Users and Innovation Programme Project Presentations

Association for Learning Technology Conference 2008

JISC Users and Innovation Programme

Project Presentations

Association for Learning Technology Conference Leeds, September 2008

ARGOSI: Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction .... 5

Audio Supported Enhanced Learning ........ 8

AWESOME: The Academic Writing Empowered by Social Online Mediated Environments............................................ 12

Evolve ....................................................... 16

MOOSE: MOdelling Of Secondlife Environments............................................ 20

Open Habitat ............................................ 25

PREVIEW: Problem-based Learning in Virtual Interactive Education Worlds ......... 29

SkillClouds ................................................ 32

Sounds Good............................................ 37

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THIS PUbLICATIOn SHOWCASES nInE projects from the JISC Users and Innovation Programme which presented papers at the

15th annual Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) in September 2008.

The JISC Users & Innovation Programme is a £4.75M development investment funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which aims to transform practice in UK higher education by developing technologies and innovative processes based on the needs of individual users working within institutions across multiple domains.

The programme has funded 23 major projects and a wide range of benefits realisation and community development activities.

Emerge is the support and synthesis project for the Users and Innovation Programme. The aim of the Emerge Project is to support the JISC’s forming of an “effective and sustainable community of practice” (CoP) around user engagement processes. The Emerge Project runs a networking website and organises activities to disseminate, share and implement the benefits of the programme.

User-centred design, like many other-centred practices, traces its lineage to community development learning pioneered by Paolo Freire (Freire 1996). A Freirian approach emphasises activities that are authentic to the participants’ cultural context. The Emerge project aimed to test the hypothesis that by using community development processes, the quality of educational-technology projects might be improved. We have been using an asset-based approach to community development (Mathie and Cunningham 2003) that grows from

Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987), emphasising the strengths of the bonds and bridges between people and networks.

We hypothesised that:

l Developing projects in a context where there is awareness of the wider activity in a field and an understanding of the alignments and gaps in that field will lead to better projects being developed.

l by using community development processes and social networking, the general quality of educational (learning) technology development projects may be improved, bringing benefits not just to the JISC but more widely to all sectoral funding agencies and stakeholders.

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) is a professional and scholarly association in the UK, which seeks to bring together all those with an interest in the use of learning technology. The annual ALT Conference (ALT-C) is one of the largest academic learning technology conferences in Europe. It is an important venue for information dissemination and exchange about leading-edge developments in learning technologies for higher, further and community education.

These nine projects represent the range of innovation within the programme. They are working in novel ways combining technologies and practices in innovative ways. All the projects put their end-users at the heart of their development processes. Real users (not abstractions) are involved in development teams and the projects are having real impact in institutions. User interfaces are considered as important as data models, control programs and work

IntroductionPresentations made by JISC Users and Innovation Programme projects at ALT-C, Leeds, September 2008

George Roberts

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flows. Perhaps most importantly, these projects are making their own ongoing, reflexively self-aware, purposeful community of collaborators visible, leading to the wider adoption of user-centred educational development practices.

Argosi, Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction, addresses four research objectives, asking whether an Alternate Reality Game is an effective and appropriate medium for enabling students to: meet the intended learning outcomes of the library and information skills induction; create social networks during the induction period; improve their confidence in navigating the city and university campus; engage in, and enjoy, the induction experience.

ASEL, Audio Supported Enhanced Learning, is developing, implementing and evaluating the use of audio within next generation technologies to support, enhance and personalise the learner experience in three key areas: self reflection, assessment, and collaborative learning.

The Awesome (Academic Writing Empowered by Socially Mediated Online Environments) dissertation environment (ADE) is using social software both to develop a reflective, critical voice and provide networked social support for undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation writing.

Evolve is a benefits realisation project that is designed to bring together and support researchers from different countries and different disciplines who are engaged with contemporary issues in education using social networking and Web 2.0 technologies.

Moose, Modelling of Second Life Environments, investigates the scaffolding and processes needed to enable groups of students in Higher Education to establish productive information and knowledge exchanges and learning through the medium of online 3-D multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs)using Second Life.

Open Habitat, aims to encourage students to use multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life as a means to making creative online collaboration an integrated part of their learning. The Open Habitat project is running a number of pilots integrated into the teaching of Art & Design and Philosophy.

PreView, Problem-based Learning (PbL) in Virtual Interactive Educational Worlds, is investigating, implementing and evaluating a user-focused approach to developing scenarios and materials, linking the emerging technologies of virtual worlds with interactive PbL online to create immersive collaborative tutorials.

SkillClouds is addressing the issue of making skills more visible to undergraduate students who are participating in a career development course, through an exploration of the use of social bookmarking software and tagging, and in particular through the tag-cloud data visualisation technique that has become a distinctive feature of Web 2.0 sites. The hypothesis is that the skill cloud will be an engaging way of visualising this information for students.

Sounds Good, is building on previous small-scale work using MP3 files for summative feedback on one programme. The Sounds Good team will widen the focus to both formative and summative feedback in various disciplines at different educational levels. The experimentation will include delivering digital sound files containing feedback to students via a virtual learning environment, email and widely available mobile devices such as MP3 players.

I would like to thank the nine project teams who presented their findings at ALT-C and then wrote them up for this publication; all the projects and people in the wider Users and Innovation Programme, especially the Programme Manager, Lawrie Phipps and the Director, Craig Wentworth; the Emerge Project support team, some of the most creative people working in learning technology, anywhere; and Emma Anderson, who is heading up the process of disseminating the results of the Emerge project and the Users and Innovation Programme, and who has edited this volume. Thanks also to Helen Swain for her proofreading and design skills.

George RobertsDirector, Emerge Project7 November 2008

References

Cooperrider, D L and Srivastva, S 1987, ‘Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life’, Organizational Change and Development, vol 1, pp129-169.

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Freire, P 1996, The pedagogy of the oppressed, Penguin, London.

Mathie, A and Cunningham, G 2003, ‘From Clients to Citizens: asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development’, Development in Practice, vol 13, no.5, pp474-486.

Links

PROJECTS

Argosi www.playthinklearn.net/argosi.htm

ASEL aselproject.wordpress.com/

Awesome elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/awesome

Evolve www.evolvecommunity.org/

Moose www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/moose/

Open Habitat www.openhabitat.org/

PreView www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/preview/blog/

SkillClouds www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/

SoundsGood soundsgooduk.blogspot.com/

OTHER

Association for Learning Technology (ALT) www.alt.ac.uk

JISC Emerge www.jiscemerge.org.uk

JISC Users & Innovation programme www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/ usersandinnovation

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THE ALTERnATE REALITy GAMES FOR Orientation, Socialisation and Induction (ARGOSI) project aims to provide an

engaging alternative way for students to acclimatise themselves to university life. by using techniques from game-based learning and the design of digital narrative to stimulate curiosity and provide appropriate challenges, the project team have designed a game that runs over the first eight weeks of the university term. This game – ViolaQuest – consists of a series of activities that are designed to map on to information literacy learning outcomes as well as providing the opportunity for students to work together, meet other people and get to know the city of Manchester.

The first term of a student’s university life can have a crucial influence on that student’s perceptions of and confidence in their experience of Higher Education. Issues and negative experiences, such as failing to make friends or acquire the basic skills required for university learning in this period are directly related to student retention. The ARGOSI project determined that a positive early student experience consists of three key activities: learning to navigate around the university and the city (in this case Manchester); meeting other people and forming friendships; and starting to gain the skills in learning how to learn that are required for university study. However there are issues with the traditional induction process in that it may not meet the needs of the student population, which is increasingly made up of students of differing ages from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds, with varied prior life and learning experiences and a range of personal commitments and demands on their time. The student activities available during the initial weeks often centre around pubs and clubs, and are not attractive to all students. Induction activities

ARGOSI Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction Using an Alternate Reality Game to support student induction

Nicola Whitton and Scott Wilson

focussing on key skills such as digital and information literacy are commonly front-loaded early on in the course of study and provided at a time when their use is not contextualised. Overall, the introductory processes tend to occur very rapidly, leaving students who fail to engage within the first few weeks limited to few resources and receiving little comeback; many feel that they may have ‘missed the boat’ and find it difficult to re-engage.

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are a relatively new gaming phenomenon initially developed as a viral marketing tool to promote films, television programmes and other media. They use a compelling storyline – usually centred on solving some sort of mystery – to underpin a series of challenges or activities, which combine the real-world and the online world. Players are required to solve the challenges collaboratively, either because they explicitly state that more than one person is required (e.g. a photograph of four players in a specific location) or because they require such a wealth of discipline expertise that it is unlikely that a single individual would know about all the areas required to solve the challenge. Another crucial element of ARGs is the development of a game community which provides a forum for working together and puzzle solving, and for collaboratively creating the narrative behind the game as it unfolds. In all, alternate reality games have the potential to provide an engaging, interactive and fun participative learning experience for the players.

In a typical ARG, a mystery is revealed over time in the form of a narrative expressed using a range of media, such as blogs, video, audio, web sites and artefacts in the real world. Events in the story encourage players to complete a varied range of

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tasks, many of them requiring collaboration and some that can be solved alone. For example, in ViolaQuest, the story starts with a student finding a mysterious letter from a distant relation which hints of a secret society and a ‘machine’ that has been hidden. Players then have to work together to find six map pieces that reveal the location of the machine, piecing together clues about the story as they go. Rather than provide a complete online virtual world, an ARG involves fictional events and characters alongside real world people and places and encourages the players themselves to contribute to the narrative and the mythology surrounding the story. Alternate reality games typically appeal to a small number of enthusiasts rather than the mainstream, but those who do play have high levels of immersion and emotional engagement in the story.

The ARGOSI project, funded under the JISC Users and Innovation Programme and running for one year from April 2008, is using an Alternate Reality Game to support student induction at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). The project is a collaboration between MMU and the University of bolton and is currently piloting a complete game (this is the period of the first eight weeks of the Autumn term 2008). The pilot environment provides challenges that encourage students to learn more about the city of Manchester, get to know and work with other people, and learn core library and information literacy skills.

