competition (I had heard of robot football, but not mice competitions before!)  Different teams produce different mice, which then compete in a maze finding challenge.  Tony uses his 'mice' to expose a number of different subjects to students.

Thinking about the problem for a moment we begin to see a number of different problems that we need to address, such as, how do we control the wheels and detect how far the mouse has travelled?  What sensors might be used to allow the mouse to discover the junctions in a maze?  What approaches might we used to physically design elements of the mouse?  How might we devise a maze solving algorithm?  Tony mentioned a number of subject areas that can help to solve these problems: closed loop process control (for the control of the wheels) and mechanical engineering, 3D computer aided design, power electronics, and PIC programming (which is done using C).  I'm sure there are others!

It was interesting to hear Tony say something about programming libraries.  Students are introduced to libraries in the in the second year of his teaching.  Whilst libraries can help you to do cool stuff, you need to properly understand the fundamentals (such as bit shuffling and manipulation) to use them properly.  To best teach the fundamentals, you ideally need to do cool stuff!

One thing that I took away with me was that robot control and maze solving software can exist within 32K.  I was reminded that even though there is a lot of commonality between programming on embedded devices and programming applications for a PC they can be almost different disciplines.

Critters

The micromouse robots operate within a controlled physical environment.  Another way to make a controlled environment is to make one using software.  The advantages of using software is that you can control everything.  You can, of course, define your own laws of physics and control time in any ways that you want.  In a way, this makes things both easier and difficult for us software engineers: we've got the flexibility, but we've got to figure out the boundaries of the environment in which we work all the time.

Dave Voorhis from the University of Derby talked about his work on 'emergent critters'.  By critters, Dave means simple 'virtual animals' which hunt around in an environment for food, bumping into others, whilst trying to get to an exit.  There are some parallels with the earlier talks on robotics, since each critter has its own set of inputs and outputs.  Students can write their own critters which can interact with others.  There is parallel to core wars, a historic idea where programmers write programs which fight against each other.

Dave said that some students have written critters which 'hack' the environment, causing the critter world to exhibit unusual behaviour.  Just as with the real world, working against some of the existing laws (and I'm talking those that are socially constructed rather than the other immutable variety) runs the risk of causing unintended consequences!

Final presentations

There were two presentations in the final session of the day.  The first was by Steve Joiner from Coventry University about how robotics can be used to help teach mathematics to key stage 3 and 4.   Steve is a maths graduate and is a part of the Centre of Excellence in Mathematics and Statistics Support (SIGMA), in collaboration with Loughborough University.  Steve showed us a number of videos where students had built robots out of the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit.  Projects included navigation through sensors, launching projectiles (albeit small ones!) and predicting their behaviour, and applications of graph theory.  Steve also demonstrated a self-balancing Lego robot (basically, a bit like a mini-segway) that made use of ultrasonic sensors.  Steve made the good point that through the use and application of kits and projects, students can begin to see the reason behind why particular subjects within mathematics are useful.

The final presentation was an impromptu one by Jon Rosewell, from the C&S department at the Open University.  Jon has been heavily involved with a short module called T184 Robotics and the meaning of life which has just come to the end of its life.  Like so many of the earlier presentations, this module makes use of Lego Mindstorms to introduce the concept of programming to students.  Instead of using the native Lego software, the Open University developed its own programming environment (for the earlier Lego Mindstorms blocks) which is arguably easier to work with.  Students are not given their own robotics kit, but may use their own if they have one available.  If they don't have access to a kit, students can make use of a robotics simulator, which is a part of the same software package.

Towards the end of the day there was some talk about a new Open University undergraduate module called TU100 My Digital Life.  This module makes use of a 'home experiment kit' which contains an Arduino processor, which was mentioned by Mark Anderson earlier in the day.  Whilst the TU100 senseboard, as it is called, cannot directly become a robot, it does contains some of the necessary features that enable students to understand some of the important ideas underpinning robotics, such as different types of input sensors, and output peripherals such as motors.

Plenary

At the end of the day there was sufficient time to have an open discussion about some of the themes that had emerged.  Clive Rosen kicked off the discussions by saying that robots can help teaching become engaging.  I completely agree!  One of the difficulties of teaching subjects such as mathematics and computing is that it can often take a lot of work to get satisfying and tangible results.  Using robots, in their various forms, allow learners to more readily become engaged with the subject that they are exploring.  In my own eyes there are two key things that need to be addressed in parallel: what subjects the application of robots can help to explore, and secondly, how to best make use of them to deliver the most effective pedagogic experience.

These ruminations connect to a plenary discussion which related to the teaching of computing and ICT at school.  There was a consensus that computing and ICT education needs to go so much further than simply teaching how students to make use of Microsoft Office, for instance.   We were all directed to a project called Computing at School and a relatively new education (and hardware) project called RaspberryPi was mentioned.  I'm personally looking forwards to how this project develops (and hopefully being able to mess around with one of these devices!)

There was some debate about individual institutions 'doing their own thing', in terms of building their own teaching hardware, raising the question of whether it might be possible to collaborate further (and the extent to which the higher education hardware might potentially be useful in the school environment).  It was concluded that it isn't just a matter of technology it may be more of a matter of education policy.

In the same vein, it was hypothesised that perhaps the embedded processors within students' mobile telephones might (potentially) be used to explore robotics, perhaps by plugging in a phone to 'extension kit'.  Another point was that little was discussed about fixed or industrial robots, which is almost a discipline in its own right, having its own tools, languages and technologies.  This is a further example of how robotics can connect to other subjects such as manufacturing.

Thinking back to the event, there are a number of other themes that come to mind.  Some of these include the role of simulation (and how this relates to physical hardware), the extent to which we either buy or build our hardware (which might depend on our pedagogic objectives), and the types of projects that we choose.

Through the use of robots students may more directly appreciate how software can change the world.  Robotics is a subject that is thoroughly interdisciplinary.  I've heard artificial intelligence (AI) described as applied philosophy.  Not only can robotics be used to help to study AI, it also has the potential to expose learners to a range of different disciplines, such as mathematics, electronics, physics, engineering and the fundamentals of computing.

Learning how to program a robot is not just about programming.  Instead, it is more about developing general problem solving skills, developing creativity and becoming more aware at how to conduct effective research.

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Christopher Douce

Distance Learning for Computing and ICT Workshop

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 18:47

A Higher Education Academy sponsored distance learning workshop for computing and ICT was held at the Open University on Thursday 20 October 2011.  The workshop addressed a number of different themes.  These included internationalisation and the delivery of modules to different countries, professionalization and industry, models of distance learning, the use of technology and its accessibility.

The day was divided up into a number of different sessions, and I'll do my best to summarise them.  I feel that blogging this event is going to be a little bit different from the previous times I have blogged HEA workshops since this time I was less of an observer and more of a participant.  This said, I'll do my best!

Introduction and keynote

The event was introduced by Professor Hugh Robinson, head of the department of Computing at the Open University.  Hugh briefly spoke about the history of the university and mentioned that Open means that students who enrol to courses do not necessarily have to have any qualifications.  This connected to one of the university's themes: to be open in terms of people, places and ideas.  Distance education enables education to be open in all these respects but it is apparent that due to the changes in the higher education sector, all institutions are to face challenges in the future.

Hugh's opening presentation gave way to Mike Richards keynote presentation about a new computing module entitled TU100, My Digital Life.  Mike described some of the main topic areas of this new module which will for a common entry point to a number of degrees.  This module addresses themes that are rather different to those that used to be on the computing curriculum, mostly due to the changes in technology and what is meant by a 'computer'.

Mike mentioned important subjects such as privacy and security, the notion of ubiquitous computing and what is meant by 'free', connecting to subject of open source software systems.  Mike went on to say that the TU100 module contains some hardware that might once have been known as a 'home experiment kit'.

In the case of TU100 this is in the form of a programmable microcontroller board which can be configured in a way to work with different types of measurements and share the results with other people over the internet.  Furthermore, the microcontroller (and connected software) can be developed using a visual programming language called Sense, which is a version of Scratch, a popular introductory programming environment developed by MIT.

Mike's presentation emphasised that distance education need not only begin and end with a virtual learning environment.  A distance education module can contain a rich set of resources such as video materials and physical equipment that can be used to facilitate both understanding and debate.  Mike emphasised the point that many issues that connect to the increasingly broad discipline of computing (broad because of its impact on so many other areas of human activity) is that some debates do not have right or wrong answers.

One thing is certain: technology has changed so many different aspects of our lives and will continue to do so in ways that we may not be able to expect.  It's my understanding that one of the aims of TU100 is to highlight and uncover different debates and help students to navigate them.  What was very clear is that computing education is so much more than just technology and getting it to do cool stuff.  It's essential to understand and to consider how technology affects so many different aspects of our lives.

Morning session

The first presentation in the morning session was by Quan Dang from London Metropolitan University.  Quan's presentation was entitled, 'blending virtual support into traditional module delivery to enhance student learning'.  Quan emphasised how synchronous tools, such as on-line text chat could be used to create virtual 'drop in' sessions outside of core teaching hours to enable students to gain regarding subjects such as computer programming.  Quan's presentation was very though provoking since it made me ask myself the question, 'what different tools and practices might we potentially adopt (at a distance) to help student get to grips with difficult issues such as debugging'.  Debugging is something (in my humble opinion) that you can best learn by seeing how different people consume elements of the programming tools that are available through development environments.  Getting a feeling of the different strategies that can be applied is something that can only be gained through experience, and technology certainly has the potential to facilitate this.

The following presentation, by Amanda Banks from the University of Manchester, was entitled 'advanced professional education in computer science'.  Amanda spoke at some length about how a tool such as MediaWiki could be used to enable students to create useful materials that could be used with others.  This presentation was also thought provoking: Wiki's can certainly be used within on-line modules to enable to student to generate materials for their own study, but Amanda's presentation made me consider the possibility that wiki-hosted material can be used between different module presentations as a way to facilitate debates about different ideas.

The final presentation was by Philip Scown, from Manchester Metropolitan University Business School.  Philip's thought provoking presentation was entitled, 'the unseen university: full-flexible degrees enabled by technology'. Philip argued that technology can potentially allow different models of studying and learning, such as modules which don't have start dates, for instance.  I can't do justice to Philip's talk within this space, so I do encourage you to have a look on the HEA website where I understand that his presentation slides are hosted.

First afternoon session

The afternoon session was started by Mark Ratcliffe, discipline lead for computing at the Higher Education Academy.  Mark outlined the role of the HEA and then went on to describe funding opportunities and the role of a HEA academic associates.  Mark then directed us to the HEA website for more information.

Distance education is one of those terms that can mean different things to different people, and this difference was, in part, highlighted by Mariana Lilley's first presentation of the afternoon that had the title, 'online, tutored e-learning and blended: three modalities for the delivery of distance learning programmes in computer science'.  Mariana's presentation also represented a form of case study of a programme that is presented internationally by the University of Hertfordshire.  It was interesting to hear about the application of different tools, such as Elluminate (now Blackboard Collaborate), QuestionMark Perception and VitalSource Bookshelf.  This suggested to me the point that distance learning is now facilitated by a mix of different tools and made me question whether we have (collectively) identified best (or most effective) mix.  Institutions have to necessarily explore technology in combination with pedagogic practice, and sharing case studies is certainly one way to understand something about what is successful.

Mariana's presentation was nicely complemented by Paul Sant's (in collaboration with his colleague Malcolm Sant) who was from the University of Bedfordshire.  Paul's presentation was entitled, 'distance learning in higher education - an international case study'.  Paul identified a number of challenges which included, 'how can we ensure that distance students remain engaged? How can we offer support in a way that meets their schedule and requirements?', and 'How can we ensure that the work performed by students meets their potential?'  Paul mentioned tools such as the Blackboard VLE and synchronous tools by Horizon Wimba.  Paul's presentation also helped to expose the subject of partnerships with international institutions.

Second afternoon session

The final session of the day was broadly intended to focus upon the needs of the student from two different perspectives.  Steve Green from the Accessibility Research Centre, Teeside University kicked off this session by describing 'studying accessibility and adaptive technologies using blended learning and widgets'.  Accessibility is an important subject since it enables students to make use of learning resources irrespective of how or where they may be studying (both in terms of their physical and technical environment), but also widens the way in which resources may be consumed, taking into account learners with additional requirements.  Steve described how students create accessible widgets and their evaluation.

Steve's talk reminded me of a question that I was asked not so long ago, which is, given that distance legislation is now an international endeavour and the development of accessibility is supported by equality legislation, where do the boundaries lie in terms of offering support to students?  The answer may depend on the issue of how partnerships are developed and function.

The final presentation of the day, entitled 'finding a foundation for flexibility: learner centred design' was by Andrew Pyper from the University of Hertfordshire.  The underlying theme is that institutions need to understand the needs of their learners to best support them.  Tools such as learner centred design, which is known to the interaction design and human-computer interaction communities, have the potential to create rich pictures which then potential guide the development of both learning experiences and technology alike.

Plenary

Towards the end of the day there was a bit of time to hold an open discussion about some of the different themes that the presentations had exposed.  Many thanks to Amanda, Philip and Andrew for taking part.  Some of the themes that came to my mind were the issues of  tools and technology, internationalisation, industry and employability, and student skills.  Points included that we need to be careful about our assumptions of the technology that students might have.  Another important point is that one way to differentiate between different institutions might be in terms of the technologies that they use (and also how they use it).

We were also reminded about something called the Stanford Machine Learning course, which provoked some debate about 'free' (which relates back to Mike Richard's earlier TU100 presentation), and we were all directed towards the QAA Distance Learning precepts (many thanks to Richard Howley for bringing this to our attention).

Summary

All in all, it was a fun day!  There were loads of questions asked following each of the sessions and much opportunity for talk and debate in between.  I have to confess I was very relieved when the tea, coffees and sandwiches arrived on time, so thanks are extended to the Open University catering group.

It's tough, for me, to say what the highlight of the day was due to the number of very interesting thought provoking presentations.  I certainly feel that there is always an opportunity to learn lessons from each other; it is clearly apparent that there are many different ways to approach distance education.  Whilst there are many differences between institutions, similar issues are often grappled with, such as how to best make use of technology and ensure that students are offered the best possible level of support.

