We can learn social skills

I gave the annual lecture on virtual worlds in E-Learning for my Master's seminar this morning. As usual, I have to download new versions of browsers and such, check that my Second Life avatar looks presentable and position her in a useful location, see if I can still find the things I want to show, and then see if I can scare up some living being for a chat.

I did manage to find a vampire last night that let me know that he was from Oregon and that he was here to find new friends. He asked how the weather was where I am, I said that we had snow. He replied that snow was not his thing, and he needed to go get some blood. Whatever.

This morning we got lucky as well, there was an entire group in one of the welcome areas I like to visit because it is not full of advertising. There were a bunch of guys doing their morning exercises, they didn't answer me. But a girl in a bridal dress did answer me and tell me she was from Turkey. It was a bit odd, as she stood with her back to my avatar, and she didn't really understand any of the other questions I asked. Whatever.

I found a film in the Internet archives about the Onlive Traveller virtual world, a very early one that is no longer alive. I had only played the first few minutes of it and decided to show it in class today. I forwarded it a bit past the text stuff, and let it play. I immediately had to giggle. There was this very, very "edgy" rabbit talking with another creature, perhaps a unicorn. They were talking about why this was such a cool thing.

I usually have myself under control when teaching, but this just cracked me up. The rabbit was going on and on about why learning in virtual worlds is great. About 6:30 the rabbit says "We're here to see our friends... the training here in social skills alone is a valuable tool", and I lost it. I started laughing so hard, I had to turn to the wall to try and compose myself. It continues "... we swap recipes ... some people got married here ...." and I stopped  the video. This rabbit - eyes blinking, mouth moving - was just too funny.

At the end of the session the students were all of my opinion - why on earth would anyone want to use an environment like this for teaching and learning? As one student noted, at least in World of Warcraft the graphics are better.

Collaborative Writing

I attended the E-Learning 2009 conference in Berlin this past week - a combination of the GMW and DeLFI conferences with around 400 people in the new conference center of the FU Berlin.

During the first talk I sat with a friend from another university in Berlin. He knows I like to play with software, and he showed me their experiment in collaborative writing: They were using EtherPad to take notes on the conference online. There were three people participating, who could not all be at the conference for the entire time.

I was intrigued, logged on, and watched them write while I continued to take my notes long hand on paper.

Then my fingers started to itch. I like to copy & paste a link and put it in a digital document after tagging the URL for delicious. And I love to make comments on things online. I couldn't resist commenting on a note my friend was taking. EtherPad color-codes each person, so it is easy to see who wrote what.

He responded by correcting my German, as he is wont to do ;)

The next talk got us mostly writing nasty comments about the pictures. I was a bit irritated at all the pictures being used (let's not get started on the lady with the pointy breast) with no reference. I want to know where I can go to see the pictures and perhaps use them myself. Why can't people include a small caption? Oh, and slide numbers in the form of x/44 so I know how many more are coming.

We split into sessions, and suddenly the usefulness of this tool proved itself. We were sitting in different sessions, but writing on the same page. One of the talks we attended together, and with two people concentrating we managed to get a good bit more of the meat from the talk noted. Someone asked me if a wiki would not be better for this. I think not - I would not see the others writing if I had my own Wiki-Page, and that was a very important aspect of our writing, being aware of who was reading and who was currently writing where.

More and more we could jump to the parallel session, make a note, ask a question, and jump back to our own sessions to continue writing. We eventually developed a style for delimiting the talks, copying over the titles and abstract links from the conference home page, and formatting our work. Little things like a long line between talks and setting the talk titles in bold and including the organization of the speaker emerged as useful.

When we again attended the same session, it was a bit strange when both started writing the same thing down at different places, and my habit of not copying directly but summarizing sometimes got in the way. Also I have lots of typos and der/die/das problems ;) I began to adapt how I write to my audience - my collaborators.

I was twittering in parallel on this first day, and by the end of the day I was exhausted - it was hard to write together in one style and to twitter in another and to listen to the talks and to think and reflect....

On day two I dispensed with most of the Tweets, concentrating instead on getting a good record of the conference. Okay, that was also because I had my OLPC with me and was fussing with the keyboard layout setting and trying to figure out which of the 73 WLAN dots was the conference one while listening to Michail Bletsas talk about what he learned at OLPC.