The rationale behind the use of alternate reality games for learning is that they provide engaging problem-based, experiential, and collaborative activities, which make them ideally suited to teaching in higher education, particularly as they enable players to become involved in both playing the game and shaping the narrative as it emerges. The story and the curiosity it engenders provides a context and purpose for tasks to make them more engaging and interesting than would usually be the case. ARGs also have the advantage of flexible duration, typically running over several weeks or even months, which means that students can engage at times and places to suit themselves, making them more accessible. This also enables students who engage late to catch up easily and take part and is a benefit from the teaching perspective as challenges can be modified and release dates tailored as the game progresses. Participation in the game also supports the development of a community of learners. Another

advantage of ARGs is that unlike high-fidelity digital games which use advanced 3D graphics or virtual environments, they are implemented using inexpensive technologies such as blogs and social networking sites, making their use in Higher Education viable both financially and technologically.

The key objective of the ARGOSI pilot is to test the viability of the ARG model for student induction, looking initially for a single set of learning outcomes as a proof of concept, in this case associated with digital literacy. However, the project hypothesises that there is no reason why the model – if proved successful – should not be extended to a variety of learning outcomes, both associated with key learning skills and in different subject areas. The outputs of the project will be an open source game platform (supporting the release of challenges, forums, one-to-one messaging and a leader board) with a validated set of challenges in information literacy, a development handbook, and a training course to support the creation of further challenge sets and other games in different disciplines and institutions. Over the final months of the project, training with other groups will be rolled out in order to produce a bank of challenges in a range of core learning skill areas. Ultimately this should, if the ARG approach is viable, enable other universities to easily adapt the model to run their own games.

In terms of research, the project aims to discover whether the game is effective in supporting students in getting to know a city and other people, the acquisition of key library skills in an enjoyable way, as well as the long-term viability of the ARGOSI approach to induction. This will be done with the use of surveys with students, interviews and analysis of online interaction data. User engagement is seen as one of the crucial aspects of the programme and the project has been involved in extensive user testing throughout the development of the game and its software environment. Initial findings are encouraging, providing evidence that the game environment is an engaging learning medium for some people. However, a key emerging issue is how to reach the people who might potentially be interested. Tentative findings on the reasons students engage in alternate reality games indicate that there are four primary factors: Completing (finishing all the challenges), Competing (being first and fastest to complete), Curiosity (finding out how the

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story unfolds), and Communicating (talking to and working with others). These factors are a useful tool in the design of games that support all the reasons for player engagement as a successful game will need to balance these factors in its design and implementation.

While the ARGOSI project feels that there is a clear pedagogic justification for the use of ARGs in education, the team also recognises that alternate reality games are unlikely to engage all students. The intention however is to establish whether they engage a significant minority, which would make them viable both in terms of the game functioning and benefits to the learners and the institution. In particular, the project hopes to discover if the students who do engage with and benefit from the game are those who would otherwise not be engaging in the induction process at all, and may have an elevated risk of either dropping out of university or failing to thrive in their first year.

For further information, contact:

Dr nicola Whitton, Manchester Metropolitan University, Education and Social Research InstituteTel: 0161 247 2046Email: n.whitton@mmu.ac.uk

www.playthinklearn.net/argosi.htmwww.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/argosi.aspx

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WEb 2.0 TECHnOLOGIES OFFER nEW pedagogic opportunities to support and empower the net generation of learners.

However, to many academics and institutions this can appear risky as there are many issues yet to be resolved surrounding the use of these technologies. This paper explores some of the issues by examining the early findings of the JISC-funded Audio Supported Enhanced Learning (ASEL) Project and by summarising key areas that emerged from a symposium delivered by members of the project team at the 2008 ALT-C conference.

This paper brings together two separate, but linked, events. The first is the Audio Supported Enhanced Learning (ASEL) Project, a JISC-funded project looking at the use of audio within emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning. The second is a symposium presented at the ALT-C conference in September 2008 by four members of the ASEL project team.

The link between these two events, apart from the colleagues involved, is Web 2.0 and emerging technologies, or, more precisely, the challenges that Web 2.0 and emerging technologies bring to the way we teach, the way our students learn and the way our institutions go about their business.

The project

The ASEL project is developing, implementing and evaluating the use of audio within next generation technologies to support, enhance, and personalise the learner experience. It is also capturing effective lecturer and learner practices from across the domains of teaching and learning that will help inform future practices across the HE sector.

Audio Supported Enhanced Learning

Challenging the digital divide: the use of audio within emerging technologies

Will Stewart

It is addressing four key challenges for the HE sector:

l harnessing next generation technologies

l embedding these technologies in order to enhance the student learning experience

l transforming curriculum design and teaching practice

l personalising learning

The focus of the project is the changes in practice, both for tutors and learners that are necessary to achieve this enhancement, transformation and personalisation. Recent JISC studies (Creanor et al 2006; Conole et al 2006) on learner experiences of e-learning show that learners are increasingly using technology as tools in their everyday lives but there is also evidence from the Students Expectation Study (JISC, 2007) that they struggle to see how these same technologies could be used as learning tools.

The ASEL project is promoting a model of two-way, interactive and dialogic engagement to underpin the use of audio within next generation technologies. It is using social constructivist and collaborative approaches where learners co-create content and help to re-engineer their curriculum. To this end, the project is focusing on how we can use audio within next generation technologies in three key areas, namely:

l self reflection

l assessment

l collaborative learning

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Initial Findings

The Project started in January 2008 and has involved tutors and students from six subject areas: Health, business, Management, Optometry, Law and Computing.

CASE STUDy 1

A business tutor changed a text based exercise to a collaborative task where group discussions were recorded as part of a formal assessment in an attempt to improve learners’ critical analysis skills of key texts.

The tutor reported that audio “gave me the opportunity to listen in on a conversation in a way which would not have been possible before, gave me the opportunity to see how small groups function and how thinking about academic literature moves and is swayed by opinion or by the most forceful members of a group.” The tutor further reflected “this process will, I believe, allow us to hear how students work, rather than relying on a constructed version of this, which is what we usually see when we assess written work.”

CASE STUDy 2

In Law, tutors professionally recorded a 15 minute audio scenario in the style of a Radio 4 news programme, punctuating storylines with music, humour and informative strap-lines.

As part of their learning, students were expected to listen to the recorded scenario prior to attending a revision workshop. At this workshop students were expected to record, using an MP3 recorder, a 10 minute group activity to solve a problem using material presented by the tutor, including the audio scenario. On completion of the workshop, student groups were also required to record their reflections under a series of headings on their experiences of using audio to support their learning. This data is currently under analysis.

The tutor reported that, “These new and diverse teaching strategies are designed to complement the existing traditional methods. This deep approach to learning allows the students to practically apply newly gained knowledge whilst encouraging them to

interact with each other.” The Law tutor continued, “by enhancing the learning experience in this way we are imparting the student with an appreciation of the importance of the subject matter; an appreciation which will remain with them throughout their professional career.”

CASE STUDy 3

Tutors in Optometry adapted teaching and learning practices to include audio feedback and lecture summaries to Career Progression students in a work-based setting. Audio feedback on assignments was provided and made accessible to students through their secure drop-box on blackboard.

The tutor reflected that “feedback from the University is critical to their achievement of the desired standard before they enter the University for full time study in September.”

The tutor also noted that “a problem raised by last year’s cohort of students involved their understanding of the two theory based modules. This was particularly evident for those students entering the programme with the least accredited prior learning”. To this end, learners were also provided with audio recordings of lectures for a 12-week period and were accessed through the group’s ning social networking site.

What the students think

A tutor in the School of Health Studies provided students with both formative and summative audio feedback on one of their assignments. She also asked them to self-assess their work using audio and to submit this with their assignment.

On formative feedback, students said:“I really liked it. I got positive feedback. you don’t often get told that you have done something well, so it’s really nice to get that verbal feedback as opposed to written. It worked well for me.”

“I think that because of the tone of her voice and the way she said ‘I think I have got some concerns about this’, you got more sense from verbal feedback than written about genuine concern. you pick up on the tone of her voice and how [she is] saying things and it makes you think ‘yeah, she’s right there’, and it comes across better verbally than written.”

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When asked about her experience of using audio for self-assessment, a student replied:

“I think it is good because it makes you refer to the marking criteria, which you may not have done otherwise, and to consider the learning outcomes. I spent a lot more time considering the points because I was actually talking about it. I think when you say something it’s a lot less ambiguous than when you write it down. I could put my own personal comments as opposed to writing in the small box on the form.”

The Symposium

The symposium, Web 2.0: The Digital Divide between the Net Generation Learner, Institution and Practice, was presented at the 2008 ALT-C conference by members of the ASEL project team.

The symposium focussed on the so-called ‘digital divides’ between academic skills, institutional practices and infrastructure, and the skills, expectations and technologies of our current “net generation of learners”. All of these issues are ones which we are addressing in the ASEL project in our exploration of the use of audio.

The format for the symposium consisted of four panellists each arguing for or against a particular aspect of the use of Web 2.0 technology.

To this end:

Panelist 1 argued FOR the use of Web 2.0, drawing evidence from studies of curriculum redesign and social constructivism.

Panelist 2 argued AGAInST this position and supported a more traditional academic role. Evidence included studies which demonstrated that the “net generation learner” is largely a myth.

Panelist 3 argued FOR institutional infrastructure and a Web 2.0 strategy to support the growing numbers of net generation learners.

Panelist 4 argued AGAInST the need for radical shifts in technology and explained why our current use of technology is perfectly adequate.

After each panellist had put their case to the

audience, the debate was opened up to the audience for discussion of the issues raised.

The discussion

The discussion covered a wide range of topics ranging from how institutions adapt to the new and emerging technologies, to the need for new models of curriculum design and assessment in order to cater for the demands of today’s learners and the world in which they will find themselves when they leave our institutions.

On the topic of assessment, there was a general agreement that new technologies offer a potentially wider range of opportunities to assess learners, but that institutional barriers often preclude this. Changes to curriculum design are often made more difficult because courses have to meet the requirements of professional bodies in addition to their own institutional requirements.

While there are many examples of individual innovation, these tend to be isolated within a school or department, driven largely by an enthusiastic member of staff. Embedding these innovations and bringing whole course teams on board requires support from senior managers who are often remote from the day-to-day realities of teaching and learning.

The issue of staff awareness of new technologies and their skills in the use of them was raised. Staff are often reluctant to devote time to learning about ways in which they could incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into their courses, citing other pressures such as research, administration and marking as barriers.

While there were a few members of the audience who supported the arguments against change and questioned whether today’s learners were actually any different to those of the past, the majority agreed that institutions did need to rethink their traditional educational model in light of changing technologies and the demands of the world outside HE.