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Christopher Douce

PPIG 2011

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 1 Dec 2017, 14:21

 I recently had the pleasure of attending the PPIG 2011 workshop between 6 and 8 September.  As I might have mentioned in an earlier blog, PPIG is an abbreviation for the Psychology of Programming Interest Group.  There used to be an American equivalent which was called ESP (Empirical Studies of Programmers), but this community seem to have disappeared.  PPIG, on the other hand, is going strong.

This year it was held in the University of York computer science department.  The department had moved since I was last there, forcing me to circumnavigate the campus and arrive at a time when almost all the tea and sandwiches had disappeared.  Thomas Green gave an opening address, and then it was swiftly on to the first presentation.

Mathematics and Visual Impairments

Alistair Edwards gave a talk entitled 'new approaches for mathematics in blind students'.  Mathematics, of course, relies on visual notations.  These notations, it was argued, are an integral part of working with maths.

Alistair holds that view (or, should I say that I understand that he holds the view) that there is more to it than just using an appropriate notation, or having that notation converted into another form.  We externalise parts of our working memory by using pen and paper.  Also, the idea of cancelling (or balancing) an equation by crossing of similar teams from both sides can be viewed as a visual manipulation.

Alistair mentioned a couple of projects, one of which was called Lambda, an abbreviation for Linear Access to Mathematics for Braille Device and Audio-synthesis.  Here, the challenges began to be clear: I didn't know this but different countries have different braille notation for mathematics.  There is, of course, the issue that using an interface to a notation immediately places cognitive barriers in the way that has the potential to make things more difficult to understand.  Users, it was argued, need more direct forms of interaction when working with mathematics.

All in all, a very thought provoking introduction, and it made me wonder how Green's cognitive dimensions of notations framework might be used to analyse interactions to notational systems (such as mathematics or programming languages) by users who may have different modality preferences (i.e. auditory over visual).

New Tech

The first main session of the workshop was called New Tech.  I'll do a very quick run through of the papers from each session.  Jon Rimmer presented the shyness project, and introduced the beguiling ambient computing device called the 'subtle stone', whereby class participants can communicate their emotional state to the lecturer by a click of a juggling ball.  Jon deftly directed us to a series of interesting papers about shyness.

The following paper was closely connected.  It was entitled 'self-reporting emotional experiences in a computing lab', by Judith Good (et al).  Us programmers go through a whole spectrum of different emotions during a programming session, from delight, through to wishing to jump on our laptop (although I don't recommend this).  This is an interesting direction: emotion connects to motivation, and traditionally the PPIG community have more focussed upon the cognitive.

Chris Roast, from Sheffield Hallam University, took us on a tour of a tool that helped to create different internationalised film posters; software localisation through abstraction.

One of the papers that I most enjoyed was by Chris Martin from the University of Dundee, who took dancing robots on a road trip to a number of different schools to further explore whether a robot dance workshop can inspire interest in a technical subject such as computer programming.  Or, does using robots 'sugar coat' a difficult subject, or is there more to it than this?  By robots, imagine small buggies.

In fact, Chris's robots use the same Arduino microcontroller that is central to the TU100 Senseboard. By dance, this is an activity that has a low threshold to success, is created, transcends culture, and where performance can be valued over competition (I made notes during this bit of Chris's talk).

The two other papers in this section described how to make music with a dry marker pen, a whiteboard and a mobile phone by defining your own musical notation (which was pretty cool), and considered the challenges that users of mobile spreadsheets face.

Human and algorithmic complexity

The next presentation was a 'work in progress' paper by yours truly.  I talked about a project (that has been making very slow progress, due to a myriad of different reasons) to explore whether it is possible to link measurements of program complexity to physiological measurements that are known to indicate human cognitive load. 

The workshop participants gave me a whole number of things to think about, including the names of a number of researchers, as well as a clear message of: 'stop procrastinating, just get on with it'.  I'm certainly going to take that last piece of advice.

The following presentation was about the challenge of working with test data.  A subject that can easily cause terror to many a software developer.

Language Formalities

Wednesday yielded a change of plan.  Thomas Green ran a session entitled, 'how to design a notation'.  A programming language is, of course, a form of notation.  Thomas posed interesting questions, like, 'how might we invent a different type of musical notation?', which led onto other questions such as its level of abstraction (what each element of a notation can represent), what you might wish to do with a notation, it's overall purpose, and how you might off load to external representations.

A theme underpinning all this debate was one that is familiar to many human-computer interaction and interaction design researchers: the idea of trading one thing off against another.

Giora Alexandron then presented his paper entitled 'programming with the user in mind' which led us towards considering something called live sequence charts, which is an extension of UML sequence diagrams.  We were introduced to the Play Engine and the PlayGo IDE.

This was followed by a presentation by Ahmad Taherkhani who spoke about 'automatic algorithm recognition based on programming schemas'.  I really liked this paper, since it was a new angle on some very early psychology of programming themes.  I particularly like how Ahmad was attempting to use existing theories to engineer a solution that may not only have practical use (in terms of providing tools to help educators to understand the programming code that students write), but also the act of programming a solution has the potential to allow us to learn more about the theories that are being applied.

The final paper in this session was a work in progress paper by Khuong A Nguyen who used a human-computer interaction technique called cognitive walkthough to learn more about the NXT-G visual programming language that can be used with the Lego Mindstorms hardware.

HCI for the future

Following a tour of a HCI and accessibility lab (which resembles a small apartment), a short panel discussion took place, with Nicholas Merriam and Luke Church taking centre stage.  Nicholas's perspective was especially welcome, since he spoke about the challenge of working with low level embedded software and the role that timing visualisation tools may play when attempting to solve programming problems that seem particularly intractable.  This linked back well to the earlier discussions of notation.

Learners and language design

This session contained two papers.  The first was a paper by Ahmed Alardawi, from Sheffield Hallam, aimed to explore the effect that object-oriented programming language class structure has on the comprehension of computer programs.  What was great about this research was that it clearly made use of existing work, and partially replicated earlier studies, thus adding to evidence.  Babak Khazaei, also from Sheffield Hallam, presented an empirical study on the influence of OCL, an abbreviation for Object Constraint Language (wikipedia). 

Motivation and affect

This part of the workshop contained a single presentation, by Rein Sach, from the Department of Computing at the Open University. 

Rein's paper was entitled, 'what makes software engineers go that extra mile?'  Rein asked software engineers what it was about their work that they enjoyed.  This gave way to an interesting discussion about the perception of the nature of programming work.  Even though developers might have to battle with misbehaving operating systems and maintain servers from time to time, perhaps these activities need to be considered as work rather than nuisances that get in the way of the real task, which is doing the intrinsically rewarding and creative work of creating code.

Invited paper

Thursday kicked off with a presentation by Gerrit van der Veer, from the Open University in the Netherlands and the Free University, Amsterdam.  Gerrit's presentation was about different aspects of design, how technology might be used to gather debate surrounding the artefacts that are created during the design process through a system called CAM, meaning Co-operative Artefact Memory.  A barcode sticker could be attached to different artefacts, such as a sketch or a physical prototype.  Design groups could then use these stickers, with mobile phones, to access a shared Twitter stream that relates to each object, allowing views and ideas to be shared.

Two thoughts came to mind during Gerrit's presentation.  Firstly, I wondered the extent of similarities between design practice (in different disciplines) and what occurs within software development practices that use agile methods, such as eXtreme Programming.  Secondly, CAM reminded me of a tool called OpenDesignStudio used for an Open University design course called U101, Design Thinking.

Another part of Gerrit's presentation was all about service design (i.e. design which yields a product that is not a tangible item).  Gerrit pointed us to a number of resources, such as the Service Design Tools site, and mentioned the importance of culture, by referring to the work of Hofstede (which is studied in the M364 Interaction Design Open University course). 

Cognitive considerations

The final session of the workshop contained two presentations that related to the cognitive dimensions of notations framework, papers by Anna Bobkowska, Maria Kutar and John Muirhead.  Anna introduced a language for the processing of multimedia streams through the use of a visual language.  Maria and John's presentation explored how a cognitive dimensions questionnaire might be used by non-experts.

Miguel Monteiro went on to speak about the cognitive foundations of modularity.  Miguel referred to a programming paradigm called Aspect-oriented programming (wikipedia), a subject that I have heard of many times, but one that I have not explored in a great deal of depth.  Learning more about AOP is certainly something to do at some point.

Qualitative and Quantitative

The final presentation of the workshop was by Gordon Fletcher from the University of Salford.  Gordon's presentation was entitled 'methods and practicalities of qualitative research', but it was so much more than this.  Gordon spoke about data collection in different communities, and mentioned the concept of biographical research (which made me wonder if anyone has thought about applying this technique, perhaps with regards to exploring motivation or software related careers.

I came away with a number of messages, namely, it can be relatively easy to gather qualitative data, but figuring out what to do with it is a whole other issue.  Also, both quantitative and qualitative research can be both systematic and rigorous; these different approaches to research have a lot in common.  An interesting quote was, 'the method has to fit the researcher even more than it has to fit the research'.

Gordon's presentation gave way to a memorable debate on the use of terms.  Undoubtedly the use of language will remain a perpetual challenge when carrying out multidisciplinary research.

Themes

A number of diverse themes were evident within the PPIG '11 workshop, representing its broad membership.  There was a strong theme of computing education and pedagogy.  Programming and educational motivation was also apparent, mixed in with the use and design of visual programming languages.  This connected to the important theme of cognitive dimensions, notational systems and notational design. 

Two interesting inclusions were links to the broader subject of design, and accessibility.  Human-computer interaction and interaction design remains important theme too.  A final theme is (perhaps that isn’t as strong as in previous years) is the application of ethnographic methods to further understand the activity of programming.  It was great to hear from a broad spread of presenters who are exploring many different research areas.

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Christopher Douce

Psychology of Programming

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 10 Aug 2018, 14:39

Ever since July 2001 I have edited (off and on) the Psychology of Programming Interest Group newsletter.  The group, known as PPIG has been in existence since 1987.  Its purpose is to provide an interdisciplinary academic forum for researchers who are interested in the intersection between computer programming and psychology.

PPIG can be described as a pretty broad church.  On one hand there are those who aim to explore program comprehension and the relationship between notation systems and programming languages, whereas other researchers have been performing ethnographic studies and considering the different types of research methods that could be used.

Some of the questions that the PPIG community have been exploring resonated strongly with my doctoral research which was all about understanding how computer programmers go about maintaining computer software. 

I will probably always remember the moment when I started to be interested in the link between computer programming and psychology, particularly cognitive psychology.  I studied computer science as an undergraduate.  Our lecturers asked us to do a time limited summative programming assignment.  What I mean by this is that myself and my cohort were all corralled into a tired computer lab, given a sheet of program requirements, a Pascal compiler, and were told to get on with it (and, no, we couldn't talk to each other).

When we had finished our programs, we had to print them out using a dot matrix printer (which was, of course, situated within its own sound proof room), and give the fruits of our labour to our instructor who exuded a unique mixture of boredom and mild bewilderment at the stress that he had caused.

What struck me was that some students had finished and had left the laboratory to go to the union bar within twenty minutes, whereas others were pulling out their hair four hours later and still didn't have a working program.  This made me ask the questions, 'why was there such a difference between the different programmers?', and 'what exactly do we do when we write computer software?'

I seem to remember that this was in our first year of our degree.  Our computing lecturers had another challenge in store for those of us who made it to our second year: a software maintenance project.

The software maintenance project comprised of one third role play, and two thirds utter confusion.  Our team of four students were presented with a printout of around forty thousand lines of wickedly obscure FORTRAN code, and given another challenging requirements brief.  We were then introduced to a fabulous little utility called GREP, and again told us to get on with it.

This project made me ask further questions of, 'how on earth do we understand a lot of unfamiliar code quickly?', and 'what is the best way to make effective decisions?'  These and other questions stuck with me, and eventually I discovered PPIG.

So, during my week on study leave I compiled the latest edition of the PPIG Newsletter.  The next annual workshop is to take place at the University of York, and I hope to attend.  If I have the time, I'll try to write a short blog post about it and the themes that emerge.

Work-in-Progress Paper

When I was done with the newsletter I turned my attention to a research idea I have been trying to work on for well over the past year with an esteemed collaborator from Royal Holloway, University of London.

As well as studying a number of different programming languages during my undergraduate years I was also introduced to the all-encompassing subject of software engineering. In engineering there is a simple idea that if you can measure something, that something can be controlled. One of the difficulties of managing software projects is that software is intrinsically intangible: it isn't something you can physically touch or see. It's impossible to ascertain, at a glance, how your developers are getting along or whether they are experiencing difficulties. To get round the problem researchers have proposed software complexity metrics.

Having a complexity metric can be useful (to some extent).  If you apply a complexity metric to a program, the bigger the number, the more trouble a developer might be faced with (and more money spent).  Researchers have proposed a number of different metrics which measure different aspects of a program. One counts the number of linguistic parts of a program, another metric counts the number of unique paths of execution that a program might have.

Another type of metric, called spatial complexity metrics, have sprung from an understanding that programmers use different types of short term memory during program comprehension and development. The idea behind this metric, which was first published in a PPIG workshop back in 1999, was to try to propose a metric which is inspired by the psychology of a programmer.

The work in progress paper describes a number of experiments that aims to explore whether there might be a correlation between different software complexity metrics, and empirical measurements of cognitive load taken from an eye tracking programming comprehension study. The research question is: are program complexity metrics psychologically valid? 

Of course, writing up a research idea is a lot easier than carrying it out!  This said I do hope to share some of the research materials that may be used within the studies through this blog when they are available.

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TLAD (Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases)

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Tuesday, 15 Nov 2011, 11:36

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I always enjoy visiting Manchester.  Having spent many years there (both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate) visiting Manchester almost feels as if I'm coming home.  Plus, travelling directly to the computer science building (as a computer scientist) feels as if I'm returning to a 'spiritual home'!

The reason for my most recent visit was to attend the 9th TLAD workshop, which was all about the teaching, learning and assessment of databases.  Below is a summary of the event.  I hope it is useful for someone.

Paper Session 1 - Data Mining

The first paper that was presented during the day was entitled 'Teaching Oracle Data Miner using Virtual Machines', by Qicheng Yu and Preeti Patel, both from London Metropolitan University, and expertly presented by Preeti.

Preeti made the point that employers are demanding up to date practical and technical skills.  The issue of employability was, of course, an issue that was discussed within an earlier HEA event entitled Enhancing the Employability of Computing Students.  To address the important issue of technical skills, educators are necessarily faced with the challenge of how to enable learners to make use of industrial tools and products.  One of the solutions (in the area of database and data mining education) was to make use of virtual machine technology, such as the Microsoft Virtual PC, Oracle Virtualbox and a product called VMWare Player. 

