Online Educa Berlin 2007 - Intro

Online Educa Berlin 2007, one of the largest - if not the largest - gatherings in Europe on educational technology, is a place where you can meet about 2000 colleagues from more than 100 countries in formal and informal settings. Last year, I participated together with a large representation from AVNet. The Flemish EdTech community was represented in the form of two edubloggers, who were given reporter status and had thus access to the press room and facilities.
Also this year, a large AVNet/EuroPACE contingent is present, but I have also run into two Flemish and a number of Dutch edubloggers, so there will be no shortage of blog posts about the conference.
I will be actively involved in three things here in Berlin:

• on Thursday, I chair a joint session of a number of major European IST research projects (TENCompetence, Prolix and Aposdle, amongst others) on the openness of the infrastructures that are arising to support lifelong learning
• on Friday, I will do a presentation in one of the parallel streams on the current status of the OUNL elo2b project (see previous posts on this topic). Problem here is that I don't really know what I am allowed to divulge, as this is considered as a strategically critical project. I'll have to find a middle ground between general and not-too-specific.
• During the conference exhibition, we will also take turns in 'manning' the TENCompetence boot, so I will probably be somewhere in that general area on Friday.

But the informal part is often the best part. Just had a very enjoyable dinner with Fred Truyen from K.U.Leuven, and will be having lunch with Marc Dupuis from Leiden University on Thursday. I hope to meet many of my former AVNet and Elise colleagues, and have a philosophical drink with Tom Wambeke.
Should you come looking for me: try the EuroPACE booth, as it worked pretty well as a pivotal point last year! (Bottom part of the pic). I'll try to blog in the evenings, but I'll most probably be using Twitter to keep track of sessions and interesting ideas.

OUNL Learning and Working environment (Final)

Don't misunderstand the title of this post: the final word has not yet been said about the OUNL PLWE (personal learning and working environment). There will be many more meetings like this - maybe not always ending with a beer ;-)
The meeting ended on a very positive note, with all participants congratulating Kathleen and Rob - the initiators of the Dagstuhl conference - on the positive and open atmosphere that they succeeded in creating. The atmosphere was indeed very good and productive. In the morning plenary session both subgroups presented the work that they had done during the Wednesday and Thursday sessions. It was quite amazing to see how much can be achieved in a week!
After the coffee break we split up in two groups again, and our group went to a room with a very nice stove (see pic) to develop a first implementation plan for the service that we had chosen to develop as a first.
Then after our final lunch - the food at Dagstuhl is of quite good quality, by the way - we had a final plenary to decide on the internal communication strategy to follow in relation to the outcomes of the Dagstuhl conference, and to evaluate the conference progress and outcomes. Everyone was very pleased (as I mentioned before), and there are plans for a quick follow-up at the start of January, in order to keep the momentum. I found out that this kind of top management meetings is very rare at the OUNL - the previous one was estimated to have taken place some decades ago ;-). It was suggested that this kind of plenary management meeting about strategic directions might need to be repeated every second year or so.

As to the near future: next week Tuesday the University Board will be hearing Rob's report on the outcomes and will be asked to decide on the principles of the new direction, and to take actions to warrant the continuation of the work that we started in the past week.

Henry and I will be working together with Kathleen and Rob to finalise the report of the conference and to discuss the next steps for our elo2b project.

OUNL learning and working environment (Part 2)

The 5-day strategy seminar on the OUNL learning and working environment for the future is nearing its completion.

• On Tuesday, we finished the presentations with Bert's contribution on the role of the Ruud de Moor Centre for teacher professionalisation, Huub & Ron's duo-presentation on the service and ICT support centres. Rob concluded with the presentation of the Master in Active Learning, and a heated discussion of the role of OTEC in the future learning and working environment.
• We then started with the discussion of how we want to further develop and position the OUNL lifelong learning activities (other than the courses and programmes we offer) in our search for a lifelong relationship between learners and the OUNL, with an attractive offering of services and contents.

• Starting Tuesday lunchtime, we split up in two groups in order to make our visions of the future of our regular (Bachelor/master - BaMa) and our lifelong learning (LLL) offerings more explicit, through scenario's, high level use cases and a domain model. While Kathleen chaired the BaMa group with support from Henry, Rob chaired the lifelong learning group with support from Hubert and myself.
  
