In memoriam Erik Duval: TEL Rockstar or TEL-evangelist?

This is a picture of the late Erik Duval talking about "Open learning in practice" on October 24, 2011 during the VLHORA Studiedag "The Educational Highway" at the Flemish Parliament. It was an interesting programme that day, with keynotes by Steven van Bellegem, and Stephen Downes, and parallel workshop sessions with most of Flanders' experts in the field of technology-enhanced learning: Pedro de Bruyckere, Cindy de Smet, Jan Elen, Jos Dumortier, Jan Seurinck, and of course Erik Duval.
The picture illlustrates Erik's typical presentation style: one hand in his pocket, relaxed, eyes sparkling, with a semi-smirk on his face, semi-improvising his way through his never-ending stream of mostly graphical slides. Typical for Erik was that he would be sitting in the audience until 10 minutes before his speech or keynote, refining his presentation, or linking his thoughts to issues mentioned by the speakers before him. An avid Apple-fan, he had a huge collection of slides in Keynote, from which he made a selection on-the-fly to fit the audience, the theme or some recent topic. Also, he didn't rely on his slides, like so many others. The slides would most often illustrate the story that he told, and if the presentation technology failed, Erik would still keep you chained to your chair with his intense, and often somewhat controversial style of storytelling.
In the flood of social media reactions on Twitter and Facebook that was triggered by his untimely passing on March 12th, some people have called him a Science Rockstar, or even the Steve Jobs of Flemish higher education. Of course, some of his talks were controversial or provocative, but that was mainly to start people thinking and get them to reconsider pre-conceived ideas, or look at an issue from a different perspective. But he was no rockstar in the sense of aloofness, prima-donna-ism or inflated ego. Erik was as down-to-earth an academic as you may ever encounter, always stressing the work of others, usually downplaying his own contribution, and friendly to a fault.
He was a Steve Jobs in the sense that he was very influential, innovative and that he passed away much too soon, but the comparison stops there. Erik was first and foremost a family man, firmly rooted in Antwerp, who preferred video-conferencing and skyping above travelling and plane hopping. He was also open and generous with his knowledge, insights and ideas, and not just trying to monetize them. He was the ultimate educator when guiding and supporting his students, PhD researchers and colleagues. His research group often had the highest number of PhD students within the department or even the faculty, mostly due to Erik's network and ideas. When talking with Erik, he would give you his full attention, even though he always seemed to be in a hurry.
Was he a TEL-evangelist, as the title of this post suggests? Definitely not in the sense of someone trying to convince you about his viewpoints at all costs. He didn't just talk the talk, he applied his ideas in his own work with his students and colleagues, and led by example.
Erik and I have been colleagues for more than 10 years, first at KULeuven, in projects such as Pubelo or on the advisory committee for the KULeuven VLE. Later we kept in touch through conferences, workshops, PhD defenses and of course online. I remember a semester where Erik invited some close members of his international network to join his HCI students through Facebook to allow them to test Facebook apps that the students were developing. Last time we had dinner together was at Bozart in Brussels some years ago, when I had arranged a meeting of a number of Flemish TEL-experts, together with Stephen Downes who was visiting for a keynote. When Stephen came down with the flu, the rest of our group went to dinner anyway, and enjoyed a lovely meal and lively conversation.
Erik will be missed in our international family of researchers and practitioners of technology-enhanced learning, but his ideas, his enthousiasm and soul will stay with us for a long time to come.

Bless me reader for I have sinned - #ocTEL week 0

Bless me reader, for I have sinned. It has been two and a half years since my last blog post ;-)

It seems like I never take the time to reflect and work on my own professional development. There's always so much stuff that needs to be done, with a higher priority - but often with less importance, if you think of it.

So - by way of penance - I decided to join the 2nd run of the open course on Technology-enhanced Learning (#ocTEL), after hearing so much positive feedback at last year's ALT Conference (#altc2013).

What's my main goal in attending ocTEL this year? What do I want to achieve? Well, you could call it industrial espionage. Together with Wilfred Rubens (@wrubens), I will be developing a MOOC on blended learning at the Welten Institute of the Open University in the Netherlands. I want to learn which tools we could use in our MOOC, and see how we can connect those to our main site (a Liferay-based learning environment).