Some of the challenges that have to be addressed are technical i.e. how to share drives through a host computer, and financial or legal challenges, such as how to make sure that any solutions are correctly licenced.  Preeti pointed us to a product known as WEKA, which I had never heard of, but it seemed that many of the audience had!

The second paper of the morning was by Hongbo Du from the University of Buckingham.  His paper entitled, 'Data mining project: a critical element in teaching learning and assessment of a data mining module' won the 'best paper' prize of the workshop.  Hongbo mentioned what seemed to be an important paper in the area, namely, something called the CRISP-DM standard (wikipedia), which enable students to gain an understanding of the data mining process.  Hongbo also presented a general framework for assessment (within his paper) which drew upon this methodology before presenting three different case studies.

The key points that I took away from his presentation was: group work is important (but very often students don't want to do this since they might want to own their own scores completely), and that the domain of application is very important too, and represents a substantial area of complexity that students need to necessarily grapple with.

The final presentation of the first session, entitled, 'Making data warehousing accessible' was by Tony Valsamidis from the University of Greenwich.  Tony began by presenting some of the problems, such as the availability of large data sets (an issue that I shall return to later), unwieldy query languages and unfamiliar domain and data models. 

Tony spoke of a number of different technologies and techniques, some I had used in anger (such as Visual Basic for Applications), others I had heard of but had forgotten the meaning of (such as OLAP).  An important issue that was raised was that of data sanitization: when you move data between different systems, things might not be directly compatible, so database practitioners might have to design some magic data transformations.

Paper Session 2 - Database and the Cloud

The fourth presentation was rather different.  Mark Dorling from Langley Grammar School described his teaching practice and association with a project called Digital School House

Mark trained as a primary school teacher but he is now working within the secondary sector.  He described how he helps students to understand the key concepts of data, information and logical operators, sometimes applying kinaesthetic learning techniques (i.e. movement).  Mark also described the use of something called independent learning videos (allowing students to remember how to use elements of applications).  This reminded me of the industrial term of 'on-demand e-learning', where learners can call up screen casts or bite sized presentations about how to carry out or complete different tasks.

Mark also showed how secondary school pupils could make use of cloud application, such as Google Spreadsheet, to enable an entire class to enter data (and for the data to magically appear on an interactive whiteboard).  Mark's presentation (and paper) got me thinking about how I might potentially adopt some of the pedagogic techniques that he described into my own teaching practices.

Mark's description of how he makes use of Google Spreadsheet lead us directly to Clare Stanier's presentation which was entitled, 'Teaching Database for the Cloud'.  One of the things that I really liked about Clare's presentation was that she addressed a question I was already mulling over, namely, 'how is it possible to define cloud databases?'  She gave an answer that related to some NIST definitions (pdf). 

A cloud database can be considered in terms of Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service (such as Google Spreadsheet).  Depending on their task, developers will interface with different products (and different levels of abstraction).  Clare pointed us to interesting sounding products such as Microsoft Azure and Oracle on Demand, neither of which I had ever heard of before. 

This is obviously a rapidly changing field!  If you require any further references to either cloud related papers (or products), Clare might be able to share a useful URL.

Paper Session 3 - Embedding Technology

Jackie Campbellfrom the University of Leeds began the final session by presenting a paper entitled, 'Inquiry based learning database oriented applications for computing and computing forensic students'.  Two activities or tools were described.  The first was an SQL Quiz application, where students were challenged to compose correct SQL statements.  The second was more of a software maintenance task, where students were asked to investigate and carry out a number of fixes to an existing application developed using something called Oracle Apex.

I personally consider maintenance activities to be really valuable for a number of reasons.  Firstly, maintenance is a substantial on-going challenge.  Database designs are likely to be particularly affected if software applications or businesses merge.  Businesses, of course, continually change and evolve (as must the software systems that they support).  Understanding how (and where) to change or correct database queries may require students to navigate their way through unfamiliar systems.  This, in itself, is likely to be an intellectually challenging task.

The presentation by Craig McCreath (and supported by his supervisor Petra Leimich) reminded me of an earlier presentation about the JISC WILD project that was held at the HEA mobile event a number of weeks ago.  The underlying ideas were very similar: using mobile devices to elicit responses from students to (attempt) to assess their understanding of materials.  Craig did a fabulous job at presenting, and I had a sense that the application he had developed for his final year project was easy to use.

The final presentation was, 'Using Video to Provide Richer Feedback to Database Assessment' by Howard Gould, Leeds Metropolitan University. Howard addresses the important questions of: 'what kind of feedback would most effectively benefit our students?, how do we make the best use of our time to provide this feedback?, and, how might we practically provide video feedback?'

Howard's paper was, in essence, a practice paper; I think this type of paper can be really valuable.  One of the challenges that lecturers face is to offer effective and useful feedback on entity relationship diagrams, showing students alternative database designs.  I sense that providing feedback on any kind of non-written notation is something that is intrinsically very difficult (and can include notational systems such as mathematics and music).  Howard solves the problem by recording screen captures after having spent some time initially looking at a student submission.  Practical challenges include file sizes (the videos themselves can be very big), and on-screen flicker (since an inexpensive digital camera is used as opposed to an expensive licence for Camtasia).

Discussion

After all the paper sessions a discussion was initiated by Alistair Monger (Southampton Solent), David Nelson (University of Sunderland) and Charles Boisuert (Sheffield Hallam).

Alistair pointed us towards a number of useful assessment resources, beginning by mentioning that the QAA code of practice requires formative assessment.  He also mentioned REAP, an abbreviation for Reenginerring Assessment Practices in Higher Education, followed by TESTA, Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (JISC).  Alistair mentioned the importance of having an audit trail of feedback, and mentioned a system called GradeMark.

David raised the perennial issue of collusion and plagiarism and made the point that assessment should always be at such a level that it is difficult for students to quickly 'find answers'.  One solution might be to have time constrained assessments, perhaps in a computer lab (something that I remember from my days as a computing undergraduate), and the production of a portfolio which shows evidence of understanding.

Charles pointed us towards the idea of Nifty assessments.  Charles mentioned the point that markers mark in different ways and that there will be variability.  Another point was how to help those students who always seem to struggle with the subject.

The ensuing discussion took us into issues such as the importance of good feedback (and explaining the importance of why certain subjects are assessed), differences between both individual students and cohorts, and a reference to something called the Database Commons Initiative.

Summary

Although I'm not directly involved with the teaching of databases and database technologies I found this to be a very interesting event for a number of different reasons.  The first is the difference in the variety of database related topics that are now taught; things are rather different from my undergraduate days when database education began (and ended) with SQL syntax and learning about different types of joins.  The domain is now a lot richer than it ever was. 

There are now different levels of 'cloud' databases, small embedded databases, huge data warehouses, object-oriented databases and XML databases.  Other themes that might have been perhaps discussed are the connections between database teaching and software design, alerting students to issues such as making database abstraction layers and stored procedures (but perhaps these issues have been explored in earlier workshops).

The second reason also relates to this issue of richness.  Software engineers and system designers are now faced with a myriad of different choices in terms of architectures (how to set up large systems) as well as products, both commercial and open source.  Understanding what different products do and how they might support business objectives are issues that software professionals always need to bear in mind.  These 'industrially connected' points relate to the issue of certification.  The teaching and learning of databases is, perhaps, now an endeavour that is shared between academia and industry.  Perhaps the role of higher education teaching and learning in this area is to provide a useful context to help students to get to grips the more practical dimension of professional certifications.

Another thought that came to mind was I felt that there was a degree of useful cross over between other HEA events, particularly the joint employability and computing forensics event that I attended.  During the forensics part of this day I remember a fair amount of discussion about the sharing of 'data sets' which could be used to enable students to hone their computing forensic skills.  It struck me that database technology educators are faced with a similar challenge.

A final comment is I personally consider that the subject of databases is a pretty fundamental area of computing education.  I have to mention, of course, the Open University's own database course, M359 Relational databases: theory and practice.

Database education is an area is necessarily rich: students will be exposed to different languages, problem domains and wider system architectures and designs as soon as they set to work on 'real world' applications.  Databases represent a domain of software technology that ultimately helps 'to get jobs done'.  Where would we be without them?

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Christopher Douce

Scholarship for Staff Tutors

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Thursday, 6 Mar 2014, 16:37

I haven't really blogged about 'internal events' before.  I think this is my first one.  Although I've written this post mainly for an internal audience, it might be useful for a wider audience too, although I'm not yet sure whether I'll click on the 'make available to the world' box in our VLE blogging tool.

About a week or so ago I was lucky enough to attend what is called a Staff Tutor Staff Development event that was all about scholarship.  It was all about how we (as staff tutors) might fit scholarship into our day job.

The SD4ST scholarship event was hosted by the Open University office in Gateshead, a part of the country I had never explicitly visited before (other than passing through either in the car or on the train).  The Gateshead office is fabulous (as is the architecture in Newcastle).  The office presented us with a glorious view of the millennium bridge and the imposing Baltic contemporary art gallery.  I'm digressing before I've even begun, so, without further ado, on to describing the event.

Introducing scholarship

The first day kicked off (in the early afternoon) by asking the question of, 'what exactly counts as scholarship?'  An underlying theme was how to contribute to research that might be used as a part of the university REF submission (which is, of course, used to assess how well universities compare to each other in terms of their research output).

A number of different types of scholarship were defined, drawing on a paper that had recently been circulated (or published) through senate.  The paper also included explicit examples, but I won't go through them here.  Here's my attempt at summarising the different types:

  • Institutional scholarship (about and for the institution)
  • Scholarship of teaching (the investigation of one's own, or teaching by others)
  • Scholarship for teaching, or outputs that contribute to teaching materials in its different forms
  • Research that relates to and can inform professional practice (in whatever form this might take)
  • Discipline based scholarship, investigative research which can be understood in terms of adding to the knowledge of a particular subject or area.

The output of scholarship may be presented within journal or conference papers, chapters in books or be in reports.  Blogs can also be considered as scholarship too, but this is a rather difficult category, since it has to be a 'rated blog'.  In essence, an output should be something that can be judged as excellent by a peer, capable of use by others and have impact.

I thought about which of these categories I could most readily contribute to.  I came up with a couple of answers.   The first was that I might be able to carry out some discipline based scholarship, perhaps building on some of the accessibility or computing research I have been previously involved with.  Another idea might be to do some research that might inform the different course teams I'm involved on.  An example of this might have been an earlier blog post on mobile technologies that fed into course team discussions.  Also, given my current duties of supporting course presentations I could also see how I might be able to (potentially) contribute to the scholarship of teaching in a number of different ways.

How to find the time

Although I'm relatively new to the role of a staff tutor (or regional academic), I am beginning to feel that we have to be not only good at juggling different things, but also be able to put on a good balancing act too! 

The reason for this is that our time is split down the middle.  On one hand we have regional responsibilities (helping our tutors to do their job as effectively and as efficiently as possible, and doing a lot of other mysterious stuff, like marketing) which accounts for fifty percent of our time.  The other fifty percent of our time is spent on 'faculty' work.  This means that we are able to contribute to course teams, offering useful academic input and ensuring that our associate lecturers are fully taken into consideration during the course design phases.  We can also use this fifty percent slice to carry out scholarship in its different forms.

Given the different pulls from course teams and regional responsibility there is a significant question which needs to be asked, namely: 'how is it possible to do scholarship when we've got all this other stuff to do?'  The second section in the day aimed to answer this exact question through presentations by two staff tutors who seem to be successfully balancing all their different responsibilities.

The first presentation was by Dave McGarvie, Science Staff Tutor in Scotland.  Dave gave a cracking presentation about his research, which was all about volcanoes (I'm sure he will be able to provide you with a better description!)  What struck me about Dave's presentation was that he was also came across as being a bit of a 'dab hand' at media stuff too, being called upon as an 'expert' to talk about Icelandic volcano eruptions.  Dave talked about how he used his study leave (he uses all of it), and said that it is possible to ask for research leave too (which was something that I hadn't heard about).

The second presentation was by Gareth Williams, Maths and Stats Staff Tutor (or MCT), in Manchester.  Gareth told us about how he managed to carve out (and protect) a 'research day' which he used to speak (and work with) with other academics in his subject area.

I noted down a really important part of Gareth's presentation which summarised the reasons for doing research: that it is something that we're passionate about, that it's fun, it can help us to maintain knowledge, it can be exciting, it can help with networking (and recruitment of good ALs), and help to introduce and advertise the work of the university to a wider audience.

One fundamental point was echoed by both presenters, namely, that research can take a lot of time, can (and probably will) eat into our personal time.  Gareth offers some practical advice, urging us to be realistic, develop multiple strategies (or routes to publication), prioritise workload carefully and, importantly, to have fun.

The final talk of the day was by Ian Cook, who spoke about the universities eSTeEM initiative which replaces earlier funding mechanisms.  eSTeEM lets individuals or group of researchers to bid for funding for projects that may able to benefit the university or help to further understand and promote teaching and learning.

Designing a scholarship project

The next part of the day (and a part of the following day) was spent 'in the deep end'.  We were put into groups and asked to work towards creating cross faculty scholarship project which could help us to collectively understand our knowledge of Open University teaching and learning (perhaps through the use of technology).  Following the group discussions, we then had to devise an eight minute presentation to everyone in the room to try to 'win' a pot of imaginary funding.  Here's a rough list of the titles of the various projects that were proposed:

  • Group 1: Can on-line forums enhance students learning?
  • Group 2: What constitutes useful monitoring for associate lecturers?
  • Group 3: Investigate if text messaging can improve TMA (assignment) submission and retention
  • Group 4: Why do students attend (or not attend) synchronous on-line tuition?
  • Group 5: A system for the sharing of media resources between tutors

I have to confess I was involved in group five.

This activity reminded me that different people can understand research (and, subsequently, scholarship) in different ways.   In my 'home discipline' of computer science, research can be considered in terms of 'building stuff'.  This 'stuff' might be a new software system, tool or environment.  The 'stuff' might even be a demonstration of how different technologies may be connected together in a new or novel ways.   I also must confess that my discipline background emerged through our brainstorming activities.

In the end, there were two winners, and it interesting to learn that one of the winning project ideas (the use of text messaging) was the subject of an existing project.  It just goes to show that old adage that good ideas can emerge independently from different (independent) sources!