Conclusion

The symposium highlighted many of the issues faced by lecturers, course teams and institutions when considering the impact of Web 2.0 technologies. While many of the issues are common to all

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institutions, there was general agreement that these new technologies do require us to rethink our curricula and pedagogic practices. The initial findings of the ASEL project support this and will provide examples of ways in which these changes can be achieved.

References

Canole, G, De Laat, M, Dillon, T and Darby, J 2006, JISC Student experiences of technologies. Final Report December 2006.

Creanor, L, Trinder, K, Gowan, D and Howells, C 2006, LEX: The Learner Experience of e-Learning: Final project report, JISC.

JISC (2007) Student Expectations Survey: Findings from Preliminary Research, JISC.

ASEL Project team members and Symposium contributors

Peter HartleyProfessor of Education DevelopmentTeaching Quality Enhancement GroupUniversity of bradfordp.hartley@bradford.ac.uk

Carol HiggisonSenior e-Learning AdvisorTeaching Quality Enhancement GroupUniversity of bradfordc.higgison@bradford.ac.uk

Mary SimpsonLecturer in business StudiesSchool of businessUniversity of Hertfordshirem.a.simpson@herts.ac.uk

Acknowledgement (for initial idea and submission of Symposium)

Martina A DoolanLecturer in Computer StudiesSchool of Computer ScienceUniversity of Hertfordshirem.a.doolan@herts.ac.uk

For further information, contact:

Will Stewart, Project Manager, Teaching Quality Enhancement GroupTel: 01274 235137Email: w.stewart@bradford.ac.uk

aselproject.wordpress.com/www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/asel.aspx

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AWESOME IS A MULTIDISCIPLInARy TEAM exploring the potential of Web 2.0 tenets and practices to support academic writing

development in UK higher education. based at Leeds University, the initial team combined diverse but complementary experiences; computer scientists with expertise in computer-human interaction and artificial intelligence provided technical development; Educationalists with expertise in ICT in education and academic writing development across subject disciplines provided use cases in Fashion Design and Education and ensured that the project addressed contemporary pedagogical needs. A member from the staff development unit ensured that the project focused on user engagement and institutional adoption from the outset, a principle enhanced by the team’s representation on a strategic institutional working group, the blended Learning Futures Group. AWESOME has grown to include partners from the Centre for Academic Writing, Coventry University, and the College of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of bangor. Together with our internal partners they have contributed to the requirement gathering, which has informed the design, building and testing of the prototype ADE and its subsequent versions. Scenarios gathered from partners guided the ADE instantiations and provide a baseline for evaluation and reflection.

Our initial interest in academic writing became focused on dissertation writing because it offers the best opportunity to make a significant contribution to learning and teaching in the sector. Our project aims

AWESOME The Academic Writing Empowered by Social Online Mediated EnvironmentsAWESOME Dissertation Environment (ADE) Project

Rebecca O’Rourke

to develop, deploy in real settings and disseminate a personalised learning environment [ADE] to support dissertation writing for final year undergraduate and taught postgraduate UK higher education students.

There are three reasons why we chose dissertations. First, the dissertation is unique to higher education and required by all disciplines. This heightens the potential pedagogic impact of our work whilst generating genuine research challenges in both technical and pedagogic development. Second, the dissertation is a complex, multi-dimensional academic writing task involving independent learning. It is an area of academic practice which students and tutors alike find extremely challenging and one in which their collective knowledge of the experience is less likely to be shared, both because it is an individualised form of learning and teaching and because it takes place as students leave the institution, which limits opportunities for informal learning between cohorts of students. The final reason we focus on dissertation writing is that insights from academic writing development research and practice1 strongly suggest that the most effective approaches to writing development are both social and scaffolded. A personalised virtual learning environment enables the complex, multiple dimensions of planning, researching and writing a dissertation to be authentically captured at the same time as the tenets of collective intelligence and active user engagement in creating and sharing content encourage social networking and peer support. The learning and teaching context for dissertations

1. Ganobcsik-Williams, L, Ed. 2006, Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education: Theories, Practices and Models, Palgrave Macmillan, basingstoke; Hyland, K 2004, Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interaction in Academic Writing, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan; Lea, M and Stierer, b, Eds. 2000, Student Writing in Higher Education: New Contexts, Open University Press, buckingham; Lillis, T 2001, Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire, Routledge, London.

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normally involves limited contact time, with front-loaded delivery of critical information and guidance. Here, the ADE performs a valuable repository function, but its dynamic content, and the way in which its structure is based on a mapping of the complex processes of designing, researching and writing a dissertation, means that it has the scope to do far more than this.

Developing the ADE

The prototype (see Figure 1) utilises collective intelligence technologies based on MediaWiki combined with chat, blogs and tag clouds (Web 2.0 technologies). The ADE has exploited the MediaWiki’s semantic extension for within-page semantics, which enables users to add meaning to the content according to their context of use, and enables the ADE to ‘mine’ this content for other users with similar interests (see Figures 2 and 3). It has three features which distinguish it from similar VLE tools. These are semantic tagging, the AWESOME press and mood gathering.

The ADE prototype was developed following a series of consultations with a range of stakeholders and partners. These included technology developers, who evaluated, integrated and stretched the capability of the standard wiki platform for the prototype by adding social and semantic features to facilitate the innovative practice aspired to by staff and students. We gathered and explored these aspirations through a series of activities which drew on the Users and Innovation Development Model (UIDM) promoted by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)2. These included workshops, scenario-driven techniques in requirements gathering, individual and focus group interviews for requirements, elicitation and feedback, the use of prototypes for confirmation of requirements and for user trials.

The ADE design took shape through dialogue between the users and the team’s pedagogical and technical experts conducted through a needs analysis based on interviews with a sample group of tutors and students from different disciplines.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

2. www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/funding/2007/07/circular0207appendixf.doc

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Tutor needs and Concerns

The main issues for tutors were (i) amount of time spent on individual supervision and the time ‘wasted’ on going through the same issues and answering similar questions; and (ii) unlocking the performance potential of students undertaking independent study by supporting them over an extended period of time as they complete the complex and multiple tasks necessary to research and write a successful dissertation. These tasks include linking the project to taught aspects of the course, finding a researchable topic, understanding the concept of a literature review, research design, data collection, critical analysis and project management skills.

To begin to meet these needs, tutors wanted the ADE to provide genuine and annotated examples to familiarise students with the dissertation and support them as they explored the skills of research and writing. Combining this information with online mediated peer discussion would provide community support, which they hoped would enable students to use face-to-face tutorial time more effectively. They were also interested in the potential to monitor student progress – in terms of engagement with the dissertation writing process – at a formative stage. An additional benefit they identified was the ADE’s potential to make individual tutors’ tacit knowledge accessible to colleagues.

Student needs and Concerns

Students reported anxiety and unease when first faced with the task of dissertation writing, and uncertainty about what exactly was required of them to fulfil the assignment task. Despite the provision of institutional support and supervision, the dissertation project is perceived as a lone journey. They reported difficulties with time management, finding relevant resources, getting started in general and specifically starting the writing-up process. Undergraduate students about to start their projects pointed out the initial information overload, through handbooks or introductory lectures in the dissertation module. Interestingly, these anxieties also occurred with

postgraduate students, even though they usually had the experience of writing undergraduate dissertations to draw on. There was also a clear preference for feedback that came from the tutor, a challenging idea for a project rooted in social networking and the promotion of peer support. Interviews with students also confirmed the need to provide examples within the ADE and to offer bite-size information at strategic points.

These interviews were further analysed and articulated into written scenarios for a number of specific problem areas. Tutors and students checked whether the situation was captured correctly. These scenarios served as a means to communicate the requirements to the designer of the first ADE prototype.

ADE: Prototype, Versions 1, 2 and beyond

The proof of concept prototype was demonstrated to stakeholders in April 2008 and the first user trial, for Fashion Design and Education, ran from July until September 2008 using ADE V1. Following the user consultations, the first ADE prototype included several semantic features in addition to the media wiki. Dimitrova et al3 provides further details on the prototype and the use of underlying semantics. The additional features included a core ontology for dissertation writing process to provide the structure; semantic forms to ease user contribution; use of semantic mark-up (tagging) for capturing emerging ontology through use; use of queries based on semantics for dynamic content (e.g. top tips). There were also social tools, including blogs, chat, tag clouds, and scope to embed Audio / Video and a cultural space in home page to gather users’ mood.

A second trial, utilising ADE V2, currently running with these departments will shortly be extended to include external partners at Coventry and bangor. A further instance, designed to explore the scope for locating the ADE within a Higher Education Authority Subject Centre, taking philosophy as an experimental use case, is currently under development.

3. Dimitrova, V, Lau, L, and Le bek, A 2008, Sharing of Community Practice through Semantics: A Case Study in Academic Writing. In Proc. Sixth International Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Web for E-Learning, in conjunction with International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems – ITS ’08, Montreal, June, (2008), 30-39.

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Emerging Research Issues

We are relieved, and excited, to have proof of concept for our initial idea. The ADE can support the scaffolding of a complex academic writing task and do so in a context which provides social networking and in which peer support complements tutor input and moderation. In doing so, as our first user trials demonstrate, it meets a genuine need in countering the isolation and debilitating anxiety that accompanies many students on their dissertation journey. However, our goal has been and continues to be that the reliability and usability of the ADE will be consistent enough to lead to widespread adoption as a plug-in to a range of existing VLEs. We still have much work ahead of us to achieve this goal.

There are five main aspects in which research issues are emerging, which, in practice, are interdependent. In technology development, these research issues centre on semantics, notably the challenge to communicate the connection between the value of content derived through ‘semantic tagging’ and the need to do ‘semantic tagging’ when contributing to the sites. For pedagogy they centre on the critical role of anonymity in generating the prerequisite trust for social networking and peer learning and insight into the affective processes of dissertation writing, questioning especially whether mood gathering has affective benefits in community building and whether the community mood shifts during the dissertation process.

Academic writing concerns focus on the tension between discipline specific genres and practices of writing dissertations, including how they generate their own pedagogies, and observable generalised processes and ontologies which the use of semantics makes explicit. The attention to user engagement and usability issues provides valuable data for human computer interaction. Finally, each area of practice and theorisation is underpinned by the methodological challenge of our own complex and multi-disciplinary research team, which will result in an interesting case study in research methods.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the participants in the trials and the partners from the Centre for Academic Writing at the University of Coventry, and the College of Education and Lifelong Learning, at the University of bangor for their involvement in this project.