Moreover, I want to test whether I can use my attendance in the course as credit for our internal professional development requirements, and whether it would be useful to direct my colleagues to next year's ocTEL.

ocTEL is not my first MOOC, so I kind of know what to expect in terms of overwhelming experiences, getting lost, and finding interesting people to network with. So I have attended the first webinar, and based on that, I have started a Scoop.it topic, that I am hoping to populate together with co-curators from the ocTEL course.

The digital scholar - which way to go?

Within the context of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) #change11, week 3 dealt with different aspects of digital scholarship. This week's discussion was based on the new book by Martin Weller called: The Digital Scholar. I participated in a webinar with Martin on Wednesday, and heard him present a strong case for the potential impact of digital technologies on professional scholarship.
Now I have been following Martin's contributions in this discussion for some time now (I have referred to his work in my workshop about social media for PhD students, and will be interviewing him later for an internal workshop at Open Universiteit), so I kinda knew his story.
I find that what I'm missing from his story, is a perspective for individual teachers and institutions on how this digital scholar will look in practice.

• Is it enough to use social bookmarking or to share your conference presentations, or is that a start that will inevitably lead to more?
• Are you only a 'real' digital scholar if you refuse to publish in closed journals and only opt for open access journals? How to deal with publishing your publically-funded research results?
• Do I need to be a rebel within my institution, and how does it effect my own career? Or can I act as an evangelist and try to convince people that the end of the world as we know it is near?

I am convinced that the digital scholar is the scholar of the future, but I guess what I'm looking for is some guidelines on how to achieve a gradual, yet speedy innovation within our institutions that will lead to a point in the near future where we look back upon 2011, and wonder where the change actually happened. Can we formulate a path of inevitability that will sneak up on our decision makers and allow us to gradually become digital scholars, or do we need a shock therapy to achieve this?
And - by the way - I made a first downloadable ebook version of Martin's book. The internal links in the document are not all functioning perfectly, but you can download the book as is (also on non-Kindle readers) and enjoy reading it offline too. I've made pdf, ePub and mobi versions available on Dropbox, made with the help of the calibre tool.

Professional identity and social media

It seldom happens these days that I meet someone - or hear someone speak - who causes immediate recognition and identification. This morning was one of these occasions where you think: "How come I wasn't following this person already?" Anne Marie Cunningham's talk about professional identity was very much related to the work that I have been focusing on the last couple of years, namely the role of social media in professional learning. We at CELSTEC have been focusing rather on the technology side of what we call "Learning networks for professionals", but I notice that in recent workshops and presentations people keep asking me more about the issues around social appropriateness, openness vs. safety,  reputation, being taken seriously, etc.
Anne Marie's talk - similar to this workshop - addressed exactly those issues. Looking forward to getting the presentation and recording online. Some of @amcunningham's most remarkable quotes were:

• "Online identity has more to do with behaviour and relationships than the information provided." True, but usually the information constitutes the 'social objects' around which behaviour and relationships are centred.
• "I'm too busy to be unprofessional online." A great oneliner, but I forget the context in which she said this. Personally I do not distinguish much between my personal and professional online identity. I prefer those online 'friends' who tend to blur the professional and the personal. I don't expect my students or colleagues in real life to just forget their personal background or worries between 9 and 5.
• "To be a doctor is to be who the patient needs you to be". Does that apply to my students and professional network as well? Could you paraphrase this as: "To be a professional is to be who your customers need you to be?" Tricky, that one. @amcunningham quoted this in relation to an anecdote that she reported on, in which a seemingly innocent question for information suddenly turned into a kind of online doctor-patient consultation. I had a similar episode a while back when someone contacted me on Skype. She was an exchange student studying at a Dutch university, taking an elective distance e-learning course in the UK, and she had a problem with one of her assignments. I spent a good half hour 'coaching' her in trying to solve her problem (without solving it for her), whereas I could have just ended the conversation and said: "I am not your tutor or coach, so I am not the right person to talk to". Are you ever a non-teacher / non-e-coach when you are online 24/7?
• Levels of professional identity: (3) socialised mind -> (4) self-authoring mind -> (5) self-transforming. This sounded very interesting, and I will be looking for the source of this theory.

Interesting issues, brilliant presentation. Great start of the day.

Personalised learning mesh through a multipath learning tool

Very humorous presentation style in the next presentation by Iain Stewart from Glasgow Caledonian University about enriched recorded lectures, integrated in Blackboard. All related content to the lecture is in an interactive container: tutorial questions, exam questions, related content, discussion items. Lecturers starts a new container by uploading a powerpoint slideshow, and an existing lecture recording in the form of a video/audio file in flash or mp3. This assumes that the container involves quite a lot of post processing.