I enjoyed this activity.  I remember a lot of discussion about dissemination and how to evaluate whether a project had succeeded.  Referring back to the earlier notions of scholarship and Gareth's multiple routes to publication, dissemination can, of course, have a range of different forms, from internal presentations, workshops, focus groups, through to formal internal reports and REFable publications, such as conference and journal papers.

Final presentations

The event was rounded off by two presentations.  Celia Popovic gave a presentation about SEDA, which is an abbreviation for the 'Staff and Educational Development Association', which is a non-profit organisation which aims to facilitate networking and sharing of resources.  Celia begins by asking the question, 'what do you need [to enable you do to your scholarship and research stuff]?' and talked us through a set of different resources and the benefits of being a SEDA fellow.  The resources included books, a magazine, and a number of scholarly journals.

The final presentation, entitled 'Getting Started, Overcoming Obstacles' was by Karen Littleton.  Karen is currently the director of CREET which is a cross-faculty research grouping which comprises of Education and the Institute of Educational Technology (and some others too, I am sure!) 

A couple of things jumped out at me, namely, her advice to 'be pragmatic'.  I am personally guilty of 'thinking big' in terms of research ideas.  I once had this idea to perform some kind of comparison of different virtual learning environments, but it was something that I have never managed to get around to doing, perhaps because my heart sinks when I see all the obstacles that lay ahead of me.

Karen advises us to consider working on a series of smaller projects which have the potential to contribute towards a main goal.  She also mentions the important issue of time and the need to ring fence and guard it carefully, a point that was echoed throughout the two days of the event.

Summary

I'm only just starting to appreciate the different demands on my work time.  I have been wondering, for quite a while now, how to do 'research' within my role as a staff tutor.  What this event told me was that it is possible, but you need to do it with a high level of determination to succeed.

It strikes me that the best way to do research is to make sure that your research activities are aligned, as closely as possible, to some of the other duties of the role.  Of course, it might be possible to do other research, but if your 'job role dots' are not connected together, seeking permission and making cases to go ahead and do your own scholarship is likely to be so much harder.

A feeling that I have always had is that through research there are likely to be opportunities.  An example of this can be finding stuff out that can inform course production, or, connecting to Gareth's example, making contacts may help with recruitment of associate lecturers.  I've also come to the conclusion that network is important too.  Networking might be in the form of internal contacts within the university, or external contacts within either other higher education institutions or in industry.

A really important point that jumped out at me is that you really do need to be passionate about the stuff that you're finding out about.  The word 'fun' was mentioned a number of times too.

As a result of the event I've been thinking about my own scholarly aspirations.  Before changing roles I had some quite firm ideas about what I wanted to do, but this has changed.  As mentioned before, I think it's a good idea to try to align different pieces of my role together (to align the fifty percent of regional work with the fifty percent of 'other stuff').  I hope I'm making some progress in figuring out how to make the best contribution to both courses and research.  I hope to continue to blog about some of the stuff that I'm getting up to whilst on this journey.

I'm also hoping there is a follow up session next year which might ask the question of, 'how is your scholarship coming along, and what practical things could be done to help you do more of it?'

All in all, a really enjoyable event.  Many thanks to the organisers!  For those who can access internal OU sites (and might be staff tutors), some of the presentations have been uploaded to the VLE STLG workspace.

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Christopher Douce

eTeaching and Learning workshop

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Sunday, 1 Feb 2015, 13:37

I attended a HEA eTeaching and Learning workshop at the University of Greenwich on 1st June 2011.  It is always a pleasure visiting the Greenwich University campus; it is probably (in my humble opinion) the most dramatic of all university campuses in London - certainly the only one that is situated within a World Heritage site.

My challenge was to find the King William building (if I remember correctly), which turned out to be a Wren designed neo-classical building that sat adjacent to one of the main roads.  Looking towards the river, all visitors were treated to a spectacular view of the Canary Wharf district.  Visitors were also treated to notes emanating from a nearby music school. 

I first went to the eTeaching and Learning workshop back in 2008 where I presented some preliminary work about an accessibility project I was working on.  This time I was attending as an interested observer.  It was a packed day, comprising of two keynotes and eight presentations.

Opening Keynote

The opening keynote was given by Deryn Graham (University of Greenwich).  Deryn's main focus was the evaluation of e-delivery (e-delivery was a term that I had not heard of before, so I listened very intently).  The context for her presentation was a postgraduate course on academic practice (which reminded me of a two year Open University course sounds to have a similar objective).  Some of the students took the course through a blended learning approach, whereas others studied entirely from a distance. 

The most significant question that sprung to my mind was: how should one conduct such an evaluation?  What should we measure, and what may constitute success (or difference).  Deryn mentioned a number of useful points, such as Salmond's e-moderating model (and the difficulty that the first stages may present to learners), and also considered wider economic and political factors.  Deryn presented her own framework which could be used to consider the effectiveness of e-delivery (or e-learning).

This first presentation inspired a range of different questions from the participants and made me wonder how Laurillard's conversational framework (see earlier blog post) might be applied to the same challenge of evaluation.  By way of a keynote, Deryn's presentation certainly hit the spot.

General Issues

The first main presentation was by Simon Walker, from the University of Greenwich.  The title of his paper was, 'impact of metacognitive awareness on learning in technology enhanced learning environments'.

I really liked the idea of metacognition (wikipedia) and I can directly relate it back to some computer programming research I used to stidy.  I can remember myself asking different questions whilst writing computer software, from 'I need to find information about these particular aspects...' through to, 'hmm... this isn't working at all, I need to do something totally different for a while'.  The research within cognitive is pretty rich, and it was great to hear that Simon was aware of the work by Flavell, who defines metacognition as, simply, 'knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena'.

Andrew spoke about some research that himself and his colleagues carried out using LAMS (learning activity management system), which is a well known learning design tool and accompanying runtime environment.  An exploratory experiment was described: one group were given 'computer selected' tools to use (though LAMS), whereas the other group were permitted a free choice.  Following the presentation of the experiment, the notion of learning styles (and whether or not they exist, and how they might relate to tool choice - such as blogs, wikis or forums) was discussed in some detail.

Andrew Pyper from the University of Hertfordshire gave a rather different presentation.  Andrew teaches human-computer interaction, and briefly showed us a software tool that could be used to support the activity of computer interface evaluation though the application of heuristic evaluations. 

The bit of Andrew's talk that jumped out at me was the idea that instruction of one cohort might help to create materials that are used by another.  I seemed to have made a note that student-generated learning materials might be understood in terms of the teaching intent (or the subject), the context (or situation) in which the materials are generated, their completeness (which might relate to how useful the materials are), and their durability (whether or not they age over time).

The final talk of the general section returned to the issue of evaluation (and connects to other issues of design and delivery).  Peiyuan Pan, from the London Metropolitan University, draws extensively on the work of others, notably Kolb, Bloom, and Fry (who wrote a book entitled 'a handbook for teaching and learning in higher education - one that I am certainly going to look up).  I remember a quote (or a note) that is (roughly) along the lines of, '[the] environment determines what activities and interactions take place', which seems to also have echoes with the conversational framework that I mentioned earlier.

Peiyuan describes a systematic process to course and module planning.  His presentation is available on line and can be found by visiting his presentation website.  There was certainly lots of food for thought here.  Papers that consider either theory or process always have a potential to impact practice.

Technical Issues

The second main section comprised of three papers.  The first was by Mike Brayshaw and Neil Gordon from the University of Hull, who were presenting a paper entitled, 'in place of virtual strife - issues in teaching using collaborative technologies'.  We all know that on-line forums are spaces where confusion can reign and emotions can heighten.  There are also perpetual challenges, such as none participation within on-line activities.  To counter confusion it is necessary to have audit trails and supporting evidence.

During this presentation a couple of different technologies were mentioned (and demoed).   It was really interesting to an the application of Microsoft Sharepoint.  I had heard that it can be used in an educational context, but this was the first ever time I had witnessed a demonstration of a system that could permit groups of users to access different shared areas.  It was also interesting to hear that a system called WebPA was being used in Hull.  WebPA is a peer assessment system which originates from the University of Loughborough.

I had first heard about WebPA at an ALT conference a couple of years ago.  I consider peer assessment as a particularly useful approach since not only might it help to facilitate metacognition (linking back to the earlier presentation), but it may also help to develop professional practice.  Peer assessment is something that happens regularly (and rigorously) within software engineering communities.

The second paper entitled 'Increased question sharing between e-Learning systems' was presented by Bernadette-Marie Byrne on behalf of her student Ralph Attard.  I really liked this presentation since it took me back to my days as a software developer where I was first exposed to the world of IMS e-learning specifications.

Many VLE systems have tools that enable them to deliver multiple choice questions to students (and there are even projects that try to accept free text).  If institutions have a VLE that doesn't offer this functionality there are a number of commercial organisations that are more than willing to offer tools that will plug this gap.  One of the most successful organisations in this field is QuestionMark.

The problem is simple: one set of multiple choice questions cannot easily be transferred to another.  The solution is rather more difficult: each system defines a question (and question type) and correct answer (or answers) in a slightly different ways.  Developers for one tool may use horizontal sliders to choose numbers (whereas others might not support this type of question).  Other tools might enable question designers to code extensive feedback for use in formative tests (I'm going beyond what was covered in the presentation, but you get my point!)

Ralph's project was to take QuestionMark questions (in their own flavour of XML) at one end and output IMS QTI at the other.  The demo looked great, but due to the nature of the problem, not all question types could be converted. Bernadette pointed us to another project that predates Ralph's work, namely the JISC MCQFM (multiple-choice questions, five methods) project, which uses a somewhat different technical approach to solve a similar problem.  Whereas MCQFM is a web-service that uses the nightmare of XSLT (wikipedia) transforms, I believe that Ralph's software parses whole documents into an intermediate structure from where new XML structures can be created.

As a developer (some years ago now), one of the issues that I came up against was that different organisations used different IMS specifications in different ways.  I'm sure things have improved a lot now, but whilst standardisation has likely to have facilitated the development of new products, real interoperability was always a problem (in the world of computerised multiple-choice questions).

The final 'technical' presentation was by John Hamer, from the University of Glasgow.  John returns to the notion of peer assessment by presenting a system called Aropa and discussing 'educational philosophy and case studies' (more information about this tool can be found by visiting the project page).  Aropa is designed to support peer view in large classes.  Two case studies were briefly described: one about professional skills, and the other about web development.

One thing is certain: writing a review (or conducting an assessment of student work) is  most certainly a cognitively demanding task.  It both necessitates and encourages a deep level of reflection.  I noted down a number of concerns about peer assessment that were mentioned: fairness, consistency, competence (of assessors), bias, imbalance and practical concerns such as time.  A further challenge in the future might be to characterise which learning designs (or activities) might make best use of peer assessment.

Pedagogical Issues

The subjects of collusion and plagiarism are familiar tropes to most higher education lecturers.  A paper by Ken Fisher and Dafna Hardbattle (both from London Metropolitan University) asks the question of whether students might benefit it they work through a learning object which explains to learners what is and what is not collusion.  The presentation began with a description of a questionnaire study that attempts to uncover what academics understand collusion to be.

Ken's presentation inspired a lot of debate.  One of the challenges that we must face is the difference between assessment and learning.  Learning can occur through collaboration with others.  In some cases it should be encouraged, whereas in other situations it should not be condoned.  Students and lecturers alike have a tricky path to negotiate.

Some technical bits and pieces.  The learning object was created using a tool called Glomaker (generative learning object maker), which I had never heard of before.  This tool reminds me of another tool, such as Xerte, which hails from the University of Nottingham.  On the subject of code plagiarism, there is also a very interesting project called JPlag (demo report, found on HEA plagiarism pages).  The JPLAG on-line service now supports more languages than it's original Java.

The final paper presentation of the day was by Ed de Quincy and Avril Hocking, both from the University of Greenwich.  Their paper explored how students might make use of the social bookmarking tool, Delicious.  Here's a really short summary of Delicious: it allow you to record your web favourites to the web using a set of keywords that you choose, enabling you to easily find them again if you use different computers (it also allows you to share stuff with users of similar interest).  

One way it can be used in higher education is to use it in conjunction with course codes (which are often unique, or can be, if a code is combined with another tag). After introducing the tool to users, the researchers were interested in finding out about common patterns of use, which tags were used, and whether learners found it a useful tool.

I have to say that I found this presentation especially interesting since I've used Delicious when tutoring on a course entitled accessible online learning: supporting disabled students which has a course code of H810, which has been used as a Delicious tag.  Clicking on the previous link brings up some resources that relate to some of the subjects that feature within the course.

I agree with Ed's point that a crowdsourced set of links comprises of a really good learning resource.  His research indicates that 70% of students viewed resources tagged by other students.  More statistics are contained within his paper.

My own confession is that I am an infrequent user of Delicious, mainly due to being forced down one browser route as opposed to another at various times, but when I have use it, I've found browser plug-ins to be really useful.  My only concern about using Delicious tags is that the validity of links can age very quickly, and it's up to a student to determine the quality of the resource that is linked to (but metrics saying, 'n people have also tagged this page' is likely to be a useful indicator).

Closing Keynote

Malcolm Ryan from the University of Greenwich School of Education presented the final keynote entitled, 'Listening and responding to learners' experiences of technology enhanced learning'.  Malcolm asked a number of searching questions, including, 'do you believe that technology enhances or transforms practice?' and 'do you know what their experience is?'  Malcolm went on to mention something called the SEEL Project (student experience of e-learning laboratory) that was funded by the HEA.

The mention of this project (which I had not heard of before) reminded me of something called the LEX report (which Malcolm later went on to mention).  LEX is an abbreviation of: learner experience of e-learning.  Two other research projects were mentioned.  One was the JISC great expectations report, another was a HEFCE funded Student Perspectives on Technology report.  I have made a note of the finding that perhaps students may not want everything to be electronic (and there may be split views about mobile).  A final project that was mentioned was the SLIDA project which describes how UK FE and HE institutions are supporting effective learners in a digital age.

Towards the end of Malcolm's presentation I remember a number of key terms, and how these relate to individual project.  Firstly, there is hearing, which relates to how technology should be used (the LEX report).  Listening relates to SEEL.  Responding connects to the great expectations report, and finally engaging, which relates to a QAA report entitled 'Rethinking the values of higher education - students as change agents?' (pdf). 