My friend could not be there this day, but he dropped by occasionally and read what was written, asking questions about things we has written. In the parallel sessions we discovered that writing too much caused a few cursor problems, with the screen jumping from where it should be to someplace the other person was writing. We tried the "undo" functionality, unfortunately that (and disconnections) undo too much.

There is a little chat window next to the writing area, I asked the other collaborators to please meet me after the day's sessions - I wanted to know who these people were in real life!

We continued on the last day, and I discovered that I was developing collaborative writing "muscles" and was back tweeting again.

At the end of the conference I exported our work to PDF - 28 pages! The text would need work before being published (like getting all my German fixed), but it would be easy to have someone else do this, and then remove all the comments and colors.

It was hard to keep from writing comments in the text - they belonged in the chat, but sometimes you just had to put a comment right into the text. I spoke briefly with Michail Bletsas about our experiment at lunch the last day. He asked if we were using Google Docs, I said no, I don't like the delay. He nodded, the OLPC's editor was designed for collaboration with a quick turnaround after typing. Google collects up stuff first before it gets bundled off to the server.

I don't know how the system would scale to > 4 writers at a time, but it does seem to be a nice array of export formats so that you can move your collaboratively written opus to other platforms. A very interesting experience - I think I want to know more about this tool!

I decided to attend the Vielmehr conference in Lübeck this year instead of the GMW. The main reason is the co-location of a number of different conferences, an e-learning conference, a human-computer interface conference, a usability interface and a cognitive design conference. Over 500 people are milling around the University of Lübeck, attending the lecture.

The main result up front: No one used the word "learning object" in my hearing during the entire conference! There are new buzz-words, however. These are the talks I attended:

• Rolf Schulmeister spoke about the Myth of the Net Generation (in German). He listed many studies and statistics that show that there actually is not such a thing as the "Net Generation", no matter how often the media try and tell us that they are there. There is actually quite a number of subgroups that are very diverse. And most youth watch TV and listen to music, sometimes using a computer to do so, instead of participating the Web 2.0. When they do participate, they are interested in the communities, i.e. communicationg with their peers.
  
• Martin Gieseking (University of Osnabrück) demonstrated an interesteing system, media2mult, that offers a wiki-based authoring system for cross-media (web and print) publishing. It sounds like just what I need for my current book project, so I will be trying it.
  
• Angela Carell and Isabel Schaller from the University of Bochum used a mix of Netvibes, WordPress, Google Docs and Bibsonomy for sorting out learning processes. Bibsonomy is a tagged literature database that I will be looking at more closely. They report that the students didn't use Google Docs, but didn't investigate the reasons.
  
• Sarah Voß from the University of Frankfurt reported on a class she conducted in Second Life. But she did not evaluate anything or measure anything, but the students were happy although there were a lot of technical problems. Why, she doesn't know. And it was so difficult to record what people did, so she is now working on connecting up a wiki and SL. Why she just doesn't dump SL is a mystery, she got a lot of flak in the discussion about her paper, which was more of a "My nicest memories from work" essay.
  
• M. Dahm, FH Düsseldorf discussed the problems that occur when usability and security meet - they seem to be mutually exclusive.
• Roland Hartwig, User Interface Design, preached to the converted, talking about in-house usability testing and doing some advertising for his company. He also demonstrated that self-moderation doesn't work.
  
• N. Oberg from the company phaydon had some nice slides with a lot of things we already know before she started talking about using ethnographic methods for doing usability testing. These were interesting, but she breezed through overloaded slides. She didn't manage to have a paper for the conference proceedings, but one can send her an email. Or maybe you can find it on the company homepage.
  
• Harald Amelung discussed his Master's Thesis from the FH Erfurt in which he looked at usability methods for mobile devices. Many techniques of traditional usability evaluation are not usable or adaptable to the mobile applications. There is a nice picture of the context of mobile use to be found in Savio and Braiterman.
• Then a group of computer students presented their semester work (this seems to be a trend at this conference, completely unreflected work without empirical evidence is presented, mostly in the form of: gee, look at me, I can program a web site / PDA application / server. There are horrible slides and mumbled technical explanations. When questioned on how on earth this can work, they have no answers. In this case they developed, among other things, a chat application that children are to use on a PDA via WLAN outdoors. That there is no cheap, readily-available WLAN outdoors was just a technical problem. Sigh.
• Ekatrina Kurdyukova wins my personal prize for research dedication for her Evaluation and Design of Auditory Feedback for a Mobile Outdoor Training Assistant. She was evaluating whether voice or signal was better for a jogging training assistant. She had her 20 test subjects think aloud while using the systems, and she jogged along, taking notes.
  