• We used Google Docs to collaboratively work on documents and used Gliffy for the diagrams. All the sources, working documents and multimedia materials were made accessible through a private Wetpaint Wiki that Rob had set up. Nice tool that, really impressive. The dialogue between the two groups in the last two days was limited to informal moments during lunch or dinner, or after working hours. But we were able to read the working documents that the others were building.
• Today, while the managers in the LLL sub-group developed a rough business case for the service we chose to develop first, Hubert and I worked on formalising some of the free-text scenarios. We soon discovered that even at such a high level of abstraction, our ideas for LLL services are extremely complex, involving many different concepts and actors. However, the exercise has helped to make the design process more concrete for all participants, and has allowed us to identify some critical issues that still need to be resolved.
• Whereas the BaMa group had succeeded in taking some distance from the current situation during the development of the scenario's, this turned out to become more difficult as soon as the task became more concrete. For us in the LLL group things were a bit different, as we could start from scratch as it were, and in developing our scenario's the limitations of the current situation were less of an obstacle.
  
• For me as a newcomer in the OUNL it was striking to see how organisational obstacles and defensive mechanisms come into play when discussing the practical plans and task divisions of such a large project. There seem to be a lot of unresolved issues between the different entities in the organisation, and I am not sure that good process can be made as long as there are such forceful hidden agenda's. But then I am only a by-stander in this process.
• Also for the LLL group the management and organisational issues have not been sufficiently dealt with yet, at least not from my perspective. There are issues of overlap with other projects and initiatives, there are issues of development and programming capacity, and so on.
  
• I hope that we can end the meeting on a positive note tomorrow noon, and that we can agree on follow-up activities for the next month, that can lead to implementation and management plans that are acceptible to all parties. In my view, a co-ordinated approach is needed to tackle the issues that lie ahead. The ideal situation would be one were all those that are actively involved would work closely together - also literally in close vicinity to each other - to get the critical mass and cross-fertilisation that is needed to pull this major undertaking of.

• Anyway, we continued working in separate groups, right up until 9:30 this evening - thereby skipping our social event. Yesterday and today the evening only started around 10:00. Henry, Hubert and I would play some billard, and then join the others in the Weinstube for some bread and cheese and a German Weissbeer.

Continuing debate on loosely coupled vs. integrated VLE's

Martin Weller's claim that "The VLE/LMS is dead", has started an interesting discussion that continues to rage (especially within the walls of the British Open University, with Niall Sclater and Grainne Conole chipping in - read more about it here, here, here, here and here).
In my view the intermediate conclusion is formulated by Martin as follows:

I guess what I'm suggesting is a kind of middle ground between the institutional, one size fits all VLE and the complete anarchy of a PLE. We allow educators to use tools available elsewhere, while making recommendations, and concentrate on providing a framework to use these within (both technical and pedagogic).

I don't expect this to happen quickly, but I do get a sense we are approaching the tipping point. This will be realised through a range of tools which are easy to use and familiarity amongst educators and students.

In my view, some of the critical applications will be centrally managed within an institutional VLE, while others will be "out there". In the end, it does relate to the trade-off between control and freedom. Why not put some of that trade-off in the hands of the individual teacher / student?

Your space or mine?
Just previous to the previous statement, Martin suggested:

If universities are using third party systems I don't think students will care particularly, as long as they are getting the best experience they can.

Interestingly, in his next post - where do you find the time, Martin? - he goes on to quote the Guardian article "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on a JISC study. On the basis of this study one might argue that students do care about using third-party systems that they want to use for private purposes.

Makes you wonder, no? Do universities invade their students' personal spaces when they suggest using publicly available tools such as Facebook? We briefly touched upon that discussion in the OUNL as well last week. Is it smart to start mixing up one's different social networks? I'm not sure. My Facebook 'friends' consist of relatives, real-life friends, colleagues, study friends, ex-colleagues, and even complete strangers that know me through a friend-of-a-friend.
On the whole - if one chooses to - the barriers between the different niches in our lives can be blurred. Others may choose a much stricter policy regarding the individuals they allow as friends. I read that Facebook will make it possible in the future to "Sort out ones friends":

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

Would be good if they can extend these roles to the applications as well. That way, my friends would know that I'm interested in comic books and astrology, and my colleagues would know wich events I want to attend and in which e-learning groups I participate. Is that a task for Facebook 2.0?

