Tag: e-learning

CompendiumDS helps OU win gold

A great success story for KMi technology transfer: our Compendium knowledge mapping tool was customized by the OU’s Learning & Teaching Solutions team for a groundbreaking OU course U101 “Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century”. I met with U101’s chair Peter Lloyd several years ago when the course was in conception, and we discussed the potential role that Compendium might play and the kinds of customisations it would need. Well, Peter and his team ran with it, and the results are impressive.

They produced a special edition called CompendiumDS (for Design Studio) which provides a radically new way for design students to share their projects, submit them as multimedia Compendium maps (the OU’s assignment system was extended to handle Compendium XML files), and tutors marked them by annotating the maps. U101 secured the Institute of IT Training 2011 Gold Award, with specific mention of CompendiumDS (news story).

The simplified CompendiumDS user interface is introduced in this JISC Design Studio briefing with a couple of screencasts, and a research paper documents the process including some CompendiumDS template examples:

Lloyd, Peter (2011). Does design education always produce designers? In: Researching Design Education: 1st International Symposium for Design Education Researchers, May 18-19, 2011, Paris, France. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32291

CompendiumDS student assignment template

 

 

OpenU rolls out argument mapping in its VLE

One of the things that fascinates me is Argument Mapping. So, I had a fascinating time with Paul Piwek this morning, as he showed me the fruits of his ArguEd project, an OU strategic project aiming to provide “evidence-based improvement of VLE-based formative assessment of students’ argument analysis and evaluation skills.”

“Context: The ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is a key transferable skill. Firstly, it is an indispensable skill for study at Higher Education level. From the University’s point of view, retention is likely to be better for students that have mastered it. Secondly, it is central to many employability skills such as “negotiating/persuading, contributing to discussions”, “analysing facts and situations” and “the ability to produce clear, structured written work and oral literacy” .1 Finally, it is a skill that helps citizens to assess their own and other people’s arguments both on issues of personal importance and questions about the society they live in.

Research Question: The presentation of TU100 (“My Digital Life“), which includes a part (Part 5, Block 5) dedicated to argument analysis skills, presents an opportunity to collect data from relevant iCMAs and TMA questions for answering the question: Which mistakes do students make when analysing arguments and how can we help them avoid these mistakes?“

Paul showed me the introductory tutorial on argument mapping in the OU’s Moodle-based VLE (using our OpenMark formative assessment technology), and  the integrated drag+drop interface for students to complete simple argument map templates, in their analysis of a target text. A couple of screens below show how the learner drags the statements into the template in order to demonstrate their ability to parse the text into the top level claim, and supporting/challenging premises/sub-premises. Learners can then check their map, which preserves the elements in the correct place, but leaving them to try again with those they got wrong.

Fabulous to see this in use by 2000 students, and hopefully something that will spread to other faculties, now that the infrastructure is in place within the OU’s VLE. Kudos to Paul for all his hard work!

Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics

Here in Banff, we’re wrapping up the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge in the outstanding Banff Centre. I have to say that I’ve also never been anywhere so cold, and this is the only conference where they provide free tissues on every delegate table!

It’s been an exciting event to be at, with a tangible sense that this is only going to get bigger, and fast. More reflections on this later, but here are the slides from the session we ran yesterday, with a focus on how analytics might help us understand not just the quantitative analytics on online discourse (e.g. how many people are engaging in discourse, and how often, etc), but what’s the quality of that discourse?

This might go under the heading of discourse-centric learning analytics. In the first approach, we deploy a platform for structured deliberation, and in the second, seek to detect quality discourse in textchat.

(Slideshare embed code seems to be broken right now in this blog so follow the link)

De Liddo, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Quinto, I., Bachler, M. and Cannavacciuolo, L. (2011). Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics. Proc. 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. Feb. 27-Mar 1, 2011, Banff. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/25829

Abstract. Drawing on sociocultural discourse analysis and argumentation theory, we motivate a focus on learners’ discourse as a promising site for identifying patterns of activity which correspond to meaningful learning and knowledge construction. However, software platforms must gain access to qualitative information about the rhetorical dimensions to discourse contributions to enable such analytics. This is difficult to extract from naturally occurring text, but the emergence of more-structured annotation and deliberation platforms for learning makes such information available. Using the Cohere web application as a research vehicle, we present examples of analytics at the level of individual learners and groups, showing conceptual and social network patterns, which we propose as indicators of meaningful learning.

