Stanley Portier

Do it right and do it first, this decade

2011-12-07T14:23:00.001-08:00

The title of this post is referring to a quote from JF Kennedy in 1962, during his speech to continue achievements to put a man on the moon. The quote was heard again during a presentation by Fabrizio Cardinali (chairman of the ELIG) at Online Educa Berlin 2011. It was meant as a wake up call for the e-learning industry. We are moving too slow and should DO things, rather than debate about it and compete with each other. This is why emerging organisations are doing a good job now. Plan – Act – Share are the key drivers to move ahead. Open co-opetition (a blend of competition and cooperation) as the main filosophy to take us to the next step.

Creativity and genius should be nurtured in this process, it is the way to move ahead and survive global competition. According to Cardinali the creative genius can be described in 7 typical habits:
1. Managing ambiguity and change
2. Systems thinking
3. Curiosity
4. Learning from experience
5. Sharpening the senses
6. Whole brain thinking
7. Body-mind fitness

When it comes to creative minds it was good to attend Frank Kresin’s presentation about Fablabs: the user as today's designer of what we can use tomorrow.

Innovation and knowledge are the key drivers to get us out of the crisis (Kroes) and on an individual level an escape from poverty (Weber). The United Nations expect a substantial reduction of poverty in the next four years, which is a remarkable statement when we look at the current situation in the Euro countries. As a consequence of the reduction of poverty it is expected that the need for education will grow dramatically (Nowak) on the one hand. However, on the other hand it is expected that we will be 8 million short of teachers in 2015. Entrepreneurial learning – where people teach themselves – is going to become a reality for many individuals, both in the developed and developing worlds. It is beyond doubt that technology can give us the tools to speed things up and prevent us from lagging behind. Fast growing economies like some of the Arab countries spend up to 20% of their national budgets on education, which means investing billions of Euros. Learning improves business performance (Moehrle), business performance means economic revenues.

Due to the crisis, most European countries are forced to downsize their budgets, including budgets for education which is a serious threat from a long term perspective. Monika Weber from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) stated that the so called developed countries may still be ahead, but African, Arabic and Asian countries are catching up quickly. We have to ask ourselves how to survive the global competition. Things are changing rapidly. It’s not only about manoeuvring in a maze, but on top of this, the maze is constantly changing. It's the one most adaptable to change who will survive (Darwin).

Blended learning in martial arts

2010-12-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

This week I passed for my 2nd degree (dan) exam in taekwon-do (ITF), which is the result of several months of training labour. Without the required learning and training of both mental and physical skills it's extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve a black belt degree. In a reflection on the learning process I went through, I also would like to give the reader a little insight in martial arts training, and more specifically the thorough and blended learning approach (including ICT!) that we followed to prepare for the exam. As you may know, martial arts is not only a physical thing, i.e. kicking and punching each other or performing a spectacular power break. As a matter of fact, a lot of techniques are performed in a non contact or semi contact way. The success and failure of your training labour depends largely on the five so called tenets (values): self control, integrity, courtesy, perseverance and the indomitable spirit.

So how to prepare for a degree exam? First of all there is the list of ITF criteria which in detail describes what you need to know and perform in order to pass the exam. The exam includes the following categories: patterns (hyongs), partner exercises, self defense, breaks and some sparring. In the near future the exam will also include a theoretical part about (historical) facts and background of taekwon-do. As an example of how a blended learning approach is applied I'd like to elaborate on the way how the performance of a pattern can be trained.

For the 2nd degree you need to train the first 12 (of a series of 24) different patterns. For the exam you know for sure that you have to perform the highest pattern (no 12, Ge Baek), four others are selected randomly by the exam committee, i.e. they mention the Korean name of the pattern and you need to start performing it immediately after the start command. To give an impression what it means to perform a pattern, take a look at the following movie of the Ge Baek pattern:

The question is how to learn such a pattern. Not only in the sense that you perform every movement in the same, mandatory sequence, but also to achieve that your movements have the right speed, balance and power.

The following list shows what we do and use to learn performing a pattern:

video examples of each pattern (like the one above)

a text book in which every pattern is described and illustrated with a series of pictures

instructor led training

practicing each pattern by yourself

The video examples work very well in different phases of the learning process. First it helps you to orientate on what the pattern looks like, secondly it is helpful when you want to practice the pattern at home and the instructor obviously is not around to ask questions or to demonstrate the pattern.

The text book basically has the same function as the video examples, although the emphasis is different. The pictures are of excellent help to show the specific positions between the subsequent movements. The movies can show how the movement itself needs to be performed. We used a text book written by van Beersum and Jansen (2009), two certified Dutch taekwon-do instructors (4th dan). In addition to the book we also used some reading materials about self defense and some advanced partner exercises.

A major part is probably the instructor-led training given by Sabum Ad Dekker. This part was done in the local dojo in Boxtel. This training is necessary to (1) demonstrate (first step-by-step, then as a whole) how the pattern should be performed and (2) to give immediate feedback once you need to perform the pattern yourself. The only way to perform a pattern really well is to do it over and over again, but also to receive feedback on how to improve your performance.

Obviously, it is not possible to use every training to perform patterns, so there is a need to practice patterns by yourself, outside the dojo, at home, together with fellow students.

This example demonstrates that a blended learning approach can work really well in sports education. In addition to the four points mentioned in the bullet list, the blend was even further extended in the sense that we could participate in several national training events of ITF Royal Dutch in Nieuwegein, hosted by master Steve Zondag and Sabum Hennie Thijssen. Here we had the opportunity to train with other certified instructors and masters in taekwon-do. Moreover, we were invited at the dojo of Sabum Willem Jansen and Sabum Paul van Beersum (the authors of the book), to train a couple of times with them in Bemmel.

I think it's fair to say that all of these training sessions did contribute to the final result: pass! The blend of tools, resources and trainers (who all had their specific insights and feedback to share; many thanks to all of you) provided a really rich learning environment.

ITIL Foundation exam

2010-11-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I participated in an official ITIL Foundation V3 exam. For those who are not familiar with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), it offers a systematic approach to the delivery of quality IT services. However, although I work in the field of e-Learning, I am not really an 'IT guy'. So sometimes I felt like a complete stranger in a world that obviously has a relationship with e-Learning, but the focus is on delivering IT services and creating value for the customer. Different semantics and a lot of acronyms (AMIS, SPOC, SPOF) do not make things easier.

The training sessions (3 mornings) were offered in a F2F setting in combination with a Study Guide and a map containing handouts of the powerpoint slides (230), a glossary and two sample exams. The map also contains some brief overview document, which I cannot recall reading. For each training session we had to prepare some reading in the Study Guide and a part of the ppt slides. As I happen to work in the field of e-Learning the first question that raised my mind was, why not do the preparation with e-Learning? There is already a lot out there about ITIL V3. The second point that made me feel like a stranger is that in a normal training / learning situation the learner tries to find relations with knowledge structures that are already present (activating prior knowledge). I can assure you that this becomes rather difficult in a setting where a lot of the terminology is new and at first gives no clue. When I read something about 'follow the sun' you might think of some romantic place in a sunny location, but not about a service desk that is located in different continents in order to offer a 24/7 service. The third point I was not really fond of, is the fact that ITIL Foundation is a lot about knowledge and facts. Although the trainer did give us some small assignments, it is not about gaining insight or skills. This is also reflected in the MC exam with 40 MC questions. It was a deja vu experience (not in the good sense of the word) to my first year at the university. If you learn the full book by heart, you have a good chance of finding the right answer. Questions in which you have to read four statements and answer which one(s) is/are right are not really fun to do. In some sample questions the only difference between statement 1 and 2 could be the word 'AND', which was replaced by 'OR'. So you read the statements, you feel relieved to recognize the concepts that are mentioned, but then you still feel unsure whether the right answer was 'AND' or 'OR'. Luckily there were also some easier questions such as 'what does PDCA mean?'. At the university the MC exams were not really my friend. I often needed two or more attempts to pass. On the other hand exams with open questions in which you had to proof your insight, connect concepts with each other, reflect on it, led by far to better results.

So, after more than 20 years this was the first time I was confronted with a MC exam again. First of all I did not really have the time to do a thorough preparation, lots of stress at work are not good circumstances to study. So I postponed the preparation to the last day before the exam and did that in a marathon session from 08.30 until 23.30. Of course a couple of small breaks for coffee or eating. Via Twitter I had some contact with colleagues who were preparing the same exam. Most of the time I spent in reading the book, not at a very deep level I believe and looking through the ppt slides. Furthermore, I made two sample exams. On the one hand to see whether I would be able to achieve the pass score of 26, on the other hand to do a sort of question analysis. In one sample exam I discovered that if you have to answer which statement(s) is/are correct and you really don't know the answer choose 'all of the above'. When I made the sample exam as you make it normally I achieved a score of 21. When I applied the rule I just described to the questions I answered wrong, my score went up to 26! The difference between fail and pass.

So back to the beginning of my post. The exam was yesterday morning. Did I pass? I don't know yet, since we had to fill in a form, which was taken by the official examinator. The forms need to be scanned before we get the results. It could be next week, but may also take up to 14 days... I'm slightly optimistic that I did achieve the pass score of 26 or more. I'm just a little worried that when the result comes in that a lot of the theoretical facts already have left my brain. New knowledge is lining up to fill the ITIL knowledge gaps. It's much more important to know where I can find the necassary information, interpret it and see whether I can apply it to a specific situation instead of simply learning it by heart. Moreover, a point I did not even address here, it is obviously a prerequisite that ITIL procedures need to be implemented on the organisational level too, in order to be able to create added value for the customer.

Online Educa 2009

2009-12-02T01:34:00.000-08:00

Quite a while ago since my last post. In busy times it is my experience that blogging is one of the first things that gets lower on the priority list. This week I'm at Online Educa in Berlin. For me it's the third time. Last year I had a presentation together with Koos Winnips, who now works at the University of Groningen. This year my role is more focused on the partnership with Giunti Labs. It means that I will be spending quite some time in the Giunti Labs booth at the information market, so if you want to meet me, there is a big chance that you can find me there. Stoas will have a small corner inside the Giunti booth. My colleagues Egbert van de Winckel and Randy Vermaas will be primarily focused on the combined booth for the European Moodle partners. Yesterday evening it was nice to meet my former colleague Hans de Zwart again, who will be doing a presentation on the Moodle impplementation at Shell, during today's Moodle pre-conference. I hope to find some time to write a summary of highlights during the next couple of days at #OEB2009

Why content is not king

2009-05-17T05:16:00.000-07:00

I still see them around: e-Learning projects in which the main deliverable is one or more packages of content, deployed using a web based platform. It’s obvious that providing attractive, interactive content will engage the learner more than only text based page-turners. But even when you are able to provide attractive content, this is just the beginning. As Martin Dougiamas stated during his presentation at MoodleMoot in April 2009, providing content is the first (of ten) pedagogical levels of e-Learning. Content varying from sophisticated, flashy WBT’s to powerpoints and PDF readers that are published by an instructor to his students. Content has a role in organizing, providing structure, orientation and activating links with existing cognitive schemata. Content can also address prior knowledge. Moreover, content can provide new knowledge elements. Deep level learning, however, is about what you do with the content: how to (re)organize it, paraphrase it, reproduce it, apply it in different contexts and finally incorporate it. Learners need to be actively engaged in discussions, in (group) assignments, in settings where user generated content is a goal. This way they are forced to do something more than passively reading or do some pre-defined exercises. At higher levels of e-Learning peer review, active research, reflection and networked learning provide additional opportunities for a form of information processing in which the learner needs to be actively engaged, including interaction with fellow learners.

There is a lot of writing and discussion on how to use Web 2.0 functionality in different learning situations. For example, Moodle is designed as a social constructivist learning environment, and it does include some of the Web 2.0 functions. It is not just an advanced content player. Then let’s use it that way! The learner is not a sole individual, but has a network of peers, mentors, colleagues, or even experts who can help him reflect on the issues he is working on. It’s ok to start with content first, but only if it is part of a long term roadmap in which further steps are also acknowledged and planned. A full, comprehensive SCORM package may be just one simple hyperlink in Moodle (or any other learning environment), but just think about all the other resources and activities that can be organized around it. The opportunity to do so is just around the corner. In the market of commercial training institutes there is a growing awareness that the competition cannot be beated, only by providing high-end content. Especially in this time of crisis there is a battle going on in which prices for e-Learning modules are dropping. You need to do more to create additional value, a unique selling point in the business of e-Learning. Providing a rich, interactive learning environment is one of the possibilities.

RFI, RFC, RFP, RFX, RF...

2009-04-29T11:25:00.001-07:00

The last 48 hours I have been working on a so-called RFC proposal for an extensive e-Learning solution. Together with a colleague, almost completely separated from the real world, we have struggled trough over 300 questions, not only yes/no but also quite some open text questions. I get the idea that the number of requests has increased, maybe because nowadays it is quite easy to create a web environment that supports the complete workflow to submit a proposal. The problem I have with this approach is that the request process has become completely anonymous: no possibility to have an intake interview or a kick-off session where you can ask questions and find out what the really important issues are. That may help to address some issues more or stress some of the strong points of the solution you may provide. The anonymous 300-list gives no clue about the weight of each question or even category of questions. It feels like a shot in the dark, because you don't know where your target is. It also feels that there is no solution that can cover all the requirements asked. Moreover, you really don't know what instructional design principles the customer wants to apply, so you might be able to argue which requirements are more important than others. Most questions are strictly limited to availability of functionality: can your solution provide it or not, yes or no. An alternative reaction could be: why bother, why submit at all, do I stand a chance at all? On the other hand, if you don't reply you're out of the process for sure. Of course it's not feasible to submit to any RFx that passes by. Based on experience a quickscan can help to get a rough estimate whether or not it's worthwile to go through all the trouble of filling in the question details. In most cases RFI's and RFP's have a very strict time schedule, so as a potential vendor you have an idea when the process will be finished. The case which urged me to write this blogpost did not have a time schedule at all, only a deadline for submission, but no time schedule whatsoever for any (if any) follow up steps taken by them. Anyway, we were quite pleased with the result: proposal finished and submitted before the deadline. Now the waiting starts.

Bb World Europe 2009 – Day 3

2009-04-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

The third and final day of the conference included some more interesting topics than the day before. I selected a couple of sessions in which collaboration, communication and use of (recorded) video were the main subjects. The first session I attended was about the Wimba collaboration suite, which claims to provide the answers for the social dimension in 21st century education. An engaging environment in which students can interact and collaborate. The presentation was strongly product oriented and unfortunately suffered from some performance issues because of the slow WiFi network at the conference site. It was not really rocket science that was presented to us. A lot of functionality, such as content- and application sharing, videoconferencing, voicechat and instant messaging is also available in other tools as well (e.g., MSN, Skype, Adobe Connect). The interesting part is the full integration of some components with Blackboard. Wimba Pronto provides an instant messaging tool (looks a bit like MSN Messenger) that can be fully integrated with Blackboard. This means that your organization structure can be mapped onto Pronto: see who’s online for all classes you follow, see if someone is available at the student’s servicedesk, etc. An instructor can organize virtual tutoring sessions in which the students who are enrolled can participate.
After this I went to a Blackboard Product Management session, which was not very good by the way. The focus was on how to get to Bb9. It was more or less a listing of upgrade scenario’s and the resources you can use as a client:
o www.blackboard.com/release9 (preview account, webinars)
o behind.blackboard.com (license keys, documentation)
A somewhat disturbing part of the presentation was the repeated ‘advice’ (at least 5 times during the presentation) to move to Bb managed hosting services. No word whatsoever on the technical issues that were found at some client sites and the need to release a service pack before the summer.
After a great Mediterranean lunch I was curious about the session of André Rosendaal on the virtual cutter of existing video material. I have used previous version of the virtual cutter so I wanted to know about it’s current status. The virtual cutter adds a begin- and endpoint to existing media. Only the part within the defined timeframe will be played. It’s online av-editing without creating a new media file. The nice thing is that it is available as a webbased software service, free to use (in English, Dutch and Spanish) and open source:
o video.surfnet.nl/virtualcutter
o sourceforge.net/projects/virtualcutter
The virtual cutter can provide three types of output: copy link, URL or embedded object code to paste into your HTML editor. At first glance this provides interesting opportunities to use video clips in your Bb courses. However, this is not always possible. The WYSIWYG editor in Blackboard is not suitable to include full HTML-markup. The HTML is changed upon saving. In Bb9 it’s even worse: the code is rewritten when saving it: ‘embed’ tags are removed, which makes that the video clip does not play, or plays with limitations (depending on the browser you are using). Rosendaal argued that Bb should provide a real ‘add streaming content’ function to the WYSIWYG editor.
Another (research) presentation was on the use of Echo360 at the University of Birmingham (recording of video lectures), a product comparable to Mediasite or Presentations2Go. The interesting part of the presentation was not on the product itself, but on some findings that confirm my own experiences when I just to work for the University of Twente. The presenters also found that the attendance % was not systematically influenced upon the introduction of video lectures. The student see is as a supplement, not as a substitution. Students believe it to be a course enhancement and a means to improve their results. The results also show that students are highly selective when downloading a video lecture. The majority only selected 1 or 2 video lectures from a list of 10 available lectures. A remarkable conclusion is that members of the university staff are less positive. Staff members think that video lectures:
o will be a threat to student’s attendance,
o are not a engaging as face to face;
o cannot provide the right pedagogical quality;
o may threaten their job position.
The final session by the colleagues from the University of Avans was inspiring and highly interactive. They introduced a 4-quadrant model based on two axes: transaction versus interaction and virtual versus analog. The participants were invited to join 1 of 4 subgroups (representing 1 quadrant) and discuss the challenges that have to be faced in that quadrant. The results have been collected and will be published (and further discussed) at:
o avans-elearning.blogspot.com

On a scale of 1-10 I give the conference an overall rating between 6 and 7. The presentations had very different quality levels. Remarkable: we did not receive any evaluation forms! There were plenty of networking opportunities, that was good. From an organizational perspective I missed a sort of closure or closing reception. As a matter of fact the information market was closed directly after the lunchbreak. People were tearing the information boots down, while the 3 afternoon sessions were held. That’s probably why quite some people left early because it gave an atmosphere that the conference was over. At the Avans session there were probably only 15 participants. On the other hand the session proved that you don’t need a very large audience to have an inspiring debate with each other.
When the session ended at 5PM I directly went off to Barcelona El Prat airport to catch an evening flight back to Amsterdam.

Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 2 (2/2)

2009-04-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

The second morning session was entitled "Making the grade with Bbv8: Practical measure", which was somewhat misleading because I was expecting some practical issues and/or experiences about the use of the Grade Center. Basically the presentation was about how to instruct people on using the Grade Center, because this is the biggest change when migrating from Bb7 to Bb8. The university of Tennessee Knoxville seems to have some interesting tutorials on using the grade center. The main problem with this kind of tutorials is that nobody wants to read! For this reason the American University of Sharjah reduced the number of tutorial pages, but in such a way that instructors and students still can find the basics. Ron Ray listed the following recommendations when developing instructions for the grade center. Obviously, most of these are rather familiar and can also be applied for instruction on any other application. His list includes the following recommendations:
o Keep it basic, achieve a working grade center
o Hands-on training configuring an actual course, then use copy course function for settings)
o Lead faculty into the grade center incrementally
o Keep instruction materials simple and limited
o Provide instructions tailored only to the most commonly used options
o Provide other instructions only on a on-request basis
o Confirm that totals are calculated correctly
o Download Grade Center instances and confirm calculations in Excel
I found the two last recommendations a little bit odd, since you may expect that such an import function as the grade center will calculate correctly.

The next presentation I joined was given by Beatrice Lacomte from the University of Liege (B). There is not very much to write about, you should take a look for yourself at the eDemos portal (URL subject to change) they developed. In their vision on autonomy and self-directed learning the e-Learning team provided some online courses showcases as examples and good practises of e-Learning. The portal will be available outside ULG. The first release will be only in French but Beatrice promised there will be an English version too.

Besides attending sessions an important aspect of this kind of conferences is meeting with people. There was plenty of time for this during the (lunch) break and during the early evening client appreciation party. One more day to go here in Barcelona, strange idea that in 24 hours from now I expect to be landing in Amsterdam again.

Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 2 (1/2)

2009-04-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day with a full programme of (parallel) sessions. In general I found the presentations a little bit disappointing. Only traditional powerpoint-led lectures, some questions at the end, but no interaction at all. This makes the sessions not very inspiring so far. However, there my hopes are on the guys of Avans who will present tomorrow. They promised to have a highly interactive format in which the audience will be set to work.
This morning started with a keynote by Dirk van Damme from OECD. From a research perspective he focused on issues that determine the context of change. Utilisation of human capital is important factor for (future) success and driver for innovation. We need more diversity to address the heterogeneous demands of the future. However, curricula have not really changed to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Van Damme mentioned two critical issues here:
Issue 1:
Success = being able to appeal to diversifying provision and offering higher added value in an increasingly competitive market. Technology will be part of the answer

Issue 2:
Will Higher Education Institutes (HEI) be able to sustain their role as dominant producers of knowledge, skills and qualifications? HEI exist because they provide institutional arrangements and provide powerful learning environments.

As a threat we see an increasing number of competitors:
• More alternative providers
• Direct skills assessment
• Why is a university grade so important? As a company we can assess them ourselves!

HEI's even may have to face the threat of disappearing. Technology adoption in HEI’s is there, but not into the heart of teaching & learning. In general one may say that the institutional potential for change is underused. Institutes and employees may have a drive for innovation and will bring some change into their organization, but this needs to be recognized and supported. Of critical importance is the institutional commitment to change! For more information and publications of OECD you may want to visit their website.

Later more...

Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 1

2009-04-06T13:39:00.000-07:00

After a long trip with quite some delays, today I arrived at Bb World Europe 2009 in Barcelona. In order to clear my head a little bit, I made a small afternoon walk in the immediate surroundings of the Fira Palace Hotel. Quite nice, sunny and around 20 degrees. At 5 PM the conference started with a Blackboard opening keynote by Michael Chasen (CEO Bb Inc.).

A main part of his talk was focused on the roadmap, which he organized around three main issues:
o Learners at the centre (“engaging the student”)
o Leveraging the community
o Expanding openness

As examples of engaging the student Chasen mentioned some features of Bb 9 such as the drap&drop functionality of dashboard items, personalization of the dashboard also by students, choices for different notification settings (RSS, e-mail, SMS alerts) and the possibility of blogs as a reflection instrument. However, if you consider blogging as a tool which is especially interesting in informal learning situations, it was a little bit surprising to hear about the reviewing and grading functionality in relation to blogs. Why formalize what people may write as their personal reflection?
In relation to community aspects Chasen was proud to announce the in-built Enterprise Instant Messaging (based on Wimba) functionality. Well, you might say why bother to offer another IM tool in Blackboard? The first reason he mentioned was not very convincing to me: to get rid of all exotic IM aliases that people might have. Isn’t this contradictory to the trend that organizations are wondering if they should provide an institute e-mail address to their students? Other reasons that are more interesting is the possibility to have the IM function organized across institutions, around the courses in which you are enrolled. E.g., you can see who’s online for each of your separate courses. Moreover, there is a trend towards enhancing all sorts of content sharing, including assessments.
On a different level Chasen mentioned the Bb Connection site where Blackboard users of all sort users can collaborate and share best practices and deepen their knowledge and expertise in all things eLearning
The final subject was related more openness: Bb 9 has an open API in order to deploy multiple VLE’s: the Bb portal may display links to e.g. Moodle or Sakai courses or announcements from a Moodle course. Clicking the link will lead the user immediately to this environment without the need to logon again. A similar example was given for a Blackboard Learn add-on for your Facebook profile: see if there are any announcements or grades published in your Blackboard environment.
After the opening keynote I joined the welcome reception and met a lot of people from the Dutch Bb community. Nice to see them all here. Tomorrow the conference will move ahead with a full programme starting at 9 am.

SAP into learning 2.0?

2009-03-16T06:54:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I was able to attend a presentation by SAP Education on their SAP Enterprise Learning solution. As SAP indicates on their own website "SAP Enterprise Learning is the only enterprise solution that integrates back-office ERP functionality with functionality for both learning management systems (LMS) and learning content management systems (LCMS) in a single offering. As a result, you can improve competency management, performance management, and analytics, including support for ad hoc reporting". In my opinion the presentation clearly showed that the core of the system is still in the HR domain. The presenters used four scenario's in order to demonstrate how a manager, a trainer and an employee could work with the system. It showed that the traditional workflow (scenario 1) of an employee who wants to enroll for a F2F training or course is perfectly covered. The employee can send a request, which needs to be approved by the manager. From an organisational perspective it's possible to organise course offerings, including all the organisational and logistic issues that are involved. Of course the monitoring and registration of achievements are well taken care of and can be included in the personal files of an employee. The second scenario was not that different from the first one, except for the fact that an enrollment for a F2F training was subsituted by an enrollment for a WBT. The employee gets access to the WBT using a content player that is included in the SAP Enterprise Learning environment. The third scenario was on using a virtual classroom as a possibility to support a 'learning 2.0' scenario. I found two remarkable points in this scenario: firstly, the virtual classroom was organised in a formal setting. As a default mode, the trainer decides when, how and what happens. Secondly, I noticed that the system used Adobe Connect as a plugin. The fourth and last scenario was on collaborative working using a wiki. The wiki however is part of the SAP Portal and seems to be a little bit separated from the learning environment.
SAP acknowledges that Learning 2.0 / Social learning is on their roadmap for 2010. For 2011 it is foreseen that it may become an independent solution, less intertwined with the HR domain as it is at the moment. During the presentation I got the idea that the learning 2.0 facilities are still very basic and were shown to us because the presenters knew, that the possibility to support informal learning processes was an important requirement for the audience. Perhaps SAP will succeed to keep their learning 2.0 promisses, but at the same time it's a difficult decision for them. On the one hand the integration with SAP HR solutions is a strong advantage for companies that are already using SAP, on the other hand it's the question whether the SAP Learning solution can become strong (from a learning perspective) as long as the core of the system lies in the SAP ERP back-office. A scenario that may well be followed is the furthter development and improvement of a library of plugins. SAP already uses Adobe Connect and Questionmark Perception plugins to cover for specific functionality that they can not deliver themselves.

See also: SAP Enterprise Learning

Don't stop experimenting

2009-02-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended the 10th Dutch e-Learning Conference held at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. The closing keynote session was a virtual classroom by Elliott Masie, live from the US. After 10 years of e-Learning conferences it was one of the conference themes to look back and evaluate what e-Learning has brought us and may bring us in the future. One of Masie's points was that we focused too much on the 'e' in e-Learning, whatever meaning we may relate to it. In our instructional design we should more focus on the Learning aspect and especially include the role of the learner in the design process. What do we want him/her to do or to achieve? Innovation has the ability to make us enthousiastic, sometimes overestimating the possibilities and creating a hype. After a while we may find out that this great idea we thought we have did not become a success after all. One of the reasons is that we tend to move our existing behavior to the new technology, e.g. copying classroom based learning when we started using e-Learning. As long as we are aware that innovation has it's limitations and we do reflect on what is happening we can learn from it and improve our next steps towards a better way of e-Learning. One of his closing statements was not to stop experimenting, as long as we accept that we will mistakes and/or find out that some interventions may not work. Learn from it in order to make improvements.

During the Q&A session after his presentation Masie mentioned the ReSkilling project which may lead to huge opportunities for e-Learning. It's good to hear that the new Obama administration is making a big effort to create an environment in which people can be helped to stay employed or get back to the workforce by offering them maximum educational resources. I think it would be great if a project like this would also be organised by the Dutch administration, as we see lots of Dutch workers losing their jobs too or are dealing with a situation in which they have less working hours to spend.

Cloud computing

2009-01-16T01:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I participated in the 19th ROC-i-partner conference in The Hague, which had the concept of een integrated application landscape as a central theme. I did a presentation together with Gertjan Sinke from ROC ID College. Unfortunately, all parallel sessiosn were scheduled twice, so I only could attend the two keynote sessions. The morning keynote was given by Ben Gorter from SURFdiensten, and was about 'cloud computing'. The title surprised me a little bit, since in previous announcements the title was something about 'Software as a Service (SaaS)'. Well, listening to Ben I was wondering whether this is just another marketing label for something which is basically the same as SaaS. A lot of stuff he mentioned was about SaaS, with Google Apps and Salesforce.com as familiar examples of a SaaS solution. Advantages such as full service by the provider, pay-per-use, web based access and scalability are also applicable for SaaS. I believe it is more or less a matter of representation: there are a lot of services out there (in a cloud) that can be used in an instance. For an overview you might want to take a look at www.saas-showplace.com. Other examples included the MS Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and the Amazon webservices. The last one was new for me: Amazon apparently has extended their business with offering all kinds of webservices, e.g. if you need a Windows test server you can find it at Amazon, pay per hour and be up and running within 10 minutes. Another example is the devPay service that can be integrated in your online store and can handle all necessary online shopping and payment facilities. The only 'but' is that they require 3% from your turnover. Gorter argued that ICT will move out of our organisations. Compare it to elektricity power units in the beginning of the previous century. Most of our electricity demands are completely outsourced now. Only for business critical purposes (such as in a hospital) there may still be an electricity aggregate in the basement, in case of emergency.
Gorter closed his talk with some relativating remarks. It's extremely difficult for application developers to shift towards a SaaS approach. SAP has terminated their SaaS developments, because they still focus on developing a complete, coherent software solution. It's also difficult for relatively small companies who operate in the educational market. Typical educational applications can be considered a niche, it will probably take more time before those applications will be offered as SaaS. Nevertheless, the believe is that we will shift towards a SaaS model. The question is when. A lot of issues need to be solve. We will have to deal with interoperability issues, definining standards and last but not least legal and security issues. Do we want our data to be moved to an external repository or not? It still gives a feeling of 'trust' if the content server is inside the walls of our own organisation, but do we really know where it physically is? Especially when thinking about using single resources (to prevent redundancy) or collaborative repositories the physical content will no longer be in your own office, building or even your own organisation. It will take a careful transition process before we can really move to SaaS and what the benefits will be.

Rush hour generation

2008-12-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Today I did a presentation together with my colleague Job Bilsen entitled 'e-Learning sustainable?' The presentation was held at the 'Nationaal Opleidingscongres' in Breukelen (NL). We were quite satisfied to have a relatively large audience and I think we managed to have a very lively session. Overall, it was an interesting day, chaired by prof. Robert Jan Simons from the University of Utrecht. One concept which stayed clearly in my mind and which is one of the drivers to write this post right now is the concept of the 'rush hour generation', introduced by Wil Loermans from SNS Reaal. He indicated that the rush hour generation is represented by those who combine a (part-time) job, finding a girl- or boyfriend, having children, going away on far vacations and a lot more activities in as less time as possible. Another buzzword, a variation to Netgeneration, Generation Y? I am not sure, because he did not elaborate on it, but to me a new label was born.

Subsequently, we had an inspiring session with Manon Ruijters from Twyntstra Gudde who succeeded (in my opinion) to have a talk in a very relaxed, informal way. A major part of the time she focused on learning preferences. To illustrate this, she reported from a survey-scan she did among the audience (which was sent out a few weeks before the conference). She defined five types of learner preferences:

Looking at the art
Participation
Knowledge acquisition
Exercising
Discovery

It appeared that 'Looking at the art' and 'Discovery' were the dominant preferences in the audience. Looking at the art as in 'what works?', learning in real life, how do others do it and can I benefit from it? Discovery as in curiosity, coincidental learning, creativity and selfregulation.

The reason for picking out these two presentations is that they both did an attempt to label a group of learners. The more I hear those kind of labelling, the more I feel resistance, because it tries to put groups of people in a specific category, as if it were a robust part of you as a person. I think the discussion that was going on during the presentation of Manon Ruijters clearly indicates what I mean. Some people had high scores on both 'looking at art' and 'discovery', so what does that make them? There may be some kind of situational preference, that depending on the context you can have a different learning preference.

At the end of the day I attended an interesing session by Nicolet Theunissen from TNO. Among a lot of other interesting things she said, one that is interesting to mention here is that selfregulated learning is evaluated with rather extreme scores. Either the learners like it very much, or they get to some sort of 'learner crisis', they hate it or even become angry because there is too little coaching. For educators the concept of selfregulated learning is sometimes frightening, because it gives them a sense of losing control.

Reflecting on OEB 2008

2008-12-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

24 hours after coming home from Berlin it was time to reflect some highlights at Online Educa. Thursday was focused on having my own session on content repositories, together with co-presenters Koos Winnips (soon to be University of Groningen, NL), Leo Højsholt-Poulsen (UNI-C, Denmark) and Pascal Craeye (KlasCement, Belgium). Together with our chair Thomas Fischer (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) we agreed on a Learning Cafe format. In three introductory presentations (of approx. 10 minutes) we were firstly aiming at setting the scene and secondly at ‘animating’ a lively debate during the following four Interactive Learning Cafe. In these thematic Learning Cafés the following themes were discussed: 1) the potentials, 2) the risks, 3) the desired future and 4) pathways to the desired future of Open Educational Resources and Content Repositories. After a discussion interval of approx. 10 minutes the participants change tables/themes and will be introduced by the table facilitator to the outcomes of the discussions of the previous group. By these means the participants are able to build upon the insights and ideas of the previous group. Learning Cafés are therefore a powerful interactive and joyful method to stimulate the existing wisdom and creativity of participants and to collaboratively create knowledge by avoiding redundancies and repetitions. I was asked to moderate the Learning Café on risks. At first I was a little bit skeptic about the format, and thought that after the second round the creativity would decrease, but I was very wrong about this. Every session was a very lively and inspiring one. Four groups of approximately 15-20 people meant that we got real input from more than 70 people. The five main risks that came up in the Learning Cafés were:
1. Lack of a business model, meaning that there is not a clear perspective on running costs/funding after a project has finished (what about maintenance and support in the long term)
2. Content repository projects are often not integrated into a larger framework
3. Quality issues (is the material that I find good enough / is my material good enough to contribute)
4. How do the materials fit into a didactical approach or curriculum (level + topic)
5. Small sized communities include a risk that only one or two experts will the driver behind the community. If they drop out, the community is dead.

In addition to these five risks we defined some 10 more.
Afterwards we were quite satisfied with the format. The audience explicitly said they liked it and perceived it as very inspiring. What’s also nice is that the results of all Learning Cafés will be summarized and brought together so it can be shared with anyone who is interested. I just submitted my summary to Thomas Fischer.

Next to my own session I joined a session on SecondLife Learning Experiences, a promising title and possibly very relevant for the things we are doing at Stoas right now. Maybe I had too high expectations, but the session was not very inspiring. The first presentation by Jean Miller from Linden Labs was ok. She mentioned some interesting experiments about mixed reality: (1) your own movements can be reflected in movements from your avatar (2) using brain waves to move your avatar around. From a more technical side, she announced ‘behind the firewall SL solutions’ for 2009-Q1. Although not a new announcement, it was good to hear her re-announce it. In addition she also shared two other security issues: islands can be made invisible on the map, and only people you wish to attend can be invited. The two other presentation did not bring very much news. Both included research projects, one on Understanding in-world socialization and learning in groups (Leicester University), the other on life long learning (Institut fur Lern-Innovation). I hoped to hear more about the issue of SL for work-based learners to share work and experiences, but this was scheduled for future research at Leicester.

The final session on Dec. 4th (17.30-19.00) was about Gen Y. Especially right after the SL session I hesitated whether I should stay for this one, but I did. And it was good! I was impressed by Ton Zylstra’s keynote on Gen Y. In his blog he indicated four messages he wanted to give to the audience. It is very much linked to the discussion about the non-existence of the Netgeneration. Zylstra adds the perspective that we as a society have created a networked infrastructure (mobile communication, a 24/7 networked environment) which has a major impact on everything we do. We all need to become part of Gen Y not because we are a different species or generation, but because we have to adapt ourselves to the changing world. This sounds a bit like Darwin’s evolution theory: survival of the fittest. But let’s face it, there is really an enormous gap between those who have access to all kind of different information sources and those who haven’t.

Friday morning I mainly stayed around the booth of GiuntiLabs, to discuss in a few consecutive talks some training and marketing & sales issues with the people from Giunti. The meetings were very useful and provide a good starting point to move ahead to intensify further collaboration.

Early afternoon I drove back to the Netherlands with my colleague Egbert vd Winckel, hoping to be in time for a typical Dutch event: ‘Sinterklaasavond’. Children receive gifts in their shoe or we make surprises and write additional poems. The first part of the trip went very well, at 200 km/h we quickly gained one hour on the estimated arrival time which was displayed on the navigation display, but then we got stuck in two traffic jams, one near Bielefeld and a serious one near Dortmund: accident. Traffic came to a complete stop for about 45 minutes. So we lost all the time we gained earlier, we became worried whether we would make it in time for home. Fortunately, the second traffic jam was the last one and we arrived after rush hour in the Netherlands. We gained back a little bit of our lost time, so I was home at 8 PM, the time which was originally estimated at our leave from Berlin…

Online Educa Berlin, day 1

2008-12-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

Today was mainly for the pre-conferences. For me the day did not start too well, as there seemed to be a problem with my registration. That’s not even the worst thing, you only hear about it when you are first in line in a long waiting cue. So I had to move over to another cue where all the problem issues were handled. It turned out to be a simple matter, but it caused me a 30 minutes delay before I could join the pre-conference about building a course in Moodle. The session was presented by Pieter van der Hijden, with the support from my colleague Hans de Zwart. It was good to have an in depth overview on Moodle, especially in a workshop format where there was plenty of time to have some hands on experience. All together it was a long run, the session finished at 6.10 pm. Before I went to the speakers’ reception I had a quick meeting with Carin Martell from Giuntilabs about the training needs of our staff. Time was too short to get into much detail so we settled for another appointment tomorrow morning. At the speakers’ reception I met with my fellow presenters and the chair for tomorrow’s session on content repositories. We have worked out a promising interactive format (Learning Café), but need to have a plan B in case we have more than 100 in the audience. During the reception it was mentioned that OEB2008 has over 2000 participants, so with 15 parallel sessions it may well be that we will have 100 or more people in our session. The reception was sponsored by Blackboard, but the guy who gave a welcome speech on behalf of Blackboard had a hard time to get everybody’s attention. Although it was only 5 minutes, it was a rather commercial talk, so half of the audience wasn’t really listening. Interestingly, he mentioned the University of Twente as one of their promising new Bb sites in 2008.

On my way to Berlin

2008-12-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

This morning I started travelling from 's-Hertogenbosch railwaystation. First I had to go to Deventer where I could catch
catch the ICE train from Amsterdam to Glowny (Poland). On arrival in Deventer I saw that most of the Dutch delegation (organised by SURFFoundation) was
either waiting for the same train or already in it coming from Amsterdam. We had reserved seats so almost the whole delegation was sitting close to each other.
The journey went quite well and I managed to work together with my co-presenter Koos Winnips on our talk for next Thursday. We had to compress it into a 10
minute introduction instead of a 40 min. presentation, but we were quite satisfied with the result. Arrival at the hotel
went quite smoothly. At 7.30 Hans de Zwart and I will go into Berlin to have some dinner, together with some old colleagues of mine from Twente University. Looking
forward to the first activity at OEB: a pre-conference on Moodle.

Restyling

2008-12-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

After two years I decided that my blog was in need of a new look. So, I did a little bit of restyling. I am not done yet, but so far I am quite satisfied about the new look and feel. Today I'm making my final preparations for Online Educa Berlin, which will be starting on Dec. 3th with a number of pre-conferences. On Thursday I will have my own session together with Koos Winnips about Open repositories and why people seem to hesitate to make their contributions. The title draw some attention since the OEB organisation decided to have an interview with Koos and me. The result of this interview is now published on the OEB website. I will be at OEB together with colleagues from Stoas, like Hans de Zwart. In the next couple of days we will try to keep you posted about interesting issues and events that occur during the conference.

Nationaal Onderwijscongres 2008

2008-11-20T04:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended the annual Nationaal Onderwijscongres at the WTC in Rotterdam. Although the conference was also focused on higher education, it was a completely different type of audience compared to the SURF Onderwijsdagen a week ago. Main topics were more about education innovation, future plans, improving study success, quality insurance and less about ICT in education. One of the things I found remarkable is the rather traditional way of setting up a conference: keynotes in the morning, parallel sessions in the afternoon. We also received a large, paper-filled conference map, including all the hand-outs (why not distribute this on a CD?).

My own presentation was quite satisfying. Based the pre-registration I expected 22 participants in my session. However, at starting time it became about 50, so the lecture room was rather crowded. Perhaps my presentation title (HE Student 2020) attracted a lot of people, I am not sure. Beforehand all presenters were instructed to built in a sense of reflection, so I choose not to give a science fiction like presentation, but to stay rather close to things that are possible right now and are happening in the near future. I tried to sketch some ICT trends, which I think was useful for this specific target audience.