OUNL learning and working environment (Part 1)

Senior management of the Open University of the Netherlands are currently on a 1-week strategy session in Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany, where they are discussing and drafting the model for the future ICT-support for OUNL education. The "VLE of the future" project leaders - Henry and myself - are there too in order to present the project findings sofar, to participate in the discussions as domain experts, and to model the outcomes of the discussions into Use Cases and a Domain Model - thus taking a head start in the design of the new system(s).

The schedule of the week - chaired by Rob Koper - is rather full, with plenary and parallel discussion and working sessions in the mornings and afternoons, while Henry and I use the evening sessions to allow our colleagues to explore Web2.0 applications that can be used within education (cf. picture above). This evening we had a hands-on session about mash-up (iGoogle), RSS and del.icio.us, which our colleagues seemed to appreciate, as they prepare to become more "net savvy".

The day sessions w mainly focused on reporting on the current state-of-the-art within the institution.

• The University Board members provided us with a clear outline of the relevant decisions and directions, and of the goals of the strategy week.
• During the morning session, Jeroen presented the current state of the enterprise architecture initiative and the main figures about student populations, followed by Kathleen's summary of the discussions about the OUNL's educational model, and her report on the current state of the VLE - with Blackboard as its central element. After Cees' presentation of the current costs of the VLE provision, it was my turn to present the main principles of the future VLE - or PLWE as we prefer to say. However, the lunch bell prevented me from discussing the life-long learning scenario, which will probably become the main topic for discussion during the remainder of the week.

• After a brisk autumn walk to the ruins of the old castle, Stef presented the current status of the Web2008 project, that intends to develop a new customer-oriented portal for the OU. This presentation gave rise to quite some comments and questions, as it closely interlinks with the PLWE and architecture initiatives.
  
• Stef's presentation was followed by the deans of the faculties who presented the current issues of each faculty, their wishes with regard to the PLWE, and to the current processes.
• We did not succeed in finishing the presentations, so tomorrow morning will continue.

On the whole, the discussions were quite constructive in my view, and similar issues seem to arise in the different parts of the organisation, even though each faculty has its own student population, and operates in a different market with different requirements with regard to education. We were presented with quite a lot of valuable information, which we now need to narrow down and condensate into concrete models and later into a general implementation plan. More to come...

VLE of the future - current status

I want to briefly report on the status of our project on the OUNL's VLE of the future. When the project started in February, the goal was to write an advice for the University Board about the technology needed to support the OUNL's future educational activities. For me - as a newcomer at OUNL - it was not clear what the future educational strategy of the OUNL was, and interviews with stakeholders showed that I was not the only one in that position. I need to add that clear choices were made by the University Board at the end of 2006, but my perception during a round of interviews was that the implications of those choices were not clear to all those involved. The following double choice was made:

• On the one hand, the main objective remains to offer Dutch-spoken academic courses and bachelor and master degrees for open and distance learning. Target groups here are those that want to combine education and work, or never had the chance to study before. Underlying this is a supply-based business model, centred around high-quality self-study materials with minimal coaching.
  
• Next to that, there is growing activity in more targeted areas, where lifelong learners with fragmented learning needs are the target audience. Basic resources for this activity is the existing supply of course materials and of human expertise that can be used in other settings and for other audiences. Also partnerships with other colleges and shorter programmes are offered in this area. The business model for these activities is not quite clear yet - as is the case for most institutions in this rapidly changing area. The student is very much in the centre of this model, and the OUNL wants to be able to offer services and content that provide added value in a way that clients will want to pay for the services.

In order to try and clarify some of the implications of these choices on ICT tooling, the project developed a number of extreme scenario's of the future. These scenario's were not meant as distinct future directions for the institution, but rather as vehicles for bringing across the message that

different business choices imply different business processes (and staff skills) and that different business processes imply different ICT support tools.

