Online EDUCA 2010 Impressions

Last week I and Ger Tielemans were at the "Online Educa" in Berlin. SURF organized this trip for us and 50 other IT and teaching staff from Higher Education in the Netherlands. Below are my impressions. Ger will send his impressions later.

ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN is a large international platform for exchanging ideas and experiences on ICT-supported education and training. 2197 learning and training professionals from 108 countries convened at the Hotel InterContinental in Berlin from December 1st – 3rd.

In 85 parallel sessions, delegates discussed the latest trends and developments in ICT-supported learning in the corporate, academic and public service sectors. 530 speakers from 45 countries contributed to the comprehensive agenda.

Other locations with impressions and findings from Online Educa:
http://blog.hansdezwart.info/2010/12/05/so-what-did-i-learn-at-online-educa-2010/
http://wiki.surffoundation.nl/display/oeb2010/Home http://www.havanaweb.nl/rubriek/de_weekgast
http://berlijn2010.cviweblog.nl/
http://nielsmaes.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/oeb10-technologische-ontwikkelingen-veranderen-de-wereld-maar-het-onderwijs-is-in-kern-hetzelfde-gebleven/#more-10
http://ictohub.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/terugblik-op-online-educa-berlin-2010/

Wednesday 1 dec 2010 - Pre-conference on Moodle2.0
At UNESCO-IHE we have Moodle version 1.9 Upgrade to Moodle 2.0 is planned for 2012 .

- the presenter showed an animation of Sir Ken Robinson on: "Changing Education Paradigms" which is really great FUN, both in content and in format. You can watch it on Youtube on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U There is also a Book called 'the element' by Ken Robinson

-GOOD IDEA: Place a Group photo of students in Moodle classroom to make themselves at home

-The presenter claims that Mahara can be the step from LMS (Learning Management System) to PLE (Personal Learning Environment). Mahara is an Open Source E-Portfolio platform. In principle Mahara is a separate product, but it links very well to Moodle. With Moodle 2.0 single sign-on is taken care of.

Some statements:
-An e-portfolio is a tool for reflection.
-Moodle/Mahara is Yin/Yan
-Teacher and students learn together
-Students learn to be responsible for their own learning
-Diferent forms of assessment are needed
-What an e-portfolio does is: Focus on positive achievements, not on mistakes..
-with uploading texts on Mahara, yo can let students acknowledge that they are the intelectual owner of the material they upload.


Moodle 2.0
------------
Most important new functionality is about: Files and repositories

-Filepicker is the new Moodle-tool to link to files etc. It is in fact similar to the Mrcute block that we have in Moodle 1.9. You now link to files that you first upload in your personal Moodle repository or in any other repository (Youtube and Flickr included). For most files you can select whether only a reference to the repository location is made or whether the file has to be copied to the local Moodle installation. If all links to a file are gone, moodle deletes the physical file. Students can have access to repositories as well, but NOT to some only. It is all or nothing.



Thursday 2 december 2010 - Opening Plenary
A University Degree with an Expiration Date ?
In todays keynote by Adrian Sannier (Pearson eCollege)the term "A Degree with expiration date" was dropped. In my view that would really express the concept of lifelong learning ;-).

See (ao) http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/MALAYSIAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:21620323~menuPK:324494~pagePK:2865066~piPK:2865079~theSitePK:324488,00.html

SESSION: E-learning for Environmental Sustainability (SFS04)
UNEP ( http://www.unep.org/mentor/africa ) is trying to set up large scale E-learning in Africa for environmental sustainability .

Several representatives from several African countries shown us how things are developing from governance to organization to implementation.

During the session the term E-waste is explained to be one of the major problems in Africa. E-waste initiative is about electronic waste dumped by western world. Kenya has e-waste regulation (is leading in this)

Common sense Vienna ( www.common-sense.at/i-call ) is supporting and helping (sponsoring?) in this E-Learning initiative. They give a presentation about their interactive-storytelling-by-GSM product they developed for awareness training in Africa.


SESSION: Assessment
The presenter tell about a HR E-learning study where Peer assessment is used for assessment of the final dissertations . The teacher just one of the assessors among students. She tells us that to make this a success you must start the design of your course with the assessment.


Friday December 3 - Academic Plenary
Darwikinism: One of the speakers today introduced this funny new word to the audience:

"Darwikinism"

Survival of the fittest content

Deletionism + exclusionism / inclusionism = darwikinism


See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Darwikinism

SESSION: Informal Ethics (ETH46)
Drunk students where always there, but now photos appear on fe. face book. This will make applying for job difficult and will worry patients that lookup their doctor on the internet..
To educate students about these ethical issues we could let them look up photos of themselves on facebook or google. The shock of the amount and diversity will make them aware of possible implications putting embarrassing photos on the internet.

One person in the audience explains that in Africa they feel our ethical issues and behavior on internet is invading their culture. They talk about war . Many Africans feel swamped by another culture

When using humor on the internet it is better to be pretty inclusive


SESSION: Online assessment (PED61)
Natasa Brouwer UVA
Natasa shows us the measured results of assessment results of students that were offered formative assessment along the "Homogeneous catalysis" course. The formative assessment was not scored and was only offered to the students to help them study. The results were (lightly) indicating that formative assessment helped the students to improve the formal summative assessment at the end of the course.

( In the evening Ger and me had dinner with Natasa and Lilia (Lilia Ekimova assisted in the research) where Natasa told me about this interesting video: "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI )


Sofia Torrão FEUP Portugal
In this presentation told us about her experiences with using a VLE (in this case Moodle) for having electronic assessments.

Preconditions set:

-Restrict access to ip numbers used in the room

-Restrict access to other apps such as browsers etc. This can be done by pre-installing the PC's with a (bare bone) Linux (Ubuntu) and Firefox only installed.

-Use strict time-window

Experiences:

Even with all these precautions in place, students managed to sabotage. They used fe. their moodle profile (where you can change your employer data etc.) to transfer answers etc. to each other. Or they used mobile phones.

One of the other 'technics' was one 'good' student logging in for 3 others and doing their tests for them.

"geo contextual time security"


SESSION: Students Feedback for Learning (PED78)
Ellen Kuipers HAN
Ellen demonstrated an interesting tool that allows teachers to upload a short piece of lecture on a YouTube-like manner. Students are then invited to comment on the piece of lecture and can add pieces of movie where they explain the issue in their own (better) words. The tool will also be used for language learning where students can help other participant's pronunciation by commenting on a movie of the student telling fe. about a family picture.

Computer tool is called 'talent' and is implemented by Wortell company in the cloud. It is built in/using 'Microsoft assure' ?

Timescale under the movie so that comments can be given by saying 'at second 67 you pronounce this wrong etc....


From the Vendor show

PANOPTO lecture capture software

Panopto had a very small booth next to the Africa virtual University. They showed software for Lecture capture that might be interesting for low profile solutions. The software can record:

-1 or more Webcam streams
-Powerpoint
-Smartboard

During the recording no editing can be done. The concept here is that students while viewing can switch from presenter to Powerpoint and/or Smartboard. This sounded very new and simple to me.