One of the highlights of the conference was the presentation entitled ‘Teach the brain to study’, by Prof. Jelle Jolles from Maastricht University. In a clear way he elaborated on the relation between education and cognitive neuroscience. We know some things about cognitive processes, but not what’s happening in education and why it’s happening that way. The other way around is also true. By showing several pictures of MRI scans Jolles argued that learning leads to less brain activity to perform a certain task. Someone who is learning to read shows much more brain activity than a skilled reader. Moreover, adult readers are able to activate different parts of the brain simultaneously which provides evidence that multitasking, or should I say multichannel information processing is possible. When we are driving a car we are able to steer, to shift gears, to listen to the radio, to talk with a passenger at the same time.

An interesting part of his presentation was about the maturational changes of the brain from childhood to adult ages. In this perspective learning is not only about stimulating the right connections between braincells, but also about disconnecting links that are not efficient. As an instructor (and as parent) we have the ability to feed and guide the development of relevant connections, so they can become information highways that are able to perform high speed information processing requests. A general misunderstanding is that the maturation of the brain is finished around 18. Well, this is not the case. Research shows that the maturation process continues until the age of 30. Moreover, we see a differential development process in the sense that some parts of the brain mature earlier than other parts. Especially the ability to make judgments, taking multiperspectives into consideration, emotional and motivational skills develop further until the age of 30. This means that in the phase of higher education (appr. 18-22 years) we have to realize that the brain is still in the phase of adolescence. Psychosocial maturation is not completed yet. However, we have the possibility to stimulate the maturation process. We need to use as much information channels as possible: not only talking to the student, but also providing a hands-on experience. We need to support, guide and inspire and use the opportunity that young adolescents – in general – have an interest in technical novelties. The social networking sites, or a presence in a virtual world provide an additional way to work on these psychosocial skills. More information can be found on:

http://www.brainandlearning.eu/

And finally, the education innovation award 2008 went to Dick de Wolf (Hogeschool Utrecht) and Theo Wubbels (Universiteit Utrecht) for their joint effort to establish a pedagogical curriculum that leads to two bachelor degrees: a pedagogical agree for becoming a teacher in primary education AND a university bachelor degree in educational science. After three video presentations and an additional interview with the nominees, the audience was invited to vote for the best education innovation. The result was very clear: 77% in favor of de Wolf and Wubbels. More information about their joint efforts can be found here (in Dutch).

SURF Onderwijsdagen - 3

2008-11-13T23:46:00.000-08:00

Another interesting presentation on day 1 was by Pieter van der Hijden. Although not very new, it was nice to see an organised overview of all steps that need to be taken during the implementation of a VLE. A crucial turning point is when the bottom up initiaves (enthousiastic instructors who started using e.g. with Moodle in their daily work environment) need to be transferred into a top down organsation. This means that organisation processes, support, workflow need to be (re)organised in order to use the VLE on the level of an entire organisation.
Van der Hijden indicated some advantages and disadvantages of the top down approach:
Advantages:

Management commitment
Finance
Common infrastructure
Professional support organisation

Disadvantages:

Slow implementation process
Needs to compete with other policy issues
Potential lack of support by workforce

According to van der Hijden organisations tend to emphasize maintentance and organisation issues, instead of education. This is an important threat for acceptance. In order to deal with this he presented the so called TACTEC approach, consisting of the following steps:

Identify your main stakeholders (max. 7)
Allocate roles
Current situation
Required situation
Scenario's
Cross check (are there any interdependencies?)

According to me we see an analogy with an enterprise architecture approach: you need to clarify what the business processes are in relation with your main actors. Then there is the analysis of IST (current) and SOLL (required).

Day 1 started with an opening keynote entitled 11-11-2020. This title made me curious, also because it did not show who the presenter would be. Well it was not a traditional presentation in the sense that Marc Dupuis from the University of Leiden did four interviews with two people, who gave their vision on how education will look like in 2020. In summary they described the following scenario's:

the airport
the warehouse
the fair trade
the supermarket

The scenario's were categorized on two axes: (1) from supply driven VLE to demand driven VLE and (2) from supply driven curriculum to demand driven curriculum.
We saw some science-fiction like impressions, interactive holograms, implanted chips and that kind of stuff, but I also noticed a slightly negative expectation. For example, the student who tried to select course packages in the warehouse whas confronted with several messages that his selection did not meet the 'standards', so the final result was that he did not find what he wanted. After the presentations the participants were asked to vote (rise your yellow card) for the scenario they liked most. Most votes were counted for the warehouse and the supermarket metaphore. To me the differences between the two were not very clear. Basing myself only on the presentations I voted for the "supermarket" which appeared to be in the quadrant of supply driven VLE x student centred curriculum. This is rather strange, since I don't believe in a supply driven VLE in the perspective of 2020. According to the quadrants I should have voted for 'the fair trade scenario', but somehow the presenters did not succeed to present this as an attractive metaphore, or maybe it was just too far away from a realistic scenario.

Last but not least I did a presentation together with Oscar Vonder from Learning Valley in which we argued that a service oriented approach (integrating applications through services) is the way to create a comprehensive, but also sustainable environment for the end user. The full presentation can be found on slideshare. Any comments or questions are welcome.

SURF Onderwijsdagen - 2

2008-11-13T23:24:00.001-08:00

I promised to get back to you with some more impressions about the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008. On day 1 I joined a very interesting presentation by Willem-Jan Renger from Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht. He had the disadvantage of being the closing session of the day, before the reception and dinner. Nevertheless, he did an amazing job. A very lively, humoristic way of presentation. I was attracted by the title: "designing education for the netgeneration: the gaming mindset". During the first part of his presentation Renger argued that we shouldn't look at the "netgeneration" in the strict sense of the word. There is more and more debate going on whether we can talk about a generation (in terms of age) at all. It's about new literacy, or digital literacy if you like. However, this is not necessary age-related. The digital divide is present across generations, but also across different social classes. Youngsters who are not in a position where there parents can afford having a computer, PS3, Wii, iPhone, iPod, etc. can also be on the 'wrong' side of the digital divide.
Henry Jenkins published a whitepaper about models and frameworks for new media literacy. It's important to acknowledge the media skills.
But what about the gaming mindset for education? Renger thinks a lot of people have a narrow, biased view on the role of games. It's only fun, you can't learn from it, or in some occasions is even considered 'bad'. When using gamedesign for education it's important to consider the end goals you want to achieve. An interesting remark was that you can even have analogous education, but still use game principles in your design. It's about lean forward, taking control as a learner. You need to design the behavior of the 'player', what can he do, which rules are available, how do you create a challenge? The main issue is to create a challenge that is not too difficult, nor too easy.

SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008 - 1

2008-11-12T12:25:00.001-08:00

Just two hours at home after joining the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008. The closing keynote by Gordon Freedman (vice president educational strategy at Blackboard) was a little bit disappointing. The good thing was that he did not get into the Bb Next Generation plans, which would be quite strange in this setting (already mentioned by Wilfred Rubens in his blog). Freedman's talk was about education innovation, which should be the key issue for the next couple of years. "Let's put technology aside". Strange to hear someone say this who claims to have an install base of 3000 organisations in 70 countries using Blackboard. Is this to prevent them from looking at other VLE's in the meantime? It's hardly news to say that we should think about education innovation. This should always be the basic drive, shouldn't it? Well maybe this is a difference between the European approach and the US approach. After analyzing which educational processes should be facilitated, one gets to the required functionality and finally to one or more applications that are able to deliver this. Taking the ongoing process of ICT development into consideration it would be a pity to neglect potential new ICT solutions. You could miss a lot.
One of the highlights today was the session by Wilfred Rubens about the non existing net-generation. It was interesting to see how he handled a multichannel approach: face to face presentation, streaming video, powerpoint and a backchannel (also displayed by a beamer) through which participants (sometimes at other locations) could make contributions. This was a strong demonstration of a (temporary) NET-community. There were also other backchannels, like the Twitter feeds that went around and which were used by participants to have short Twitter discussions during the presentation. The conclusion of the session was that it's not relevant whether or not the net generation exists. ICT is there and we can use it, independent of age. It's important to deal with the information skills, plagiarism aspects and digital literacy if we want to use ICT. There are many reasons to use ICT, and for a personalised environment it's a prerequisite. So far for now. Further impressions will be in a next post.

SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008

2008-11-11T01:04:00.001-08:00

Today and tomorrow I will be joining the "SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008" in Utrecht. I am curious about the keynote for today, which has the title of "11-11-2020". Tomorrow I will have my own presentation, together with Oscar Vonder from Learningvalley. We need to finalize some details today, but the presentation is more or less ready. Besides visiting the conference it is always a good annual opportunity to meet all the colleagues working in the same field. I've seen a lot of familiar names on the participants list. So let's go. I'll try to keep you updated by more blog posts and of course using Twitter.

Election time!

2008-11-03T23:52:00.000-08:00

I am probably not the only person on the planet to address the American elections today ;-). Looking at the results of different polls and surveys in the Netherlands there seems to be an overwhelming support for Barrack Obama to win today's elections. I've never witnessed such a devistating gap between two candidates before, but let's not claim the victory before this day is over. Last Sunday, Felippe Massa also thought he was going to be the World Champion Formula 1, until Lewis Hamilton caught up with Timo Glock in the very last lap and became the youngest F1 world champion ever....
Today, the interesting issue for me is what will be the benefit for education when (or should I say 'if') Obama wins the elections. On his site there is an overview on all educational issues he stands for. Also take a look at his technology issues. No need to repeat that here, but I would like to point out some of his issues. In my opinion he is setting clear goals that (higher) education should be achievable and affordable for everyone. He believes in the openness of the internet and a connected, communications infrastructure. Moreover, we need to prepare our children for a 21st century economy. Well you might ask whether the term 'prepare' is right. It's more like coaching I think, because the teens of this time - in general - are 'technology enabled'. We have more trouble in catching up with them, instead of the other way around. However, what we could contribute to, as a parent, is on critical reflection: ask yourself what information you have found, what's the source and value of this information, are there any risks involved? We can also create a belief that they have to process the information they find: just copy&paste any content and then submitting it as 'your work' won't create a large learning effect.
Anyway, I think Obama stands for creating a right, modern context in which the so-called NetGeneration will be enabled to develop themselves in the best possible way and be interconnected with eachother. A democratic vision in which every member can contribute (isn't that the underlying principle of Wiki's?) and has a freedom of choice, meets the demands of the current networked user.

Capturing the Captcha

2008-10-31T05:53:00.000-07:00

A CAPTCHA or Captcha (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer (Source: Wikipedia). During my search for new, interesting technology based learning solutions it's often needed to create an account to take a closer look. In most cases I need to confirm that I am real human by entering a Captcha. However, spammers already found possibilities to crack the Captcha coding and create usernames by a robot (e.g. at Live Hotmail). This is probably one of the reasons why Captcha's are increasingly difficult to read. The ultimate consequence is that the human reader cannot identify the characters he needs to enter. Only this week I had two experiences in creating test accounts in which a Captcha confirmation was included. Both times I was not able to read the Captcha code the first time right. It took me three times before the Captcha code I entered was right. Is this just my subjective impression, do I need glasses, or is this something that other also encounter?

Reflecting on the financial crisis

2008-10-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

I just submitted my conference presentation for NOC 2008, so I thought I take a moment to reflect on some remarkable issues in the financial crisis. Although I don't experience any personal damage yet, it all looks quite distressing if you would only look and listen to all the news flashes. Nowadays, it should be quite easy to select a number of RSS feeds in order to get you into a deep mental depression. For someone who is really working in the financial business, I can imagine that it must be quite depressing to see how things drop down for days in a row. The thing that happen seem to go beyond their span of control. On the other hand, I sometimes get the impression that the 'panic of the crowds' is the only leading driver for everything that is going on. I wonder if there is really any reflection, or is it just blindly following the crowds in a sort of belief that this will get you into a save place where you can wait until the crisis is over. Another factor I noticed is the role of the media. Listening to radio interviews I sometimes get the impression that it is not interesting enough to make a report on companies that are doing relatively well. The tone of voice also contributes to how news items are perceived by the public. For example, the 6% decrease of the Nikei index on Oct. 28 was considered "dramatic" and "historical". One day later, the 6.4 % increase was mentioned only a "light recovery". If I would only have read the header, I would think about an increase of 1 or 2% maybe, but not 6.4! This is not helpful to create a more positive context in which structural recovery of the damage can be established. It's not a coincidence that the possibilities for short selling have been restricted.

The financial crisis has already infected some real 'economies', such as the automotive and hospitality industries. A rather unexpected thing is that - so far, so good - the ICT business is not mentioned very much (read a Dutch review on this by Irma Borst). In the 2001 crisis we got the full blow. But what about this time? Will we remain in the periphery of this financial hurricane? Cutting costs on training and education is one of the things that are always a risk, unless there is a clear business case that supports the idea that the benefit will be larger than the costs. Especially for the e-Learning business the definition of clear business cases may become essential drivers for investments in the near future.

Microsoft as a virus distributor?

2008-10-24T11:45:00.001-07:00

Reading today's newspaper I noticed a small article about Chinese computer users who are angry with Microsoft. What's new you might think? Well the case is that Microsoft has developed a Windows Genuine Advantage application that is automatically installed through Windows updates. The program detects whether or not you have a legal version of the Windows OS. If not, the user gets a black wallpaper every hour, during 45 days. You may change it to a wallpaper you like more, but it will be replaced by the black wallpaper in the next hour. This type of computer behavior reminds me of a typical, rather innocent category of computer viruses. It's Microsoft's way to strive against illegal use of their OS. On the one hand they may be right to protect their legal rights, on the other hand it is questionable whether they have the right to infect millions of computer users this way. It seems like taking the law into their own hands, instead of sending out legal claims. Trying to imagine how this would be in a more physical metaphor I can think of a situation that a manufacturer would come into my house to shut down my cd player, so I cannot play copies of CD's anymore. How would that look like? You cannot pop into somebody's home and do things that you believe are right, it would be considered trespassing. Is the Microsoft example a case of digital trespassing?

Sakai re-visited

2008-10-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

My career at the University of Twente is now exactly 10 days behind me - it was a nice "say goodbye" reception by the way - and I shifted to 6th gear in working for Stoas Learning. The past few days I contributed to a proposal for an enterprise learning solution based on Sakai. Last Wednesday we had an intensive 5-hour information session with representatives from our potential customer. Besides taking a close look at Sakai, they were also very interested in the way Stoas may act as a partner organisation, making the implementation of Sakai a success. Yesterday and today I have been working on the contents of a proposal together with some colleagues at Stoas. In the meantime several additional questions popped up, which also need to be addressed in our offer. It was a deja vu to re-visit familiar webpages like confluence, collab and jira, and to take a closer look how Sakai 2.5.3 has developed, compared to the last version (2.3) I have worked with. Some new tools in combination with GUI skins and didactical templates for deployment of Sakai sites (both developed at Stoas), gave a promising perspective. Of course we have to wait if our proposal will be accepted, but if so, it will probably mean quite some Sakai-related work for us.

FireFTP

2008-09-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

One of the things I do in my spare time is the maintenance of a few websites such as www.tsdekker.nl. In a technical sense it's a rather straightforward site, basically some .css, .js and a bunch of .html files, that can be easily adapted by using e.g. FrontPage. Up until a few years ago I used WS FTP for uploading new files to the server, a rather straightforward easy to use FTP application. Nothing fancy, but quite reliable. After that I moved to SmartFTP. The nice thing about SmartFTP is the functionality to open different FTP servers at the same time. You can switch between them just by clicking on tabs. It was not a big problem to use SmartFTP for free, as an educational license. However, at certain moments it was necessary to do a re-install the program. Not a big problem you might say, but the removal of a previous version was never 100% complete as some entries remain in your Start menu. Recently SmartFTP launched their 3.0 version of the program, but also introduced license restrictions. After 10 years they are no longer able to provide SmartFTP as a free service. I managed to download a trial version, which would expire in 1 day... Well, 1 day is enough to make the most urgent uploads to the website, but it became very clear that I should look for an alternative. I already heard about FireFTP, a free FTP add-on to your Mozilla Firefox browser. It's a relatively small add-on and promises to give you easy and intuitive access to your FTP server. What I like about it is (1) that it loads very quickly and (2) it simply opens another tab in your active Firefox browser. Compared to SmartFTP, which is a separate application, loading FireFTP saves you a lot of time. In one half of the screen you can see the contents of your local computer, in the other half the contents of your FTP server. Just as in SmartFTP it's very easy to select the files you need to upload. After uploading your files, simply switch to another tab to see the result on your live website. So far it works great: it does all the things I expect it to do.

Making the next step

2008-09-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in one of my previous posts my career is moving ahead to the next step: senior consultant e-learning at Stoas Learning in Wageningen (NL). September will be a sort of transfer period in which I start working for Stoas, but I also have to finish some work at the University of Twente. The main issue that has to be worked on in Twente is the writing of an implementation plan for Blackboard. As you may have read elsewhere (www.utwente.nl/elo) the university has decided to choose for Blackboard as their next VLE. This means that TeleTOP will be phased out in the next couple of years. The writing of an implementation plan is not as easy as it seems. It's not only setting up the infrastructure, but also a support organisation and the training of end users. Moreover, it's an interesting issue for the University of Twente to collaborate closely with the colleagues from the Technical University of Delft. They already have a lot of experience with Blackboard in their organisation and are also actively involved in the Bb user group in the Netherlands. The collaboration with Delft is also interesting from the perspective of integrating Blackboard with OSIRIS, the new student information system for both universities. Well, the challenge is to deliver a 1.0 version of the implementation plan by the end of september. In the meantime I started working for Stoas. At first for two days a week, but it will build up rather quickly towards the end of september. Obviously a lot of impressions and meeting new colleagues. It felt great so far, and as I understand there won't be a big problem in finding challenges that need to be worked on at Stoas..;-) I'll keep you posted.

World Mind Map

2008-07-18T07:17:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I was invited by a friend to contribute to a new thing he developed together with a colleague. It's called World Mind Map (www.womima.com). The idea is relatively simple. I think most of you know the concept of mind mapping: using associations to relate a set of concept to one another. Often succesfully applied in brainstorming sessions. The additional value of Word Mind Map (as I understand it) is that you can immediately relate to associations that others have already made (and which are stored in the WoMiMa database). So I registered for a user account and made a first try-out. The very first word I entered immediately displayed a mindmap of all the concepts that appear to be related to that word. I was surprised. At this moment the mindmap that appeared is rather clear. I wonder what will happen after a few thousand members have entered their associations. Will there still be a clear overview? Sometimes I noticed that some of the words were displayed on top of each other which makes it difficult to read. The founders claim that this new concept can be a powerful way to make a map of your business and it's context. At this moment it's only in Dutch, but there are plans to make translations (or should I say associations) to other languages as well. For example the word 'computer' is the same in Dutch as it is in English. Well, if you became curious, just take a look and see what happens.

Give way to math education

2008-07-08T00:26:00.000-07:00

After a long period of writing a coherent development programme, together with the department of applied mathematics, we finally received a 'go' on a series of four projects in the field of math education. The past years have painfully shown that a lot of students have trouble with their math subjects like Calculus. Although in most cases they achieved reasonably well scores in their final exams in secondary education, the math entrance test at the very beginning of their university career is often a great disappointment. Another issue that comes up during the curriculum is that students who have enrolled into a to a science curriculum also have to take some obligatory math courses. One of the questions they ask themselves is: "do we really need this?", i.e. there seems to be no clear relation between what is learnt in the math courses and what they will need in the further parts of their science curriculum. The math is given on a much more abstract level than they are used to, which makes it difficult to imagine how it can be applied in the context of their major curriculum. As a result some students tend to develop a negative attitude towards math and postpone taking exams in these math courses, sometimes until the very end of their bachelor program.
One of the projects in the new development programme aims at developing context-specific cases. However, this will be addressed in a much more integrated way in the sense that the abstract math theory will be part of a face-to-face introduction. The cases will be presented right after this introduction causing that students do have to apply their fresh knowledge in a context that relates to their main curriculum. So, a student in construction technology receives a different case than a student in chemical technology, although in both cases they may follow a course called 'Calculus I' for example. Besides an expected improvement in transfer of knowledge, we hope to find a spin-off effect in the sense that students may develop a more positive attitude towards math subjects, and possibly spend more time on the subject. And as we know from previous projects and research: spending more time on a subject is positively related to the results that will be achieved. The projects will be started during the summer. The first products (cases) should be available already in september 2008.