I think we may have formulated the message somewhat too pointedly, but as a result I think the message came through.

Next to the scenario's, we formulated a number of basic principles for the future VLE, which we have now given the working title "Personal Learning and Working Environment" (PLWE). These principles are:

1. Every student his/her own learning environment: personalisation & flexible delivery are important key words. We need to offer an integrated portal entry as well as feeds, widgets and web clients that feed into mash-up tools such as iGoogle, Netvibes or Pageflakes. Moreover, the student is in control of the functionality and tools that (s)he wants to use.
   
2. The PLWE needs to support the complete educational process for teachers, tutors and students, and not just the delivery of course materials and interaction (the so-called exploitation processes). The PLWE needs to offer services and functionality for the design, assembly, and delivery of courses / learning materials, for teaching and tutoring, for community building, and finally for the management and maintenance of educational materials and activities.
3. The student and his/her learning are central to the PLWE, and these need to be supported by the most appropriate digital tools. However, the PLWE needs to be at the same level of priority within the organisation.
4. Cohesion through architecture: business choices need to be aligned with business processes, with systems and applications, with information and ICT infrastructure. This cohesion needs to take the form of an integrated design that warrants long-term sustainability.
5. Open standards allow technical components and services to communicate. Moreover, as the OUNL is a small institution, the importance of partnerships and alliances will increase, thus enhancing the importance of (open) standards.
6. One single infrastructure for all current and future markets and product-market combinations will increase the potential for functional synergies.
   
7. Open Source software enhances the extension and adaptation possibilities of the PLWE. Next to that, the OUNL is a public institution mainly funded with public money, and the public can benefit from the software that is developed for the PLWE.
8. Finally, the PLWE needs to have an experimental setup, next to its production environment to allow faculties and staff to research, develop and test new tools and methods. An easy transition from experimental to production environment is needed.

Next week, OUNL management will discuss these issues and make some decisions about them. More to follow.

Is the VLE/LMS dead

Martin Weller states: "The VLE/LMS is dead", but I am not sure I agree with him, at least not for formal education settings.

• Sure, the freely available tools on the Internet are much more fun, and do not feel as 'awkward' as the tools in monolithic VLE's, but as Niall Sclater said:"(formal) Education is not meant to be fun, it's meant to be hard work"
• I feel that the issue of control is more important than Martin argues, because educational institutions are legally forced to keep local copies of all learning materials and their students' learning outputs for reasons of quality control and accreditation, or in case students want to contest exam results.
• Thirdly, not all higher ed teachers - or students for that matter - are as technologically savvy as we think them to be. There is something to be said for learning from a book in your backyard, and attending face-to-face tutorials or lectures. Differences in learning style and preferences need to be accounted for...

If I come up with other arguments, I'll post them later.

Visit from the OU (UK)

Yesterday and the day before, Niall Sclater - programme manager of the UK Open University's VLE - visited the Open Universiteit Nederland (OUNL). Next week, the OUNL management will be spending a week at the Dagstuhl castle to discuss implementation issues of the OUNL's future strategy, especially with regard to its educational model and the ICT instrumentation to support that model. Therefore it was good to have Niall over, and hear his take on the OU-UK's choice for Moodle, and the experiences with it so far.

We had some pretty good discussions and a nice dinner and Niall was nice enough to give two presentations to a select group of stakeholders within the OUNL, some of whom will be present at the strategy week. Even though our educational models are somewhat different, we have a lot of issues and problems in common. We have decided to take these issues as a starting point for a further close collaboration. So in the coming weeks, you will find a list of issues emerging on the elo2b weblog at edublogs. Kathleen (our Programme Manager), Henry (my fellow project leader) and myself will contribute to that list, and discuss the issues.
After the strategic week, we can see how we can extend our collaboration.