Malcolm's presentation has directly pointed me towards a number of reports that perhaps I need to spend a bit of time studying whilst at the same time emphasising just how much research has already been done by different institutions.

Workshop Themes

At the end of these event blogs I always try to write something about what I think the different themes are (of course, my themes are likely to be different to those of other delegates!)

The first one that jumped out at me was the theme of theory and models, namely different approaches and ways to understand the e-learning landscape.

The second one was the familiar area of user generated content.  This theme featured within this workshop through creation of bookmarks and course materials.

Peer assessment was also an important theme (perhaps one of increasing importance?)  There is, however, a strong tension between peer assessment and plagiarism, but particularly the notion of collusion (and how to avoid it).

Keeping (loosely) with the subject of assessment, the final theme has to be evaluation, i.e. how can we best determine whether what we have designed (or the service that we are providing) are useful for our learners.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, this is the second e-learning workshop I have been to.  I enjoyed it!  It was great to hear so many presentations.  In my own eyes, e-learning is now firmly established.  I've heard it say that the pedagogy has still got to catch up with the technology (how to do the best with all of the things that are possible).

Meetings such as these enable practitioners to more directly understand the challenges that different people and institutions face.  Many thanks to Deryn Graham from the University of Greenwich and Karen Frazer from HEA.

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Christopher Douce

Using and teaching mobile technologies for ICT and computer science

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 18:48

 I recently attended an event entitled Mobile Technologies - The Challenge of Learner Devices Delivering Computer Science held at Birmingham City University last week, organised by the Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Higher Education Academy (HEA) subject centre.

This blog post aims to present a summary of proceedings as well as my own reflections on the day. If any of the delegates or presenters read this (and have any comments), then please feel free to post a reply to add to or correct anything that I've written. I hope these notes might be useful to someone.

Keynote

The day was kicked off by John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton. Just as any good keynote should, John asked a number of searching questions. The ones that jumped out at me were whether information technology (or computers) had accelerated the industrialisation of education, and whether mobile technologies may contribute to this.

John wondered about the changing nature of technology ownership. On one hand universities maintain rooms filled with computers that students can use, but on the other hand students increasingly have their own devices, such as laptops or mobile phones. 

John also pointed us towards an article in the Guardian, published in July 2010 about teenagers and technology which has a rather challenging subtitle. Mobility and connectedness, it is argued, has now become a part of our identity.

One thing John said jumped out at me: 'requiring students to use a VLE is like asking them to wear a school uniform'. This analogy points towards a lot of issues that can be unpacked. Certainly, a VLE has the potential to present institutional branding, and a uniform suggests that things might done in a particular way. But a VLE also has the potential be be an invaluable source of information to ensure that we know what we need to know to navigate around an institution.

For those of us who had to wear school uniforms, very many of us customised them as much as we possibly could without getting told off for breaking the rules. Within their constraints, it would be possible to express individuality whilst conforming (to get an education). The notion of customisation and services also has a connection with the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) (wikipedia), which, in reality, might exist somewhere in between the world of the mobile, a personal laptop and the services that an institution provides.

Session I

The first session was opened by Kathy Maitland from Birmingham City University. Kathy talked about how she used cloud computing to enable students using different hardware to access different different software services. She spoke about the challenge of using different hardware (and operating system) platforms to access services and the technical challenges of ensuring correct configuration.

John Busch from Queen's university, Belfast made a presentation about how to record lectures using a mobile phone. It was great to see a (relatively) low tech approach being used to make educational materials available for students. All John needed to share his lectures with a wider audience was a mid range mobile phone, a tiny tripod, a desk to perch the mobile phone on, and (presumably) a lot of hard won experience.

John gave the audience a lot of tips about how to make the best use of technology, along with a result from a survey where he asked students how they made use of the recordings he made of his computer gaming lectures. 

A part of his talk was necessarily technical, where he spoke about different data encoding standards and which standard was supported by which mobile (or desktop) platform. One of the members of the audience pointed us to Encoding.com, a website that enables transcoding of digital media. The presentation gave way to interesting discussions about privacy. One of the things that I really liked about John's presentation was that is addressed 'mobile' from different perspectives at the same time: using mobile technology to produce content that may, in turn, be consumed by other mobile devices.

Laura Crane, from Lancaster University then gave an interesting presentation about using location, context and preference in VLE information delivery. Laura's main research question appeared to be, 'which is (potentially) more useful - it is information that is presented at a particular location, or information that is presented in a particular time?'

This reminded me of some research that I had heard of a couple of years ago called context modelling. Laura mentioned a subject or area that was new to me, namely, Situation Theory.  Laura's talk was very well received and it inspired a lot of debate. Topics discussed include the nature of mobility research, the importance of personal or learner attributes on learning (such as learning styles). Discussions edged towards the very active area of recommender research (recommender system, Wikipedia), and out to wider questions of combining location, recommender and affective interfaces (interfaces or systems that could give recommendations or make suggestions depending on emotion). A great talk!

Darren Mundy and Keith Dykes gave a presentation about the WILD Project funded by JISC. WILD is an abbreviation for Wireless Interactive Lecture Demonstrator. The idea behind the project is one that is simple and compelling: how to make use of personal technology to enable students to make a contribution to lectures. By contribution, I mean allowing students to add comments and text to a shared PowerPoint presentation.

A lecturer prepares a PowerPoint presentation and providing there is appropriate internet connectivity, there is a link to a WILD webpage, which the students can send messages to. This might be used to facilitate debate about a particular subject, but also enable those learners who are less reluctant to contribute to 'speak up' by 'texting out'. We were also directed towards the project source code.

During the talk, I was introduced to a word that I had never heard of before: prosumerism (but apparently Wikipedia had!). At the end of the talk, during the Q&A session, one delegate pointed us towards the SAP Twitter PowerPoint plug in, which might be able to achieve similar things.

This last presentation of the morning really got me thinking about my own educational practice, and perhaps this is one of the really powerful aspects of using and working learning technology: it can have the potential to encourage reflection about what is and what is not possible, both inside and outside the classroom. I tutor on an undergraduate interaction design course with the Open University, where I facilitate a number of face to face sessions.

Due to various reasons my tutorials are not well as attended as they could be. Students may have difficulty travelling to a tutorial session, they may have family responsibilities, or even have jobs at the weekend. This is a shame, since I sense that some students would really benefit from these face to face sessions. The WILD presentation make me wonder whether those students who attend a face to face tutorial might be able to collectively author a summary PowerPoint that could then be shared with the group of students who were unable to attend. Interactivity, of course, has the potential to foster inclusivity and ownership. Simply put, the more a student does within a lecture (or puts into it) the more they may get out of it.

Session II

After lunch, the second session proved to be slightly more technical. The first half was merely a warm up!

The second session kicked off with demonstration by Doug Belshaw. Doug works for JISCInfoNet. This part of JISC aims to provide information and products known as InfoKits which can be used by senior management to understand and appreciate a range of different education and technology issues. We were directed towards examples, such as effective practice in a digital age, and effective assessment in a digital age. A new kit, entitled JISC mobile and wireless technologies review is currently under presentation.

Doug asked the audience to share information about any case studies. A number of projects were mentioned, along with a set of links. During the discussion part of the demo we were directed towards m.sunderland.ac.uk , and this makes me wonder whether the 'm.' is a convention that I'm not aware of (and perhaps ought to be!) Something called iWebKit was also mentioned. Other projects included MyMobileBristol.com, in collaboration with Bristol University and Bristol City Council. For more information visit the m.bristol.ac.uk site.

There was also a mention of a service provided by Oxford University, m.ox.ac.uk (the project also has an accompanying press release) This service appears to have been developed in association with something called the Molly Project, which seems to be a mobile application development framework. There was a lot to take in!

Gordon Eccleston from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen gave a fabulous presentation about his work teaching programming the iPhone. Having remained steadfastly in the desktop world, and admitting to being a laggard on the mobile technology front, Gordon answered many questions that I have always had about how one might potentially begin to write an iPhone application. Gordon introduce us to the iPhone software development kit, which I understand was free to universities. The software used to create Apps is called Xcode.  Having predominantly worked within a PC software development environment for too many years than I would care to admit, a quick poke around the Apple Tools website looked rather exciting; a whole new world of languages, terms and technologies.

Gordon had a number of views about the future of App development. He thought that XHTML 5, CSS 3 and accompanying technologies would have an increasingly important role to play. On a related note, the cross mobile platform PhoneGap was mentioned during the following presentation which makes use of some of these same technologies. (Digging further into the web, there's a Wikipedia page called Multiple phone web based application framework, which might prove to be interesting.  There was also some debate about which platform mobile might dominate (and whether mobile dominance may depend on whether how many Apple stores there may be within a particular city or country!)

Gordon also briefly talked about some of the student project he has been involved with. A notable example was an iPhone app for medical students to learn ophthalmology terms and concepts. There were some really good ideas here; how to create applications that have direct benefit to learners by the application of mobile technology through learning how they can be developed.

Karsten Lundqvist from the University of Reading offered technology balance to the day by presenting his work teaching the development of Android applications. Karsten began his presentation by considering the different platforms: iPhone, RIM, and Android, but the choice of platform was ultimately decided by the availability of existing hardware, namely, PC's running Windows or Linux. In place of using Xcode, Java with Eclipse was used. I seem to remember that students may have had some experience using C/C++ before attending the classes, but I can't quite remember.

The question and answer session was really interesting. One delegate asked Karsten whether he had heard of something called the Google Android App Inventor, another mobile software development platform. It was also interesting to hear about the different demo apps. Karsten showed us a picture of a phone in a mini-segway cradle, demonstrating the concept of real-time control, there was also a reference to an app that may help people with language difficulties, and Karsten pointed us to his own website where he has been developing a game template by means of a blog tutorial.

Towards the end of Karsten's session, I recall an echo from the earlier HEA employability event which explored computing forensics. One of the ideas coming from this event was that perhaps it might be a good idea for institutions to share forensic data sets. An idea posed within this event was that perhaps institutions might be able to share application ideas or templates, perhaps for different platforms. Some ideas might include fitness utilities, 'finding your way around' apps (very useful: I still remember my days being a confused fresher during my undergrad days!), simple game templates, and flash card apps to help students to learn a number of different concepts.

Plenary

The plenary discussion was quite wide ranging, and is quite difficult to down to a couple of paragraphs. My own attempt at making sense of the day was to understand the key topics in terms of 'paired terms', which might be either subject dimensions or tensions (depending on how you look at it).

VLEs and apps: different software with different purposes, which connect to the idea of information and content. Information might be where to go to find a lecture theatre, or the location of a bank, and content is a representation of the course materials itself.

Ownership and provision: invariably students will have their own technology, but to what extent should an organisation provide technology to facilitate learning? Provision has been historically thought of in terms of rooms filled with computers, and necessarily conservative institutional IT provision (to make sure that everything keeps working). Entwined with these issues is the notion of legacy information and the need for institutions (and learners) to keep up with technology.

Development and usage: where does the information or content come from? To what extent might consumers of mobile information potentially participate in the development of their own content? Might this also create potential dangers for institutions and individuals. This is related to another tension of control, namely, institutional versus individual control, of either information, content or technology.

Guidance and figuring things out: when it comes to learning, there is always a balance to be reached between providing just enough guidance that enables learners to gain enough information so that they find the information that they need. On one hand, there may be certain apps that facilitate learning in their own right, apps that provide information, and apps that may present content held within a VLE. One idea might be that we may need a taxonomy of uses for both an institution and an individual.

Industry and academia: a two way relationship. We must provide education (about mobile) that industry needs, and also make use of innovations coming from industry, but also we have a role to innovate ourselves and potentially feedback into industry. (I seem to recall quite a few delegates mentioning something called mCampus, but I haven't been able to uncover any information about it!)

Other discussion points that were raised included the observation that location-based information provision is new, and the need to interact with people is one of the things that is driving the development of technology. A broader question, posed by John Traxler was, 'does mobile have the potential to transform teaching and learning?' Learners, of course, differ very widely in terms of their experience and attitude to interactive products.

Points such as accessibility, whether it being availability of technology or ability to perceive information through assistive technologies are also substantial issues. The wider organisational and political environment is also a significant factor when it comes to the development of mobile applications, and their subsequent consumption.

Footnote

All in all, a very enjoyable day! As I travelled into Birmingham from London on the train on the morning of the event my eye caught what used to be the site of an old industrial centre. I had no idea what it used to be. I could see the foundations of what might have been a big factory or a depot. I was quite surprised to discover that Millenium Point building also overlooked the same area.

Walking to the train station for my return journey to London, I thought, 'wouldn't it be great if there was an app that could use your location to get articles and pictures about what used to be here before; perhaps there could be a timeline control which users could change to go back in time to see what was there perhaps twenty, thirty or even one hundred years before'. I imagined a personal time machine in the palm of your hand. I then recalled a mash-up between Google Maps and Wikipedia, and had soon uncovered something called Wikimapia.

Like so many of these passing ideas, there's no such thing as an original thought. What really matters is how such technology thoughts are realised, and the ultimate benefit they may have to the different sets of end user.

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Christopher Douce

Enhancing Employability of Computing Students

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Monday, 3 Mar 2014, 18:49

I was recently able to attend what was the first Higher Education Academy (HEA) event that explicitly aimed to discuss how universities might enhance the employability of computing courses.  The intention of this blog is to present a brief summary of the event (HEA website)  and to highlight some of the themes (and issues) that I took away from it.

The day was held at the University of Derby enterprise centre and was organised on behalf of the HEA Information and Computer Sciences subject group.  I had only ever been to one HEA event before, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  This said, the title of the workshop (or mini-conference) really interested me, especially after having returned to the higher education sector from industry.

The day was divided into two sets of paper presentations punctuated by two keynote speeches.  The afternoon paper sessions was separated into two streams: a placements workshop and a computing forensics stream.  Feeling that the placements workshop wasn't really appropriate, I decided to sit in on the computing and forensics stream.

Opening Keynote

The opening address was given by Debbie Law, an account management director at Hewlett Packard.  As well as outlining the HP recruitment process (which sounds pretty tough!) Debbie mentioned that through various acquisions, there was a gradual movement beyond technology (such as PCs and servers) through to the application of services.  Business, it was argued, don't particularly care for IT, but they do care for what IT gives them.