The AWESOME team are: Rebecca O’Rourke, Sirisha bajanki, Vania Dimitrova, Melissa Highton, Kathrin Kaufhold, Lydia Lau, Alex Lebek, Aisha Walker

For further information, contact:

Dr Rebecca O’RourkeLifelong Learning InstituteTel: 0113 343 3181Email: cedrko@leeds.ac.uk

elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/awesome/www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/awesome.aspx

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Overview

OnLInE COMMUnITIES HAVE bEEn seen as a way of overcoming digital divides by providing access to informal

learning and to knowledge exchange, regardless of geographical location or of participation in formal learning programmes. Online communities can also mediate institutional or organisational learning and knowledge with individual knowledge sharing and development allowing informal content to be transformed into more formal collective knowledge bases. This paper is based on research work carried out through the JISC sponsored Evolve network that builds on both theoretical understanding of networks and communities, and empirical studies. We examine findings of how individual’s participatory presence in Evolve’s online events is helping to shape the community and reduce the digital divide in the learning technologies field. Participant involvement, communal tasks and access to experts in the area have been key to the maturity of the network and the development of a participatory community.

Introduction

The Evolve Open Community project came out of a series of discussions with key figures in the field of technology enhanced learning regarding the development and support of research in e-learning. A number of issues arose that led to the desire to develop an international Emerging Research Community of Practice in Research in TEL:

l The lack of constructive discourse between practitioners and researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and related fields

Evolve

A story of building community bridges between researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)

Graham Attwell, Steven Warburton, Cristina Costa and Raymond Elferink

l The lack of basic research in social science disciplines on the social impact of Web 2.0 and social software

l The lack of expertise inside institutions on these topics and the effective isolation of researchers that suggested a need for closer networking and knowledge sharing between researchers in TEL

l The lack of effective dissemination of developmental activity to researchers

l The national focus of research communities in the field despite the growing internationalism of development and technologies

building a community space

The aims of the project were to develop an international Community of Practice in TEL research and facilitate a two way discourse between members of the Emerge community with members of the wider international research community. To achieve these aims, the Evolve project was split into four stages:

Stage 1: An analysis of user needs via a web-based survey of potential users with follow up interviews

Stage 2: Rapid prototyping of a community platform based on the existing beta Wordpress-based Freefolio collaboration software

Stage 3: Facilitating the emergence of the community including the testing and evaluation of the community platform and tools and facilitation of community events

Stage 4: An evaluation of the Evolve project and its initial vision and criteria for success

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Evolving processes

RICH SURVEy

The project team developed the idea of ‘rich surveys’. These involved the use of multi media for eliciting replies to a wider range of attitudinal questions than are normally included in a ‘standard’ type survey. The hope was that a rich survey utilising multi media might attract more attention and interest than standard text-based surveys.

SEMI-STRUCTURED InTERVIEWS

A semi-structured interview template was designed. It was decided to interview participants at partner institutions and at the PROLEARn/EATEL – PALETTE joint Summer School 2008 in Ohrid/Macedonia.

PLATFORM

The community platform at www.evolvecommunity.org is based on the Wordpress Freefolio e-Portfolio software, and includes individual blogs, an aggregated community area, a forum, a wiki, user customisable widgets and various mashup functionalities.

ACTIVITIES

The project has launched a series of activities. besides routine interaction through the web site, monthly online seminars have been set up. The first four seminars have used the Emerge Elluminate platform – although experimentation with different platforms is planned for the future. The launch seminar held on 30th May 2008 was led by barbara Dieu on the topic ‘Social Software in Schools and Institutions’. Using Elluminate allowed the project to record the seminars and make them available to people who could not attend.

PROLEARn/EATEL – PALETTE JOInT SUMMER SCHOOL 2008

The European Summer School for postgraduate researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning was held in Ohrid, Macedonia and lasted one week, with a considerable attendance form Eastern Europe. A twitter hash tag, used by a large number of

participants, became the most popular and used channel for spontaneous feedback and immediate reflection on the summer school activities. By engaging participants through this medium, the project was able to hold extended discussions with a large number of postgraduate researchers in the field. This greatly added to our understanding of the needs of this target group.

WEDOTEL

The WeDoTel group was established following the Ohrid Summer School. WeDoTEL was the tag participants agreed to use to start a new tweme (see twemes.com) as there was some mutual consent that twitter would continue to be one of the main communication channels after this experience. The group rapidly evolved both as a social network and as a peer support group for research and for the development of collaborative papers for a number of forthcoming conferences. As members have realised the potential of group sharing and learning, they have slowly started to take the initiative to invite other researchers to join the chat channel. The absence of any kind of hurdle to joining the group seems to ease association with it and favours informal interchange of this type between individuals.

TRAInERSInEUROPE.ORG

The Evolve team has developed relations with a number of different European projects. One of the first outcomes of this work has been the agreement to co-sponsor the first European online conferences for research in the training of trainers to be held in november. The conference is being organised by the Trainers in Europe network sponsored by the European Commission DG Education and Culture.

Discussion and issues

COMMUnITIES AnD EMERGEnCE

Is it possible to ‘set up’ a community intentionally? Probably not. Communities are emergent and will develop at their own pace and time. Communities need to develop a shared sense of purpose, a shared repertoire and shared collaborative spaces. These spaces can be enhanced through common practice and activities that are mediated through the use of common web tools that help establish a communal

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atmosphere and a contained space where community actions are made visible.

In some senses it would appear that Evolve is looking at a number of different community ‘features’ which may not be entirely consistent. Firstly Evolve has consciously targeted ‘emergent researchers’ in TEL. Secondly that community was seen as international. Thirdly, the community was implicitly seen to be working with social software and Web 2.0 tools. Is there such a ‘natural’ community? Our investigations and activities would suggest there is the potential for the emergence of such a community although whether it is a community of practice or a community of interest is open to debate. We have predominantly identified postgraduate students in a number of different countries undertaking research related to the use of technology for learning, who are both looking for peer group support and an interchange of ideas and who are relatively isolated in their own institutional environments. Many are isolated in their institutions due to lack of understanding of social software and Web 2.0 for learning, and institutional support for postgraduate students – particularly part-time students – would appear to vary greatly.

It is clear that, within communities, there is a relationship between critical mass and the level of facilitation that is needed to move towards self-sustainability. There is also the need to maintain momentum and communities tend to thrive on continuous low-level activities that acknowledge inclusion and membership.

nEEDS

The project has been able to identify a reasonably clear set of needs or desires. These were expressed both through the interviews undertaken and in subsequent discussions on the WeDoTel group:

l Peer group support around research and research methodologies

l Support in writing conference papers and journal articles

l Co-editing and collaborative writing

l Information about useful research resources

l Social and cultural interchange with other

researchers – social networking in a trusted environment

l Mentoring – especially around research proposals and PhD proposals

l Spaces for the publication and dissemination of work outside of rigid academic boundaries

PLATFORMS AnD SPACES

The Evolve platform is based on a blogging interface and this raises questions when many participants already maintain one or more blogs. It may be more relevant to further develop the platform as a mashup environment, especially given that social tools for creating mashups are improving. The platform has come into its own around the different events that have been staged as a place space for reflecting and sharing experiences and it would be possible to enhance the communication functionality in this regard.

A simple Skype chat group has proved effective in dealing with the need for social networking and peer support. That the chat is a closed environment may be a factor in developing trust relations – and the process of members inviting others to join may be a more natural form of legitimate peripheral integration and development of trust relationships and of social and peer support. It is also interesting to observe that the immediacy of this communication channel seems to impact on the way people learn and interact in a shared space in interesting ways – the frequent ‘just-in-time’ peer feedback and personalised dedicated support to individual needs coupled with an informal conversational tone and celebration of achievements suggests why such a channel is proving more successful when compared to the blogging platform. However the interactions on the Skype channel, whilst numerous and at times intense, require mentoring support and are relatively unfocused to date.

The emergence of micro-blogging (for example the use of Twitter) as a new form of resource sharing and social networking is a further factor which needs to be taken into consideration in iterating platform design and development and in configuring tool support and functionality.

Matt Locke (test.org.uk/2007/08/10/six-spaces-of-social-media/) has come up a description of the

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different private-public spaces that compete for our information:

l Secret Spaces e.g. SMS, IM

l Group Spaces e.g. Facebook, Myspace, bebo

l Publishing Spaces e.g. Flickr, youtube, Revver

l Performing Spaces e.g. MMORPGs, MUVEs, Sports, Drama

l Participation Spaces e.g. Meetup, Threadless, CambrianHouse.com, MySociety

l Watching Spaces e.g. Television, Cinema, Sports, Theatre

This raises the question of what forms of spaces a community requires. Our investigation suggests a need for a flexible combination of different kinds of spaces – to be accessed for various purposes at different times in community development. It may also be that community members will need to move between these spaces within the development of an activity.

MEMES AnD EPISODIC InTERACTIOn

It is clear that the pace of development and involvement in activities in an emergent community is not even. Instead there are episodic periods of interaction, interposed with periods of quiet. Periods of activity happen around organised events and the emergence of particular memes in TEL, or around particular emergent issues of interest to a group of community members. These interactions play across the spectrum from informal unstructured episodes such as micro-blogging to more formal structured type seminar events.

InSTITUTIOnS AnD LEARnInG CULTURES

There has been growing discussion round the TEL community about the cultures of learning using social software and Web 2.0 and social software. Recent discussions have included the theme or meme of ‘edupunks’1 and the phenomenon of ‘creepy treehouses’2. It may well be that the tensions

between the learning cultures of the TEL research community and the learning cultures of institutions are particularly sharp due to the nature of the subject area. There are interesting issues in the relationship or potential relationship between a community of practice in TEL research and the institutions to which the researchers belong – including their supervisors and managers.

TRAnSnATIOnALITy

Members have expressed a feeling of added value on the transnational nature of the community in allowing exploration of different cultural themes and mutual learning from each other. However, the use of English as an interchange language can be inhibiting for expression and a discouragement for writing. It is important to note that members have expressed the desire for further support in writing in English – not so much in language but in how to structure research papers and journal articles. It would appear that this support is not available in their institutions.

Conclusions

Evolve is slowly starting to link to different TEL initiatives and broadening its networking scope. Although we cannot predict whether it will be transformed into a sustainable community, there are indicators that it could take a prominent role in supporting the development of learning technologies and expertise as Evolve is committed to engage, support and bridge researchers, practitioners and projects at a transnational level.