Back in blog-business

2008-07-03T05:45:00.000-07:00

It has been quite a while since my last post. A number of reasons - which I will not bother you with - caused that I simply didn't have the time to maintain my blog. Hopefully this will change from now on. This week two important things came up, which made me decide that I should pick up blogging again. The first thing is that I will move to the next step in my career. As of september 2008 I will leave the University of Twente and start working as a senior consultant e-learning at Stoas Learning. A lot of interesting challenges over there in both the business as well as in the educational market. I am well aware of the fact that a commercial environment is completely different, but from previous job positions I think I know what choice I am making right now.

The second thing is the university board has made a final decision for the next VLE at the University of Twente (see www.utwente.nl/elo for more information, partly in English). For outsiders it may seem rather surprising that the board made a decision for Blackboard. Well maybe it is. If you asked me four months agon what it would be, then I would have said 'probably SharePoint'. However, our SharePoint reports listed a lot of critical remarks and risks that need to be addressed in case a VLE will be based on MS SharePoint. Moreover, a united group of students wrote an open letter to the board of directors in which they criticize the possible choice of a Microsoft solution. Although Blackboard (6.3) was not considered 'good enough' in 2005 the board asked the project team to take a good look at Blackboard 8 and see how the newest release would meet the main decision criteria. Thanks to the close collaboration with our colleagues from the University of Delft we managed to conduct another quickscan within a very tight time schedule. Besides the fact that basic Bb functionality will be sufficient for the majority of our instructors and students, a great advantage is that we can collaborate with 'Delft' on the integration with OSIRIS (the new student information system for Delft and Twente). I think it's good that a choice has been made, it's time to move ahead to the next step. In my final weeks at the University I will be closely involved in the development of an implementation plan.

Do open source learning solutions really stand a chance?

2008-02-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

This evening I was reading the blog of Andreas Wittke who brings up an interesting and the same time somewhat worrying perspective. I think he is quite right in his analysis that higher education institutes have a sort of default procedure when they consider changing to another VLE. Basically the process starts with setting up an extensive list of requirements, followed by a request for proposal (to which companies can subscribe). After the companies have provided their information a small number is invited to make a commercial offer. This whole procedure has to be done according to strict European rules (and takes part mostly behind closed doors). Basically this is what happened in the decision making process of buying a new student information system (SIS) at the University of Twente. For open source communities it is much more difficult to make a bid and offer their proposition in this kind of procedures. The Sakai board tried to enter the Dutch High Education market in 2007, e.g. by setting up a meeting with members from the boards of directors and not to forget by organizing one of the Sakai World Conferences in Amsterdam. It was not a great success in the sense that only a few institutes went along with Sakai. The criteria that Andreas Wittke mentions sound very familiar. Annual turnover is one of them. Companies fall out of the buying procedure, just because their annual turnover is too low. This makes it impossible to compete for small or relatively young companies, which don't have a very good track record. And what about market share? Microsoft claims to have a 95% market share, but this can also be part of their sales strategy in order to keep up a high score on this criterium. An analysis earlier this week at the University of Twente shows that 27% of our VLE users use Firefox as a browser, which is surprisingly close to the share mentioned by Wittke. Perhaps we may set our hopes to our government. The Dutch parliament is nowadays very critical about the sales procedures on software applications. The recent disasters in large governmental ICT projects will make this even worse. A few weeks ago the government stated that in case of equality of software applications (I wonder how they will measure equality...), governmental institutes (which then also applies to higher education institutes) should choose for open standards and open source. Among a lot of other issues we did mention this in our final evaluation report on MS SharePoint. It seems that Google Sites might be(come) an interesting alternative. Our board of directors has to make up their minds on what to do with our current VLE TeleTOP. But what will it be? Take the 'easy' way and go for a migration project with a big and reliable multinational? Or maybe not... Whatever the choice, I think it is time to make a choice, any choice. After three years of doing research, running pilots, analysing where the real problems are, it is not done to postpone the decision again. The first group of students who gave their input on what needs to be improved (system integration!) are moving quickly towards their bachelor or master degree. So they won't benefit anyway...

Another fine for Microsoft

2008-02-27T23:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday EC commissioner Kroes anounced yet another fine for Microsoft, this time for an amount of € 899 million. This is the highest fine so far and sums up to a total of € 1.7 billion. The reasons for this third fine are basically the same. The EC ordered Microsoft to provide technical information on their server software products in order to enable other companies to develop applications that can run smoothly on the MS platform. However, according to Brussels Microsoft is asking way too much money for this information. Just recently, Microsoft announced to be more collaborative. Technical information on their main server products would be made available for free. The EC was not impressed, since Microsoft did not show any collaborative attitude so far. Brussels is still also looking into complaints of producers of other web browsers like Opera and Firefox. It is very well possible that these complaints may lead to another fine.
The EC announcement comes at a moment that we are finalizing our Quickscan SharePoint final reports (deliverables are due on Feb 29th). One of the issues we are addressing, is that a choice for SharePoint automatically sets course towards vendor lockin, especially on the server and maintenance side of the product. It is suggested that e.g. Firefox end-users can also take advantage of full functionality of MS Sharepoint (MOSS2007), this is not the case, however. For some functionality it's possible to install a Firefox plugin, but this does not provide an equivalent solution compared to IE users. During the site visits it was suggested that Microsoft showed a tendency towards more openness, thus providing better opportunities for interoperability. However, the news as summarized in the first paragraph does not give very much faith that substantial strategy changes indeed can be expected in the near future. Our conclusion to this point is rather straightforward: if you want the optimal SharePoint solution, it means you have to move to a MS infrastructure.

Preliminary conclusions

2008-01-24T10:07:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week we held our information session on the Quickscan Sharepoint project, which is running towards it's end. Sir Bakx (Information manager at the University of Twente) was invited to give a brief opening session. He presented a brief historical overview about relevant previous projects and about related projects (such as the implementation of a new student information system) that have to deliver their results in the spring of 2008. The university board will then have to decide how to move on to the next phase. One of the main questions obviously will be what will be the future of our current VLE: TeleTOP.
After Sir's opening speech I presented an overview of the site visits we have made at Dutch Higher Education institutes: INHOLLAND, Wageningen University, Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen and Technical University Eindhoven. The final reports will be available on Feb. 29th, 2008. The summary report will also contain a separate summary in English. Some preliminary conclusions will be addressed here. First, MS Sharepoint (MOSS2007) includes a lot of functionality, but you need to invest a lot in tailoring it to your needs. Sharepoint by itself is not a classic VLE such as TeleTOP or Blackboard. However, the site visits have shown (and also a pilot at our own university) that you can build your own lists and views on data in order to build a VLE-like interface. Advanced MOSS users can achieve a lot without the need to develop software code in C#. A second major issue is that you need serious investment in change management. Training of end users is one thing, but you also need to achieve acceptance for the new environment. The third point that can be mentioned - and which relates back to one of our first projects - is the possibility to integrate with other systems. The site visits and our own technical research show that a choice for MOSS2007 would be in line with a service oriented approach. The ICT department at the Technical University Eindhoven has high expectations that a MOSS based solution will be able to communicate with an Enterprise Service Bus. On the one hand to communicate with other TU/e systems, on the other hand to be able to community with the outside world, more specifically the 3TU Federation. Two technical issue that are of major concern is performance and upgrading. All sites that have started with SP2003 indicate that performance is a critical factor. You need to monitor the performance and decide for upgrades on your servers. The other one is that you may encounter serious problems when upgrading from SP2003 to MOSS2007. Tailor made adaptations may be lost or may have become a standard function in MOSS2007.
The fourth point is related to the strength of the community. This was also a major criterium in the Sakai project we have conducted in 2007. The impression so far is that the sites we have visited have run their projects by themselves, sometimes supported by external consultants and/or developers. However, there was hardly any exchange of resources or collaboration in the sense that e.g. webparts have been developed in a joint project. The Dutch Special Interest Group so far is just a platform where information and experiences are shared, but is not a joint development group. The interesting question is whether there would be enough support for a virtual 'institute' in which participating institutes can only join if they provide let's say at least 1 fulltime developer or consultant.
You may find some pictures of the information session on Flickr.
You may also be interested in the minutes of this meeting (only in Dutch). Here you can also find our powerpoint presentation.

2008

2008-01-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

First of all I'd like to start with wishing you a very happy and succesfull 2008. From an ICT in education perspective I truly hope the new year will bring some solutions we have been waiting for so long. In the 3TU consortium we have a big challenge to meet in which the process architecture (designed in Archimate) needs to be mapped on (non) available application components in the three institutes. Will we truly make steps in interoperability and data exchange so 3TU students can look into their required information files, at all locations? Will they be able to manage their own study process, supported by an integrated study planning system? It's inevitable that the 3TU's need to make choices in order to make this happen. A second major challenge is today's official start of the new Student & Education Service Centre at the University of Twente. The service department (ITBE) in which information technology, library and the educational department were combined is now completely closed. Former ITBE units are now implemented in different shared service centres. Of course, a lot needs to be done before things will run smoothly in the new organisation: new departments, new procedures, clear internal and external communication, and last but not least new colleagues are just some of the issues we have to deal with. A new start provides new chances, 2008 is the year to prove it!

Getting used to it

2007-11-29T04:51:00.000-08:00

The project we are currently running on MOSS2007 is about halfway. Part of the project is to work with MOSS2007 ourselves, the other part is to gather information from site visits in the context of Dutch Higher Education. It's still to early to draw any conclusions, but there is one remarkable issue I'd already like to share with you. This issue comes down to changing one's working process, or one's habits if you like. MOSS2007 provides a lot of functionalitiy and especially advanced users (provided they have the corresponding rights) can make a lot of configuration changes to their environment, without the help of an ICT specialist. Another thing is that using MOSS2007 in the way it's meant to be used (at least I think it is), is that users should get all necessary information from the site, instead of receiving a whole bunch of attachments throught e-mail. If everyone puts down the documents in the Sharepoint site instead of e-mailing it, it would decrease current e-mail traffic a lot. So it's not only getting information from the site, but also putting your own information there. It's a two way interaction. However, in daily practice people have trouble to change their working processes according to the new paradigm. They are very much used to sending e-mails and attaching documents to it. Instead of attaching the files you want to share, you can include a shortcut link if you want to be of help to the receiver of your e-mail. Even better is to let users set an alert on all folders they want to receive notifications in case changes are made. In our experience the alerting function is not 100% reliable, and moreover, you don't know who has set an alert and who has not. So it's not bad to include the link. This way you'll force all group members to go to the Sharepoint site. Some guys have avoidance tactics, by sending you an attachment and ask you to put it on the site for them. Don't do that! You're not a secretary. If you are sure they have contribution rights on the site, ask them to put it on themselves. If possible you may want to instruct them the first time, but the message is that they do it themselves. This is the only way to change the working processes. During our site visits we have seen that institutes who have more years of experience with working with Sharepoint still have trouble to get users on to the 'new' paradigm.

Using Archimate modelling techniques

2007-10-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

Last Friday (Oct. 19th) I attended an information session at Surf Foundation, focused on modelling your information architecture by using the Archimate language. (see http://www.archimate.org/). We are dealing with Archimate in our 3TU working groups in an attempt to describe the relevant business processes that have to be supported in a federative virtual learning and working environment. However, in our group we mainly focus on the top level of the Archimate framework (the business layer). The functional and especially the application layer is beyond our scope.
Well, back to the Surf session we were offered two presentations of tools that claim to support your modelling work in Archimate: Architect by BiZZdesign and ARIS bij IDS Scheer. Although I had some trouble in following the sometimes fast pace of the demo (including all the technical, architectural issues that were considered as prior knowledge) I saw clear differences between the two. Architect gives me the impression that it delivers results that are suitable for further communication (e.g. validation purposes) with stakeholders in your organisation. It delivers flows that can rather easily elaborated. ARIS seems much more complex (although it has an impressive track record in large industries) to handle and to communicate about for non-technical people. One specific weakness in the ARIS presentation is that the current version is not capable to show the designs in Archimate modelling components yet. This will be the case in the next release (to be expected in 2008-Q1).
Personally I was also more attracted to the presentation style of BiZZdesign. Their business proposition as a lean and mean orgaisation with a clear focus is more attractive that a large multinational and more commercial approach. The IDS Scheer presentation was much more of a commercial kind, and I'm not sure whether the listeners were really waiting for this. Several colleagues indicated that Dutch Higher Education is still at the very beginning of working under architecture and were wondering whether ARIS is the right choice. According to IDS this is the right moment to step in, but I never heard an argument why. So far, I believe we made the right choice to work together with BiZZdesign for our 3TU objectives.

Beyond the VLE

2007-10-02T02:08:00.000-07:00

Last week I visited the third SURF conference titled 'Beyond the VLE'. Some of the issues brought up were a follow up of the the Personal Learning Environment as presented by Scott Wilson at the second edition of this conference in 2006. An additional issue that was explicitly mentioned in the presentation of Nico Juist (Hogeschool INHOLLAND) is that we should also take into account the technical 'infrastructure' a student already has when he enrolls for a study program. His bag is not only filled with (note)books, but also with virtual things like a MSN, Skype, Google docs, a Hyves profile, and last but not least an impressive 5Gb mail account on e.g. Gmail. However, when a student enrolls we tend to prescribe a whole range of ICT facilities that can or need to be used as a facilitator for his work as a student. But does the student really need it? For example Hogeschool Zuyd made a clear choice in relation to an instant messaging function: students may need it for their group work, and if so, they can organise it by themselves. Many VLE's offer a (most times) limited chat function, but in daily practice students tend to use MSN. They're used to it, and it contains all their relevant contacts. So why bother to offer an instant messaging service? The same rationale may apply for offering an e-mail account. Why? To have an addiotional e-mail address that won't be used (or only for auto-forward purposes) and has a limited mailbox site of 200Mb? The discussion comes down to the fundamental question what we want to facilitate as an organisation. In addition to the PLE paradigm isn't it much more powerful when a student can create his own portal page, including those components ('web parts') that he needs. If for example Netvibes is your default carrier, you can organise a lot of things only by developing the right RSS-feeds for the user. He is responsible what he wants to see, where he wants to see it and how he wants to see it. I'm afraid it will take a real paradigm revolution before educational institutes will go this far. Many things of our current organisation are based on a sense of control: we want to monitor what happens and what students are doing. In a 'free' PLE format we feel that we loose this sense of control. Can we deal with that? Well think about this: there is already a lot of virtual communication and collaboration going on that we don't know about. It's naive to think that all learning and organisation processes happen inside the virtual walls of our institutional systems.

The speed of innovation

2007-09-11T03:17:00.001-07:00

In 1997 Philips introduced the first flatscreen plasma television set, Sharp introduced GPS car navigation and Sony showed the first designs of mp3-like players, www was still an acronym for wait-wait-wait. Ten years later we have iPod, broadband internet connections (24/7), sophisticated smartphones, and mini memory cards that can easilty contain 8Gb of data. Ten years ago the University of Twente also introduced it's own e-learning platform TeleTOP (nowadays available from a commercial vendor), which was quite an innovation for that time. However, when we look at the way how the platform is applied today it is not fundamentally different from the way it was used in 1997. The traditional instructional model is supported by an electronic equivalent: planning information, reading materials and powerpoint slides are basically what is being provided by the course sites in TeleTOP. From a more negative point of view, one might even argue that education in general has not dramatically changed over the past 40 years. New educational paradigms are often approached with suspicion. The concept of 'new learning' (het nieuwe leren in Dutch), seems to be contaminated. The pure constructivist view that the learner creates all new knowledge by himself is passed. Some basics/fundamentals need to be developed first, before the learner is able to build new knowledge elements on top of it. The pessimists find arguments that educational innovation is equal to loss of quality. Just recently prof. Rob Martens introduced the concept of positive learning. Especially in this time frame where broadband connections and new media play such a dominant role in daily life it becomes inevitable to think about the educational value of new media. Teleac/NOT - for many years producers of educational media - has recognized this challenge and links to the academic world in order to provide a solid base for their future productions. How do learners process these new media, how can cognitive load be controlled and how does intrinsic motivation play an important role in achieving learning objectives. The world of game based learning also provides perspectives that new media can contribute to an experience in which learning can be fun. It's not likely I think that the development of new learning paradigms will catch up with the development of new technology, but it is at least somewhat odd to stick to old paradigms, while at the same time the outside world has drastically changed.

Wikipedia censured?

2007-08-30T00:18:00.001-07:00

This morning there was a lot of fuzz on the news because it is assumed that Princess Mabel of Orange-Nassau and/or her husband Prince Friso of Orange Nassau have made changes to a page on Wikipedia. But isn't that the basic idea behind a Wiki? Wikipedia itself provides the following definition: "A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it". The philosophy is that because so many people can edit these pages. there will be a sort of self-correction mechanism which eventually will lead to high quality pages. Research has shown that Wikipedia is able to compete with the quality level of a formally published encyclopedia like Encyclopedia Brittanica. Well back to Mabel again, the fuzz is caused because she has changed a page about herself. From a legal point of view there is no hard evidence that she did it herself. The only identification comes from an IP number that relates to the palace she lives in. But is she the only one accessing the internet from there, or are there others too? And what if she did edit the page? If her change is incorrect others will probably re-correct it again (and so it already happened). The thing that worries me in this specific example is that the Dutch royal information service (RVD) wants to make specific pages read-only. What is this?? It's fundamentally against the open source philosophy behind Wikipedia. Who decides what's the truth and what I may read or may not read? The truth according to the RVD or prime minister Balkenende? Or is it because Mabel is controversial, because of her past relationships? Large organisations such as the CIA, the Vatican and the Australian government are also known for making self-serving changes to pages on Wikipedia. Are we at the threshold of a new type of censureship here? What if I would make the change back to Mabels' version? Will I be in the news headlines tomorrow? If you don't want to have pages changed: print a book, put it in 5 layers of plastic wrap, store it in a safe deposit which is guarded next to the royal jewelry in the Tower of London.

The students have arrived!

2007-08-21T04:24:00.001-07:00

Today is the start of the introduction weeks for our new bachelor students. The main campus road (Drienerlolaan) is blocked with a sort of market with all kinds of activities, music and of course most student societies try to attract new members. There was a long cue of students waiting in front of the main tent. Here they need to register for the introduction program and receive all the necessary information. Some students carry bags, backpacks or even a hard-cover suitcase, indicating that they also have to check in for their sleeping quarters, wherever that may be. Looking back at my own introduction period (which is 24 years ago, gosh I'm getting old...;-) it is an exciting period of adventure. For lots of students it's their first step towards living on their own. No mom or dad to rely on for their daily needs, making your evening dinner, do the laundry, etc. From an ICT perspective they probably have high expectations, assuming that all ICT facilities are prepared to handle their needs. Our University has an IT profile, so it must be well organised you may think. However, students don't know that new software releases or complete new applications are installed in the summer, literally a few weeks before they start. One may really get stressed when things don't go as smoothly as you would like. From experience it is known that there are always unforseen circumstances. This year is no execption to the rule. The instructors will have to prepare their lessons and make their course sites. Will it just be a copy of the previous site again, or will this year bring us a true innovation? In the past years we always succeeded to get everything up and running on time. There is no reason to believe that it won't be that way this year.....-);

Taking a look at MS Sharepoint

2007-08-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

In July we have finished our final report on our pilot experience with Sakai and have presented this to our Board of Directors. As predicted we are asked to initiate a follow-up project on MS Sharepoint which is an important factor within the federation of the three technical universities in the Netherlands (3TU). The follow up project cannot be as extensive as the Sakai project, due to time restrictions. This means that it will be more or less a quickscan. One of the consequences is that we cannot organise pilot projects together with our faculties. Instead, we are planning to make some site visits at institutions who already implemented Sharepoint in their educational organisation. In order to keep our stakeholders involved we will invite some teachers and students to join the projectteam during these site visits. Besides the pedagogical/organisational criterium we also want to take a look at the technical features in the sense of web services, interoperability and the use of (open) standards. This must give us insight into the way Sharepoint may be linked into a broader ICT architecture in which it has to work together with other (3TU) applications. Currently, I am writing the project plan. We hope to start in september. The good news is that most of the Sakai team members will also be involved in the follow up project, so we have the same reference background in this matter. The 'bad' news is that we are asked to put all effort into the research of Sharepoint and leave Sakai for the time being. The final decision on which application components will be used to deliver the range of required services will be made in 2008. Will Sakai still be a serious candidate for this purpose? Time will tell.

