We are looking to recruit a Learning Technologist. Closing date is 3rd June
Here are the bare bone details
London School of Economics
Centre for Learning Technology
Learning Technologist
£38,212 – £44,624 PA
An experienced Learning Technologist is required to join an active team.
Click here for further details
Informal enquiries to Steve Ryan
I have been looking at Drupal as part of a slow burning project which is aiming to create a repository for language teachers to share teaching resources. The project is a collaboration between 3 universities but will initially run as a pilot for the French department at LSE. It’s still in the development stage but some real resources will be added soo. Project >>
Drupal is essentially a content management system – see for example HarvardScience & MiNa – with social software features built-in: tagging, blogging, RSS etc. It’s open source and one of the areas we’d like to explore, is content sharing through possible integration with Moodle, our virtual learning environment. At present integration only seems to go as far as single sign on which is aimed at those who might be using Drupal for a portal or intranet site alongside Moodle as a VLE. One of the aims of the OpenAcademic project is to integrate Drupal, Moodle & MediaWiki but it’s not clear how far this has got. That project has produced DrupalEd which is a pre-configured version of Drupal for use as either “a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment”.
As Steve has comprehensively blogged on this already: day1, day2 I’ll just add a few comments on e-portfoilos and some more stuff coming our way from the OU.
E-Portfolios
These have always been on the edge of my radar but they were highlighted in Martin Dougiamas’ keynote for v2 and again in Niall Sclater’s excellent review of the thinking on the future of VLEs / PLEs. Without really planning to I ended up spending most of day 2 looking at portfolios. The idea with regard to Moodle is that external E-portfolio systems will plugin to Moodle allowing for data to pass from Moodle to the E-portfolio.
So what is an e-portfolio and how might it be used? For me the best starting point is how the OU have named their own home-grown system: MyStuff which is an open source plugin to moodle to be released soon. It is intended as a personal space for students to create, organise & store their ‘stuff’: files, links etc and allows students to make them available to who they wish. The other system featuring highly at the Moot was Mahara (open source from NZ) which seems to go further and includes a CV Builder and social software tools. I liked the way the Mahara team were talking about developing links to other systems such as YouTube & Flickr, so not everything has to be in Mahara.
I missed Niall Sclater’s closing keynote from the previous report, mainly because I was writing it during his talk (sorry Niall). But it was good, delving into the debate about the role of VLEs in a world of personalised learning. He outlined various possible approaches, such as:
In the process he mentioned the OU’s new “Moodle on a stick” – an offline Moodle that can be synchronised with a central server. This is due to be released soon – by end of 2007 probably.
His conclusions were that none of these setups is yet wholly convincing, and that the VLE still has a place in formal learning. Future PLE clients and e-portfolios will certainly have a role to play, but probably in concert with a VLE.
So, on to day 2 highlights:
Jonathan Fine from OU ran through some applications of MathTran, his system for processing TeX in web pages and serving up the output as images on the fly. There seem to be a lot of these systems knocking about, but this one is very impressive. Jonathan admitted that jsMath is also a very strong rival, and said that where jsMath wins on layout, his system wins on speed.
In the last session of the day, Peter van der Hijden argued that the Moodle “World” was growing out of control and that it needed more structure. His solution is the formation of local Moodle associations, and used the Dutch Ned-Moove group as an example of how such groups can support users and developers. He argued that such groups should encourage personal membership, rather than having institutional representatives, to empower users of Moodle.
Steve
The electronic course pack service is available to all VLE users (WebCT or Moodle). This allows you to request small extracts of core readings which are scanned and made available to your students through their online course. If you wish to take advantage of this service the deadline for submissions for the Michaelmas Term is 31st July 2007. If you used the service last year you will be shortly getting a message from us about ‘renewing’ these readings and we will also be shortly sending you usage statistics of your current readings. Requests or queries about the service should be e-mailed to epacks@lse.ac.uk
Please note:
* You must have a course in the VLE (either WebCT or Moodle)
* Normally no more than 20 core readings can be included in a pack each term
* Extracts should be no more than 5% of work / one chapter from a book / one article from a journal issue
* Only readings NOT available in electronic format will be scanned – so please check the e-journal collections at LSE
* Readings should be covered by the CLA Scanning Licence which essentially means small extracts from UK publishers – we cannot guarantee being able to obtain copyright clearance for non-UK readings as these can be very expensive
New E-Pack User Guidelines available. If you wish to take advantage of the e-course pack service please read the notes for users before compiling a request. These are available at: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/Online-Readings/E-Course-Pack-User-Guidelines.php If you are interested in paper course pack services please visit the Course Pack One Stop Shop website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/tss/OSS/OSS.htm
Have anyone across this? It is a kind of word processor, designed for scientists but produces teX files. So complex equations can be copied and pasted into moodle. It also says it is good for producing structured documents like reading lists
From the link above
“LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, ‘finger painting’ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth’s legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output — or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced — looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes ‘eating’ your dissertation the evening before going to press.
LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.”
Not tried it yet but the screen grabs are very impressive. It could be useful.
Following a year of evaluation, LSE has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment.
We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:
A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community.
Some brief notes from this event attended by around 30 participants at Nottingham Trent University:
Wimba Update – Good news from Jessica D’Souza… Moodle integration will be available for late April. I was also reminded that v5.1 is a free upgrade which includes:
Version 5.1 allows for 20mins recordings (and longer if files are imported).
This’ll be a quick post as my tired old legs need a rest. Just a note on the Blackboard ‘next generation’ talk (presented by the head of product development) that I attended yesterday afternoon. This was generally disappointing as it was a rehash of the opening keynote with a little more detail, but it still managed to be suitably vague. Bb confirmed that they’re extending support for WebCT 4 CE for those that want to wait for Blackboard 2.0/NG or whatever they choose to call it (hey, they even refer to it verbally as WebCT rather than Blackboard Learning System CE 4 blah blah blah). It strikes me then that there is little incentive to migrate to CE6 in the near future if there are going to be further changes down the line and waiting is now ‘officially’ an option. They also outlined how they see the future Blackboard Academic Suite architecture as a framework for linking a whole number of Blackboard and non-Blackboard systems together – including… Moodle as some sort of ‘niche’ VLE within the Blackboard universe. See ‘Other 3rd party CMS or LMS’ in the diagram below.
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| From Blackboard Conference 2007 |
Just attended an interesting session on how Sheffield Hallam University provide Blackboard support for their staff – essentially they outsource their first line support for basic technical queries, thus allowing SHU staff to concentrate on pedagogical and more in depth questions.
Before that I listened to a discussion about the application of blog, wiki, podcasting and other ’emerging technologies’ for teaching and learning. There were a few people trying similar things to LSE, one person even plans to use Elgg to support their PhD community – didn’t get a chance to chat unfortunately. But generally I got the impression that wikis and blogs haven’t become ‘mass market’ anywhere else yet (at least nobody from Warwick piped up).
It looks like this is going to be my final post from the conference as they’re packing up the cyber-cafe around me – guess I’d better go and catch the end of the final session – Blackboard’s approach to open-source; should be fun.
In yesterday afternoon’s session, I attended the “Blackboard listening session”, with senior members of the board arrayed before us like contestants on University Challenge. There was very little discussion of the Blackboard Academic Suite: almost everyone wanted to talk about the Vista/CE6 product line.
Bb have committed to extending the open API layers for all their products. This is primarily to enable better integration with external systems, but also, one hopes, to expose information stashed safely away in the database, presently protected from the impious meddlings of systems administrators.
One delegate noted that there were diagnostic and performance tuning tools available to the sysadmins at Blackboard hosting services that aren’t currently available to the poor souls who have chosen to support the system in-house. Sadly many of these products are proprietary tools not belonging to Blackboard, so they can’t be released. They have promised, however, to release some “best practice” guides and improve the “reference architecture” so we can find out what the thing is up to.
Inevitably our attention turned to the thorny issue of stability. One delegate said they were now having trouble “defending the product” to the user community. We were told that Blackboard had learned from a bad version upgrade from 5.5 to 6 for their Academic Suite, and were now much better at running an “enterprise development shop” than were their colleagues at WebCT. The core development and maintenance teams had been separated so the product could continue to evolve while bugfixing went on elsewhere. The beta release programme is now being extended to Application Pack 2 for CE6 and Vista, and time on developing this release is almost 100% focussed on stability & scalability issues. AP2 is being presented as an end to all our woes, but the release date may yet be too close to the start of the academic year.