• Wonder what the scalability of this solution is due to the amount of post-processing needed.
• Questions about the use of proprietary formats.
• Wonder if it could be linked to existing lecture recording platforms, so students can add materials to a lecture on the fly..

Work based learning study amongst stakeholders

One of the papers in this morning's proceedings session focused on technology-supported work based learning from the university of Northumbria. The authors did a multiple case study of MSc and BSc programs delivered online to full-time employees.
The main findings that I picked up from interviews and questionnaires amongst the main stakeholders:

• Teachers are more negative about VLE and other technologies than students.
• Employer expectations of HE institution do not fit, and vice versa.
• Role of mentors at employer side is crucial.
• Get all stakeholders involved in the initial negociation about the learning contract.

Worthwhile reading, although it could use some more reference to existing research on online / distance delivery.

From Pecha Kucha through work based learning to emotional affect in learning

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamadryades/5867479356/

Next to the keynote, the first day at the 18th conference of the Association for Learning Technology (#ALTC2011) had so many interesting sessions on the programme that it was hard to choose (in French: l'embarras du choix - hence the picture above). One slot was pre-scheduled, as I had to chair the session, but the others were yet to be filled. So what did I learn? Here's the short version.

• The first session I attended was the first ever ALT-C Pecha Kucha and ePoster session, with 2 Pecha Kucha presentations and 3 ePosters. In contrast to the original 20x20 PechaKucha format, ALT has chosen a 9x45 format, in which the speaker gets to use 9 slides, which automatically progress after 45 seconds. The concept is: be well-prepared and stick to your message. The presentations covered two cases of blended learning. The first presentation by colleagues at the University of Huddersfield stressed the importance of social skills for blended learning in groups. They reported on how they used critical friendship groups to get the students to actively interact during their online learning activities. Unfortunately for the OUNL, such a model is hard to adapt to our model of solitary distance learners without the cohort to build those groups. The second presentation by University of Glasgow reported on a structured learning activity involving wikis, in which first-year philosophy students were grouped into small groups with clear assignments about collecting information before meeting in tutorial sessions. The effects of this approach on student scores were remarkable, but I wonder whether that was related to the use of the wiki or the clever design of the learning activity. The ePosters were not given a time slot, much to the surprise of the submitters who were there to answer questions. The next ePoster sessions repaired this flaw, and added time slots for ePoster discussion.
• Lunch was good, as it was next year. Great opportunities to talk to people. The number of tweeps I have been talking to these last two days is amazing. For that reason alone, the ALT conference is worth my while. During lunch break I talked to James Clay, one of the web presence co-ordinators on the programme committee, who has set up a small TV studio, and uses Justin TV to bring an informal live TV channel from the conference. Of course I installed the justin.tv app on CELSTEC's Android phone and made a number of short recordings, which were immediately streamed to the justin.tv server. A very interesting video recording, sharing and broadcasting platform which allows low-threshold recordings with mobile applications, but also higher end grassroots broadcasting with a setup like the one at ALT in the video below.