For the project to continue evolving we recognise that support is needed at different levels to ensure continued moderation of the Evolve group, update and support of the shared spaces, face to face meetings, the provision of grants for researchers to participate in the annual face-to-face Evolve summits. Finally, support is also needed to develop lightweight peer review publishing mechanisms for emerging and cutting-edge work.

For further information, contact:

Graham AtwellEmail: graham10@mac.com

www.evolvecommunity.org

1. www.blogher.com/introducing-edupunk 2. flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2008/04/09/defining-creepy-tree-house/

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A PILOT STUDy WAS COnDUCTED by beyond Distance Research Alliance (bDRA) at the University of Leicester (UoL) within

a JISC-funded research project called MOOSE (MOdelling Of Secondlife Environments – www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/moose/). The study examined the pedagogical potential of three-dimensional multi-user virtual environments (3-D MUVEs) for socialisation in Higher Education (HE) learning.

MOOSE focuses on modelling the pedagogical aspects of students’ learning in groups in Second Life (a popular 3-D MUVE developed by Linden Lab), and the facilitation required for productive learning activities to occur. To achieve these objectives we designed, developed and piloted learning activities in Second Life (SL), which we call ‘SL-tivities’, enabling groups of students, represented as avatars, to develop socialisation and engagement for more productive collaboration and knowledge construction.

Theoretical framework andpedagogical design

The theoretical framework of MOOSE is based on Salmon’s 5-stage model (2004) (Figure 1) and ‘e-tivities’ (Salmon, 2002), focusing on the scaffolding process required for learners’ socialisation and productive learning online. The model was originally developed for asynchronous text-based online environments. In MOOSE, we look at the transferability of this model for 3-D Multi-User Virtual Environments such as SL.

The pilot study involved five developmental and research stages:

1. designing and developing learning activities in SL

MOOSE MOdelling Of Secondlife Environments

3-D Multi-User Virtual Environments for Socialisation in Distance Learning

Palitha Edirisingha, Gilly Salmon and Ming Nie

2. training tutors and students in in-world participation and engagement

3. training tutors in SL moderation activities (SL moderation)

4. carrying out in-world learning sessions

5. researching student and staff engagement in SL and their perception of learning outcomes.

The study was carried out at the University of Leicester within the School of Archaeology and Ancient History. An undergraduate module on Archaeological Theory was chosen for the pilot, for which two module tutors and four students volunteered to take part.

Figure 1. 5-stage model (Salmon, 2004)

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SL developments, training andlearning activities

Archaeology teaching involves introducing students to the landscape, religion and rituals, social structure and practices of a society or culture. Conventionally, teaching has been done through written descriptions, diagrams and 2-D images, largely relying on students’ imagination and visioning abilities. SL offers a medium through which artefacts and landscapes can be built and created easily, allowing students to see, explore, interact and role-play. This immersive experience enabled by SL can extend and reinforce what students have learned from textbooks.

We created two artefacts and associated learning activities (‘SL-tivities’) in SL within the University of Leicester’s Media Zoo island in Second Life. One was a Sami tent to simulate the lives of Sami people who live in northern Scandinavia. Previously, teaching the use of social space by Sami people was dependent on textbooks and 2-D images (see two examples below).

The next two pictures show how a Sami tent has been replicated in SL. Within the tent, students can navigate around to get a feel of the layout and division of the landscape and space, explore tools and artefacts, and interact with each other.

We designed two SL-tivities associated with the Sami tent, each of which was about an hour long. In these activities, students explored different parts of the tent with the perspective of their gender. They discussed their experiences of the tent with their peers.

A second artefact built was a Kalasha valley and village, home to a minority group who live in north-western Pakistan. Teaching of the use of landscape and space by the Kalasha people is also largely dependent on text-based material and 2-D images. The two pictures overleaf show the Kalasha valley and dwellings.

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The next two pictures [above right] show artefacts developed in SL to explore Kalasha culture.

We developed two ‘SL-tivities’ about the Kalasha valley in SL, each lasting an hour, where students explored different parts of the valley and village by themselves with the perspective of their gender and discussed their experiences with peers.

We provided in-world training for the students and face-to-face training for the tutors, using specially designed training guides based on Salmon’s five stage model (Wheeler and Salmon, 2008a, 2008b).

The in-world training for the students lasted about an hour and covered the core technical skills required to use SL. Students learned the skills quickly although they were novices to 3-D MUVEs. The picture below shows a training session where the avatar of the Keeper of the Media Zoo trained students’ avatars.

The face-to-face training with the tutors lasted for about two hours and covered both the technical and moderation skills in SL.

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Initial findings

We collected data from interviewing the students and tutors, observing their in-world training and activities and analysing the chat logs on in-world sessions.

A MEETInG PLACE FOR DISTAnCE LEARnERS

SL offered distance learners an environment for meeting. Students who participated in SL sessions appreciated the opportunities for synchronised communication with the tutors and other students. They said they had enjoyed engaging in the activities and reported feeling that they belonged to a group and were no longer distant from others.

“It’s really interesting and I […] enjoyed it! Before, I usually sat at home and read the text and thought about things on my own. It’s good to meet others who study the same things in Second Life, and I do not feel alone. It’s good to meet the lecturer. You do not feel distant anymore.”

In-WORLD SOCIALISATIOn

Students enjoyed the opportunity to socialise with others in SL. They usually joined the session 5-10 minutes before it started and socialised with each other as they would in real life.

We recorded various forms of in-world socialisation between the students and tutors and among the students. The following are examples of students’ comments to each other on outfits and the artefacts.

DM: How are you?EA: Good, thanks. How are you?DM: Have you changed your outfit again? Great

EA: The rugs look so real.YU: I knitted them the weekend that’s why!EA: Ha ha!EA: You’re very talented.DM: :)

EA: Do you have to knit in the middle of the tent or in the men’s section?YU: No Comment!EA: :)

The following example shows students socialising on course and personal matters.

DM: EA, which essay question have you chosen?EA: I haven’t yet as I deferred my course ‘til the summer session…DM: Oh, sorry, you were ill, weren’t you?EA: Yes, :)EA: Which did you choose?DM: Neo-Darwinian approaches…EA: Sounds like a good one. :)

The next one shows an example of a student avatar helping the tutor avatar.

YU: Well, I feel like a prune standing up hereAC: It’s less anonymousEA: ha haAC: Sit down!DM: :)YU: I’m not sure I know how to yet! It might be embarrassing!EA: We won’t laugh. :)AC: Right-click on ‘Sit’YU: Thanks – that’s helpful. But I might fly instead…AC: That would give you a different impression of space…YU: Meanwhile, back in space… [back to the session]

Socialisation went beyond the in-world boundary. Some students emailed each other after they met in SL and began to build their own network.We also found that the first and second stages of the 5-stage model moved faster in SL than in text-based environments. This was partly due to the provision of training and necessary support at the beginning. Students did not report any problems with the technological aspects, nor did we observe severe technological issues during learning sessions.

COMPLEX PRESEnCE THROUGH AVATARS

Students and tutors enjoyed the opportunity to interact and communicate with people in SL. However, they knew that they were not dealing with the real people. There was a mixed feeling about presence through avatars. Some felt quite easy and comfortable, as one said: “using the avatars is a very

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creative idea, you can choose your appearance, clothes and hair…” Others felt anxious and uncomfortable due to the absence of body language. Some of their comments include, “people don’t know each other well enough in SL”, “SL is a neutral space – everybody behaves nicely and politely”, “It’s difficult to make joke in SL, funny can become shocking”.

ROLE FOR SL MODERATOR

We found that there is a role for an SL moderator and an SL technologist. The tutor’s and technologist’s roles work hand in hand. The technologist focuses on providing the technical support during the in-world sessions, which allows the tutor to focus on teaching and activity-related issues.

Further work

MOOSE will continue to model SL moderation and activities for formal HE teaching and learning. The team will work with a different group consisting of second year undergraduate students studying Digital Photography at London South bank University, starting in October 2008.

We will again focus on the first two stages of the model, providing the training, and designing the activities for students to participate in SL. We have planned two SL-tivities. The first one is called ‘the storytelling’, where students need to collect digital images from SL, put them on a cube and tell a story in small groups. The second one is called ‘the exploration’, in which students explore different islands in SL, and collect evidence in relation to copyright and ethical issues to do with digital photography. The evidence will be used for group discussion.

References and resources

Salmon, G 2002, E-tivities: The Key to Active Online Learning, Routledge Falmer, London.

Salmon, G 2004, E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online, 2nd edition, Routledge Falmer, London.

Wheeler, M and Salmon, G 2008a, Second Life: Guide for Learning Group Participants. tinyurl.com/mooseSLguides (accessed 06 Oct 2008).

Wheeler, M & Salmon, G (2008b). Second Life: Guide for Moderators, tinyurl.com/mooseSLguides (accessed 06 Oct 2008).

Links

Sami Tent and the Kalasha village within Media Zoo island: slurl.com/secondlife/Media%20Zoo/170/150/17

Project blog: www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/moose Training guides: www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/moose/mooseblog/training-guides

For further information, contact:

Jaideep Mukherjee, University of LeicesterEmail: jm118@leicester.ac.uk

www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/moose/ www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/moose.aspx

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THE JISC-FUnDED OPEn HAbITAT PROJECT is piloting the use of Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) or ‘virtual worlds’, as

they are sometime known, with art and design and philosophy students. It hopes to take advantage of the sense of presence or embodiment that can occur in these environments, the persistence of objects created and the social effects of being ‘in world’ with friends/peers. The art and design students are undergraduates on a face-to-face degree at Leeds Metropolitan University, and the philosophy students are distance lifelong learners who have studied on online courses with the University of Oxford. This is a summary of some of the points that were raised in a presentation given at the ALT-C 2008 conference entitled ‘From Swords to Hairstyles: bridging the Divide between Massively Multiplayer Game Design and Second Life’.

Why Attempt to bridge the Divide?