About my blogging - NOT

I know, I know. It's been too long since I blogged on Stievie. Been Twittering and Facebooking too much, I guess. However, I have been keeping up-to-date with a number of EdTech blogs via Netvibes, and I have learned a lot in this past half year (through lurking, but still - you'll find my reading sources on del.icio.us).
But I do find it hard to take the time or the energy to write on my blog, or any blog for that matter: the weblog we made for the "VLE of the future" project at the OUNL has not been updated for quite some time, and my contributions on edublogs.be have been minimal too. Wilfred is doing a study on the reasons why educational professionals do not blog, the results of which he will present during the SURF educational days next month. Interested to learn what the most important reasons are. I agree with Martin Weller, when he exclaims "ThOU shalt blog!" (with OU referring to Open University), but I seem to lack the self-organisational skills to get any blogging done, or any other writing for that matter. My innate problems with concentration and focus seem to be hard to solve. Therefore, I want to try and get back to some more blogging, as a first step to getting some preliminary ideas in writing, as a basis for some more elaborate publishing (in the line of Gráinne Conole's thinking).

Study day in KATHO Tielt

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a study day in the West of Flanders (KATHO Tielt) on new trends in distance education. I finally met some of the writers of my favourite blogs. Wilfred Rubens, Margriet Van Den Bergh, and Smetty. A strong delegation of edubloggers, AVNet staff, but also EliseLeren alumni were present.

The study day was also the formal starting point of a new Expertise Centre for Distance Education. Aims of this expertise centre: radicalising didactics, evaluating practical pilots, development of tools that are needed for distance education, critically reviewing f2f learning/teaching. This expertise centre has been an inspiring and creative innovator within the Hogeschool. Approx. 10% of KATHO students (some 750 students) are now enrolled in some form of distance education.

Four themes were discussed

• Design & didactics
• Social software
• Game-based learning in virtual worlds
• Virtual internationalisation

Together with Johannes and Maarten I contributed to the session on Social software, with a short talk on the institutional issues involved in introducing social software in traditional higher education institutions.
On the way here (and on the way back, I presume) I have been reading in Martin Weller's interesting book on Virtual Learning Environments. Interesting day!

My new job @ Educational technology expertise centre - Open Universiteit Nederland

As of today, I am a full-time assistant professor at OTEC, the Educational technology expertise centre - Open Universiteit Nederland.
I will be spending half of my time in the Development Programme - headed by Prof. Rob Koper - and the other half in the Implementation Programme - headed by dr. Wim Westera. More specifically, I will be working in the TENCompetence project on the one hand, and I'll be leading the OUNL's internal project elo2b, on the other.
elo2b is a preliminary study, in which a roadmap towards the "Virtual Learning Environment of the future" needs to be developed and agreed by all stakeholders. It is an ambitious effort by the OUNL to keep a leading position in the distance education market in the Dutch speaking regions.

eLERU moving to the next stage

I'm at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, attending the final meeting of the eLERU project. The portal with the project results is nice looking, but the Milan partner cannot guarantee the continuation.

This FlashVlog contains some impressions of the meeting.

Online Educa Berlin 2006 - Day 1

Online Educa Berlin 2006 started today for me, 10 years after my first participation in the conference. It was a good day with a full-day forum on Virtual Mobility, that we (from the Victorious project) co-organised with the Being Mobile project.
After an interesting keynote by Ray Land (currently at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow) titled "The Next Generation of e-Learning: Time, Mobility and Identity", I gave a presentation in the Victorious parallel session on some of our experiences with the Vic feasibility studies.
After a delicious lunch, we had interesting round table discussions, the summaries of which are available on Wikipedia, where I created this new lemma on "Virtual mobility".
-- To be continued --

Stephen's Web moving to Drupal

Interesting news from Stephen Downes: In the interview that Tom Wambeke and I had with Stephen in Barcelona, he already mentioned that some internal changes were impending at NRC. Now Stephen writes that his website will be moving to Drupal - a platform that we have been experimenting with extensively at AVNet - K.U.Leuven. It will be interesting to follow the transition of his extensive website on to Drupal. More about this at: Stephen's Web and HalfAnHour.

Web 2.0 Seminar at AVNet

Today, I'll attempt live blogging from an internal information seminar on Web 2.0 in Higher Education, organised by AVNet. The replay of the -Dutch language - seminar can be found here.