Back to business

2007-08-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my first working day after a long holiday break of 5 weeks. It's always difficult to get up and running the first day. Not only for my computer which needs to download and install all kinds of updates (and of course needs to restart) but also for yourself. Usually after a first working day I feel exhausted by the end of the afternoon. Yesterday was no exception to the rule. In July I spent quite some time in the south of Spain. Nice apartment, swimmingpool nearby, lots of sunshine and the Spanish atmosphere make it very relaxing to stay there. We always try to adjust ourselves as quickly as possible to the local time schedule of doing things, which basically means that everything happens a couple of hours later and at a lower pace than in the Netherlands. Moreover, during the middle of the afternoon it's rather quiet because of the siesta (or what's left of it). The evenings on the other hand are very lively and it's a great experience to go out at 9,30 pm and find out that all shops are open and that lots of people are out there, thus creating an active shopping scene. At 11.30 pm a lot of parking garages near a city centre show a 'complete' sign. At home most of the streets are abandoned by that time.
For me, the summer holidays are also a period without computers and/or communication with the home base. Although the webmail facilities are convenient enough to read your mail every day, I don't do it as a sort of defense mechanism. On the one hand because I know my out-of-office assistant has informed the sender that I'm away and that a quick answer is not to be expected. On the other hand, in case there would be an (urgent) message that requires any follow up it could spoil your day and the whole relaxing atmosphere. So I usually start reading my mail after I return in the Netherlands, a few days before I get back to work. This way the number of unread messages is acceptable on my first working day, and I have the illusion that I may continue my Spanish holiday pace for a while. This is indeed an illusion.... ;-)

Chatting with your own kids

2007-06-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

This title reminds me of a column that was written some years ago by the former CEO of SPC Group, Joost Steins Bisschop as a column to the Dutch Financial Times (Het Financieele Dagblad). The story is that Joost created an account on MSN using a nickname. This name was chosen in such a way that it looked like the MSN identity of a 15-yr old boy. He knew that his daughter was a regular user of MSN and just of curiosity what would happen Joost tried to get into the contactslist of his daughter. He managed to do so, and as a matter of fact they started a chat session. The interesting issue here is that Joost knew he was chatting with his own daughter, but the daughter didn't know her father was on the other end of the line. After a short while he confessed who he was, which was a little bit of an unpleasant surprise. It felt like a sort of intrusion or even betrayal into her personal life, because she had been rather open in her communication with her new 'friend'.
Everytime I am chatting with my own kids it reminds me of this column. The difference is that we know each others identity. Most of the time when I'm working my MSN account is active. Everytime one of my kids gets online I see the popup in my screen. It's a very convenient and efficient way to ask if everything is ok, if a test went ok or just to say what time i'll be home. Takes usually less than one minute and then I'll continue with my work. It's much easier than picking up the phone, dial the number, wait before someone answers (if at all) and have a talk which can easily last a couple of minutes. My kids are also used to these small MSN chats, and they have no problem that their 43-yr old father is listed between their MSN friends of their own age. I think (or should I say hope?) that they feel it's rather cool to have a dad who is using the same digital tools they do.
Oh yes, in case you worry, as far as I know Joost and his daughter did have a good talk about this and everything is ok with them.

Because of the summer holidays, the number of posts will probably be lower in the next couple of weeks.

Final preparations for the Sakai Conference

2007-06-11T18:22:00.000-07:00

Today I am making my final preparations for the Sakai conference, that started already with some pre-conference activities (Click on the conference link on: www.sakaiproject.org). According to my last information there are 385 registrants, which is already beyond expectations. With some last-minute registrants we may well reach a round figure of 400 conference delegates. We have two contributions from the University of Twente. The first one - presented by myself - will be tomorrow late in the afternoon, and will address the Sakai pilot projects we conducted in the past months. The second presentation will be by my colleague Wytze Koopal and will address the Sakai community in the Netherlands. Finally, I have also volunteered to be a convenor at one of the sessions. I've selected a session with an intriguing title, especially within the context of this conference: Why German Universities choose Moodle instead of Sakai.

An alphabetical overview of all conference sessions can be found here

For more impressions about the conference I would like to refer to the Sakai-NL blog at: http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com/

You will also find my contributions over there.

E-mail: the old medium?

2007-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

Large groups of people still consider e-mail an innovative and effective way of communication. Just send your message, anytime and any place you want, the reader will receive it at a convenient time form him. However, for more and more reasons one can question whether this is true. As a heavy user I can easily receive more than 50 e-mails a day (spam included), after filtering some 25-30 meaningful messages remain in my Inbox. The first problem is to organise these mails and possible attachments. There is a great risk that an e-mail remains in your inbox for a couple of days and attachments may even be unnoticed. In addition to this (even large) attachments are sent and forwarded in a flash decision, without considering the heavy traffic this will cause and the number of diskspace that is involved. It's good to see that instead of attachments more and more people tend to store a file on a shared networkspace and just refer to it by sending a link, or even better knowing that the system will automatically send a nofication when the file is there or when it is updated. This way the sender can put it on the right place, the receivers can open it or download it to their own computer.

Another reason for writing this post comes from a completely different context. I am in more than one way involved in martial arts: Taekwondo. First, being an active taekwondoka, second being involved as a member of the board, responsible for financial and ICT issues. The latter means maintenance of our website www.tsdekker.nl, but also the communication to our members. About 75% of our members is younger than 18 years. That's one of the reasons why we tried to shift from paper-based communication to communication via our website and trough e-mail. The rationale is that young people spend a lot of time on MSN, Skype, Habbo. Hyves, etc. communicating with each other, being on-line, the homo zappiens as Wim Veen would say. Most of the time this communication is synchronous however. When we send out newsflashes by e-mail it's asynchronous. It's remarkable how few responses we get. Of course, newsflashes don't necessarily require an answer, but we have the same situation when we send out explicit questions via e-mail, such as who wants to participate in a tournament that takes places a few weeks from now. The e-mail response is less than 10%, so we have to ask them in person, or send out paper-based invitations. Is it because the e-mails aren't read or because it is considered an old medium? It seems not a standard thing to do, to open your Inbox and see if there are any new messages. Maybe it's too much business like to send out e-mail. Synchronous communication provides a social context, you can also chat about some other things if you like to, whereas e-mail is much more to the point. You want your message to be as clear as possible. In a synchronous chat you can make immediate corrections if you think that the other person didn't understand what you were writing. So, the question is whether there is some sort of communication gap between what we (40+) consider effective and efficient communication and what they (-18) like to receive. Should we be more synchronous, mingle on MSN, use Breeze for group conversations? It's an interesting thought, but maybe a little bit too far for the purposes we like to use our mail correspondence for...

University Diplomas

2007-06-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

"Obtain a prosperous future, money-earning power and the prestige that comes with having the career position you've always dreamed of. Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience".

This is the first paragraph of an advertisement e-mail I received - despite of my spam filter -. It reminds me of a recent discussion on a Dutch national radiostation (Radio 1) about how we are trying to prevent students from plagiarism. Nowadays we have sophisticaed software for plagiarims prevention like Ephorus or Turnitin. These tools can be integrated in our LMS solution. Every paper submitted by our students can be checked in a very short time and we receive a sort of originality report. A percentage score can give you an indication whether a paper is a suspect of plagiarism. The results of the plagiarism software are based on exhaustive searches on billions of pages, databases, e-journals and of course the papers that have been previously submitted.

However, inventive as people are we see other fraud-phenomena arising. For example, companies who offer to write your entire master thesis for 3 fo 4 thousand Euros. They give a sort of non-plagiarism guarantee (maybe even checked with the same software) and claim to have professional writers on a great variety of subjects. Until recently, there was a discussion going on whether Google should display advertisements / search results for these types of companies. Since it was decided that the search results should no longer be displayed, the turnover results of these companies has dropped by over 90%. I was wondering anyway how students who buy their master thesis would do when they have to give their final presentation, or even worse answer in-depth questions about the thesis. They don't have a clue....

For those who are really desparate: they may reply to advertisements such as written in the first paragraph of this post. This advertisement refers to nonaccredited universities, but we have also seen that it's not too difficult to buy an almost genuine diploma of an accredited university in the Netherlands for a couple hundreds of euros. These kind of practices cannot be prevented by plagiarism software. Perhaps we should strive for a central registration system in which all your credits are stored. I am pretty sure that the University of Nijmegen must have some kind of registration on the achievement of my PhD degree, but can anyone else find it? Just type in the social registration number of a person and find out what degrees are officially registered. Of course, there are a lot of (privacy) issues that we have to deal with first, but technically it shouldn't be difficult to realise.

Presentation week

2007-05-19T04:08:00.000-07:00

The upcoming week may be considered a presentation-week indeed. In general I like giving presentations for different types of audiences. The challenge for this week is that I have to give four presentations on four different subjects and for different target groups. For the past couple of days I have been thinking about the structure of my presentations and possible powerpoint slides I might re-use. The first one (on Wednesday morning) is a keynote session for an e-learning seminar at ITC. This means giving an overview of the e-learning landscape, identifying trends and trying to formulate a vision where we're heading to in the land of e-learning. The second one (Thursday) is a presenation session for the Digital University project "Integrated Science Education". We will report our results so far for a closed group of (educational) managers. Hopefully they will provide us with feedback on how to take the results of the project further, after it has finished (June 2007). The third presentation is on the same day and includes the pegadogical results of CBUS (Sakai) project for a part of the ITBE management team. Finally, on Friday I'll have some visitor over from the University of Amsterdam. This visit is related to our Wireless Campus project. The Amsterdam delegates would like to hear our experiences, both from a technical and educational perspective. On Friday afternoon I will probably be glad that the weekend has arrived;-).

Half an empty glass or...

2007-05-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Campus Blend using Sakai (CBUS) project at the University of Twente is heading towards the end. This month we have to deliver our final reports (5 parts). During the vacation of my colleague Wytze Koopal I have to manage the writing process of three of these reports and also take account of the overall CBUS project management. On May 24 we have to present our reports and the conclusions to representatives of the management team of our service department. As a reader you may think, well in that case they will already know what their conclusion will be, but as a matter of fact it is not as straightforward as we thought it would be. It's not going to be a simple yes or no. Of course there are positive issues that came forward in our pilot projects, but we also heard some serious criticism. It is our (or at least my) ambition to present the results as objective as possible. Obviously, you have to start with presenting your research data as they are, give everyone access to your raw data. One of the difficulties here is that these data have been collected under various circumstances. This makes it easy to come up with alternative explanations. Our research setting was not a strictly controlled laboratory environment, but a realistic field experiment. Taking account of that matter it is still possible to identify some general issues and trends from the data. But we see a rather nuanced perspective. Some issues can be interpreted in favour of Sakai, some not. The major challenge here is to write down the conclusions in such a way that they correspond with your data and still provide enough information for the decision makers. Due to the rather complex data landscape, one can either choose to take the perspective of 'yes, but...', or 'no, unless....'. The data are exactly the same in both cases, and one could easily argue in favour of both perspectives. However, from a psychological perspective it is a major difference if you choose to start from a positive or from a negative mindset. The objective information behind the 'but...' or 'unless...' may be basically the same, but is a very important difference if you start from a 'yes' or a 'no' conclusion. In Dutch (and maybe also in other languages) we have a metaphor for this kind of dilemma: consider the glass half empty or consider it half full. What is it going to be? Finally, it is important to mention that the results are based on the current release of Sakai, but how will it develop in the next year(s)? What are the expectations? When should you start migrating to Sakai, if at all? Is it better to take an incremental approach or follow a big bang scenario? Is it reasonable to expect that current problems will be solved by the time you want to migrate to a campus wide production environment? If the answer to the last question is a 'yes', then it is more likely to take the conclusion from a positive perspective. Became curious? Well, I invite you back to this blog in a couple of weeks.
Click here to find out more about Sakai in the Netherlands?

Sakai and/or Sharepoint: The Sequel

2007-04-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting discussion going on why Sakai and Sharepoint are currently considered the two mainstreams as possible substitutions for traditional VLE's like Blackboard, TeleTOP. Walter Brand wonders in his comment how Sakai and Sharepoint ended up as apparently two interchangeable options on many short lists. Clearly there isn't much overlap between both products in functionality. What could be the reasons? Sakai doesn't cover the needs of good content management and basically lacks the work flow posibilities. Sharepoint on the other hand has no built in tools that focusses on specific educational areas. Maybe a (more profound) reason for showing up as 'equal' opportunities may be that Sharepoint allows to continue working in the way that people are used to. In the current use of VLE's we still see too much PDF en PPT docs being published as resources in a course site. Clearly, Sharepoint provides interesting additionali functionality to this existing process: versioning, workflow support. It's possible to stay close to the existing way of using a VLE, instead of making a next step towards educational innovation. Using Sakai you are confronted with the question how to implement new pedagogical paradigms: demand driven education instead of supply driven. A Web2.0 approach (equal rights to make contributions) instead of the instructor who is virtually the only one who decides what happens in a course.
I'd like to close this post with two statements:

Sakai and Sharepoint are not two interchangeable options. The products can complement each other, rather than subsitute the other.
Sharepoint seems to relate closer to the current daily practice of publishing powerpoint slides and PDF-readers (as is done in current VLE's) which makes it an attractive alternative for e.g. Blackboard. In my opinion this will hinder true pedagogical innovation.

Sakai and/or Sharepoint

2007-04-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

This week I submitted a post to http://sakai-nl.blogspot.com/ because the topic of the post is more relevant there. So please click on the link to read it. You are kindly invited to comment on this post.

Starting on del.icio.us

2007-04-10T00:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally made a start on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/stanleyportier I was aware about it for quite a while and the advantage of having your own bookmarks available on any internet PC in the world seems obvious. The second advantage is that you can share your bookmarks with others and you can see who else has bookmarked the same URL (the social bookmarking aspect). But, as in all tasks you want to do, it's mostly just a matter of time and/or setting priorities. You have to sit down for a while, think about the tags you want to use and whether or not you like to bundle them into meaningful categories. It's important to take some time for this, which makes it easy to find your URLs once you have created a considerable list. I have made a start now with about 40 URLs, which is not very much yet, since I know of people who already have collected some 1000+ URLs. Of course, they have been using del.icio.us quite some time and try to add one or two new URLs every day. If I can keep that up for the rest of 2007 I could probably achieve a number of 500 URLs. For the time being it's just good to know to have a set of well used favorites online when the summer vacation will start in a few months from now.

Education day

2007-04-03T01:34:00.000-07:00

Today I am preparing a presentation for the 1st day (actually it's an afternoon) of education at our Faculty of Science and Technology, which will be held tomorrow in the Horst building of the University of Twente. The education day is organised for all teachers, mentors, instructors who are involved in the primary process of education. It's a moment of reflection and information exchange about a specific educational theme. The main theme of tomorrow is the use of ICT in Education. After a word of welcome by the dean Alfred Bliek and an overview presentation by former ITBE colleague Jan van der Veen, the rest of the afternoon will consist of two mainstreams: Best practices of ict in education within the Faculty of Science and Technology and the use of (ICT) materials within the so-called SkillsLab. "The Skillslab is a learning environment in which the authentic professional environment is simulated and fits the demands for training of diverse students (e.g. technical medicine and nursing students but also professionals of all healthcare disciplines). It supports the regular study program in the development and maintaining of skills, the planning and preparation of complex interventions. It is not only a learning environment but also a research facility in which equipment and intervention modalities can be developed and evaluated" (http://www.tnw.utwente.nl/tg/skillslab/). My presentation will be presented as a best practice on the use of Maple TA (mathematic testing software) within the advanced technology course Introduction to Engineering I (I2E1). I am giving this presentation in my role as a project manager of the Digital University project Integrated Science Education. It was intended that Gijs Krijnen would give the presentation himself, but unfortunately he will not be in Twente this afternoon. Besides a general introduction on I2E1 I will focus on the use of diagnostic testing by means of Maple TA. One of the objectives was to 'force' students in a working mode, because they could take several Maple TA tests during a period of 4 weeks. It was possible to achieve a limited amount of bonus points that could be used to upgrade the final test score. The evaluation showed that 70% of the students (n=82) completed at least 1 Maple TA test, 45% of the students achieved a score on all Maple TA tests. Within the group of students who achieved Maple TA scores (and potential bonus points) it showed that 48% passed the final test. Without the bonus points only 31% would have passed the test. Besides activating the students, Maple TA is also considered a environment that is able to form a bridge between the math and physics domain. By exercising mathematical concepts (e.g. differentiation), it becomes easier to apply these in a physics context (e.g. Newton's Law). Although further improvements can be made, Gijs Krijnen considers Maple TA as a useful tool to improve I2E1. It's very likely that Maple TA will also be embedded I2E1 during the academic year 2007-2008. Perhaps the education day will create an enlarged interest within the faculty.

Innovatium

2007-03-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

On March 27th I participated in the 4th Innovatium Conference. This was the last time that the conference was organised by the Digital University, the Dutch Higher Education consortium that will formally end by July 1st. I also visited the 2nd and 3rd edition of Innovatium, which can surely be characterized as a series of conferences being held in inspiring and creative environments. Remember the conferences in Evoluon (Eindhoven) and the Rabo City Theatre (Hengelo)? This time the conference was hosted by Passenger Terminal Amsterdam, right next to the water. It was possible for delegates to take short boat tours during the lunch break.

The number of delegates was rather high (over 500) which creates a sort of mixed feeling. On the one hand there is the large number of people joining a lot of interesting presentations and workshops. On the other hand there was the perception that the DU will formally end, and the question what will happen with all of the nice products and the collaborative networks that have been established. The workshops I visited in the morning were completely full and there were lively discussions going on. After lunch it was my turn to stay at the Sakai booth of the SURF Special Interest Group. I was scheduled for only 45 minutes and had several interesting conversations with people passing the booth. As a result of those talks I spent a lot more time around the booth than foreseen, but I was still in time to join the plenary end session by Norbert Verbraak. When something comes to an end, there is time to look back. Six years of Digital University, a lot of very interesting projects and products. I heard some people saying that the nice thing of the DU was, that a lot of projects were going on in which people actively worked together on the delivery of innovative educational products. Of course not all projects were succesful, but the majority of the projects did achieve good results and deliverables. The inheritance of the DU is now being integrated into SURF Foundation. Some of the DU program managers also found a new job at SURF. But the big question is how to proceed from here. SURF Foundation is perceived as a different type of organisation than the DU. Will DU products be used in the future or will they 'disappear' in the archives of SURF?

In my opinion there is also a great personal asset that should not be forgotten. Thanks to the many DU projects and the roles one may have had, there was a context in which you really could collaborate with colleagues in the field of higher education. So 6 years of DU has also brought us a strong higher education community. This was demonstrated at the end in which a group of about 100 delegates was invited to a formal closure dinner. During on of the speeches Michiel van Geloven mentioned that about 80% sent a positive reply to the dinner invitation within 48 hours which implies a lot of appreciation for what the DU has brought us in six years.

Haiku

2007-03-23T00:53:00.000-07:00

Haiku is a mode of Japanese poetry, the late 19th century revision by Masaoka Shiki of the older hokku, the opening verse of a linked verse form, haikai no renga.
Haiku usually combine two (or rarely, three) different phrases, with a distinct grammatical break (kireji). These elements of the older hokku are considered by many to be essential to haiku as well, although they are not always included by modern writers of Japanese "free-form haiku" and of non-Japanese haiku. Japanese haiku are typically written as a single line, while English language haiku are traditionally separated into three lines (source: Wikipedia).

The digital world is sometime called as being soulless -- a charge that is borne out by on-screen error messages like "abort/retry/fail?" and "404 -- file not found."

It's already been a few years ago that there was a modest attempt at change: an error message in the form of a haiku poem. Readers were invited to submit up to three error messages written as haiku poems. The haiku is a three-line poem in the 5/7/5 form (first line 5 syllables, second line 7, third line 5). One of my personal favorites is the next one, submitted by Peter Rothman:

Windows NT crashed.

I am the Blue Screen of Death.

No one hears your screams.

Probably not a Microsoft fan;-)

More Haiku error messages? Click here: http://archive.salon.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html

You want to see some pictures?

http://www.miguelcarrasco.net/miguelcarrasco/2006/10/blue_screen_of_.html

Math Online

2007-03-19T07:14:00.000-07:00

Today I delivered a project plan for our board of directors which is focused on repairing knowledge and skill deficiencies in Mathmatics when students are admitted to our university: a considerable amount of students fail the math entrance test which has to be taken at the beginning of the academic year.