Some of the most sophisticated activities in immersive environments takes place not in MUVEs but in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games such as World of Warcraft – commonly known as the online ‘dungeons and dragons’ genre. These games share the ‘persistence, presence and peers’ factors with MUVEs but, in contrast to a MUVE, players of MMOs share motivations to progress through the game and become part of a culture that is reinforced by the games’ designers at every opportunity. Players are nurtured from their very first contact with the environment through to the higher levels of play, learning the interface, economy, culture and narrative of the game world. This type of structured progression is not promoted by the designers of MUVEs, even though using a MUVE involves similar challenges to those faced by MMO players

Open HabitatFrom Swords to Hairstyles: bridging the Divide between Massively Multiplayer Game Design and Second Life

David White

– learning how to navigate a complex environment while attempting to understand criteria for success, negotiate legitimate activity, and gain a sense of in-world identity.

both environments contain emblems of social capital – that is, visible signs of success or expertise. One such symbol in the MMO is the sword: its size and the colour that emanates from it can be directly linked to the success and commitment of the player who owns it. In a MUVE such as Second Life, elaborate dress, complex hairstyles or a distinctive look visually mark the individual’s commitment to the world. Unlike emblems in MMOs these material trappings are subject to interpretations of style and fashion, and could also have simply been bought rather than earned. It is the subjective nature of the social capital within MUVEs, coupled with a lack of overarching narrative or ‘point’, that can make them alienating and unsatisfying.

It is possible to learn from the extensive experience of the MMO games designers when planning teaching and learning in a MUVE. Games such as World of Warcraft can be a useful ‘mirror’ to hold up to the flux of activity in creative environments such as Second Life. The MMO can be likened to a novel, intricately plotted but open to interpretation. This is contrasted with the scrapbook-like conception of the MUVE: full of possibilities but often lacking in structure. It is the educational designer’s responsibility to provide the correct level of pedagogical and ‘physical’ scaffolding1 around the MUVE to ensure that learning takes place without repressing creativity, collaboration and communication.

1. This may simply involve a low level of facilitation or mentoring.

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In this context the initial piloting activity of the Open Habitat project with the art and design students and philosophy students has foregrounded a number of issues, three of which are outlined below.

building is Easy

One of the great advantages a MUVE has over an MMO is that it can allow its users to express themselves creatively by designing clothes, buildings, topography – anything that can be realised in 3D graphics. The free market economy that arises from the production and trading of goods helps to drive creativity and the distribution of designs. In contrast, the MMO cannot allow this level of freedom because the structure of the game would instantly be corrupted by players creating the equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction and wiping out the carefully designed metrics of the game play. Unfortunately the ability to build in MUVEs is often overlooked as a creative or educational opportunity, as it is considered a high-level technical skill, one that should be taught after ‘foundation’ skills such as communication, navigation and avatar appearance2. However, to teach art and design students by taking this path would have risked disengagement as the MUVE in question, Second Life, appears irrelevant to their practice until building skills are tackled.

To mitigate this problem the art and design pilot was run in keeping with the programme’s ‘in at the deep end’ pedagogy and encouraged the students to experiment with building as soon as they sat down at the computers. To achieve this, the pilot separated the social from the practical by employing an open-source version of Second Life called OpenSim3. This allowed the tutors to provide one island each for the students in which they could experiment, building with very little social risk and without being distracted by the presence of other avatars. The OpenSim platform also provided a standard ‘Alice’ avatar whose

appearance could not be adjusted; this also reduced socially driven activity. Joining two islands together (after about an hour’s building practice) encouraged the students to move and communicate as a second avatar appeared alongside them4. Using this process the students quickly picked up basic building skills and could see the ‘point’ of the environment relative to their practice.

A Fraternity of Dots?

When entering an MMO the player ‘steps into’ a pre-defined character chosen from a selection presented by the game. This character comes complete with a distinctive look, a back story and a ‘tribal’ narrative or motivation. It is clear from the beginning that the player is stepping into a fantasy world in which to a greater or lesser extent they are role playing. In contrast to this a student attending an art and design session or a philosophical discussion in a MUVE has to make numerous choices about how they choose to present themselves and what might be appropriate behaviour. Are they role playing? Is this possible if they are already known to the group in real life? Should their avatar be a virtual version of themselves or more experimental? no clues are given by the environment and only through a process of social negotiation5 can the students become comfortable with their role in world.

Upon entering Second Life the art and design group immediately became distracted by the presence of other avatars, and felt a social pressure to individualise themselves by adjusting the default avatar they had received. About 45 minutes of modifying hairstyles and trying on different clothes followed. The students also spoke of a suspicion of other avatars, many of whom appeared to be significantly more experienced than them. The avatars that seemed to be role-playing made some of the students uncomfortable, with one commenting

2. In a social virtual world such as Second Life the ability to individualise one’s avatar is a key skill. Each avatar within a community has to have a unique look as an indication of a singular identity, to aid social communication.

3. opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

4. The two avatars were owned by students in the same real-life room. This caused some confusion as they were undecided if they should communicate through OpenSim or by simply shouting across the room.

5. This social negotiation was facilitated in the pilots by running informal activity sessions. In this case a bridge building competition for the art and design group and a trip to the ‘pub’ for the philosophy group.

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that some of the other avatars appeared to be taking their in-world persona ‘too seriously’. A number of the art and design students reported the suspicion that there could be a disconnect between the identity of an avatar and the identity of the person controlling that avatar; this was felt by the students to be a form of deception rather than a form of role play.

Once the group were transported to the more private space6 Leeds Met island they became more comfortable and started to experiment with building on their allotted area of land. Over the course of the pilot the students generally remained wary of avatars outside their immediate group but began to consider the larger community within Second Life as a potential audience for their work and as an untapped pool of knowledge and advice. The understanding that the ‘little green dots’ on the map were other individuals was, for some, a motivating factor as they experimented with their emerging art and design practice in the MUVE. The motivation was similar to that of a student who knows their work will be displayed in a public gallery for their peers and others to view. While learning in a public space such as Second Life can be risky and initially uncomfortable for the students, the benefits in terms of motivation can be significant.

The Unbearable Lightness of being(an avatar)

To begin with, the main focus for the MMO player is to complete set tasks, to collect objects and to move up through the skill levels. There is little need for subtle social communication beyond gathering the knowledge required to complete these tasks. While a game such as World of Warcraft does have demarcated ‘role play’ areas, the focus in the early stages of the game on completing tasks means that initially much of the communication between players is functional. The character on screen

becomes simply a ‘tool’ which the individual is using to progress through the game. There is a clear distinction between the identity of the on-screen character and the identity of the player at home7 In a MUVE this distinction is less clear as activity is not always within the context of a framing narrative, and there is a shared understanding that the look of the avatar has been chosen (to a greater or lesser extent) by the individual. There is an underlying assumption that an avatar represents elements of the individual’s character, whether it is a fantasy persona or simply an extension of their day-to-day personality8. From the user’s point of view other avatars become anthropomorphised ambassadors for the emotional state of the individual who owns them. Most of this effect comes from a superficial reaction to the look of the avatar, as it is generally understood that they are relatively inexpressive in non-verbal terms. The apparent emotional state of the avatar, and by association or embodiment the individual who owns it, can of course be deliberately manipulated in the services of role play. Often, however, in the context of an educational session, the individual wishes to project a picture of their true mental state.

Taking this into account, and given that individuals are generally visualised as humans, it is of note that there are few options for subtle non-verbal communication in the default set of ‘gestures’9 in Second Life. For the most part the avatar’s apparent emotional state remains disconcertingly blank, even while the user communicates a range of feelings in the text chat. In discursive situations emotions are more often expressed through ‘text speak’ shorthand rather than via the visual embodiment of the avatar. This became a problem for our philosophy students, who ceased to express their opinion on the subject under discussion as soon as they stopped typing. This was typified in a moment when the tutor enquired if a particular student was ‘ok’, to which the response was ‘yes, I’m thinking’. There was of

6. The island is not technically private but non-Leets Met avatars are unlikely to visit unless invited.

7. This is one reason why the use of voice to communicate is less alienating in an MMO than it is in a MUVE. The use of voice is better suited to a situation where a specific goal is trying to be reached, rather than in social communication within a MUVE where the avatar becomes disembodied as soon as the voice of its owner can be heard. This could be to do with our innate understanding of telephone communication and etiquette.

8. For many the avatar becomes an ‘amplification’ of their real-life persona.

9. Avatar animations that can be triggered at any point.

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‘LeedsMet island’ at the end of the first art and design pilot.

The philosophy students gather to discuss ‘identity’.

course no visual clue as to whether the individual in question was disengaged, confused, thinking or any number of other possibilities. As a result of this we hope to provide a set of ‘edu-gestures’ such as ‘I agree’, ‘I disagree’, ‘I’m confused’, ‘I’m thinking’, etc., for the project’s next round of pilots. The use of these gestures will be taught to the students in an orientation session as a key skill for in-world discussions.

From the piloting activity of the Open Habitat project a number of these principles will be generated and expanded upon. This will provide teaching practitioners with useful guides, both practical and theoretical, for taking advantage of what MUVEs can offer in terms of teaching and learning. The project runs until March 2009.

For further information, contact:

David White, project managerTel: 01865 280989Email: david.white@conted.ox.ac.uk

www.openhabitat.orgwww.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/habitat.aspx

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Introduction

PRObLEM-bASED LEARnInG (PbL) HAS become a central learning approach in many curricula, but collaborative style of learning

is threatened by the movement towards more self-directed and distance learning. The concern was such that teams at Coventry University and St George’s University of London have sought to develop new approaches that would not only counter this movement but would also create new learning spaces for problem-based learning. This project investigated, implemented and evaluated a user-focused approach to developing scenarios and materials, linking the emerging technologies of virtual worlds with interactive PbL online, to create immersive collaborative tutorials.

background

The increasing adoption of problem-based learning (PbL) and the growth in online learning each reflects the shift away from teaching as a means of transmitting information, towards supporting learning as a student-generated activity. To date, problem-based learning has been seen as a relatively stable approach to learning, delineated by particular characteristics and ways of operating. PbL was popularised in the 1980s, and in many ways it resulted in spaces where dialogic learning could take place at a time in global higher education when performative practices were on the increase. Today, this largely remains the case, but there is often little realisation that there are different types and models of PbL. In early versions of problem-based learning certain key characteristics were seen as essential. Students in small teams would explore a problem situation, and through this exploration, they were

PREVIEWProblem-based Learning in Virtual Interactive Education Worlds

Maggi Savin-Baden

expected to examine the gaps in their own knowledge and skills in order to decide what information they needed to acquire in order to resolve or manage the situation with which they were presented. The ‘problems’, also termed ‘scenarios’, are central to student learning in each component of the curriculum (modules/units). The lectures, seminars, workshops or laboratories support the inquiry process rather than transmitting subject-based knowledge.