So, what makes an employable graduate?  They should be able to do a lot!  They should be able to learn and to apply knowledge (completing a degree should go some way to demonstrating this).  Candidates should demonstrate their willingness to consider (and understand) customer requirements.  They should also demonstrate problem solving and analytical skills and be able to show a good awareness of the organisations in which they work.  They should be performance driven, show good attention to detail (a necessity if you have ever written a computer program!), be able to lead a team and be committed to continuous improvement and developing personal effectiveness. Phew!

I learnt something during this session (something that perhaps I should have already known about).  I was introduced to something called ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) (wikipedia).  ITIL was later spoken about in the same sentences as PRINCE (something I had heard about after taking M865, the Open University Project Management course).

First paper session

There were a few changes to the published programme.  The first paper was by McCrae and McKinnon : Preparing students for employment through embedding work-related learning.  It was at this point that the notion of employability was defined as: A set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labour market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace - to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider economy.  A useful reference is the Confederation of British Industry's Fit for the Future: preparing graduates for the world of work report (CBI, 2009).

The presentation went on to explore how employability skills (such as team working, business skills and communication skills) may be embedded within the curriculum using an approach called Work Related Learning (WRL).  The underpinning ideas relate to linking theory and practice, using relevant learning outcomes, widening horizons, carrying out active learning and taking account of cultural diversity.  A mixed methodology was used to determine the effectiveness of embedding WRL within a course.

The second paper was by Jing and Chalk and was entitled: An initiative for developing student employability through student enterprise workshops.   The paper outlined one approach to bridge the gap between university education and industry through a series of seminars over a twelve week period given by people who currently work within industry.  A problem was described where there were lower employment rates amongst computing graduates (despite alleged skills shortages), low enrolment to work placement years (sandwich years), lack of employability awareness (which also includes job application and interview skills).

The third presentation was by our very own Kevin Streater and Simon Rae from the Open University Business School.  Their paper was entitled 'Developing professionalism in New IT Graduates? Who Needs It?'  Their paper addressed the notion of what it may mean to be an IT professional, encouraging us to look at the British Computer Society Chartered IT Professional status (CITP) (in addition to the ITIL and Prince), and something called the Professional Maturity Model (which I had never heard of before).

Something else that I had never heard of before is the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).  By using this framework it was possible to uncover whether new subjects or modules may contribute to enhancing the degrees of undergraduates who may be studying to work within a particular profession.  Two Open University courses were mentioned: T122 Career Development and Employability, and T227 Change, Strategy and Projects at Work.

This final presentation of the morning was interesting since it asked us to question the notion of professionalism, and presented the viewpoint that the IT profession has a long way to go before it could be considered akin to some of the other more established professions (such as law, engineering and accountancy).

During the morning presentations I also remember a reference to E-Skills, which is the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology, a government organisation that aims to help to ensure that the UK has the IT skills it needs.

Computing and Forensics Stream

This stream especially piqued my interest since I had once studied a postgraduate computing forensics course, M886, through the Open University a couple of years ago.

The first paper was entitled Teaching Legal and Courtroom Issues in Digital Forensics by Anderson, Esen and Conniss.  Like so many different subject, both academic and professional skills need to be applied and considered.  Academic education considers the communication of theories and dissemination of knowledge, and learning how to think about problems in a critical way by analysing and evaluating different types and sources of information.

The second paper was about Syllabus Development with an emphasis on practical aspects of digital investigation, by Sukhvinder Hara, who drew upon her extensive experience as working as a forensic investigator.

The third paper was about how a virtualised forensics lab might be established through the application of cloud computing.  I found this presentation interesting for two reasons.  The first was due to the interesting application of virtualisation, and secondly due to a resonance with how parts of the T216 Cisco networking course is taught, where students are able to gain access to physical hardware located within a laboratory just by 'logging on' to their personal computer or laptop.

The final paper of the day was an enthusiastic presentation by David Chadwick who shared with us his approach of using problem-based learning and how it could be applied to computing forensics.

This final session of the day brought two questions to my mind.  The first related to the relationship between teaching the principles of computing forensics and the challenge of providing graduates who know the tools that are used within industry.  The second related to the general question of, 'so, how many computing forensics jobs are there?'

It stuck me that a number of the forensics courses around the UK demonstrate the use of similar technologies.  I've heard two products mentioned on a number of occasions: EnCase (Wikipedia) and FTK (Wikipedia), both of which are featured within the Open University M889 course.  If industry requires trained users of these tools, is it the remit of universities to offer explicit 'training' in commercial products such as EnCase .  Interestingly, the University of Greenwich, like the Open University (in T216 course), enables students to study for industrial certification whilst at the same time acquiring credit points that can count towards a degree.

So, are there enough forensics jobs for forensics graduates?  You might ask a very similar question which also begs an answer: are there enough psychology jobs for the number of psychology graduates?  I've heard it say that studying psychology introduces students to the notion of evidence, different research methodologies and research designs.  It is a demanding subject that requires you to write in a very clear way.  Studying psychology teaches and develops advanced numeracy and literacy as much as it introduces scientific method and the often confusing and complex nature of academic debate. 

Returning to computing forensics, I sensed that there might not be as many jobs in the field as there are graduates, but it very much depends what kind of job you might be thinking of.  Those graduates who took digital forensics courses might find themselves working as IT managers, network infrastructure designers or software developers as opposed to purely within law enforcement.  Knowing the notion of digital evidence and how to capture it is an incredibly important skill irrespective of whether or not a student becomes a fully fledged digital investigator.

Concluding Discussions

One of the best parts of the day was the discussion section.  A number of tensions became apparent.  One of the tensions relates to what a university should be and the role it should play within wider society.  Another tension is the differences that exist between the notions of training and education (and the role that universities play to support these two different aims).

Each organisation and area of industry will have a unique set of training and educational requirements.  There are, of course, more organisations than there are universities.  A particular industry may have a very specific training problem that necessitates the development of educational materials that is particular to its own context.  Universities, it can be argued, can only go so far in meeting very particular needs.

A related question, is of course, the difference between training and education.  When I worked in industry there were some problems that could be only solved by gaining task specific skills.  Within the field of software development this may be learning how to use a certain compiler or software tool set.  Learning a very particular skill (whilst building upon existing knowledge) can be viewed as training.  An engineer can either sit with a user manual and a set of notes and figure things out over a period of a month or two, or alternatively go on an accelerated training course and learn about what to do in a matter of days.

Education, of course, goes much deeper.  Education is about not just knowing have to use a particular set of tools but its about knowing how to think about your tools (and their limits) and understanding how they may fit within the 'big scheme of things'.  Education is also about learning a vocabulary that enables you to begin to understand how to communicate with others who work within your discipline (so you can talk about your tools).

Within the ICT sector the pace of change continues to astonish me.  There was a time when universities in conjunction with research organisations led the development of computing and computer science.  Meanwhile, industry has voraciously adopted ICT in such a way that it pretty much pervades all our lives.

So, where does this leave degree level education when 'general' industry may be asking for effective IT professionals?  It would be naive to believe that the university sector can fully satisfy the needs of industry since the nature of industry is so diverse.  Instead, we may need to consider how to offer education and learning (which the university sector is good at) which leads towards the efficient consumption of training (which satisfies the need of industry).   This argument implies that the university sector is for the 'common good' as opposed to being a mechanism that allows individuals to gain specialist topic specific knowledge that can immediately lead to a lucrative career.  Becoming an ICT professional requires an ability to continually learn due to perpetual innovation.  A university level education can provide a fabulous basis to gain an introduction into this rapidly challenging world.

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Christopher Douce

OU Disabled Student Services Conference

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Tuesday, 22 Jan 2019, 09:40

I've have a fun couple of days.  I recently attended the Open University's 2010 Disabled Student Services conference.  Okay, I admit, I probably gate crashed the event since I'm not a member of the DSS group, but it was certainly a very worthwhile thing to do.  On more than one occasion colleagues said to me, 'it's great to have someone like you here; we certainly need more faculty at these events'.

The overall objectives of the conference were to develop greater awareness of issues affecting the sector, to gain information about developments within the University, gain a greater understanding of the needs of specific disabilities, work towards more standardised delivery of services and, of course, to find out what each other does.

For me, this conference was all about learning about the different roles that people have, and what information needed to be shared to ensure that all our learners get the best possible service.

Tuesday 9th November

A conference is not really a conference without a keynote.  The first day kicked off with a keynote by Will Swann who is responsible for the development, promotion and evaluation of services to support the teaching of students.

The part of Will's presentation that jumped out at me was a concise presentation of the potential ramifications of changes to Higher Education funding.  One thing was clear: things are going to change, but we're not quite sure exactly how they will change.  The changes may affect those students who wish to study for personal development as opposed to choosing to study for purely economic and career development reasons.  Underneath is an interesting philosophical debate about what higher education is good for.  Essentially, Will asked us to consider the challenge of how to maintain effective provision of services in a world where change is a certainty.

First workshop

Following the keynote, we were led toward the first set of workshops.  I attended a workshop that perhaps had the longest title: Exceptional examination arrangements and special circumstances, policies and procedures.  The event was facilitated by Ilse Berry and Peter Taylor.  Peter is the chair of the subcommittee which makes decisions about very many things exam related, such as whether individual students may be able to defer exams (due to changes in personal circumstances), or whether alternative examination arrangements could be organised.

I got a lot out of this first workshop: I gained more of an understanding of the procedures and policies, and the effect that the Disability Discrimination Act (now the Equality Act) has on these policies.  There was some debate about whether everyone knows everything they should know to best advise our students.  There was some discussion about Associate Lecturers, and I feel that I need to ask whether it might be possible to offer some internal staff development training to those who most closely work with students.

I also learnt quite a bit about the range of different examination arrangements that can be put in place.  I never knew that an exam could be taken over an extended period of time, for example.  It was all very thought provoking and showed me how much we try to collectively help.

Student session

I was unable to attend the afternoon event due to a meeting with a colleague in another department, but I was able to return to the conference in time to hear one of the student sessions.  Alex Wise, a student with dyslexia gave a very clear description of some of the challenges that he has faced during his educational career.  He also described some of the strategies and adaptations he both uses and has discovered.

Alex's presentation underlined a number of different points for me.  Firstly, the complexity and uniqueness of conditions such as dyslexia (I briefly studied the very broad subject of language processing when I was a postgrad student, but I was sorely missing a 'personal' perspective).  Secondly, the fact that effective strategies may only be discovered through a combination of hard won experience and trial and error.  A final point is that strategies and tools need not necessarily be high tech.

Wednesday 10th November

The second day (much like the first) was a delight.  In true academic style, I duly forgot which workshop I had signed up for, and was directed towards a session entitled, 'Sensory impairment: science course for screen readers, and D/eaf students and Openings courses - access for all?', presented by Jeff Bashton and Julie Morrison.  I was later to discover that it was two workshops for the price of one.  I had certainly chosen wisely.

Jeff works as a visual impairment advisor for the Open University.  He introduced the science project he is working on (which is a work in progress), and then he had a treat in store for all delegates.  One by one, we all donned blindfolds that Julie had given us, and we began to study two tactile diagrams (using only our touch).

I found both tactile diagrams unfathomable (which is, pretty much, an understatement!)  I could do nothing more than explore the boundaries of each diagram and get a rough understanding about its size and shape (and how the different elements were related spatially).  I couldn't make a jump from lines and bumps through to understanding a picture as a whole.  This, of course, was one of the points.  The tactile diagrams that I was presented with proved to be totally confusing without accompanying auditory descriptions.

Julie 'talked us through' each image (using our fingers!)  When I removed my blindfold, I was surprised by what I saw - it bore hardly any relationship to what I thought I was 'seeing'.

During the second part of the workshop Julie spoke about her with the British Sign Language, where she presented a small number of case studies to highlight the challenges that BSL users might face when trying to study.  To BSL users, English is, of course, a second language.  Julie's overview of the history of deaf education (and the role that Alexander Graham Bell played) was illuminating.  Thanks Julie!

This second workshop ended with a demonstration of how tough it can be to understand digital materials.  Taking a particularly accessible course as an example, Julie showed us a video without sound (it was an interview which had no subtitles of signing).  We then had a look at the transcript of the video.  The transcript contained all the peculiarities of expression that you find whenever you write down spoken language.  It was briefly considered that perhaps different learners may benefit from different versions of the same materials, which is one of the ideas embedded within the EU4ALL project I worked on for a couple of years.

A fabulous afternoon...

I struggled to give a name to the section of the conference where the delightful and charming Francesca Martinez came to talk to us for an hour or so.  It was only after just under a week of wondering did I come up with this final subheading.

I'm not joking; Francesca had us all rolling in the isles of the conference hall with laughter with a delicious mixture of political and observational stories.  There was, however, a serious tone that resonated clearly with the objectives of the conference: everyone is connected by a common thread of humanity regardless of who we are and what personal circumstances we face. 

Francesca is the best kind of comedian; one who makes us think about ourselves and the absurdities that we face.  I, for one, ended the day thinking to myself, 'I need to seize the day more'.  And seizing the day can, of course, mean making time to find out about new things (and having fun too, of course!) Linking this to studying, it is more than possible to find an abundance of fun in learning and maintain optimism about the way in which the fun present may potentially give rise to a fabulous future.

Themes

So, what were the overriding themes that I took away from the conference?  The first one was communication: we all need to talk to each other because internal policies (as well as external legislation) are subject to perpetual change and evolution.  Talk is an eternal necessity (which is what I continue to try to tell my colleagues when I sneak off to the cafe area...)

The second theme is that of information: advisors as well as students need information to make effective decisions about whether or not to take a course of study.  Accessibility, it was stated, wasn't just a matter of making sure that materials are available in different formats.  It also relates to whether or not materials can be study-able too, and this goes back to whether, for example, individual learning activities.

The final theme relates to challenges that are inherent within the changing political and economic climate.  Whilst education is priceless, it always has a financial cost.  Different ways to pay for education has the potential to affect the decision making of those who may wish to study for a wide range of different reasons (and not just to 'get a better job').

Consider, for example, a hypothetical potential student (who is incidentally fabulous) who might just 'try out' a module just to find out if he or she likes it, who then goes on to discover they are more than capable of degree level study.  A stumbling block to access is, of course, always going to be cost.  As mentioned in the conference keynote, there will be the need for creative solutions to ensure that all students are continued to be presented with equal opportunities to study.

The DSS conference has shown, to me, how much work goes behind the scenes (and how much still needs to be done) to ensure equal opportunity to study remains a reality for all.