• Gilbert Cockton gave the invited lecture on Tuesday, and decided to use a military metaphor of usability for his presentation. He began equating usability to shooting: Load, aim, fire. One "wins", when the target is hit. That hitting targets with guns or cannon involves killing people seemed to have escaped him, he joked on, and then introduced a bunch of diagrams and forms that have a column for recording "emotions". I wonder how he defines emotion. I went up to him in the coffee break and told him about my displeasure with his analogy, he defended himself with the origins of usability being in the military. Well, gosh, the entire computer industry is rooted in industry, but that doesn't mean that we can't be using it for peaceful purposes. Thinking about one's metaphors might be helpful. At least he was the only one to footnote his decorative pictures, a habit I have gotten into lately myself.
  
• Jürgen Steimle demonstrated a paper-centric interaction concept for collaborative learning, that is, writing using the Amoto method after doing ethnographic studies (these seem moern at the moment).
  
• Another student project was presented (at least nicely presented) by a student from Linz. The group set up a MirrorBoard that takes pictures of passersby and integrates them into the picture, i.e. a vacation goal or a piece of clothing. Violent objections from the audience were put off by the session chair, who was the advisor of the student group. Eventually, one guy read off the data privacy law paragraph for German, which quite clearly states that this is not permitted.
• Anja Hashagen from the University of Bremen spoke of a nice application, "Der Schwarm" (the swarm), that is projected onto the floor and which interacts with people (here kids in the 3rd and 4th grade) to show them how a swarm of things reacts. However, they chose beetles, which as far as I know don't actually swarm. But it was a fun-looking application.
• The last three talks I attended was on the topics of data privacy in E-Learning. One young whippersnapper ripped into an old version of Moodle, explaining how bad it is. Well, it is open source, propose a fix! Actually, the HU Berlin has fixed it, although the young man had a slide stating that it was unfixable. A nice lawyer explained data privacy for universities and E-Learning in very understandable terms. I used one of the statements he used at a meeting on Wednesday and appeared to be very wise. The third one was a woman going on and on and on an on about some system made with an enormous amount of taxpayer money that is not actually in use yet, but they are publishing papers on it by the minute.

Then there was a business meeting, and I could go home. Had a lovely trip with a former thesis student who is now working in industry and was attending the conference.

Meeting folks was fun and useful, but the quality of many of the talks was lacking, one wondered what the program committee was actually thinking when they accepted these papers.

From "Learning Objects" to "Knowledge Bits"

I have long been an opponent of the "Learning Objects" school of thought in E-Learning. If you take the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee definition, this is "[a]ny entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used and referenced during technology-supported learning". You pretty much get everything, including the kitchen sink, as a learning object.

Many, many authors spin wild tales of reusing learning objects, of combining them, enhancing them, and what not. I don't find any papers actually demonstrating reuse, however. We talked about learning objects in my Master's seminar yesterday, me being a curmudgeonly old skeptic and rather disorienting the student who thought he was presenting state of the art research when singing the praises of learning objects.

He can't be blamed, even the popular press is jumping on the band wagon with the current hype about "knowledge bits", little nuggets of wisdom which can be ingested in 15 minutes, between answering your email and fussing with Facebook.

The Berliner Tagesspiegel calls them "Knowledge Pills", just the thing for the younger generation. No need to read, ponder, think. Just pop a pill and be wise.

I find this to be utter nonsense. There is still no royal road to knowledge. Sure, there are things that you can learn in 15 minutes. Wikipedia offers a lot of them, and I am sure there are lots of things like "How do I force my text processor to produce a table of contents" that fit nicely in this area. But the kind of learning we want people to have at university does not fit into 15 minute sound bites (bytes?). We want people to learn to understand a larger picture, to be able to abstract away from details, to plan, to explain, to understand.