PbLonline is a relatively new approach that combines problem-based and online learning, in recognition of the fact that students can learn collaboratively through web-based materials including text, simulations, videos and demonstrations. Resources such as chatrooms, message boards and environments have been purpose-built for PbL, both synchronously and asynchronously, on campus or at a distance. However the PREVIEW team has taken this a step further. To date there has been little in-depth discussion about the design of problem-based curricula. Instead the discussions have tended to centre on what counts as problem-based learning, ways of implementing it and types of problem-based learning (see for example Savin-baden and Major, 2004). However, whether it is a module or a whole programme that is being designed, the starting point should be a set of problem scenarios that enable students to become independent inquirers and help them to see learning and knowledge as flexible entities. PREVIEW

THE ISSUES

Existing campus-based PbL carries a legacy of limitations from its paper-base nature. The paper

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cases used in tutorials can only proceed in a single direction, and they thereby prevent the user from tracking through any wrong paths by immediately correcting the user. Such cases therefore have limited use in developing clinical reasoning, and are often unrealistic for emulating real life, where there are often several ways to tackle a problem and mistakes are often not immediately obvious. This approach is unlikely to engage online students in the same way as more complex, multi-choice scenarios. The project team has therefore created (i) specific PBL environments within Second Life, (ii) PbL scenarios (iii) strategies, guidance materials and good practice guides, all of which will be evaluated under the guidance of users, and made available to the higher education community. Practising skills within a virtual environment online offers advantages over learning through real-life practice, in particular the exposure of learners to a wide range of scenarios (more scenarios than they are likely to meet in a standard face-to-face programme) at a time and pace convenient to the learner, together with consistent feedback. It offers learners the chance to make mistakes without real-world repercussions.

Thus, the project is investigating, implementing and evaluating a user-focused approach to developing scenarios and materials, linking the emerging technologies of virtual worlds with interactive PbL online, to create immersive collaborative tutorials.

PREVIEW in Practice

based in two different curricula, PbL scenarios have been created as the starting points for learning. The courses in which this will be implemented are:

The Paramedic Foundation Degree (Second year): This course is run by the Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences (a joint faculty of St George’s and Kingston Universities). It is a three-year in-service blended learning course with 70% of its materials delivered via the institutional VLE (blackboard). The students are already in practice, and are based in Kent, Surrey, Sussex and London. This is a rapidly expanding course: 45 students this year, 120 next year.

The two to three-year part-time MA programme in Clinical Management at Coventry University is a distance and online course for those wanting to be effective health service and social care managers.

The module is one that examines the role of the manager as a leader of change, recognising the need to adapt continually to changing circumstances. It explores human responses to change and enables students to develop strategies for managing people through change processes.

PbL scenarios were developed within Second Life. The students’ avatars would be directed to the appropriate scenario for that week through a SLurl (location-based linking in Second Life) in the Institution’s VLE.

For each course, it was planned that two avatar-driven scenarios would be developed, as well as two information-driven scenarios. This has since changed and currently seven out of eight scenarios are avatar-driven.

AVATAR-DRIVEn: The PbL is set in the appropriate surroundings (e.g. at the patient’s home, in the hospital ward etc) and the patient is represented by a non-player character (nPC). Initial information is given by the nPC and the students discuss how to proceed, as in any PbL. Additional information may be presented on display screens (via text, image, video, animation or external links), note cards or sound streams or through the ‘chat’ function of any nPCs involved in the scenario.

InFORMATIOn-DRIVEn: The scenario is presented through multiple interactive screens in SL. These screens output text, images, sound and video footage as necessary. The information on display changes depending on the students’ decisions, similar to the virtual patient model already used at St George’s; the difference being SL allows multiple information screens and a collaborative environment so that the students can interact with one another as well as the scenario.

new developments for PbL in Higher Education

Specific developments have emerged as a result of this project, which have been developed in response to the need for pedagogically-driven scenarios that fit with an immersive virtual. These include:

l Chat bots – These non-player characters (nPCs) are artificially intelligent Second Life avatars,

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which respond to things said in local chat. They are used in two scenarios and take on the roles of a councillor and manager character respectively. These chat bots are programmed via a web service, which allows advanced detection of keywords and phrases. The chat bot is then assigned a real Second Life avatar, and logged in to take part in the scenario.

l Machinima – Two other scenarios feature machinima videos, which provide an overview of the virtual situation for students. A machinima is a video created in world, in real time. These were made using screen recording software called Fraps and by enabling lip sync within Second Life so the characters’ lips appeared to move when they spoke. The machinimas are then streamed into Second Life and shown on a large screen to participants.

l Holodeck – We used a Second Life object called a holodeck to allow dynamic redesign of the virtual space. The holodeck responds to commands from buttons in the virtual care home reception, and transforms the office space according to the choice made. This means we can have four different office spaces, each relevant to the specific scenario. The holodeck also generates content to the main care home building for one scenario, to give the impression of a post-fire situation.

Reflections on the project to date

Access barriers were fewer than realised but the real test will be the full-scale implementation in the next few months. Although the training provided for students was quite rudimentary, the students did request time to explore the environment and experiment with what they could do. Familiarisation often took longer than expected and we found the use of mock scenarios essential. However, what was encouraging was that interest and participation has been high and other universities took part in trials over the summer period.

Some surprises

COVEnTRy: People initially approached the scenarios in SL as “games” to which there must be a solution hidden somewhere in the virtual environment. This is a good indication that the

personality of the building and surroundings are likely to prove important in getting participants to ‘buy in’ to the scenarios.

COLLAbORATIOn: Voice versus text was very undecided between students. Some preferred text as felt it was more democratic, and students liked the ability to refer back to what had been mentioned previously in the chat logs. yet sometimes people felt that they were at a disadvantage, as by the time they had written their thoughts down, the discussion had moved on. Voice was much faster, felt ‘more natural’ and encouraged greater collaboration, as well as reducing screen clutter, although it raised some technical challenges and cannot be recorded as easily.

LEARnInG: many students found it to be a more authentic learning environment than classroom-based PbL and both students and tutors commented that it was a good way to rehearse decision making.

References

Savin-baden, M and Major, C 2004, Foundations of Problem-based Learning, Open University Press/SRHE, Maidenhead.

The PREVIEW Team are: Maggi Savin-baden, Terry Poulton, Emily Conradi, Sheetal Kavia and Luke Woodham, St George’s University of London and Cathy Tombs, Coventry University

For further information, contact:

Maggi Savin-baden, Coventry UniversityTel: 024 7615 8261Email: m.savinbaden@coventry.ac.uk

www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/preview/blog/www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/preview.aspx

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background

THE AbILITy OF GRADUATES TO IDEnTIFy skills they have gained while at university is something that employers rate highly in

selecting candidates (yorke, 2006). However, these skills are not always transparent to students, and are hidden within the curriculum (Fraser et al, 2007). In addition, students’ primary motivation for studying in HE is often to learn more about a particular subject or discipline, so the skills they are developing as part of their degree are often seen as secondary. The SkillClouds project attempts to address these issues through an exploration of the use of the tag cloud data visualisation technique that has become a distinctive feature of Web 2.0 sites (Anderson, 2007). Our hypothesis is that representing transferable skills as a “skill cloud” will be an engaging way of visualising this information for students.

Tag clouds to SkillClouds

A ‘tag’ is a keyword or descriptive term that is associated with a particular resource, such as a photograph, web page or blog posting, and is used in order to facilitate the retrieval and dissemination of that resource. In the SkillClouds project1, tag clouds will be used to represent the transferable skills that students have acquired. The skill cloud will be automatically generated for each student, based on the merging or mashing-up of institutionally generated data (from a skills database associated with courses students have taken) and student generated data.

SkillClouds

Understanding skills: individual and institutional perspectives

John Davies, Carol Shergold, Stuart Lamour and Judith Good

Methods

We have adopted a user-centred design approach to inform development and carried out a number of activities. This brief paper will focus on how the SkillClouds approach has been informed by:

l User centred design sessions with several small groups of students.

l Card sorting activity in which we presented students with a number of goal statements and asked them to group them in any way that made sense to them.

l Interviews with careers advisors to explore the issues about students engagement with skills.

l One-to-one interviews with students in which they gave feedback on a prototype skills tag cloud.

Either sessions were recorded and later transcribed, or detailed notes were made during the interviews. Some sessions were also recorded on video.

Results: Mapping the divide – why is it difficult think about skills? Some of the students we interviewed said that the notion of skills was a ‘turn-off’ and that rather than talking about skills, it would be better to talk about the ‘things you enjoy doing’ or ‘things you learn as part of your degree’. Those who could define their skills still found it difficult to bridge the gap between making sense of what they had done in the university context with what employers want. There was a general feeling from students we interviewed that skills were not foregrounded within the curriculum and that 1. See www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds

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transferable skills were not mentioned on the courses they took:

“It’s quite difficult. We don’t say – ‘right, we’re learning this skill and this skill’, we just say we’re writing an essay or doing whatever course – it’s not thought of in terms of skills.”

Some students felt that the skills tended to be the same across all courses. There was some notion that course designers cut and pasted the skills from one course to another:

“They put it in our course documents, our skills or learning objectives or something, but I don’t think anyone ever reads that, because they all say the same thing.”

This perception was actually backed up by the views of one lecturer at the University:

“When filling out course forms, I tend to cut and paste the same generic skills from one form to another […] lecturers are asked to provide a set of generic skills which don’t ‘go anywhere’, as it were: there is no requirement for the skills to be mapped onto the course assessments, nor do they appear on the course web page..”

In general, students we spoke to were not particularly keen to add their own activities and related skills (stakeholders in the institution had identified this as a high priority for the project) to their cloud. If we unpack this set of responses we can conclude that:

l students may ignore information about transferable skills because they feel it lacks authenticity and freshness and is not directly relevant to them

l staff may copy and paste information about transferable skills from one course to another because they see no evidence that it is utilised by the institution or students

From this work, we realised that the key issue to engaging students around skills was to find ways of presenting credible, authentic and personalised information about their skills.