Slides: Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics [PPTX/PDF]

Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2011). Learning Analytics to Identify Exploratory Dialogue within Synchronous Text Chat. Proc. 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. Feb. 27-Mar 1, 2011, Banff [PDF]

Abstract. While generic web analytics tend to focus on easily harvested quantitative data, Learning Analytics will often seek qualitative understanding of the context and meaning of this information. This is critical in the case of dialogue, which may be employed to share knowledge and jointly construct understandings, but which also involves many superficial exchanges. Previous studies have validated a particular pattern of ‘exploratory dialogue’ in learning environments to signify sharing, challenge, evaluation and careful consideration by participants. This study investigates the use of sociocultural discourse analysis to analyse synchronous text chat during an online conference. Key words and phrases indicative of exploratory dialogue were identified in these exchanges, and peaks of exploratory dialogue were associated with periods set aside for discussion and keynote speakers. Fewer individuals posted at these times, but meaningful discussion outweighed trivial exchanges. If further analysis confirms the validity of these markers as learning analytics, they could be used by recommendation engines to support learners and teachers in locating dialogue exchanges where deeper learning appears to be taking place.

Slides: Learning Analytics & Exploratory Dialogue [PPTX/PDF]

Cohere at Mozilla Jetpack Design Camp, SXSWi

We just got back from the Mozilla Jetpack for Learning Design Camp at SXSWi (Austin TX), where our Cohere Jetpack was one of the 10 winners of their Design Challenge, co-sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. Jetpack is Mozilla’s new technology to help web developers add powerful new extensions to the Firefox browser. Read Michelle Bachler’s reflections on Jetpack, and the camp, on the Cohere blog, and give it a try! Slides below…

Cohere Jetpack Mar2010

View more presentations from sbs.

Extending Compendium for choreographic video annotation

We have now added Movie Maps to our Compendium tool. A given idea (i.e. hypertext node) can now be embedded in both time (one or more clips within one or more movies) and space (one or more locations within one or more movies). Because that’s how themes, resonances and meaning manifest.

Movie Maps can be linked into and out of just like any normal Map, so you can use all the usual Compendium strategies for making and managing meaningful connections between ideas:

  • the appearance/disappearance of a node (of any sort) to highlight something of interest in a clip (including a map containing your analysis)
  • direct graphical links to make visual connections into/out of/between clips
  • transclusion (or embedding as we’re now calling it) whereby a node appearing in a clip is embedded in other maps (including of course, other movies)
  • tags, whereby the clip shares one or more common features with other nodes, within or outside the movie

This has been developed working closely with choreographers who specialise in the use of digital media to play with time and space in dance, in the context of the e-Dance project: I just posted this description in more detail on the e-Dance Project website:

edance-demo

This series of movies brings together Choreography researcher Sita Popat and myself, who demonstrate and discuss the adaptation of one of the project’s e-Science tools for Choreography, the Open University’s Compendium tool for mapping ideas and annotating media. Acknowledgements to Michelle Bachler (Open U.) and Andrew Rowley (U. Manchester) for expert software development, and webcast wizard Ben Hawkridge (Open U.) for helping us migrate the footage to Web. High-resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the relevant tracks.

The video-enabled version of Compendium will be going into alpha release this month with invited testers, for full release within a couple of months.

The academic context for this work is set out in a recent article:

Bailey, H., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Le Blanc, A., Popat, S., Rowley, A. and Turner, M. (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science Tools to Extend Choreographic Research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 13 July 2009, Vol. 367, No. 1898, pp. 2793-2806. [PDF]

Formalizing Philosophical Narratives for e-Learning

It’s always exciting when one strand of work collides with your own, and from this fusion, interesting new particles emerge. In this case, Mikele Pasin, a PhD student in KMi with Enrico Motta on modelling the literature around Wittgenstein using a semantic web approach (to create the PhiloSURFical prototype), then joined the Cohere team, and got interested in modelling discourse and argumentation structures.

The result was a paper which went down very well at the European Computing and Philosophy Conference last month, and demonstrates the hybrid collision of a Semantic Web perspective modelling consensus knowledge, and our take on the Pragmatic Web which revolves around modelling potentially contested intepretations. Nice work Mikele 🙂

Pasin, M., Buckingham Shum, S., & Motta, E. (2008). Formalizing