The plan is written in close collaboration with colleagues from ITBE, ELAN and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. The main objective of the plan is how to use existing (on-line) materials in a blended learning approach. A first analysis on primarily Dutch projects shows that there is already a lot of ready-to-use content (tutorials, readers, exercices, assessments) available in the math domain. In some cases these materials are available for (almost) free, so why develop new materials if a lot can be re-used? It's much more interesting to think about the pedagogical way these materials can be offered to the students. Moreover, it can save a lot of time in order to achieve some quick wins.

In our project plan we distinguish three types of student admission:

those who enter from the highest grade of secondary education (VWO)
those who enter from higher vocational education (pre-master)
those who enter from an international insitute

We have proposed to set focus on the first target group, because that's the largest group and there is already a lot available that can be offered to them. Besides deploying the online materials (also in the highest grades of secondary education) it is especially important to coach their teachers and to create a collaborative setting instead of pointing the finger to someone and saying that he or she is doing something "wrong".

We now have to wait until the meeting with the board (next friday). An interesting aspect is that the plan is delivered together with a corresponding Wiki site. So, a lot of resources and links that are mentioned in the document can also be viewed in an interactive way.

Second Life for education

2007-03-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

A few days ago it was on the radio that Randstad (a Dutch job agency) is establishing a virtual office in Second Life. When you think about this it's really fascinating. Large banking companies (e.g. ABN Amro) and also IT companies (Tam Tam from Delft) have their virtual offices. But what's the purpose? Why do you want to be on Second Life as a company? Randstad claims e.g. that it can help people to prepare their job interviews. Create your very own Avatar and go to Randstad to see whether there is a suitable job for you. When you decide you want to apply for the job you can arrange for a job interview with a virtual employee from Randstad. The claim is that it will help you when you have to go to a job interview in the real world. That's an interesting claim, because a virtual interview can be hardly compared to an interview in real life. What about the 80% of non-verbal communication? You can probably write down all kinds of answers as your contribution to the job interview, but how will you behave when you are in a real interview situation. Will there be stress, will you look the other way when answering a question, instead of looking someone in the eye? It's kind of different when sitting in the quit surroundings of your home, where you can think in a clear and sensible way about the answers you want to give. Moreover, your Avatar can be much more attractive than yourself. I've created an Avatar myself and it's easy to give it any look you would like, of course far away from your own look: I was surprised how many athletic young men were running around in Second Life. This may give more confidence than you would have in real life.

Another interesting aspect is that you can actually invest money in Second Life. You can buy so called Linden dollars from your real American dollars. The exchange rate is about L$270 to one US Dollar (Wikipedia, March 7, 2007). Residents can create new goods and services, and buy and sell them in the Second Life virtual world. It's possible to buy land and build a house on it. I recently read an article in which the author suddenly became aware that he was looking into a house where someone was reading a book. He felt uncomfortable about it, feeling a voyeur, as if he was really looking into someone's home. Well if you ask me, why sit in a Second Life house to read a book??

Second Life has also emerged as one of the cutting-edge virtual classrooms for major colleges and universities, including Harvard, Pepperdine, Ball State, New York University and Delft University of Technology. Second Life fosters a welcoming atmosphere for administrators to host lectures and projects online, selling more than 100 islands for educational purposes, according to a New York Times article. The article quoted Rebecca Nesson, an instructor at Harvard who brought her Legal Studies class to Second Life in the second half of 2006. "Normally, no matter how good a distance-learning class is, an inherent distance does still exist between you and your students," she says. "Second Life has really bridged that gap. There is just more unofficial time that we spend together outside of the typical class session." Joe Sanchez, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin evaluated the use of Second Life in education in an interactive qualitative analysis, finding that once students overcome the technical and interface difficulties with Second Life, they "indicate a preference to social learning activites and find it enjoyable to interact with other avatars while learning in this space". At the University of Twente we are currently thinking about organizing (virtual) summerschools for students who want to enhance their knowledge and skills in math. Should we also bring this to Second Life (apart from the question what possibilites you have to deploy existing assignments with mathematical formulas, etc.)? I think it's interesting enough to take a closer look at. Being present at Second Life may be(come) an important unique selling point if you want to attract new students.

There is one major worry though. A Dutch professor in economic psychology stated that the Second Life economy is much more vulnerable than the economy in the real world. Companies are present on Second Life for economic, commercial reasons. They make investments and expect to gain any form of profit in the future (in money or otherwise). When they find out that their commercial objectives are not fullfilled there is a great risk that they will shut down their virtual office again, which may initiate a chain reaction.

Time management

2007-03-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

Working hard and achieving many results are two different things. The idea of a busy employee, with lots of activities, running from one thing to another sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? He or she is always busy, but the question is whether this person actually achieves results. First think, then act is the right way for an efficient use of available time. By making choices it is possible to choose whether a task should be done by yourself, by someone else or not at all.

There is an important difference between important and urgent matters. Something that is important doesn’t need to be urgent and something that’s urgent doesn’t have to be important. Before starting a task it’s a good strategy to consider what type of task it is. It can save a lot of time to choose the most efficient way of dealing with the task. The main question is to ask yourself whether the task is important and/or urgent. Depending on the two answers, this may lead to a different type of follow up:

Important – Yes / Urgent – Yes : do it yourself
Important – Yes / Urgent – No: plan the task, if possible ask someone else to do it
Important – No / Urgent –Yes: ask someone else
Important – No / Urgent – No: consider no doing the task at all (unless you have spare time)

A project manager can provide additional value to choose the right strategy, especially in case of type 1 and type 2 tasks. According to the Pareto principle 20% of the work can deliver 80% of the results, meaning that 80% of the time is lost for all kinds of trivial aspects. When you have chosen the right task strategy it is important to create the right working conditions:

Calendar: clearly make use of a calendar. What’s possible, what’s not. Reserve time for unexpected things, time for preparation, travel time, make your personal planning. When you use shared calendars in your organisation, this is even more important. Others can see that your time is set to ‘busy’, so the risk that new appointments or acitivities will be planned for you is diminished.
Planning: try to be honest about the amount of time you need for a task. Take this into account, take care of some extra time and set your priorities. Don’t underestimate this.
Phone: if possible, re-direct your calls to a secretary, don’t make longlasting phonecalls yourself and set time frames on which you’re not available
E-mail: when e-mail drops in (e.g., showing itself by a small pop-up), do not react immediately. Before you know there is another task on your table that needs to be done. This is especially bad if it is a type 1 task. When you have to concentrate on a task, shut down the e-mail and check it again after a while. An interesting filter is to create a rule to move all cc: mails to a separate folder. I have never seen Cc-mails that included type 1 or type 2 tasks. The effect on your Inbox is amazing.
Open door: beware the open door principle. Off course this creates a nice, social and open work environment, but everyone can drop in at any time, also when it’s not convenient for you. For some tasks, don’t hesitate to shut the door (as if you were in a private meeting).
Virtual office: Even better (but that depends on the work you’re doing and the HRM policy) work at home every now and then. When you have a fast broadband connection, e-mail, VPN, mobile phone, collaborative environments, and a webcam as standard facilities, it’s just a second, virtual office, only with a limited risk on disturbances. A lot of people won’t even notice, expect those who work in your immediate environment. I think it’s a pretty good estimate to say that about 50% of my work e-mails are sent from my home office. On the one hand because I work at home one day a week, on the other hand because I deal with part of my e-mails in the evening because I often leave the office at 4 PM to avoid (part) of the traffic jam. All non-urgent mails can be handled in the quiet surroundings of my home office.

RadioBlogClub

2007-02-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago my son showed me a site called RadioBlogClub. You may also want to look at my personal blog page. Read the post called "Armin van Buuren". Besides an easy way of searching trough an enormous amount of music and embed it as an object into your own webpage, you can also click the title of the song to get a sort of RadioBlog station. It brings you to a list of songs that is selected, not only the song you choose, but also a bunch of related songs/artists. The songs that are listed in the RadioBlog are played subsequently. A nice feature is the fade-out/fade-in function if you happen to change to another song while the previous one is still playing. Interested in downloading mp3's from RadioBlogSpot to your own computer? Just take a look here. A full web application, no installation required. I have tried the procedure and it really works easy.

Testing Sakai 2.3.1

2007-02-21T02:24:00.000-08:00

Since a few days we have migrated our testserver at the University of Twente to Sakai release 2.3.1. Interesting new features such as rWiki, Blogs (in a course or projectsite), a linktool and a podcast function have to be tested. Moreover, we have to test whether existing functionality from previous releases is still there and operational. I like the test so far. No major failures and the new features are interesting. I especially like the podcast function, with an inbuilt RSS feed, so you can put the feed in any feedreader such as Netvibes and create overviews of feeds from different course or project sites in your personal netvibes page.
The testing procedure should lead to a decision (Feb 22nd, 2007) whether or not we will migrate our production server from 2.2.0 to 2.3.1. I think it is a good thing to do, provided that backup measures are taken properly, so you can re-migrate in case of a crash. This way we will collect valuable evaluation data about the way a migration process may take place. Despite the fact that we are still in a pilot phase (no-warranties given) it's obvious that you will loose a lot of goodwill from your pilot partners, in case they would loose their work so far. It's hardly imaginable that you can convince them to built their site again.

University of Aberdeen

2007-02-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

Today we had a delegation of the University of Aberdeen, being a guest of the University Twente Innovation Lab. Their main interest was in the entrepreneurial activities that our university exploits both in research as in education. Within the visiting program I was asked to present something about the Wireless Campus and the consequences for organisation and education. In general I always like to tell something about my work to visitors from outside the university. Dissemination is an important part of my work I believe.

Beforehand, I was not very well aware of the expectations that the delegation would have. Of course it's possible to identify entrepreneurial aspects in the Wireless Campus project (starting from the building of the infrastructure) to the way we organise our project-based education, often with private companies being important stakeholders in a project. I was the last presentation in the program, which is always a challenge. It turned out to be a very interesting session, highly interactive. It was nice to see that the Wireless Campus of the University of Twente is still a great example of innovation.

CITO

2007-02-09T00:31:00.000-08:00

This week about 170.000 children in the 8th grade of primary school took the so-called CITO test. It's a 3-day nation-wide assessment that is used to determine what level of secondary education the child can attend after the summer vacation. Every year there is a lot of discussion on the predictive value of the CITO test. That's probably why additional tests and the advice of the primary school is also taken into account when choosing a school for secondary education. About 20% of the primary schools already have chosen to do another type of final assessment.
One of the major criticisms is that everything seems to depend on these 3 days. If a child feels sick or suffers from stress (it can be a stressful experience) his score may be significantly lower than in a normal non-stressful situation. The CITO test is just a snapshot within a period of several years. An alternative test (the NIVO test) claims to take account of this problem by taking smaller tests during the whole year. This way the scores are assumed to be much more balanced, thus being a better predictor of a child's ability to perform. Another criticism that can be identified is that a relatively low CITO-score can be compensated by motivation, but also the other way around: a high score is no guarantee for success.
Personally, I have three experiences why I doubt the predictive value of the CITO test. The first experience is that I went to secondary school (pre-academic level; VWO in Dutch) having the lowest CITO score of a group of 5 peers who went to the same school. My 4 peers all dropped out, changed to lower levels of secondary education, the first one already after 6 months! I was the only one who finished the VWO level and achieved my degree. My second experience is at the University of Nijmegen. During my 1st bachelor year in psychology one of the instructors was interested to know how many of my cohort had achieved a high CITO score. The result was rather dramatic: according to the CITO test about 50% was tested for a lower level. The third experience is with my own son, who took the test 2 years ago. He achieved a score of 541 which is 3 points below the entrance level at some secondary schools at pre-academic level. Taking a closer look at his score profile, I noticed that he had a relatively low score on math, which considerably influenced his overall score. Strange, because in the past three years he used to score straight A's on math. Why not on this one CITO test day, I wondered? An additional talk between his teacher and the secondary school (a Gymnasium) he wanted to attend was needed, because normally they use the strict policy that an entrance score of 544 is required. Well, he was accepted under the condition that he could not fail his first year, otherwise he would have to move to another school. My son is halfway 2nd grade now and he is doing fine. His test scores are quite well and he is 'on schedule' to go to the 3rd grade after this summer. He's doing as least as well as some of his classmates who achieved the maximum 550 for their CITO test.
To conclude this post, the CITO score is just one predictor in a series of many other ones. The relative weight and stress that is put on these three days in February is rather silly. Primary schools are keeping track records for years, which seems much more reliable to me than the rather coincidental score on three days in a whole year. Why not spread out the CITO test over the 8th grade (e.g., one day in october, december and february)? A completely other consquence is that the 8th grade children are virtually free, starting today until the first week of september when they start their career in secondary school. Of course, they have to attend their schools the next couple of months until the end of June, but everything is already set. In the first week of March they receive their score, one or two weeks later they subscribe to the school they will attend after the summer. For some children it will be tough to start studying again after a 7-month period of freewheeling.

External

2007-02-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

Last week was a busy week. A lot of external (whole day) meetings to which I had an active contribution. This makes your schedule very tight. First because there is little preparation time, second because you have no time to work out the results of the meetings. Starting Jan. 30th we had a Sakai information session at the University of Twente (UT). About 30 colleagues attended the meeting and were interested in the latest developments of the Sakai project. On the same day I attended a workshop on the future ICT Architecture for the UT. The contents of the workshops was not very surprising, but seems in line with other initiaves such as 3TU (see below). On Jan. 31th I went to Utrecht to a SURF Sakai SIG meeting. It was interesting to see how enthousiastic commercial partners like MemoTrainer, Portfolio4U and LOI are involved in the Sakai community. The minutes of this meeting can be found here. Feb. 1th I had to go to Utrecht again, to lead a projectmeeting of the Integrated Science Projectteam (Digital University). The importance of this meeting was rather high, because of an upcoming meeting with the DU program manager. The Feb. 1 meeting was organised to determine how far the several workpackages have proceeded. Since the last plenary meeting in June, I only had bilateral contacts with the involved project members. The June meeting was a sort of starting point for the realisation work that had to be done. I can say that I was rather relieved at the end of the day. Two of five workpackages are more or last finished. The other three were in progress, but within the time frame that was foreseen. The only worry was to get in time all the administrative details (hours spent on the project). It's nice to see that some people indeed have submitted their hours, as we 'speak'. Feb. 2th for the third consecutive day to Utrecht (it has also advantages not to live in Twente...) for a 3TU ICT workshop. I had to present to project idea that was formed within the project group on the federative digital learning and working environment for the 3TU. The project idea is based on setting up a functional services architecture first, before looking at information sources and applications. So, in ICT terms, the business layer gets first (the primary process), then we'll proceed to the next layer. It was nice to see how the project idea perfectly fits within a more generic approach of a 3TU Architecture that is being developed in another working group. This week is rather 'normal'. I hope to find the time to work out all the issues I have been dealing with in the last few days.

History of ICT in Education

2007-01-29T01:44:00.000-08:00

During the past two weeks I have spent some time in reading an interesting and worthwile book (in Dutch) by dr. Marcel Mirande, the former director of the Digital University. The Digital University (DU) used to be a consortium of 9 higher education institutes in the Netherlands. The focus of DU projects was on innovation and the use of ICT. Since Jan. 2007 the DU has been incorporated into SURF.
Mirande provides us with an interesting overview on the use of technology in education. Technology is always evolving, but only few examples have shown that technology indeed leads to a new form of education. Does it depend on the technology or do we have unrealistic expectations when a new technology arrives? The author takes us on a historic tour, starting in 1925 with the first learning machine invented by a psychologist called Sidney Pressey. Pressey was working on standardisation of tests, built several machines and did a lot of attempts to achieve acceptance for his learning machines. However, in the 30's nobody was really interested. In the early 60's the learning machines became more and more accepted. The sad thing for Pressey though was that his younger rival Skinner received all the credits. I think this is a typical example of how technology may be ahead of it's time: the technical possibilities are great, but there is no immediate need for it in education, or it takes to much effort to implement it.
The 80's can be considered the years of the rise of computer assisted instruction: i.e., not on a terminal connected to a mainframe, but on a microcomputer! This brings on a very vivid memory to myself, since this is about the period I started working with computers. I created a lot of research data files and - consecutively- a lot of SPSS-analyses on the IBM mainframe at the University of Nijmegen. Colleagues were working on one of the first IBM Personal Computer. It must have been 1985 before I started working on an IBM PC. It was the first one in the department of experimental psychology with an internal harddisk of 20Mb. Wow, that was huge! As a part of my PhD research I programmed an application in Turbo Pascal for the purpose of analysis and remedial teaching of motoric aspects of handwriting. Looking back at this and other applications the 4-E model by Betty Collis provides an excellent predictor for success: Ease of use, Effectiveness, Environment, Engagement.
In the subsequent chapters of his book Mirande takes us to the early years of the internet as we know it at this moment. Starting with Mosaic in 1993 as the first graphical internet browser. In those days I worked at OTEC at the Dutch Open University and I still remember the victory we felt when one of our programmers succeeded to run Mosaic and showed that to us. However, there was hardly any interesting content to be found. It's incredibable how the penetration of internet has grown since then: from about 7% in 1997 until well over 90% at this very moment. The internet has now become a standard tool, as much as a calculator or a television. A lot of TV commercials only mention a URL if you want to contact a vendor, whereas a few years ago the commercial also mentioned a phone number. A serious concern though is that the internet has also created new gaps: between wealthy and poor, between well educated and poorly educated, and between the young and elderly.
It was in the beginning of the internet burst that the University of Twente started their work on the development of one of the first e-learning platforms: TeleTOP, which is nowadays our campus wide e-learning facility. TeleTOP was designed from an educational background, which explains it's success and acceptance. It fulfils the needs of our instructors. Blackboard achieved a remarkable success in the global e-learning market, probably because it related so closely to the existing instructional design principles: It was not necessary to implement large changes in instructional design. Bb became an additional means to publish information (announcements, learning materials).
At the end of the 90's there was a mid-size Dutch company called SPC. They developed prototypes of an e-learning environment which was based on a communication design. MSN-like features (select your own buddies en see who's online), commenting on each other by using digital postings and the use of a discussion forum were interesting new features. Two-way interaction was the key design principle. A little bit analogous to Pressey the commercial people and consultants did a lot of presentations for prospects and during fairtrades. We organised seminars with over 100 participants, but still we did not get any further than some small pilot projects, except for one large and successful project within a Dutch financial institute. The company moved away from this market, and did not survive the economical crisis that started in 2001. Looking at the current approach of e-learning in which communication and collaborative functions are key issues, the ideas we had 8 years ago were not so bad after all. Pedagogical concepts like peer-to-peer learning, communities of practice provide a framework in which this kind of e-learning technology can fit. Blackboard has trouble in following this shift towards a two-way approach of learning. Sharepoint, It's learning, Sakai (although very different) are just a few examples that explicitly address this new way of looking at education.
Moreover, E-learning is evolving towards more wireless broadband access of rich media information and by using mobile devices. Again, we must watch out not to be too far ahead of what educators need. As Mirande concludes the penetration of the learning machine is inevitable and will further increase. It also forces educators to rethink their way of organising a curriculum, subjects and the instructional design they want to apply.

For personal reasons Marcel Mirande retired a few months before the DU was incorporated into SURF. I'd like to congratulate him on the publication of this book and I wish him the very best for the future.

Mirande, M. (2006). De onstuitbare opkomst van de leermachine: Over de precaire verhouding tussen technologie en onderwijs in de periode 1925-2005. Assen: Van Gorcum.