2. www.ipragma.com/xsort

Skills information requirements

To gain an insight into students’ information requirements on skills, we undertook an open card sorting exercise (see for example Morville et al 2006). nine students were asked to group a number of statements (information goals) that related to skills and to rank the importance of the groups they created and the statements within each group. The information goal statements were derived from the interviews held with students as part of the initial user-centred design sessions. An example of a statement is ‘I’d like to see how I have used this skill in a course’. The resulting data were analysed with cluster analysis using XSort2. We were able to identify four distinct clusters that we felt could be framed around a user journey, where students move through stages of increasing complexity associated with skills (Table 1).

Table 1: This shows information which students at Sussex stated they would like to have in order to help them to understand, access and apply their skills.

The most highly ranked information goals were the extremely basic ones in Stage 1, suggesting that students identified themselves as requiring fundamental grounding in understanding their skills. The information presented in the user journey introduced the notion of the need for scaffolding around the skills students had. The insight into students’ user journeys helped us to understand why students were not keen to add skills of their own, as

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we realised that perhaps they were still looking to the institution to explain key basic concepts rather than feeling ready to create information for themselves. This user journey reminded us of the SCOnUL (Society for College, national and University Libraries) model for Information Literacy (SCOnUL, 2007).

We explored the extent to which these stages matched expectations of careers advisors at Sussex. They were somewhat surprised that students were asking for very basic information about skills and recognised that this journey could provide useful scaffolding for helping advisors to frame discussions with students.

The SkillClouds user interface

We are currently using the information we have presented above to guide and shape the design of a skills interface tool for students.

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Conclusions and next steps

The tool is being developed with iterative cycles of development and user testing. Initial comments from students have been positive. We will undertake formal testing during the Autumn term 2008 with groups of Science and Arts students, and will use the results of this to make recommendations to the University about the resource implications and potential benefits of rolling out the SkillClouds system for all students. We are exploring approaches that will support students adding in their own skills.

Acknowledgements

The University of Sussex and the SkillClouds team are grateful to JISC for funding this work and for the support offered in the Users and Innovations programme.

References

Anderson, P 2007, What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education, JISC Standards and Technology Watch, www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf (last accessed 26-Sept-2007) .

Fraser, G, Crook, A C and Park, J R 2007, ‘A tool for mapping research skills in undergraduate curricula’, Bioscience Education Journal, 9-1.

Morville, P and Rosenfeld, L 2006, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd edition, O’Reilly, Sebastopol Ca.

SCOnUL 2007, The Seven Headline Skills expanded, www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/headline_skills.html.

yorke, M 2003, Briefings on Employability 4: Encouraging the Development of Employability, ESECT.

For further information, contact:

John DaviesEmail: J.M.Davies@sussex.ac.uk

www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/skillclouds.aspx

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FEEDbACK On STUDEnT WORK IS A problem in higher education. On the one hand, students often complain they get too little, too

late, and that they sometimes struggle to read or understand what they do get. On the other, staff may be heard grumbling that they spend ages assessing students’ assignments, but that as students are only interested in their mark, they do not read the feedback. Worse still, some do not even bother to collect it!

Could technology help? Some years ago, Rust suggested using audiotape.While reducing the time you spend, this may actually increase rather than reduce the amount of feedback given … Students frequently say that they get far more information from taped comments, including the tone of one’s voice, than they do from written comments, and they also do not have to try to cope with some of our illegible writing. (Rust 2001: 22)

but the idea did not catch on. Perhaps it was partly because of the clunky technology of the time: audio cassettes. Since then, digital audio has arrived: ‘ripping’ music CDs, Skype and the ‘Listen Again’ facility on the bbC website are but a few examples, and many students have MP3 players. Digital audio is easy to record, manipulate and transport. I wondered whether it would be worth trying to use it for feedback.

My first experience (Rotheram 2007) was very positive and encouraging. The students were new lecturers on a PGCHE programme, where the norm was to provide extensive feedback on each assignment – 500 words or so. This used to take me quite a while to write, but I was soon able to save time by recording my comments with the free

Sounds Good

Using digital audio for assessment feedback: Sounds Good

Bob Rotheram

software package ‘Audacity’, and sending each student an MP3 file containing their feedback. They loved it, noted its highly personal nature and said that it engaged them more than written comments. Clearly, using digital audio feedback benefited both me and the students.

The opportunity for a larger trial came when the Users and Innovation programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded Sounds Good: Quicker, better assessment using audio feedback. Running between January and July 2008, this pilot project involved 17 Leeds Met staff, teaching various subjects at different educational levels. They used digital audio (video, in one instance) to record formative and summative feedback on students’ coursework, mainly in MP3 format. The feedback was delivered through several channels, including email and a virtual learning environment. Student numbers on the various modules ranged from six to 151. At least 463 students received one or more items of audio or video feedback.

We cannot rely heavily on the results. The team was probably untypical of higher education teachers: they were volunteers, and most of them had been recognised by the University for their abilities in, and commitment to, assessment, learning and teaching. In addition, their project activities differed considerably. In truth, Sounds Good generated sixteen case studies, some very small, about the use of digital audio or video.

That said, what learning points have emerged? The project plan contained five main evaluation questions:

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1. (WITHOUT REDUCInG THE AMOUnT OF FEEDbACK) In WHAT CIRCUMSTAnCES CAn USInG DIGITAL AUDIO SAVE ASSESSORS’ TIME?

Only a small minority of staff said that using digital audio saved them time; the largest group thought it took about the same time; the rest felt digital audio or video feedback took more time than their usual methods.

This might be regarded as disappointing. However, most team members expressed satisfaction and noted that students received more, higher-quality, feedback than otherwise. Some staff acknowledged that they got quicker as they became familiar with the technology and techniques. Some who found audio feedback took them more time, or about the same time, only used it with a small number of students. So, arguably, they had not achieved full familiarity by the end of their involvement.

On this experience, an assessor seems most likely to save time by using audio when s/he:

l gives a substantial amount of feedback;l is comfortable with the technology;l writes slowly but records speech quickly.

2. DOES DIGITAL AUDIO FEEDbACK IMPROVE STUDEnTS’ LEARnInG EXPERIEnCE?

Students were overwhelmingly positive about receiving audio feedback on their coursework. They frequently made approving remarks on its personal nature and the detail it contained, evidence that the lecturer had considered their work carefully. There was particular approval if the feedback was received quickly. Some appreciated the advantage of replaying the recording. Others noted that audio made it easier to grasp what the lecturer felt was most important, or that it helped them understand better why they had received a particular mark. Students whose first language is not English were pleased that it gave additional practice with their listening skills. A dyslexic student said it was easier to listen than to read.

On the other hand, some students had reservations. A minority said they preferred written feedback; a few asked for audio and written comments on their work.

3. WHAT DO ASSESSORS THInK OF DIGITAL AUDIO AS A MEDIUM FOR PROVIDInG FEEDbACK TO STUDEnTS?

The Sounds Good staff team were, on balance, strongly in favour of audio feedback. Some noted it was more likely than written comments to include examples illustrating the point being made or showing how the work might be improved. A language tutor said, “It’s an interesting and personal way to do the feedback for language students.” Some remarked positively that they used more natural language when speaking, rather than writing, their feedback. This, one teacher thought, made it more understandable to students, particularly when it contained ‘feed-forward’ implications for future assignments. One team member noted that students found her voice and tone reassuring and comforting. Another, citing widening participation initiatives, reported that audio feedback “is an ideal medium to assist in the development of skills and confidence.”

4. WHAT RECOMMEnDATIOnS ARE THERE FOR IMPROVED PRACTICE?

Experience from Sounds Good suggests the following:

l Do not expect to save time immediately by giving audio feedback rather than writing it. As with most new skills, it takes a while to become competent, longer to become expert. Some persistence will be required. you may feel fairly comfortable after 10-20 attempts.

l How much time you eventually save will depend on factors such as how much feedback you give and how quickly you write. If you normally only check some boxes and write a few words of feedback, using audio probably won’t save time. However, after some practice, audio may allow you to give noticeably more feedback without spending much longer on the task.

l Consider accepting a longer pay-back period. Maybe spending more time in the short term, using audio to give your students more extensive advice and richer feedback, will save you and your colleagues work in the long term.

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l A handheld audio recorder will probably be more convenient than using a microphone connected to a computer.

l If you’re buying a handheld recorder, make sure it: – can record direct to MP3 (many can’t); – has a USB port, for easy upload to a computer.

l Aim for the minimum acceptable sound quality for the particular purpose.

l 32kbps MP3 – about four minutes per megabyte – will probably be good enough for giving individual feedback to a student.

l Make sure key administrative and quality-assurance staff accept that you are giving audio rather than written feedback.

l Keep the files short – do not ‘overdo it’. Often two to three minutes will be enough.

The project report contains a fuller list: web.mac.com/simonft/Sounds_Good/Documents_files/Sounds_Good_%20Evaluation_10.doc

5. WHAT SHOULD bE EXPLORED nEXT?

JISC has funded ‘Sounds Good 2’, to run between September 2008 and March 2009. The Sounds Good team will continue to use audio feedback. In addition, the project design calls for six of them each to induct two Leeds Met colleagues into using audio for feedback. The techniques will also be introduced to three more institutions.

Money is tight but, if resources permit, the project will try to explore these questions:

l Can staff become quicker in providing audio feedback if they persist?

l Does using audio to provide more extensive guidance and richer feedback lead to saving staff time in the medium-to-long term?

l How may the practice guidelines be improved?

l Can we automate the transmission of feedback files to students?

l Does the novelty of audio – for students and staff – wear off with repeated use?

Conclusion

Sounds Good has shown that many students prefer digital audio, rather than written feedback on their work. nearly all the project staff prefer it too, because it enables them to serve learners better. Most assessors aren’t yet saving time, but perhaps this will come with further experience. We feel we are onto something!

References

Rotheram, b 2007, ‘Using an MP3 recorder to give feedback on student assignments’, Educational Developments, Issue 8.2, Spring.

Rust, C 2001, A Briefing on Assessment of Large Groups, teaching.econ.usyd.edu.au/UoS/library/A%20Briefing%20on%20Assessment%20of%20Large%20Groups.pdf (Accessed 26.9.08).

For further information, contact:

bob Rotheram Tel: 0113 812 9045Email: b.rotheram@leedsmet.ac.uk

www.soundsgood.org.ukwww.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/usersandinnovation/soundsgood.aspx

Users and Innovation Programme Project PresentationsAssociation for Learning Technology Conference 2008

Further information about JISC: Web: www.jisc.ac.uk Email: info@jisc.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)117 33 10789

Document No: 497Version 1.01 December 2008