Watch live video from sverjans on Justin.tv
• After lunch I chaired a session on Emotion and Pluralism with two proceedings papers. Finding the room in the maze of the EC Stoner building was tough, and only about 15 people managed to get in the session, but they got their money's worth. The first paper by Liz, Gill and Lachlan from the University of Greenwich presented the PANDORA project, a multimedia training environment for high-level crisis management in which they have been researching and developing a module that deals with the role of emotional affect and stress for decision making in severe crisis situations. Their tool allows a trainer to simulate semi-realistic crisis situations, with the explicit purpose of duplicating the emotinal and informational stress load. I kept wondering whether future crisis managers - so-called Gold Commanders - who might well be experts in World of Warcraft or other strategic games, will be more suited for handling such crises. The second paper by Chris Jones from the UK Open University and Gregor Kennedy from the University of Melbourne was of a completely different nature, in that it discussed research paradigms, and argued for taking a pluralist perspective when doing research in learning technology. They argued that new LT researchers often have a (socially) predetermined perspective about the type of research that they will be doing, with too little focus on the research question and its interaction with 'suitable' research paradigms and methodologies. Both papers were followed by a very good discussion with the audience.
• For my next slot I attended a session named 'Worlds of learning' with three short papers. The first presentation by colleagues from the Japanese and Canadian Open Universities discussed research on the use of a Moodle-compatible audio applet named Nanogong for students learning English. It reminded me very much of the setup developed in the WebCEF and CEFcult projects in which I participated, where students record their own oral language utterances and are assessed on those. The second paper by colleagues from the ePortfolio centre at the University of Nottingham reported on a study of the use of the Mahara ePortfolio system with a group of Biosciences masters students during a 2-month industrial placement. The research reported positive outcomes, especially on the administrative burden of the university placement co-ordinator. Students were reported to use the ePortfolio system as if it were a special kind of Facebook. I kept wondering whether such a short term pilot would tell us anything about the long-term use of an ePortfolio tool. The final paper of that session was presented on Prezi, and discussed the instructional design practice at BPP - the first commercial university in the UK. I kept thinking about the wieldy process of developing distance learning materials at our own university, and couldn't help but wonder if thorough, structured and streamlined instructional design processes are the right way to go for any HE institution. The argument was that the students expected course modules to be similar and standardised. I'm not sure such a well-structured but time-consuming process is the right answer to the growing need for situated and just-in-time learning.
• This feeling was strengthened during the last session of the day, a workshop called 'Employer engagement' on work-based learning (WBL) and all the issues involved in that. We were presented with a short background from some JISC-funded projects dealing with work-based learning, and then asked to contribute to three themes related to WBL. The intention of the workshop was partly to get feedback on the parameters involved in the 'Work Based Learning Maturity Toolikit', a self-assessment type instrument to judge institutional maturity with regard to work-place learning. During the discussion, which was quite relevant for my recent work with colleagues from the Zuyd University College, where we looked at a group of students from a Dutch ICT consultancy firm who are taking a degree in Networking Infrastructure while being employed full-time. Turned out that most of the issues we ran into, were well known in my group, especially within Mark Stiles' group at the University of Staffordshire. Negotiation between employer, employee and institution is the key element in work-based learning, but also change efforts in the HE institution, and at the employer site are crucial for success. From experience I know that it is hard to get university staff to look at what 'the customer wants', rather than what we have 'on offer' in the institution. A very informative session, indeed.

All in all a very fruitful first day, in which I had some good conversations, started following a number of new tweeps, met some old friends, and started blogging again. I also noticed that I prefermy laptop for tweeting, rather than the HTC smartphone I borrowed from CELSTEC.

Note from editor: Is this the short version? This post is much too long, BOO!

First day at Alt-C 2011 - Opening keynote

This year, the Alt-C conference is held at the University of Leeds, and its theme is "Thriving in a colder and more challenging climate", referring to the economic cutbacks in (higher) education throughout the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. As a member of the Programma Committee Executive, I've been involved in the review and editing process, and it's been a very good experience sofar.

Opening & keynote
The conference was opened by the mayor of Leeds, a reverent adorned with an impressive official chain, who referred to the multi-cultural character of Leeds as the third biggest city in the UK. Then, the conference co-chair John Cook introduced the keynote speaker Miguel Brechner, the project leader of the Uruguayan One-Laptop-per-Child project Ceibal. He held a very inspirational talk about the project in which all Uruguayan children in the state school system (some 450.000 kids in primary and secondary education) were given a laptop that is connected to the Internet (99%) both in school and at home. This video he showed, gives a good impression of the project. Others - such as the ever productive Steve Wheeler - have blogged about this session. My major lesson from the session was:

1. This kind of project is not about ICT or infrastructure, it is about social change, about teacher training, about social support mechanisms, about political will and endurance.
2. Access to Internet is fast becoming the major factor in education. As Brechner forcefully stated: "The Ceibal project transformed access to computers and broadband Internet from a privilege to a basic human right.
3. What can we learn from this, and why can't we offer the same broadband coverage in our part of the world? Some UK colleagues asked a question during the session, about how they could help the people in Uruguay to further this project. Somehow this question felt wrong (as noted by others). It's more: what can we (in the 'civilized' developed countries) learn from this? One thing I feel is that it should not be left to commercial providers alone to get everyone 'connected'. Miguel even mentioned rural areas where the laptops and broadband arrived before electricity did!
4. Access to Internet means access to social media. I and others wondered how the kids were using their access to Internet to get to social media. Interestingly Miguel asked: "What is social media?" He then said: "Well, they're all on Facebook", which left me wondering whether their use of Facebook is similar to the way my kids are using it.

All in all, a good start to a good day. More reflections coming up later.