> 100.000 connections

2007-01-22T02:20:00.000-08:00

Wow, that sounds huge, doesn't it? Those who followed my blog a little bit - and at least some of my colleagues - may have noticed I have developed a big interest in several aspects of social software. Virtual communities are established within a very short period of time. It must have been a few months ago since I started my profile on Hyves and on LinkedIn.com. In both cases I was invited first. Hyves by a guy I didn't know at all, but he wanted to start a Hyves group for all people carrying the last name of Portier. Well, why not I thought and I joined the group. I joined Linkedin because of an old contact I used to work with - although in separate companies. There is an interesting difference between the two: Hyves is much more on social contacts, sharing media (pictures, video, building your own page (some of those are really ugly ...)) whereas LinkedIn has a professional background: it's about sharing professional networks, finding career opportunities or possibilities to cooperate with one another. Hyves defines your contacts as 'Friends', LinkedIn as 'Connections'. Personally I believe you only have a few real friends. It's hard to consider someone a friend, you sometimes haven't even met personally. Talking about 'connections' is on the other end of the continuum. It has a sort of clinical, business-like approach of looking at how people connect. I get associations with semantic networking.
Looking at the contacts I have gathered so far there is only little overlap between my contacts on LinkedIn (42 at the moment) and on Hyves (31). My Hyves contacts are much more in terms of people I personally know or have a personal connection to, on LinkedIn I have contacts with people I only met one time, but that meeting was enought to discover the mutual benefit of linking our networks to each other. It's sometimes surprising to discover shared connections: you find out that you know the same person, but you didn't know that from each other. LinkedIn may be helpful to get introduced to persons you don't have direct connections with. It's easy to find out who is in your 2nd level network in LinkedIn. Well, in that case I have more than 1500 useful connections right now. I have a little problem with the 3rd level network (> 100.000 connections in my case!) : you know someone who can introduce you to a person in his/her network, but that person needs to introduce you further to someone else in his network. I wonder why he would do that? The 2nd level person doesn't know me, so why introduce me to one of his contacts? I my opinion it's just a nice figure to see, but it has no real meaning to me. I don't want to know the 4th or even 5th level (I'm sure LinkedIn is able to calculate this for you). Before you know, you 'know' all people on the planet (or at least the ones who have a LinkedIn profile).
Despite this critical reflection it's a very interesting and valuable experience to find out how these social software applications work and what the benefit is or could be. Personally I believe you should not only read about it, but work with it for yourself and see what's going on. You might also want to try MySpace.com, Second Life or create an account in online games such as Habbo, Runescape or World of Warcraft. There you can also meet friends (real ones and just virtual friends). Runescape and Habbo support Wim Veen's statement (see my previous posting) of the gift economy. Kids have no problem to give away a set of armour to a new kid on the block, although they did a lot of effort to get it themselves. In a more extreme sense I know examples of kids who just give away their account (level 74) and start all over again. Analogous to Hyves or LinkedIn you have a list of friends, with whom you share things. In this case it doesn't matter if it's a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or whatever level connection. There seems to be a basic willingness to collaborate and share.

YouTube revisited

2007-01-19T02:03:00.000-08:00

Just a short post this time. It surprised me how quickly related issues came up in the past two weeks. I wondered about the legal and privacy issues that might be involed here, and indeed there have been some recent cases in which YouTube had to remove certain video files. The embedded video object in my posting of Jan 3, has now been removed from YouTube. The first message says: 'this video is no longer available'. When you click trough to YouTube you'll see a text banner saying 'This video has been removed due to terms of use violation'. A second case refers to the famous soccer player Ronaldo (Real Madrid) who wanted a video to be removed because of violation of his privacy. Although YouTube tried to refer to their terms of use in which solely the end-user has responsibility for checking all legal and privacy issues that might be involved, this did not hold in court. The provider of the infrastructure (YouTube in this case) has at least a shared responsibility and should pro-actively check on the video materials that are published. The Ronaldo video had to be removed at once. If not, they have to pay a considerable amount of money for each day the video would still be available from YouTube. Interesting case, because I think it's difficult to prevent that another user will upload the video again.

Best practices VLE

2007-01-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

Last week (Jan. 11th) I visited the seminar Best Practices VLE at SURFdiensten in Houten (NL). The seminar was organised by It’s learning for representatives in Higher Education. The main reason for visiting the seminar was that the program incorporated at least two presentations focusing on a service-oriented approach, which enables the integration of It's leaning with Sharepoint 2007. This seemed to be relevant to hear more about in the context of our very own Sakai project.
The full presentations can be downloaded from a webpage at It's learning.

In general I was wondering why SURFdiensten offers a platform to a - as a matter of fact two - commercial software vendors: It’s learning en Microsoft. Of course everyone is free to organise meetings and presentation seminars, but should SURFdiensten organise an excellent channel into the higher education market? Why not Netschool, Blackboard or TeleTOP (just to mention some other providers). Is it a matter of influencing the market?
Anyway, It's learning seems to have chosen the momentum quite well. The Blackboard market is not as strong as it used to be and Sharepoint is more and more claiming to be a platform that can solve virtually any problem. Organisations are making new choices, some already made a next step and did choose for It's learning instead of Blackboard. Listening to the two final presentations (by Berg and Kuijpers), the integration between It's learning and Sharepoint 2007 seems to be the 'Best of Both Worlds' solution. It looked quite good (at least the screendumps did), but in my opinion It’s learning can be subsituted by any other platform that is able to communicate through webservices with one or more Sharepoint webparts. Simply stated: it should also be possible to integrate a Sakai service with a Sharepoint webpart.

Some highlights I heard from the other presenters? Prof. Wim Veen (known from the concept of Homo Zappiens) reflected on the meaning of social networking for education. Web 2.0, the read-write web or any other categoryname for applications such as Hyves, Flickr, etc. make it very easy to share information with others. Learning has become a process of externalisation instead of internalisation. Sharing information (also by means of this blog for example) forces you to rethink and reflect on what you want to share. Externalisation may provide you with feedback to be used for improving yourself. At this moment one might speak of a remarkable gift economy (look at the way Wikipedia has been established and how the improvement process goes). Sharing of knowledge has become the leading paradigm.
The consequence for the materials which are shared is that these become more and more raw media components: small units, but flexible to integrate with the right tools. Availability of well integrated ICT, peers and feedback processes, but also available support are considered important prerequisites for Homo Zappiens.
Other presentations focused (Halleen, NTNU Trondheim) on the so far traditional use of a VLE (distribution of ppt and word files), which makes a VLE rather expensive. Publication of large PDF's is not done and focus should be set to rich media and mobile learning. Both Prison (Erasmus MC) and Tarenskeen (HU) include student orientation as the main learning paradigm, which explains their choice to use It's learning instead of Blackboard, which is primarily instructor driven. The remarkable thing in both presentations is that It's learning is used in relatively small part of the organisation, whereas e.g. Erasmus University still uses Blackboard as their default VLE. At HU It's learning is restricted to the faculty of computer sciences. The other parts of HU use Bb and/or Sharepoint. A recent achievement by the board to reduce the number of VLE-like applications in favour of only Bb or Sharepoint was blocked by students (about 110). They wrote a petition in favour of keeping It's learning. HU now focuses on the integration between Sharepoint and It's learning, which will further weaken the position of Bb.

I think it's good to see that organisations (now) recognize that Sharepoint is not a one size fitts all solution. On the one hand, it has very good functions for document sharing, workflow management and it can support collaborative work. On the other hand there is a lack of essential functions which would make it a real VLE. Think for example about the process of development, deployment and submission of assignments.

SUPER

2007-01-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

I promised to keep you updated about my YouTube experiment. Through downloads.com I found a freeware application called SUPER. This was a release from June 2005 (v1.791). I looked a little bit further and found the newest release on eRightsoft. This is called v2007.bld21 (dated Jan 4, 2007). The links on this page behave a little bit odd, so it took a while before I got to a page where I found four download links on the very bottom part of the page. First, I tried to download the installation file, but this did not work. So, I tried to run the installation file directly from the webpage. The installation itself was quite simple. This brought me to the final test. SUPER turned out to be a simple, straighforward tool. Only one screen, no menu's, no flashy user interface. Simply drag and drop the FLV source file into the entry field and then select what you want to do. There is whole list of possible output containers of which I tried mp4. The conversion to mp4 went very easy and you can indeed convert full FLV files to mp4. An interesting option is that you can also create MP3's if you're only interested in the audio stream of a YouTube video. It all works quite easy. There are a few issues that are not very well developed within SUPER. It's possible to play the last rendered file, but I could not find a button to stop the file once it was playing. So, I closed the whole application. A second issue is that you have to search where your output file is saved. I could not find a function to define your own output folder. It turned out that my output file was saved in C:\Program Files\eRightSoft\SUPER\OutPut. (! path may be different if you choose to install SUPER elsewhere !).
In summary, you need three steps to download from YouTube and to play files on a local or mobile device such as an iPod or Pocket PC:
1. Paste the URL of your favorite YouTube video on the Javimoya page.
2. Convert the FLV file to any format you like using SUPER.
3. Copy your output file to the device you want.
If you only want to keep FLV files and use an FLV player on your local computer, then you should install the FLV player from the Javimoya page instead of step 2 and 3.
Have fun.

Downloading from YouTube

2007-01-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

During the weekend I did some further research into the download possibilities of YouTube video content. As the father of two teenage kids the challenge was if we could get a YouTube video on a Pocket PC or iPod. Our first step was to find out if YouTube videos can be downloaded. This was not very difficult to find. There is an easy to use webpage on which you can simply enter the URL which is provided by YouTube. The selected video will be downloaded as a Flash Video file (FLV format). To play the file on your local computer it requires a Flash videoplayer, which can also be downloaded and installed from the same webpage.
The next step would be to install a converter which can create e.g. mp4 or avi output-videofiles from an FLV inputfile. I've tried a free demo version of Replay Converter which enables you to make 90sec. conversions. The full version of the program costs $29,95. The quality of the output file can be selected, but of course the filesize grows quickly when you require a high quality video. The mp4 output can be played with Windows Media Player and simply synchronized with a Pocket Pc running Windows Mobile. So the end of the experiment was that we were able to play a YouTube video on a Pocket PC. The mp4 also runs on iTunes, which makes it simple to Synchronize it with an iPod. A quick search on Download.com shows a lot of FLV converters. However, only very few of them are available as freeware. Next thing to do is to try one of these programs. I'll let you know what I found out, next time I write on my weblog.

YouTube

2007-01-03T14:56:00.000-08:00

In the past holiday weeks I took some time to take a more detailed look into YouTube. I already heard about the concept of a real two-way broadcasting experience, since you can upload your own video materials and thus create your own tube. Although, when in London be aware that the Tube has a completely different meaning, viz. the London subway system. It's really amazing how much materials can be found, varying from all kinds of home made videos, and both old and very recent concert registrations. The nice thing is that YouTube provides you with the literal code to embed a preferred video object into your webpage:

A world of easy accessible possibilities can be imagined. You can easily enrich a written conference report with live video fragments of presentations that you have attended, provide your students with your video materials, ask them to upload materials as a part of their assignments or share your holiday videos with friends and familiy even before you are back home. There is one thing that you have to take for granted, which is the sometimes very poor quality of the material. On the other hand you may find very unique materials, e.g. a lot of concerts which were never broadcasted on television are now freely accessible. At the risk of spoiling all the fun, I wondered about the legal issues that are involved here. What about copyrights and other kinds of legal warnings you can see when starting a DVD movie. You cannot simply distribute materials all over the world. But what's the issue here? It's not a P2P service such as KaZaa or LimeWire. As a private person you do not download or share a part of your diskspace (thus making yourself part of an illegal distribution network). The provider at risk seems to be YouTube, but when you read the Terms of Use it states that "YouTube expressly disclaims any and all liability in connection with User Submissions". The question is, however, how many people read these kinds of terms and upload materials that violate proprietary and/or public rights.

A new year, a new blogger!

2007-01-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

It has been quiet period in the past two weeks, of course related to the Christmas holidays. First of all I wish all readers of my blog a very happy and prosperous new year and hope all your wishes may come true. Although I already heard about it last December, the first challenge was to migrate to the new version of Blogger. Migrating (or upgrading if you like) always gives some excitement. Will it work, will I loose my information or even worse, the complete blog? What about this new Google account, I didn't have so far? Well, as you are able to witness while reading this posting, the migration was a success. Just a few clear steps and the migration went on quite smoothly, it just took a few minutes and so far, so good. Of course, I need to learn about the new functions, but that will come in the near future.
Why upgrade this quickly you might ask? Why not wait and see if any serious problems occur with other bloggers. Well the reason was simple and necessary at the same time. Being a co-author of a teamblog I needed to upgrade my existing blogger account, because the teamblog was migrated just this morning. I could not contribute anymore, unless I migrated my account too. While performing the migration process, I noticed that the blogs that I own myself were migrated at the same time. I must say, that's rather convenient, because all my blog data are now migrated to the new blogger in one process. So, the first achievement of 2007 is a success! The next is to get an overview of all the mails and the things that were going on when I left the office two weeks ago. It's for sure now that this is a much bigger challenge than the blogger migration I just described.

Finishing Grassroots 2

2006-12-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had the final meeting with most of the projectmanagers who were involved in the Grassroots projects 2006. In the past year we coached 348 (!) small, innovative projects in the context of Higher Education. The general conclusion is that most projects have delivered quite satisfying results. Instructors were positively surprised by the possibilities that ICT can provide for their subject. Moreover, most of the students reacted positively towards the ICT improvements that were made. Last but not least, most instructors appreciated the personal incentive they received after finishing a sucessful project. At the University of Twente the experience is somewhat different: the personal incentive is not the key motivator. Providing extra time (e.g. by hiring a student-assistent for specific tasks) has much more value.
Grassroots can also be considered as a small taste of an extensive world of possibilities. The risk is that projects will not continue once Grassroots is formally finished (and it will be in a few days). It's good to see, however, that about half of the participating organisations have adopted the Grassroots concept and incorporated it in their plans for 2007 and further. Interesting ideas include:

The set up of a so-called buddy system: colleagues who have achieved some experience with ICT can help and motivate a colleague.
Creating a pool of ICT student-assistents: students who can help instructors with pratical problems like setting up a beamer, network issues. These students should be able to handle 90% of frequently occurring problems, otherwise educate them.

More information about Grassroots in Higher Education in the Netherlands? Take a look at www.grassroots.nl (in Dutch) and search for projects within Higher Education.

Finishing Grassroots

2006-12-05T23:08:00.000-08:00

This month we will conclude the SURF Grassroots project which was run at the University of Twente within the faculty of Science and Technology. Grassroots projects are small innovative projects focused on helping teachers to embed ICT in their education. The interesting thing about Grassroots is that the financial incentive has a personal touch, meaning that the teacher who participates in a project may use the subsidy for personal purposes such as a conference visit or a piece of hardware that can be used within his work. However, when we look back at the Grassroots projects 2006 it is interesting to see that the personal incentive is not a very strong trigger to start a project. Teachers often have great ideas about what they could do with ICT to improve the quality of their subject, but simply don't have enough time to make inquiries about how to do that, what they can use and finally how to implement it. So what we see is that the Grassroots finances are mostly used to pay for teaching assistants and not for something like a study trip. The TA can work on a specific ICT-related assignment, sometimes only for a couple of weeks. The ideas are immediately implemented in the subject that a teacher has to give, which gives an opportunity to get feedback from the students and to make improvements for the next time. This makes the feedback cycle very short: teachers immediately can see whether their approach is succesful or not. In 2007 the Grassroots concept will be taken further within the faculty, as a means to help other teachers to innovate their education. The investment is relatively low, the benefit (and enthousiasm) you gain from it is remarkably high.

Critical Sakai review

2006-12-01T07:54:00.000-08:00

My colleague Allard Strijker will give a presentation at the Atlanta Sakai Conference next week. Within the first pilot of Sakai at the University of Twente in the study year 2006/2007 Allard used Sakai within an international master course on knowledge management systems. Together we collected the user experiences which are given from a teacher and student perspective. It's especially interesting to hear about Allard's experiences because he was closely involved with the design and development of TeleTOP, which is currently still the standard virtual learning environment for the University of Twente. Besides being a teacher at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Allard may be considered an expert in the field of e-learning. At this moment I will not give away too much information about the presentation, you should hear it for yourself. But be sure there will be some critical remarks. However, I think we shouldn't react too defensive about that, referring to Chuck Severance's (Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation)statement in Luebeck that the focus should now shift towards the user perspective. This is the only way we can learn from our users and it will help to improve Sakai into a better system. So for those who attend the Atlanta Conference: visit Allard's presentation in the Pedagogy track on Dec. 6th (10.30-11.30 INTL 1). After the presentation you can read more about the details of the evaluation.

3TU Graduate School

2006-11-17T13:55:00.000-08:00

Being a member of two working groups (ICT & Education and ELO-Groupware), I participated in the 3TU Graduate School (GS) Day which was held in Utrecht on November 16th. Very near to the famous Dom Church it was good to meet a lot of the members of the several development and project groups in the 3TU GS organisation. Since September 2006 the three Dutch technical universities already offer two master programs within the collaborative 3TU setting: Sustainable Energy Technology and Embedded Systems. The morning program was mostly filled with short presentations by the project groups who worked on several issues of the 3TU GS. It was interesting to hear about the achievements of the other groups, the problems and questions they have encountered and meet the people in person, which you normally see listed in mail headers.

The presentation of ‘my’ ICT&E group focused on the results that have been achieved in the past year, but also tried to give a realistic perspective for the future learning environment for the 3TU GS. Our main problem was that the development groups primarily focused on the development and organisation of their curriculum. Therefore, the ambitions with regard to an advanced ICT-based instructional design (face-to-face, distance education, campus blend, etc.) were rather modest. The problem for the ICT&E group was that it was not very clear what was needed and when it was needed to facilitate the 3TU curriculum. The danger of this situation (and a known pitfall!) is that the discussion narrows down to all kinds of interesting and nice working tools (the bottom up method). People may even experiment how these tools can be used within their course or project. Before you know there is a complete chaos of ICT tools, which cannot be managed from an ICT perspective. For fast prototyping it is not a problem to do some experiments, just to see how things might work, but these prototypes have to be thrown away as soon as the experiment has finished. This perspective, however, is not very attractive for instructors. Only few have an intrinsic motivation and interest to participate in this type of innovative experiments. The majority likes to use proven technology, which is easy to use, is serviced and maintained and –most importantly- which helps them to organise their work in a more efficient way.

The ICT&E group argued that we should first take a step back and look at the problem from a 3TU ICT Architecture. First, take the business process (the education process starting from subscription till becoming an alumnus) as a starting point, then define the information process (which functions do you need, required integration processes) and finally the technical process (which tools, operating system, one integrated system (e.g. Blackboard or TeleTOP) or a smart and coherent combination of technical components, thus creating a sort of personal learning environment). It is important to broaden the discussion by looking at the architecture as a digital learning and working environment (DLWE), and not solely as the classic virtual learning environment (VLE) such as Blackboard, WebCT or TeleTOP. The purpose of an integrated information architecture is much broader than the classic VLE. Moreover, it is stressed that we should look at it by taking account of open standards and interoperability issues. Even if the 3TU will not achieve a common DLWE (both from a short or long term perspective), the open standard approach will guarantee a second best scenario that components can work together. The information process which is required to support a student’s learning process should not be hindered by technical barriers. Even if the underlying systems are different, the front-end interface for the end-user may still be one coherent environment.

An important outcome of the 3TU GS day (in my view) is that the ambition level (with regard to ICT&E) of the board of directors seems to be more in line now with the realistic context in which the project group has worked so far. The follow up work (starting from business processes and mapping these on a functional architecture design) is already in a preparation stage. The next 3TU GS day (one year from now?) will demonstrate how far we succeeded in the achievement of a common / shared 3TU-DLWE.

Open Innovation

2006-11-15T05:08:00.000-08:00

On November 14th and 15th the SURF Onderwijsdagen took place in the Jaarbeurs buildings in Utrecht. First, I joined the keynote opening by Emile Aarts of Philips Research. An interesting and stimulating talk which was closed by a statement that eagerness is a better predictor for learning success than brightness (or smartness). For a more extensive impression (in Dutch) of this keynote take a look at Wilfred Rubens' weblog.
As a sort of follow up of my last contribution to my weblog I visited the Open Innovation track. The first presentation was by Thea Derks from the Free University of Brussels. She was talking about the implementation of the open source learning environment Dokeos (based on Claroline). It was implementated under the name of Point Carre, which would refer to the educational concept that the VUB would like to communicate: it's a central learning point where everything comes together. Before Dokeos was implemented the VUB used Blackboard. Dependencies (licensing and support agreements), lack of integration with other systems in combination with interesting open source developments made the VUB look beyond the world of Bb. Dokeos was implemented in the educational context of competence-based and flexible learning. Moreover, the VUB uses a blended learning concept (comparable to the model the University of Twente is using). Important demands for the new ELO were:

Users should have more or less the same appreciation level for the functionality of Dokeos;
Dokeos Company offers support, consultancy and hosting services;
Collaboration in the Flanders region (especially Ghent University).