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Christopher Douce

1st International Aegis Conference

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 Aegis project logo: Open accessibility everywhere - groundwork, infrastructure, standards

7-8 October 2010

It seems like a lot of time has passed between this blog post and my previous one. I begin this entry with an explicit statement of: less time will pass between this one and the next!

This post is all about an accessibility conference that I recently attended in Seville, Spain, on behalf of the EU4ALL project in which the Open University has played an important part. Before saying something about the themes of the Aegis conference and summarising some of the notes that I made during some of the presentations, I guess I ought to say something about the project (from an outsiders perspective).

Aegis is an EU funded project that begins with a silent O (the O stands for Open). It then continues to use the first letters of the words Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards. My understanding is that it aims to learn more about the design, development and implementation of assistive and accessible technologies by not only carrying out what could be termed basic research, but also through the development and testing of new software.

Without further ado, here is a rough summary of my conference notes, complete with accompanying links.  I hope it is useful to someone!

Opening

After Evangelos Bekiaris presented the four cornerstones of the project (make things open, make things programmatically accessible, make sample applications and make things personalisable), Miguel Gonzalez Sancho outlined different EU research objectives and initatives. It was stated that 'there must be research in the area of ICT and accessibility, and this will continue'.

Pointers towards future research included a FP7 call that related to ICT for aging and well being. Other subjects mentioned included the areas of 'tools and infrastructures for mainstream accessibility', 'intelligent and social computing for social interaction' (which would be interdisciplinary, perhaps drawing upon the social sciences) and 'brain-neuronal computer interfaces' (BNCI), as well as plans to develop collaborations with other parts of the world.

It was useful not only get an overview of the domains that the funders are likely to be interested in, but also useful to be given a wealth of information rich links that researchers could explore later. The following links stood out for me: the EC ICT Research in FP7 site and the e-Inclusion activities page.

The Aegis Concept

Peter Korn from Oracle presented a very brief history of accessibility, drawing on the notion of 'building in accessibility' into the built environment. He presented a total of six steps, which I hope I have noted down correctly.

The first is to define what 'accessible' is. This may involve the taking of measurements, such as the width of doors and maybe the tones of elevators, or the sounds that are made of road crossings. The next (second) stage is to create standard building materials. Here you might have a building company creating standard door frames or even making electronic circuits to make consistent tones and noises (this is my own paraphrasing!). The next step is to create some tools to know how best to combine our pieces together. The tools may take the form of standardised instructions.

The next three items are more about the use of the physical items. The fourth step is that you need to make a choice as to where to place a building. Ideally it should be situated close to public transport and in a convenient place. The fifth step is to go ahead and to 'build' the building. The final step is all about dissemination: the telling of people about what has been created.

Peter drew a parallel between the process of creating physical acccessibility and creating accessibility for ICT systems. There ought to be 'stock' components of interface elements (such as the Fluid component set), developers and designers should adhere to good practice guidelines (such as the WCAG guidelines), applications need to be then created (which is akin to going ahead and making our building), and then we need to tell others what we have done.

If my memory is serving me well, Peter then went onto talk about the different generations of assistive technologies. More information about the generations can be found by jumping to my earlier blog post. From my own perspective (as a technologist), all this history stuff is really interesting, but there's such a lot of it, especially when technology is moving on so quickly. Our current challenge is to begin to understand the challenge of mobile devices and learn about how to develop tools and systems that remain optimally functional and accessible.

Other Projects

One of the great things of going to conferences (other than the cakes, of course) is an opportunity to learn about loads of other stuff that you had never heard of before. Blanca Alcanda from Technosite (Fundacion ONCE) spoke briefly about a number of projects, including T-Orienta (slideshare), Gametel (the development of accessible games) and INREDIS (self-adaptive inverfaces).

Roundtable Discussion

Karen Van Isacker was our question master. He kicked off with few killer questions (a number of which he tried to answer himself!) The panel comprised of a journalist, industrialists, researchers and user representatives. The notable questions were: ' what are your opinions about the [Aegis] products that are being developed?', 'how are you going to make sure users know about the tools [that are being developed]?', 'what are the current barriers people face?', and 'can you say something about the quality of AT training in Europe?'

In many ways, these questions were addressed by many of the conference presentations as well as by the panel. Challenges relating to the development of assistive technologies include the continual necessity of maintenance and updates, that users ought to be more aware of the different types of technologies that may be available, the price of technology is significant and one of the significant challenges relating to training is the fact of continual technological change.

After a short break the conference then split into two parallel sessions. I tended to opt for sessions that focussed on more general issues rather than those that related to particular technologies (such as mobile devices) or operating systems. This said, there is always a huge amount of cross over between the different talks.

Parallel session 1b (part 1)

It was good to see a clear presentation of a user centred design methodology (UCD) by Evangelos Bakiaris. Evangelos described user research techniques such as interviews, questionnaires and something called contextual enquiry. His talk reminded me of materials that are presented through the Open University course Fundamentals of Interaction Design (a course which I wholeheartedly recommend!)

My colleague Carlos Velasco from FIT, Germany, gave a very concise outline of early web software before introducing us to WCAG (W3C). Carlos then went onto summarise some intresting research from something called the 'technology penetration report' where it was discovered that out of 1.5 million websites, 65% of them use Javascript (which is know to yield challenges for some assistive technologies). The prevalance of Javascript relates to the increasing application and development of Rich Internet Applications (or RIAs, such as Google Maps, for instance). The characteristics of RIAs include the presentation of engaging UI's and asynchronous content retieval (getting many bits of 'stuff' at the same time). All these developments led to the creation of the WAI-ARIA guidelines (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

Carlos argued that it was once relatively straightforward to test earlier types of web application, since the pages themselves didn't change. You could just send the pages to an 'page analysis server' or system (perhaps like Imergo), which may then persent a report, perhaps in a formal language like EARL (W3C). Due to the advent of RIAs, the situation has changed. The accessibility of a system very much depends on the state in which it is, and this can change. Testing web accessibility has therefore changed into something more resembling traditional usability testing.

A higher level question might be, 'having an application or product that is accessible is all very well, but do people have access to assistive technology (AT) that enable web sites to be used?' Other related questions include, 'if people have access to AT, do they use it? If not, why not?' These were the questions that Karel Van Isacker aimed to address.

Karel began by saying that different definitions within Europe leads to different estimates of the number of people with disabilities. He told us that the AT supplier market is rather fragmented: there are many suppliers in different countries and there are also substantial differences in terms of how purchases of AT equipment can be funded. He went on to suggest that different countries applied different models of disability (medical, social and consumer) to different market segments.

Some of the challenges were clear: people were often unaware of the solutions that best meet their ICT needs, users of AT's are just given very rudimentary training, and many people may even have a computer that they have used once, and there is a high level of users discarding their AT due to low levels of satisfaction.

Parallel session 1b (part 2)

Francesca Cesaroni began the next part of the afternoon by describing a set of projects that related to the broad theme of user requirements. These included the VISIOBOARD project (which related to eye tracking) and the CAALYX project (Complete Ambiant Assisted Living Experiment).

Harry Geyskens then went on to consider the following question from the perspective of someone with a visual impairment: 'how can I use a device in a comfortable and safe way that is good as a non-disabled person?' Harry then presented different design for all principles (wikipedia) : that a product must be equitable in use, be flexible, be simple and intuitive, provide perceptable information, be tolerant for error, permit usage through low physical effort.

Begona Pino gave an interesting presentation about the use of video game systems and how they could potentially be used for different groups, whilst clearly expressing a call for design simplicity.

The final talk of the day was given my yours truly, where I tried to present a summary of four year project called EU4ALL in twenty minutes. To summarise, the aim of EU4ALL is to try to consider how to enhance the provision of accessible systems and services in higher eduction through the creation of a small number of prototype systems. A copy of my presentation and accompanying paper can be found by visiting the OU knowledge network site (a version will eventually be deposited into the Open Research Online system).

Day 2 keynote

Gregg Venderheiden kicked off day 2 with a keynote entitled 'Roadmap for building a global public inclusive infrastructure'. Gregg imagined a future where user interfaces change to the needs of individual users. Rather than presenting a complicated set of interfaces, a system (a PC or mobile device) may present a more simplified user interface. Gregg pointed us to a project called NPII (National Public Inclusive Infrastructures). It was good to learn that some of the challenges that Gregg mentioned, specifically security and ways to gather preferences were also lightly echoed in the earlier EU4ALL presentation.

Parallel session 2a: Rich RIA!

RIA is an abbreviation for Rich Internet Application. The canonical example of a RIA is, of course, Google Maps or Gmail. Web application development techniques (such as AJAX, wikipedia) that were pioneered by Google and other organisations have now found their way into a myriad of other web products. From their inception RIAs proved to be troublesome for users of assistive technologies.

Juta Trevianus gave a talk with an intreguing title: 'changing the world - on a tiny budget'. She began by saying that being on-line and being connected is no longer an option. Digital exclusion can lead to social exclusion. The best bargain is often, in my experience, one that you can find through a web browser. I made a note of some parts of her talk that jumped out at me, i.e., 'laws work when they are clear, simple, consistent and stable', but, 'laws cannot create a culture of change'. Also, perhaps we need to move from a case where one size fits all (universal design) to the case where one size fits one (personalised design, which may be facilited through technology).

Being an engineer, I was struck by Juta's quote from computer scientist Alan Kay: 'the best way to predict the futuer is to invent it'. It's not too difficult to relate this quote back to the Aegis theme of openness and open source software (OSS): freedom of code has the potential enable the freedom of invention.

The first session was concluded by Dominique Hazael-Massieux from the W3C mobile web initative (W3C). The challenges of accessibility now reach much further than the increasingly quaint desktop PC. They now sit within the hands and pockets of users.

One early approach to dealing with the explosion of new devices was to provide a separate websites: one for mobile devices, another for 'traditional' computers. This approach yields the inevitable challenge of maintenance. Dominique told us about HTML 5 (wikipedia) and mentioned that it has the potential to help with site navigation and make it easier for developers (and end users) to work with rich media.

The remainder of the day was mainly focused upon WAI-ARIA. I particularly enjoyed Mike Squillace's presentation that returned to the challenge of testing rich internet applications. Mike presented some work that attempted to codify with WCAG rules into executable Javascript which could then be used within a test engine. Jan Richards, from OCAD, Canada, presented the Fluid project.

Parallel session 3b: Standardisation and valorisation

I split my time in the final afternoon between the two parallel sessions, visiting the standardisation session first, then moving onto the coordination strand half way through. There were presentations that described the process of standardisation and its importance in the process of accessibility. During this session Loic Martinez presented his work on the creation of a tool to support the development of accessible software.

Parallel session 3a: Coordinating research

The final session of the conference yielded a mix of presentations, ranging from description of physical centres that people could visit through to another presentation about the EU4ALL project made by my colleague from Madrid. This second EU4ALL presentation outlined a number of proposed prototype accessibility information services. Our two presentations complemented each other very well: my presentation outlined (roughly) an accessibility framework, whereas this second presentation seemed to an alternative perspective on how the framework might be applied and used within an institution.

Summary

One of the overriding themes was the necessity to not only make assistive technology available to others but also to make sure the right kind of technology was selected, and to ensure that users were given ample opportunity to learn how to use it. If you are given a car and you have never driven before you shouldn't just get into it and start driving: it takes time to learn the controls, and it takes time to build confidence and to learn about the different places you might want to go to (and besides, it's dangerous!) To risk stretching a metaphor too far, this is a bit like assistive technologies: it takes time to understand what controls you have at your disposal and where you would like to travel to. As Karol pointed out in his talk: far too much technology sits unused in a box.

Another theme of the conference was about the solidity of 'this box'. Rather than having everyting in 'a box' or installed on your computer (or mobile device), perhaps another idea might be to use technology 'on demand' from 'the cloud' (aka, the internet). Tools may have the potential to be liberated, but this depends on other types of technology 'groundwork' being available, i.e. good, fast and reliable connectivity.

Finally, another theme (and one that is pretty fundamental) is the issue of usability and simplicity. The ease of use of systems will continue to be a perpetual challenge due to the continual differences between people, task and context (where the person and the task takes place). Whilst universal design offers much possibility in terms of making product for the widest possible audience, there is also much opportunity to continue to explore the notion of interface, product and system personalisation. Through simplicity comes accessibility, and visa versa.

All in all, a very interesting couple of days. I came away feeling that there was a strong and vibrant community committed to creating useful technologies to help people in their daily lives. I also came away feeling that there is so much more to do, and a stronger feeling that whilst technology can certainly help there are many other complementary actions that need to be taken before technology can even begin to play a part.

The latest project newsletter (available at the time for writing) can now be downloaded (pdf).

See also Second International Education for All Conference (blog post), 24 October 2009.

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Christopher Douce

Understanding Moodle Themes

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Wednesday, 21 Jul 2010, 18:27

A section of a Moodle screen showing three icons: forums, lessons and resources

This post is about the journey that I followed trying to understand Moodle Themes.  Moodle Themes are pieces of programming magic that change the visual appearance of your Moodle installation.

If you download Moodle and play around with it, you might eventually arrive at a decision that it might be useful within your institution.  You might hold a meeting with senior management where you may say, 'I think it's a good idea if we try to use this thing call Moodle to host some of our courses'.  After answering some difficult questions about maintenance and development costs, your managers might say, 'okay, you've convinced us... let's give it a go, I'll give you a budget'

Other than figuring out which operating system and database to use and where (and how) your instance of Moodle is to be hosted, one of the first development activities you will have to do is make sure that your Moodle system is 'on brand', i.e. it's visual appearance should reflect the institution that you work for.

This is pretty much what I have to do.  I have to try and make my 'vanilla' (unmodified) version of Moodle blend in with a set of existing web pages that have been built as a part of a research project I'm working on.  Other development teams within my university have already done something similar with their production version of Moodle, but I need to tackle this problem myself.

I start with a couple of questions: what makes up a theme and how might you go about changing one or maybe even making a new one?

Resources galore

Before I can answer these questions I needed to find something to read, and it didn't take a lot of browsing to find a number of potentially useful resources.

The first page that I discovered was a link to over one hundred different themes thanks to the Database of Moodle Themes.  Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised given the number of Moodle installations that are out there in the world.

I soon discovered the Themes documentation pages and a number of other related links, including a set of themes related FAQs and dedicated discussion forum.

The Themes documentation link (for a Themes novice) seems to be the most useful.  One of the sections says that themes can be delivered in zip files.  You download them, unzip them and place the contents in the /moodle/theme directory, and then click on some admin tools to activate it.  This sounds almost too easy!