In the afternoon two former students dropped by with their current project. Neither had taken my e-learning class (tsk, tsk), they didn't know what learning objects are and thought meta data was something used in MPEG-7. They are right, and Dublin Core is used for both, but blessed be the people who have never heard of LOM, for they shall see light!

Their idea, called Sofatutor, consists of short videos produced with cheap cameras, paper, magic markers, bits of paper, and microphones (I do hope, however, that they can soon purchase new microphones!) demonstrating in Common Craft style mathematical proofs and chemical reactions in German.

This stuff is not actually what people mean when they talk about learning objects. For one thing, it's in German. Subtitling, like dotsub does, would handle that. There's no meta data - yet. But the idea is grand: the videos are easy to make, and cheap. Of course, they want to have social communities grow, have people make their own videos and upload them, that sort of thing. And there are no plans on re-mixing for the moment.

On the one hand, I am skeptical of this. Students often think they have understood a proof or an algorithm, when they have not. They tell other students the "right way", and the others believe it and are angry when this gets marked wrong on a test. On the other hand, the same thing is true for the Wikipedia. And despite all the nonsense to be found there, there is actually lots of useful information to be found, even if I don't want my students quoting it on academic papers. So this might actually be a useful was of getting lots of pretty-good content produced for teaching people about subjects such as maths. And boy, do we need to teach people more math, but that is the subject for another rant.

So good luck to the Sofatutor Squad!

Blackboard doesn't play well with Vista

PC Mag is reporting on problems that Blackboard (BB) is having with Vista. Blackboard is a simple "Learning Management System" that supposedly offers lots of communication possibilities between teacher and student, but actually only offers enough basic functionality to put a check mark in each field while having extreme usability problems and not leveraging things that are already in use by people.

For example, people tend to have their own email accounts, but Blackboard insists on you writing emails from inside the Learning Managment System (LMS), thus not letting people access their address books or having these sent messages merged with their other sent messages.

Furthermore, the system is quite geared to the American syllabus-based method of college teaching, being a rather bad fit for many German schools. I've been saying this for years, but who listens to me?

Me? I use Moodle. It is open source (meaning you don't have to pay BB a steep yearly fee), it fits nicely into the teaching workflow (BB and others make you adapt your workflow to something comfortable for the programmers), understands what communication and collaboration is about, and leverages things you already have such as E-Mail Clients while offering a lot of flexibility for individual configuration. I like it more and more each semester, even if there are odd quirks, it is not a major hassle like BB. Oh, and it es so easy to use, even teachers without PhDs in computing can use it :)

E-Learning at company X

Yawn. Luckily, I got a seat at the back of the auditorium near an electrical outlet. And the WLAN is working.

I am sitting through a talk by Mr. Z from Extremely Large Company X, who is explaining how the company uses E-Learning. He has at least one slide with every buzzword on it, and lots of diagrams showing money savings and more hours spent on E-Learning. Most of his slides are illegible from the back row.

It seems they have new tools that are better than PowerPoint. I hope so, his slides are really chaotic and unreadable, he has little font accidents all over the place, not to speak of color problems.

But what are they really doing? I would have loved to see some examples of what they are really doing, not just this management stuff. Yes, he quotes Kerres saying that E-Learning has to bring added value to learning. But where is it?

A disappointment and a waste of time, this talk.

Didactics

Jakob Nielson is so right - the timeline archive for a blog just sucks. I need to have a thematic archive, but blogger does not have such a beast. So I will fix this by adding some posts that will eventually hit the archives, but will have nice URLS, that I can then stick in the templates. This one links to rants on didaktics. More to follow!

• Experiment On the Reuse of Learning Objects (August 2005)
• The King is *definately* naked! (August 2005)
• Three Objections to Learning Objects (September 2005)
  
• You mean that is not a Learning Goal? (October 2005)
  
• 3D Learning environments (March 2006)
• My First Videoblog (June 2006)
• Advanced E-Learning in Berlin (June 2006)
• Small is beautiful (September 2006)
• Blackboard doesn't play well with Vista (March 2007)
• From "Learning Objects" to "Knowledge Bits" (February 2008)
  

Other topical links:
Home girl life - Wikis - Plagiarism - Book Reviews - Observations - 'Puter Stuff