• The first speaker is Tom Wambeke, lecturer at OHO, Open Higher Education of the Polytechnic KATHO. Tom starts by showing the Web 2.0 tools that he has used in the previous week, then attempts a definition, and classification.
• Examples:
  
• First: http://www.netvibes.com/starts the day
• Second: http://www.linkedin.com/
• Third: my del.icio.us tags (as a tag cloud)
• Fourth: last.fm - Musical profile
• Fifthly: http://www.43things.com/
• Finally: http://www.furl.net/ Tagged URL's
• Tom's slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/
• Web 1.0: 45 million global users of 250000 sites - passive consumption of published content
• Web 2.0: Published content & user-generated content - 1 billion users of 80.000.000 sites
• Varied arsenal of tools
  
• Weblogs (www.edublogs.be), wiki's (George Siemens' wiki of his keynote speech at Online Educa Berlin 2006), fora, social bookmarking (Furl, del.icio.us), podcast/vodcast (Stanford, K.U.Leuven), virtual worlds (Second Life), instant messaging (MSN, Skype), social network services (LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube)
• Definition
• The Wikipedia definition is not adequate in Tom's view. Tom lists a number of basic characteristics, and feels that no adequate definition is available.
• It's not about new media, but more about an attitude towards those media: Interaction, Networking, Feedback and Communication.
• The technology becomes more and more transparent: KISS (Keep it Simple and Stupid).
• Unfortunately, my battery power is running out, so my life blogging needs to end here... The rest will be 'after-the-fact'.
• Brief summary of Maarten Cannaerts' talk:
• Maarten described 4 examples of how Web 2.0 applications were used in real-life cases: - slides available online
  
• Information competencies in the 21st century
• The ELISE Online course on didactic aspects of e-Learning
• Virtual internationalisation in the GO! project
• Teaching & research communities through group blogging: www.edublogs.be
• Finally, Bieke Schreurs tried to summarise some of the good practices & lessons learned and related them to the Virtual Learning Environment within the Associatie K.U.Leuven.

It was a difficult exercise in trying to balance 'much information' with 'focussed and relevant information'. The participant evaluations will need to show how successful we were.

EDEN Research Workshop - Impressions

Highlights in the EDEN Research Workshop sofar are the

• session on Audiovisual Issues, and especially the presentation by Jack Koumi, a specialist on media characteristics,
• the keynote by Rob Koper, who starts from an interesting definition of competences,
• the interview that Tom Wambeke and I did of Stephen Downes, who will be doing a keynote later,
  
• and the election of the paper of Alberto Cattaneo & Elena Boldrini as Best Paper during the conference dinner.

Sofar a very positive experience.

EDEN Research Workshop - Barcelona

Currently at a - potentially very interesting - research workshop in Barcelona (Spain) - more info on the EDEN Website.
A number of interesting keynote speakers, but also the format of the other sessions promises to be very exciting, with much debate and discussion and little presentation.
I'll try to do some live blogging on the way.
(Already said hi to Stephen Downes)

International speaker seminar series: Venus Seminars

On October 11th, the first of a series of video-conferenced and webcast seminars with renown international speakers - the so-called Venus-Seminars - welcomes the well-known scientist Ricardo Petrella. The intended audience for these seminars consists of students in higher-education, but also the general audience is targeted. This year's theme is "Global issues for the European citizen", and lists an impressive group of speakers, including Joanne Ciulla, Wolfgang Wessels, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Stephen Downes and Derrick de Kerckhove.
Interested individuals can participate in the webcast, interested institutions with video-conferencing facilities can participate in the full session.

Elise study and meeting day

DSC02746
Originally uploaded by Smetty.

Last Thursday, the Flemish Elise community organised a study and meeting day in Leuven around practical examples of e-learning in higher and adult education. Chairperson of the day was Luc Vandeput, e-learning manager at Katholieke Hogeschool Leuven. Pity I couldn't be there, due to my broken ribs...

Windows XP on a Mac with Apple Boot Camp

The newest Intel-powered Mac computers will be able to run Windows XP natively, with the installation of Apple - Boot Camp
I think I'll wait another year for the bugs in the newest MacOSX to clear off, and then I'll consider buying an Intel-based Mac to do my video editing, podcasting and Graohics work intuitively, while being able to do my regular project work on my Windows machine. Cool stuff (if it works)...