Towards Code

Being someone who likes to view code I thought it might be useful to look at some of the magic that makes Moodle themes work.  To do this, I chose a random theme from the themes database and unzipped a folder to my desktop.  To begin to make sense of it properly, I felt that it might be a good idea to compare this random theme against one that already existed.  This made me answer, 'which theme is used by default?'

To answer this question, I logged onto my local instance of Moodle (which was running on my local machine, localhost) as an administrator.  After struggling to remember my username and password, I clicked on the Administration link, followed Appearance, Themes and then on the Theme Selector link (because I couldn't really make sense of the Theme Settings options).

I quite like the Theme Selector page.  It presents all the different themes that have been installed.  The current theme that is selected is highlighted by a black square.  The one that was selected by default (in the case of my installation - I cannot remember whether I changed it) was named standardwhite.

I delve into the Moodle code area, take a copy of standardwhite and placed it alongside the one I have randomly downloaded and started poking around.

Looking at code

I noticed similarities and differences.  The similarities are that some of the filenames are the same.  I see two PHP files, styles and config, followed by two html files, header and footer.  There seems to be a CSS file (Wikipedia) in both themes (but the downloaded theme contains a few more than the default theme).  I also notice a graphics file called gradient in the default theme (which is a jpg), and a png graphics file in the other one.  A big difference lies was that the theme I have downloaded contains a directory which seems to contain a bunch of graphic files.

Before deciding I'm terribly confused, I decide to do one more thing: open up both of the PHP files to see what they contain.

In a config script, I see assignments to a variable called $THEME.  Different attributes appear to do different kinds of magic.  Looking in the styles script, a comment tells me that 'there should be no need to modify this file'.  It seems to do something that relates to the presentation of a CSS file.  That is good enough for me!

I have a quick peek into the header and the footer html files.  It looks like these are templates (of some kind) that are filled out using the contents of some PHP variables.  Obviously the pages that the Moodle code creates have a pretty well defined structure, and presumably this structure is documented somewhere.  This is perhaps something I might need to remember later.

Return to the documentation

At this point, I roughly (think) I know what a Theme comprises: some magic scripts which define some variables (and some other stuff), some header and footer scripts which look at bit like templates, a CSS file of some kind, perhaps a graphic (which could be used by the CSS file?) and maybe a bunch of graphics that replace those that are used in Moodle by default.

If this is my current understanding, can I now find the documentation easier to understand?

I soon uncover two further pages: Make your own Theme and Creating a Custom Theme (the first link seems to be easier to understand).  A couple of clicks takes me to a documentation page called Theme config file which goes some way to explaining the variables that I have touched upon above.

The final comment in the Creating a Custom Theme page was instructive.  Other than saying that you can't change everything, if you want to make your site look like an existing site, it might be a good idea to make use of a tool called Firebug which is a plug in for your Firefox browser.

With Firebug, you can browse to a web page of your choice and uncover what CSS definitions have been used to build its visual appearance.  I've used Firebug before, and mentioning that it is a good tool is certainly a good piece of advice.  The Moodle developers have also been kind enough to prepare a CSS FAQ which is certainly worth a look.

Although I could have tried to create a new theme from scratch, I'm in a lucky position since one of my colleagues has already created a customised theme for a custom instance of Moodle.

Towards testing things out

To test things out, I copy of my customised theme into my local 'themes' directory and hit refresh on my browser.  I then select my newly installed theme and everything starts to go wrong.  The action of selecting a theme seemed to have rendered my local copy of Moodle useless since only a tiny fraction of a HTML page is created (which I see by viewing the code the browser receives).

A problem seems to have been created since the version of Moodle that I am using and the structure of the theme that I have transferred are not completely compatible with each other.  I need to go back to my default theme! But how do I do this? Where are the theme settings held?

My first guess is in the database.  I open up a front end to the MySQL database that is running on my PC, using a tool called SqlYog.  I eyeball the contents of the database to see if there's anything I can use.  I discover a 'config' table, but this doesn't tell me much.  I did, however, discover that there is a theme setting within individual courses as well as individual users.

I turn my attention towards the code by first looking at the code within the themes directory and I soon find myself fruitlessly searching through different libraries.  Finding a simple answer may necessitate spending quite a bit of time.

To get things working again, you sometimes have to cheat.  I renamed my theme to something totally different and refreshed my Moodle page.  Moodle then had no choice but to return to its default setting (which was, again, 'standardwhite').

Incrementally merging

I have two themes: one theme that I want to use but doesn't work (because it has been modified for a customised version of Moodle), and another theme that does work which I don't want to use.  When I'm faced with this situation, I try to get 'code to speak to me' by incrementally taking the one that works and making it look like the one that doesn't work.  I find I can really understand stuff when things stop working!

I begin by looking at the files and then the contents of the files.  The first thing that strikes me is that the header and footer files are quite different.  There seems to be quite a bit more happening in the customised theme when compared to the standard theme.  A step at a time I move files across and test, beginning with the favicon, then the config file, and finally the pix's.  I discover that both themes require the use of a CSS file that is contained within the standard theme directory.

The effect of moving files around seems to produce, more or less, what I was after.  The interactive 'side blocks' (particularly the show/hide buttons) are not presented as they should, but further searching reveals a magic variable, allowuserblockhiding that can be used to control this functionality.

Moodle version 2

A question to complete this post is: what is the situation regarding Moodle version 2.0?  This is a development that I have heard about for some time, but I have not heard recent any announcements regaring its expected release.  After a quick search, I reacquaint myself with something called the Moodle Roadmap.

This appears to state that there will be a beta release of V2 by the end of 2009, followed by some months of testing before a final release.  Judging by the planning document, there appears to be quite a lot more coding to do (nearly four hundred days of development time to go, so we should expect some delays).

I appreciate that giving opinion is certainly a lot easier than giving code, so I hope that Moodlers who read this section will forgive me.  I personally hope that the code for the next version is a lot cleaner.  Since the developers are forced to move to PHP version 5, I hope they will choose to adopt its object-oriented features which can help developers to form clearer (less leaky) abstractions.

In a perfect world, developers should be able to look at a screenful of code and be able to describe, more or less, what that section of code does without having to look at other code (providing, of course, they more or less have an understanding of what the product does).  From what I have seen so far in version 1.9, there is a long way to go to, but I'm certainly looking forward to learning how things have moved on in version 2.0.

Wrap-up

It's great that the developers of Moodle have designed it in such a way that it is 'themeable' (if there is such a word).  In some respects, I was surprised to discover things were not as difficult as I had expected.  Whilst, in some ways, going directly to the code and looking what is there may be a daunting challenge, it is one that I certainly recommend doing.

There's a whole lot more to the issue of Moodle themes.  I haven't touched upon the structure of Moodle pages and how they relate to elements in stylesheets, for example.  I'll leave this challenge for another day!

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Christopher Douce

Considering Middleware and Service Oriented Architecture

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Edited by Christopher Douce, Wednesday, 21 Jul 2010, 18:25

4815941514_0b0c87dda6_m.jpg

I wrote the following notes some time ago as a way to share information about the subject of middleware and service-oriented architecture.  I think I began by asking the questions 'what is middleware?' and 'what can it do for us?', explicitly in the context of making information systems that can help to support the delivery of useful services to support learning.

I should add a disclaimer: some of the stuff that is presented here is quite technical and seems quite a long way away from my earlier posts that relate to accessibility, but there are connections in terms of understanding how to build information systems that can help an organisation to manage the delivery of accessibility services (such as the loan of assistive technology).

Beginning my search

I began by exploring a number of definitions.  I first attacked the notion of workflow (Wikipedia).  What does workflow mean?  Is it one of those terms that can have different meanings to different people?  I rather like the Wikipedia definition, which goes:

  • A workflow is a reliably repeatable pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are always designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

I then asked myself, 'how does the idea of workflow relate to the notion of middleware?' (I had heard they were connected, but wasn't quite sure how).  Again, the Wikipedia definition of middleware proved to be useful:

  • Middleware is the software that sits 'in the middle' between applications ... stretched across multiple systems or applications. ... The software consists of a set of enabling services that allow multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact across a network. This technology evolved to provide for interoperability in support of the move to client/server architecture. It is used most often to support complex, distributed applications. ... Middleware is especially integral to modern information technology based on XML, SOAP, Web services, and service-oriented architecture.

So, these two ideas are connected.  Carrying out workflow may involve making use of a number of different services, which might be able to call through some sort of middleware...

Further links

A little more digging pointed me to a number of other directions.  Clever people have proposed something called BPEL, an abbreviation for Business Processing Execution Language.  Wikipedia is again useful:

  • WS-BPEL (or BPEL for short) is a language for specifying business process behavior based on Web Services. Processes in WS-BPEL export and import functionality by using Web Service interfaces exclusively.

On this page, there is a link to a blog post which is a very good primer and introduction.  It is lots more clearer than the Wikipedia page.

I found the following text to be useful:

  • In BPEL, a business process is a large-grained stateful service, which executes steps to complete a business goal. That goal can be the completion of a business transaction, or fulfilling the job of a service. The steps in the BPEL process execute activities (represented by BPEL language elements) to accomplish work. Those activities are centered on invoking partner services to perform tasks (their job) and return results back to the process.

Interestingly, it also contained the following:

  • As for limitations, BPEL does not account for humans in a process, so BPEL doesn't provide workflow-there are no concepts for roles, tasks and inboxes.

We are almost at the point where the same terms may be used to mean different things.  Perhaps there is a difference between what workflow is and what business processes are?  Michelson (the blog author) seems to equate workflow with 'things that people do'.  The point is that a wide definition of workflow can include things that BPEL does not.

At this point, I was wondering, 'if I have a process (say, a task that I have to complete), where half of the task has to be completed by a machine and the other half has to be completed by a person, then what technologies should I use?'.  All is not lost.  The blog mentions there is something called  BPEL4People (Wikipedia), and contains a link to an IBM whitepaper.

I've extracted some fragments that caught my eye:

  • The BPEL specification focuses on business processes ... But the spectrum of activities that make up general purpose business processes is much broader. People often participate in the execution of business processes ...

Following this, I stumbled across the following scenario:

  • Consider a service that takes place out-of-sight of the initiating process. In many circumstances, it may be immaterial as to whether the service is performed with or without user interaction, for example, a document translation service.

This made me wonder about my own involvement in the EU4ALL project, which is exploring processes that enable lecturers to order alternatives formats, such as tactile maps or other kinds of materials, for instance.

Application Servers

BPEL is represented using something called XML (Wikipedia), which is, of course (more or less) a text file that has lots of structure (created by the enthusiastic use of angled brackets).

BPEL is not the only way to represent or describe business processes (or workflow).  Another approach might be to use something called State Chart XML (SCXML), for instance.   There are probably loads more other data structures or standards you might use.

At this point, you might be asking, "okay, so there are these magic XML data structures that allow you to describe entire processes but how do you make this stuff real so people can use it?".  The answer is use something called an Application Server (Wikipedia).

Here, I am again lazy and quote from Wikipedia:

  • Application server products typically bundle middleware to enable applications to intercommunicate with dependent applications, like web servers, database management systems ...

Although an application server may be able to run middleware (and potentially sequence the order in which activities are carried out), we need to add interfaces so people can interact with it.

Always being the pragmatist, I asked myself another question, 'all this sounds like good fun, but where can I find one of these application servers that does all this magic stuff to manage our workflow and processes?'  I don't have a precise answer to this question, but I did find something called Apache ODE.

To quote from the project website,

  • Apache ODE (Orchestration Director Engine) executes business processes written following the WS-BPEL standard. It talks to web services, sending and receiving messages, handling data manipulation and error recovery as described by your process definition. It supports both long and short living process executions to orchestrate all the services that are part of your application.

Another distinction (as opposed to long and short running processes) include processes that require human intervention (or actions) and those that can run on their own, such as executing a database query or sending messages to another part of a large organisation to request the availability of resources.

All this sounds great!  All I have to do now is to find some time to study this stuff further.

Other approaches

Whilst reading all this stuff, the purpose of other products that never made sense to me started to become clear.  A couple of years ago, I had heard something called Biztalk mentioned, but never properly understood what it was.  Again, Wikipedia is useful, describing Biztalk (Wikipedia) as

  • a business process management (BPM) server. Through the use of "adapters" which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in a large enterprise, it enables companies to automate and integrate business processes.

I've not looked into this very deeply, but it also seems that the House of Microsoft might have concocted something of their own called the Windows Workflow Foundation (Wikipedia) which I understand also connects to the topic of BPEL.

Of course, there's a whole other set of terms and ideas that I haven't even looked at.  These include technologies and ideas such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), message queues, message-oriented middleware (MOM), the list goes on and on...

A summary (of sorts)

The issue of service-oriented architecture design goes a lot deeper than simply creating a set of solitary web services running on different systems.  Designers need to consider how to ensure that messages are received successfully, how to consider or address redundancy and how to measure or ensure performance.  The ultimate choice of architectural components and elements depend very much on your requirements, the boundaries of your organisation, your needs for communication and who you need to communicate with.

What I found surprising was the number of technologies that could be potentially used within the project that I'm currently working on.  The ultimately choice of technologies are likely to boil down to the key issue of: 'what do we know about right now', and 'what is the best thing we can do'.

Footnote

I was going to add a footnote to one of the earlier sections, but because my notes have turned into a blog post, I've decided to put it here.

I like this stuff because it reminds me of two areas that always fight with each other: software maintenance and business process re-engineering.  Business practices can change more quickly than software systems.  The need for process flexibility (and abstraction) is one motivation that has driven the development of things like SOA and BPEL.

This stuff is also interesting because workflow is where the world of 'work' and the world of software nearly combine.  There is another dimension: would you like a computer telling you what to do?  Also, no matter how much we try to be comprehensive in our understanding of a particular institution there will always be exceptions.  Any resulting architecture should ideally try to accommodate change efficiently.

Middleware (in some senses) can have a role to play in terms of gathering information about the performance of services, i.e. how long it takes for certain actions to a certain kind of request, and has the potential toe manage the delivery of interventions (such as issue escalation to supervisors) should service quality be at risk.

Acknowledgements

Blog image is a modified version of the one found on the Wikipedia SOA page.  I also cheekily consulted an O'Reilly book when I was preparing an earlier version of these notes, but I've long since returned it to the library (and I can't remember its title).

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