Virtual presentation at Digital Heritage Conference 2010

On December 7 and 8 2010, Rotterdam was host to the Digitale Erfgoedconferentie 2010 (Digital Heritage Conference 2010). The theme of the conference was lifelong learning, and the focus of the conference was on digital developments surrounding heritage and education. I was supposed to have been there to present some reflections on lessons learned within the e-learning domain, during a parallel session on the role of the heritage institutions in the production of learning materials.
However, a flu virus kept me from travelling to Rotterdam, so I decided to prepare a virtual presentation for the session organisers.

1) I had prepared my presentation using Prezi, which was a very informative exercise, as it was the first time I used the tool.

e-Learning en de erfgoedsector - Enkele reflecties on Prezi

 2) I then decided to make a slidecast of my presentation. I first looked at Slideshare, but decided against it, because I would have to record a separate mp3-file, upload it to slideshare, and then sync the slides with the audio.

3) I ended up using Screencast-O-Matic, because it allowed me to record my voice, while I walked through the Prezi presentation. I had used the tool before, and was quite pleased with its functionality.

4) The 15-minute limitation of the basic account, however, forced me to split my talk up into two pieces, which I found rather annoying, so after I had recorded the first part, I decided to get a pro-account, hoping that I could extend the first part of the recording. Unfortunately, that was not the case. So I forwarded the link to the two presentation videos to the conference organisers. 

I was quite disappointed to find that they decided not to use the video in the session, especially since I felt that the discussion (which I followed on Twitter) would have benefited from my contribution.

Anyway, while making an overview of my contributions for 2010, I decided to turn the two videos into a single video.

5) I recorded the playback of the first 15-min video (using Screencast-O-Matic), added the second video (which was about 5 minutes), edited the two pieces together, and exported it as an mp4-file.

6) Finally, I uploaded the mp4-file on Vimeo (because YouTube has a limit of 15 minutes) and TADAA, here it is.

E-learning en de erfgoedsector: Enkele reflecties from Steven Verjans on Vimeo.

The presentation and video are both in Dutch, but if you're interested, just write me a line, and I'll translate it for you!

Open Educational Practices - Expert meeting of OPAL project @ UNESCO - Paris

On Monday and Tuesday, I participated in the "Research workshop on Open Educational Practices" hosted by the OPAL project at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The workshop was chaired by Ulf Ehlers (University of Essen-Duisburg and project co-ordinator) and Grainne Conole (Professor at Open University). It's been an intensive, but very informative and interesting two days. I got to meet a number of interesting people in our plenary and group discussions, and I bumped into Tom Wambeke, whom I hadn't spoken to in quite some time.
The workshop centered around reviewing, commenting and refining the current OPAL model of Open Educational Practices, and it was organised mainly as small group sessions, in which the participants were asked to answer 5 questions, after which the groups reported. Tim Unwin's brilliant blogpost has mindmaps summarising that discussion, so I'll focus on my own learning points:

For me, some of the more fundamental issues were

• How do we define Open Educational Practices (OEP)? I felt that there was a consensus amongst the participants that OEP is broader than just practices involving OER, and that it relates to 'openness of teaching practice, learning envronment and educational resources' (Chris Pegler on Twitter).
• Do we need specific practices for Open Educational Resources (OER), or can we make do with practices regarding 'Educational resources' in general? I share Susan D'Antoni's concern that we must avoid focusing too much on content as the Holy Grail. Let's not replace a 'technology push' within education with a 'content push'.
• Building on that idea, should we focus on content when we talk about OEP, or should we focus more on learning activities or learning conversations that make use of resources? In that light, I like the CELSTEC view that learning content - artefacts as we label them - are an inherent part of a learning network, but in the sense of social artefacts, not as static, finalised bits of explicit - often factual - knowledge, eg. this working paper by Wigman, Hermans & Verjans (2009).
• Our discussion group on Monday concluded that "Context, not content is KING", later changed to "Context is QUEEN". The background for stating this so strongly was that it is important to primarily consider the stakeholders' context (national, cultural, educational, etc.) before looking at other aspects of OEP, such as the main dimensions in the OPAL model: strategy, tools, skills.

View from UNESCO meeting room

All in all, it has been a fruitful 2-day meeting, supplemented by an active online discussion on Twitter and Cloudworks, which also produced a set of quite interesting and relevant external links and references. My follow-up from this meeting will be to
- continue to act as an external expert
- be a 'national ambassador' for both The Netherlands and Belgium
- to stay active within the wider OPAL community.