After the pilot phase Point Carre was implemented within one semester (2004-2005). First-year students started on the new environment right away. For other cohorts there was a timeframe of 6 months to migrate from Bb to Point Carre. Point Carre was launched at the VUB on the Day of Educational Innovation. It's important that there was a migration tool that helped instructors to migrate their courses from Bb to Point Carre. Instructors were able to do the migration by themselves. Furthermore, there was a great offering of manuals, helpdesk and a FAQ page. The usability level of Dokeos is considered high. It's performance is stable and users like it. Compared to Bb the learning path function and the Wiki are considered as interesting new functions. Thea pointed out that the choice for open source didn't mean that the total costs were reduced. The VUB negotiated that the license costs could be re-allocated for further development of Point Carre. This way it was possible to develop tailor made links to other systems (e.g. curriculum information, a reservation system, peer assessment tool). So basically the message is: get more for the same money. Future developments are also focused on strenghtening the possibilities for collaboration. The current community is mostly build in Belgium. Just recently there is a Dokeos representative in the Netherlands. Take a look at: www.dokeos-nederland.nl, www.dokeos.com or www.osc.vub.be.

One of the other interesting talks I heard was by prof. Fred Mulder from the Dutch Open University. He claims that the Lisbon issue of lifelong learning still has no high priority within the academic world. One of the most promising developments in this field can be found in several initiatives focused on Open Courseware. MIT already showed in 2001 the potential of this paradigm by putting all their learning materials (lectures) on the web, for free. The Dutch Open University will take this one step further in the so-called OpenER project.
The aim of OpenER is to increase the participation level of adults in higher education, this way creating more opportunities for lifelong learning. The Dutch OU has also initiated a European project in this field, together with nine partner universities throughout Europe, supported by the Hewlett Foundation. An important remark - to which I fully agree - is that open educational resources should go beyond content. It's also about dialogue, communication, collaboration and establishing learning communities. In his SURF keynote speech in 2005 Prof. Martin Valcke (University of Ghent, B) stressed that the strongest benefit from e-learning is found in situations where collaboration and communication are major ingredients. In these kind of settings students are forced to work actively with the resources which are provided, thus incorporating new knowledge in their cognitive schemata. Open ER will deliver it's first results around this time of the year. Also take a look at OpenLearn from the British Open University and the European Moril project (EADTU).
In his conclusions Fred Mulder mentioned that in a comparable way as Wikipedia one might think about a establishing a concept such as Wikiversity, based on two important aspects: high quality academic content in combination with collaborative learning projects.

The power of knowledge sharing

2006-11-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

Five or six years ago I visited LearnTec in Karlsruhe. There is still one presentation that comes to my mind when I reflect on what was being presented over there. It was a presentation about the power of knowledge sharing as a key factor in future competition. Basically the presentator argued that a key factor for successful entrepreneurship is the ability to share knowledge instead of keeping it to yourself. The paradigm is no longer 'the power of knowledge' but the power of knowledge sharing.
Looking at the current situation in educational organisations there is still a lot of hesitation (or even resistance) towards sharing knowledge with others (colleagues or not). This is probably one of the major problems why collaborative content projects have so much trouble in letting people make contributions. But why? MIT already gave access to a lot of learning content years ago. Working together and providing feedback can help the originator of the content to improve it to a next version, hopefully a better version. Wikipedia shows that shared contributions can lead to quality content. The networked organisation and more specifically the networked employee has (virtual) access to a lot of knowledge and experiences compared to those who act in an isolated way. This external knowledge can often help or speed up your own process of knowledge achievement. In a more confronting way I would like to argue that most content is developed during working time, which makes it rather strange that people attach a sort of personal copyright to things they have created. A lot of organisations even state that all content/products that are being produced are automatically owned by the employer and not the employee. Sometimes even for things you create outside working hours. For the latter situation I believe there is a difference between work related productions and things you produce in a completely different context. In my situation it seems clear that content I produce for the website of my Taekwondo school does not belong to the university I work for.

Of course there are clear exceptions that can be used to argue against the free sharing of knowledge and content. For example, when you're working on getting a patent on a certain product it is obvious that you don't want your confident information to be on the internet. Another example is a research paper that is expected to be a major breakthrough in your line of expertise.

As a concluding statement I believe the default paradigm should shift from "closed unless" to "open unless".

About deliverables

2006-11-02T00:20:00.000-08:00

This week can be considered a week of deliverables. The first one is related to the Integrated science project which is run within the Digital University consortium. The team developed an instructional design document including a practical guide for instructors to transform their education according to the integrated design principles we defined in the project. The deliverable was accepted by the program management of the Digital University and is also considered a worthwhile contribution to share with others. Therefore it will be mentioned in the next DU newsletter and the document (in Dutch) will be available as a download.
The second deliverable is the finishing of an evaluation project on the use of laptops within courses of the faculty Science and Technology. The evaluation was held amongst 154 first year students of the academic year 2005-2006. Although the number of laptop-based courses should further increase, the students in general did appreciate the way that the use of laptops was embedded in a didactical way. This year the number of students using laptops at the Campus has further increased. The notebook service center is supporting around 2000 students who acquired their laptop via the university. In addition to that there are also hundreds of students who have laptops which are maintained by themselves. This increase in laptop users has caused that the number of wireless access points will be doubled in certain areas in order to guarantee an acceptable performance.

50th anniversary mobile cellphone

2006-10-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

Today seems to be the 50th birthday of the mobile cellphone. Of course the first cellphone can hardly be called a cellphone according to our current definitions or specifications. The first cellphone (by Ericsson) used to carry some 40kg of heavy weight. It must have been some suitcase that can be carried around and be placed in a car. The few cellphone users in those days were found amongst about 100 docters and lawyers around Stockholm and Gotenborg in Sweden. On the one hand because their jobs required to have a mobile communication channel, on the other hand because the mobile phone could only be afforded by the rich and wealthy. Due to the heavy weigh a car was required. Of course there were no GSM networks in those days. Ericsson launched the so called MTA (Mobile Telephony A) in october 1956 which may be considered an ancestor of the GSM network (AFT-4) that was launched in 1994.
I remember early pictures of mobile cellphones, a fine and wealthy looking young guy placing an enormous 'bag' on the hood of his car (a large and probably quite expensive BMW). On a timescale of 50 years it seems only a short period since I started using my first mobile phone. It must have been 1994 or so, quite a big device (a Siemens), with a battery that could be empty within just a few minutes. I was one of the first at my work carrying a mobile phone. I remember colleagues who thought of it as a ridiculous item: "are you that important that people must be able to reach you 24/7?". The early use of my mobile phone was mainly related to calls indicating that the train was delayed or that I was stuck in a traffic jam. It became easy letting people know that you were going to be late. It was appreciated by those who were expecting you for an appointment. Only one or two years later it was almost considered rude if a person did not contact you in case of a delay. Of course we had no SMS, MMS, WAP in those days, not to speak of inbuilt VGA camera's, WiFi, Bluetooth, Mobile Internet, and only a handful of ringtones. Still it was quite satisfactory to have a cellphone, given the state of technology at that time. Today the mobile cellphone (you can hardly consider it a phone in the strict meaning of the word anymore) it has become part of our daily life. In the Netherlands there are more cellphone contracts than inhabitants. It's sure that the number of functions will further increase in the following 50 years. It's already amazing to see all the new technological developments that are currently going on in the far east and which will (partly) reach the consumer in one or two years from now. If you live in South Korea, it is an everyday reality to have always-on superfast Internet -- broadband -- both in your cell phone and in your home. So picking up your cellphone to watch your favorite TV show is already there. Why still have a stand alone DVD player in your car?

Back to work again

2006-10-23T06:12:00.000-07:00

Last week I had a short holiday break. After working to my (junk) e-mail I have my orientation again on the issues that are at stake in the near future. This week we are expecting to have the first evaluation results from our Sakai pilot projects. Furthermore, I have to finish a report on the use of laptops within the education of our faculty TNW. The first results look promising: students are moderately positive about the way intructors have embedded the use of laptops in their education. Some improvements can be made, however, such as increasing the number of courses where a laptop is required (on the other hand: watch the possible risks on RSI!). Furthermore, some buildings require a better and slower WLAN performance and the number of 220V points are too low in some lecture rooms. A final important goal this week is a meeting with my DU projectmanager about the Integrated Science project. The first course is running right this moment according to the new didactical concept. However, we foresee some problems with the implementation in other courses.

Asynchronous transition

2006-10-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

This week I spent quite some time on 3TU issues. The federation of the three Dutch technical universities (3TU) will be formally established on April 1st, 2007. One of the jobs that needs to be done is providing e-learning facilities for 3TU students and instructors. The 3TU Graduate School already launched two master programs (Embedded Systems and Sustainable Energy Technology) in September 2006. For the short term the students and instructors can logon to their own virtual learning environment (VLE; TeleTOP, Blackboard or StudyWeb) and to the VLE of the other two institutes. However, this will not be a sustainable solution. The University of Twente is seriously looking into Sakai - as you may know -, as a possible subsitution for TeleTOP. The two other TU's have quite another time frame for reconsidering their VLE, if at all. This is the first type of asynchronous transition, which makes it difficult to define a common 3TU VLE. Moreover, it is not clear whether they will make the same choices as Twente will make. A possible solution might be found in the definition of a common functional architecture in terms of a set of services. The components fulfilling these services may differ between universities. A second type of asynchronous transition can be seen between the 3TU entities that work on different aspects of the fedaration process. The (board) of the 3TU Graduate School has already some high expectations about pilots for the new 3TU VLE. However, the development groups that are involved in the master programs are not in a big hurry and want to start easily, e.g. by starting with lectures in streaming video format. Sharing content and collaborative working accross institutes is not an issue yet, but may develop slowly during the current academic year. The VLE projectgroup will proceed anyway, looking into more detail into the possibility of setting up a common framework in which a set of services will be defined. When the question is there (and it will be), we hope to be ready to provide an adequate solution.

Integrated Science Education (ISE)

2006-10-10T03:05:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of 2006 I am the projectmanager of a DU project called Integrated Science Education (ISE). The basis idea is to integrate (or incorporate if you like) mathematics content in science courses. It is a major problem that students in a course on Quantummechanics for example have big problems in applying the correct mathematical concepts. The preceding Calculus I course does not look forward into possible contexts in which the mathematical concepts can be applied. The other way round the Quantummechnanics course doesn't look back in order to incorporate the abstract mathematical concepts into the cognitive schemes of a student. In the didactical model we strongly stress that explicit feedback to previous mathematical concepts is needed in order to incorporate them. It is more that just mentioning that the concept has been addressed earlier. Students should be confronted again with exercises and assignments, so they have to be actively involved in understanding and applying the relevant concept(s). The point is that transfer between the two domains is a big problemn. The project is a so-called transition project focused on integrating (abstract) math into science courses. Moreover, we are trying to include applications like Maple, Maple TA, and Simulink that can provide a natural 'bridge' between the two domains. At this moment we are close to finishing the instructional design. In two weeks the first course (Engineering for Advanced Technology) that is changed according to the principles of ISE will run at the University of Twente. Next courses will start in january 2007. Other partners in this project are the University of Amsterdam and Saxion University. The first evaluation results are expected by the end of November. Obviously, these results will determine whether the ISE model will be adopted in other curricula or even other institutions.

Marom Ayoubi on D66 candidate list

2006-09-30T06:28:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce that on September the 30th my wife Marom Ayoubi was chosen by the members of D66 to be on the final candidate list for the National elections to be held on November 22nd this year. D66 (the Dutch social-liberal party Democraten 66) is a member party of the European Liberal Democratic Reform party (ELDR) and the Liberal International (LI). The candidate list has a fixed part of 25 national candidates and a part of 5 candidates who are known for their regional work and acitivities. Marom will be in the regional part of the list, which means that she will be listed on the candidate lists in 6 of 19 election districts. These will be mostly in the south of the Netherlands. Marom has a background in education and pedagogy, which will be two of her key drivers within the election campaign.

"Voorbij de grenzen van de ELO II"

2006-09-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, sep 28th I visited this conference ("Beyond the boundaries of the Electronic Learning Environment") which was held for the second time in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Starting with almost 200 attendees, the morning part of the conference was provided by three distinguished, international speakers starting with Chuck Severance, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. For me this was the second time in three weeks that I attended a presentation of Chuck. This one was quite different from the one in Luebeck. Chuck provided a general overview of Sakai and the vision behind the community. He gave us a very clear perspective on how to position Sakai as a teaching, learning research and most of all collaboration tool. In that perspective Sakai is more related to Lotus Notes or Sharepoint that to the typical VLE's like Blackboard or Moodle which are designed from a traditional teaching perspective.
Although already familiar it was good to hear about the way the development community works. First, there is someone having an idea and contributes that to the community. Secondly, one or more developers in the community may decide to develop a provisional version of the tool. The third and most exiting part is probably the decision whether or not it should be implemented in a next production release. The decision on this is not a matter of getting a lot of votes, but on experiences from people who used it in their daily practice. If they like, it's stable and the QA tests have proved to be succesfull, the component might included in the next production release.
One of the attendees asked Chuck's opinion about the Blackboard patent in the US. Chuck made it very clear (and I strongly agree on that), that this patent is rather ridiculous. It's like having a patent on 'sunrise', in this specific case saying that there is a distinctive role between instructors and learners. It's a big question whether the patent will hold in court. In a worst case scenario you may be confronted with a payment for the patent, maybe $ 5000 a year, but it doesn't matter if you use Sakai or another LMS. So his strong advice is: proceed with what you are doing and what you believe in is right.

The presentation of Sarah Porter (JISC) on the e-Framework did not include very much new information for me. Although it was good to hear (and in accordance with a shift of attention within the Sakai community) that services are more and more considered from the USER DOMAIN. Mapping the user provides information on how to design necessary services.

The third interesting keynote was by Scott Wilson (CETIS) on the personal learning environment (PLE). Another acronym after ELO, ILE, VLE, LMS, CAI, ITS, etc... ? I like the idea very much and believe PLE is indeed a next step forward, relating to the Web 2.0 generation in which the web has become a read-write environment in which the user can actually influence what's happening for him/her. Formal and informal learning are being combined, long lasting communities of practice (before and after the course someone is taking) and using shared goals to forge a social identity are key issues in the PLE approach. Important to note is that a PLE is personally constructed, it is not a box you provide. It's about tailoring the infrastructure so it will be supportive for you.
Interesting links to visit:

I also joined Scott's afternoon workshop on PLE. One of the questions was about the role of the teacher in a PLE. What strategies can a teacher take, because you cannot be sure what students actually see within there PLE. One of the solutions could be that a students gives two or three things that can be tracked (e.g. by RSS) as proof of achieving a certain competence. It's clear that the variety of information sources becomes much bigger, which makes it a big challenge to deal with in your role as a teacher.
Another, more fundamental issue is how to determine that person x indeed achieved learning objective y? Promoting open access is one thing, but what is the real incorporation into cognitive schemata of the learner if information can be collected in a very easy, open way. Copy-pasting a nice piece of work is not difficult, but do they actually learn? What's the transfer to other parts of the curriculum or further in time: to the outside world.

A workshop that strongly connects to the PLE was the workshop about ELGG. It was the first time I heard about it. It is based on a model of a distributed global learning environment. ELGG may take information from different underlying systems and bring it together in one coherent environment for the user. Interesting features are:

Personal and community blogging
Tagging
Private and public communities
Podcasting
Social Networking
Learner defined spaces
Personal and community file storage

Meeting deadlines

2006-09-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

This week was more or less about meeting deadlines. First I visited the "Haal meer uit de DU" conference for which I had to prepare a poster session. Moreover, I also had to deliver an instructional design document for the DU-project Integrated Science Education. This project is conducted by a consortium in which Twente University, the University of Amsterdam and Saxion are participating. I spent quite some hours on writing the document which will be discussed by a review committee next tuesday. So far, I have the impression that I managed to find a compromise between the insights that were shared within our team sessions earlier this year. Among other issues, the discussion was focused on whether the 4C-ID model (van Merrienboer) would be usable within our project. In the academic context there is still a lot of hesitation towards competence based learning models, although it's slightly changing nowadays. There is the impression that everything will be about skills and the learning of (abstract) knowledge will be neglected. I think this impression is not correct. Especially 4C-ID is flexible enough to incorporate the knowledge component. Tuesday the team will discuss the document with the review committee. The interesting question is: will they agree with our basic approach or do we need to make fundamental changes before we can continue with the project? You'll read more about it next week.

"Haal meer uit de DU"

2006-09-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

On september 19th I visited the conference of the Digital University (a consortium of dutch universities and institutes for higher vocational education). The Dutch title "Haal meer uit de DU" means that the focus is to share products and experiences that have been achieved in the past year in a broad range of collaborative projects.

Besides having my own poster presentation on the project "Integrated Science Education" I visited two workshops and two plenary sessions. In my opinion the workshops were highly inspiring. The first one I joined was about Web 2.0. In summary it gave a good overview of using social software (wiki, blog, social bookmarking and social networking) in an educational context. Some conclusions were that a group blog is more suited to support learning than a blog which is maintained by one or two people. Group reflection is the central issue.
Wiki's provide a common feeling of working together on a result. It can be confronting on the one hand (others may change or delete your contribution), but everyone is invited to contribute. Everyone can be engaged on an equal basis.
Unfortunately the session itself was not very interactive (only presentation and a few short questions).

The other workshop I visited was mainly given by students who were involved in the instructional design process of a part of the curriculum. Based on their own experiences they worked together with the teachers, trying to improve courses for future student groups. Both students and teacher were enthousiastic about this interesting approach.

The plenary sessions (keynote by Marinus Dekkers and a panel discussion at the end) were not very inspiring to me. I did not hear many new insights, and especially the acoustics in the lecture hall were not very good to keep track of the panel discussion. The discussion itself was also rather vague. My overall impression (which was shared by some people I talked at the conference) is that it is very much about competence based learning, i.e., a focus on vocational education. However, within the (Dutch) university context this is not (yet) the mainstream of their didactical approach.

Lisbon objectives at stake in the Netherlands?

2006-09-13T04:12:00.000-07:00

The main objective of the Lisbon agenda is to achieve a EU as 'the most dynamic and competitive knowledge based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment'. This process should be concluded by 2010. The question is, however, will me manage? Former Dutch prime-minister Kok questioned the achievement of the Lisbon agenda during a speech he gave in 2004. We were already behind schedule. On a government level the issue of becoming a knowledge based economy is a key issue in the politics of D66. In the past four years they have succeeded to claim extra funding for (higher) education. We are two months away from new elections. The forecast at this moment tells that D66 may be reduced to one representative in the house of parliament. It's not likely that they will become part of the new Dutch cabinet, which brings up the question to what extent the Lisbon agenda will remain on the agenda. In their election programs other parties also claim to increase investments in education, but the question is whether or not this will be the case once they have been elected. We may prevent this from happening or at least try to reduce the negative impact by electing D66, hoping that they will stay strong enough to keep asking attention for the knowledge based economy.

Are we becoming NET geners?

2006-09-11T00:29:00.000-07:00

One of the claims about the (future) NET generation (see the work by e.g. Oblinger, Veen, Prensky) is that these youngsters are perfectly capable of using a large set of ICT tools (e.g., smartphone, laptop, mp3 player, PS2) in a multichannel fashion. At the university where I work it can be observed that more and more students have their own laptop, which they use during the time that the teacher is giving his lecture. Do they perform learning related acitivties? Well certainly not the whole time, basing myself on the number of MSN and Skype conversations that could be observed. The conference I visited last week showed a remarkable number of laptop users during the conference presentations. I was able to make several observations about what people were actually doing: writing software code and sending e-mail were the two acitivities I noticed most. Indeed, I saw one guy taking notes about the presentation! Were the others not listening, or not interested then? At least one guy was still able to pose a relevant question, even while he produced some lines of software code in the very last minutes before. So the interesting question is: are we (30+ generation) learning to become NET geners too? It seems that we are learning quickly. Nevertheless, from a cultural perspective it's still a strange phenomenon that most of your listeners look at their computer screen instead of looking at you. You don't get the non-verbal feedback about whether they understand, agree or disagree to what you are saying.

Kicking off a new week

2006-09-10T23:42:00.000-07:00

Well, we're at the start of a new interesting week. Last week I visited an interesting conference in Lübeck (Germany) about which I created a posting in the Sakai-NL weblog. This week will probably be focused on revitalizing another large project I am running as a projectmanager. This project is about Integrated Science Education. We have to deliver the description of a didactical approach how to integrate mathematics content with content from science subjects. Moreover, it should not only be a theoretical elaboration about the pro's and con's of this approach, but also a practical guide for teachers which they can use in their daily work.

Welcome

2006-09-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

Hi,
Welcome to this new blog. I already observed for a while what a blog is, how people use it and what would be the use for me. Well, one of the things I sometimes think about is writing a sort of column. These can be about something I encountered during my work or about something I heard in the news. The blog can be an ideal environment to share this with others and get reflections on it. The biggest challenge for me is probably to find the time to write postings on a regular base. So, time will learn I guess.