Stephen Powell, thoughts mostly about learning

Rather than fund a whole army of ‘Plagiarism Consultants’ and associated conferences why not re-engineer towards authentic forms of assessment - deal with the root of the problem rather than tinker with the flawed approach of the essay!

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Universities review plagiarism policies to catch Facebook cheats:

Universities are reviewing their plagiarism policies to clamp down on students who use Facebook to cheat.

Plagiarism experts have warned universities and colleges to be aware of students copying from each other when discussing coursework on social networking sites.

Gill Rowell, from the consultancy Plagiarism Advice, said universities needed to rework their plagiarism policies with “internet working in mind” but insisted institutions were taking cheating seriously enough.

The warning comes after almost one in two Cambridge University students in a poll of 1,000 admitted to cheating in their studies.

Student newspaper, Varsity, found 49% of undergraduates who anonymously took part in their poll confessed to passing off other people’s work as their own.

One anonymous student said: “Sometimes, when I am really fed up, I Google the essay title, copy and throw everything on to a blank word document and jiggle the order a bit. They usually end up being the best essays.”

Just 5% of the students admitted they had been caught.

“It is a depressing set of statistics,” Robert Foley, a professor in Biological Anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge, said.

University plagiarism experts will discuss cheating with Universities UK, the umbrella group for vice-chancellors, on November 19.”

Should e-learning policies be written to empower staff and students to abandon institutional provision?

Two weeks into the semester proper the 7 student researchers recruited for the first cohort are all engaging with the first module.

Forced to work outside of the UoB learning platforms (administrative issues), we have concentrated our communications around our Wordpress.com site and Google Docs for formal support (negotiation of learning contracts), with the more informal aspects catered for by blog aggregation through YahooPipes, synchronous text chats & oral communication through skype, and some exploration of twitter and a beta beta IEC Statusometer (developed by Sam) - there are probably also things happening that I don’t know about.

Next week we will finally start our Hotseat with Oleg Liber and that will also use wordpress.com.

Thus far there is no compelling reason to use institutional technology at all. A little more thought on my part on setting-up of the wordpress blogs would, however, have enhanced the experience for student researchers. For example, choosing at the point of making posts visible to allow comments or not as we currently have too many places where these can be left - turning this function off retrospectively hides comments already made.

Another issue is that of privacy as the model of learning we have developed requires the discussion of work issues that it may not be suitable to be aired publicly, but again with a little more thought up-front this could easily be catered for.

Chapter 2, Understanding the Curriculum in Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (2005, Barnett and Coate) is a useful starting point for considering curriculum design in HE.

This is complex area, and the slide below summarises seven notions of what might influence the development of curricula. Arguably an eigth dimension could now be added in the light of the Leitch Review (2006) and Foundation Degrees, namely that of ‘Employer Defined Curriculum’ whereby the government seeks to coerce employers into funding HE with the inducement of having a large say in the design of programmes.

Running through these notions Barnett & Coate identify three ideas that are essential in trying to understand contemporary curricula:
- the influence of the social context in the shaping of curricula
- hidden curricula processes
- the power of knowledge fields/discipline groups

A bit of a déjà vu feeling with this one. It is a racing certainty that institutions like mine will have to increasingly meet the needs of students who are not the ‘traditional’ 18 year undergraduate. They will want to study increasing amounts of CPD (short courses), will study entirely online and won’t wish to come to the institution at all, and will want to student when they need to or find the opportunity to do so - this may mean deciding they want to enrol one week and starting the next.

Institutional systems and practices cannot adequately cope with these demands (despite the good will of those trying to deliver) and will have to change. The experience of the new Masters course will inform the identification of what needs to change, but making those changes will require a systemic intervention - far more difficult to achieve.

I started this Pattern Language project last February with Ian Tindal and Richard Millwood and have been making intermittent progress since then. It is based upon the Ultraversity project and aims to capture the key elements of the approach developed for a degree programme based on action research methodology supported entirely through online communities of inquiry.

An enthusiast when I started, I am now more circumspect about the approach has anything fundamental to offer other than as a presentation framework.

I am playing around with dipity recommended by Sam as part of a data collection exercise for Bolton’s Co-educate initiative a project that I am managing, one of 12 Jisc funded Curriculum Design Projects.

One of the things we want to do is to run a series of focus groups both face-to-face and online to collect the history of the University of Bolton set in a context of UK HE policy, politics and technology. We believe that this is an important step in trying to understand the curriculum design process from inception through to delivery. If we want to find an agile and responsive way of doing this we first need to understand the complexity of impacting forces on this process.

On completion we may well produce a ‘posher’ timeline using the MIT Timeline Project software, but this looks like a good starting point as it will allow is to collaboratively ‘remember’ this history.

The London Pedagogy Planner is intended as “a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs.” - arguably an area that requires some serious attention. However, as it stands I would be surprised if any teachers actually use it. On downloading and unzipping the compressed file users are then have to open the ReadMe.text to discover that the planner is launched by opening lpp.jar A bit of thought about making this a foolproof process would have been effort well spent.

Pressing on, I am faced with a set of fields to fill in (a bit like a spreadsheet) that use typical HE descriptions of modules (”Properties”). For some reason, I couldn’t fill in “start date, number of staff, duration”.

Next I used the planning grid to allocate time against different teaching methods which then generates suggested breakdown of ‘learning experience’ - personally I think that learning activities would be a better label - who can tell what the experience will be?

Lastly I tried the “Allocate” tab where it appears that learning outcomes are mapped against topics, but none of the fields were available for me to edit, not sure why.

Beyond the problematic interface and unfriendly installation process and remembering it is a prototype there are several keyissues:

- can subject teachers be persuaded that the learning and teaching approaches are relevant enough to their discipline to warrant the considerable effort required to use the tool;
- the field labels and descriptors don’t adequately reflect the range of learning and teaching practice. For example, in work-based learning (the field I work in) I would say that inquiry is a “teaching method” not a “learning experience”. Also, what about ‘action learning sets’ or “Patchwork Text” for collaborative learning and formative assessment? The list is endless, and creative teachers will be constantly adding to it…;
- arguably, in trying to ‘atomise’ the description of learning and teaching (precise allocation of effort against topics, outcomes, teaching methods, learner experience) in support of a particular interpretation of “Learning Design”, in any practical or usable sense, all meaning is lost.

I just downloaded “Google Gears, an open source browser extension that adds offline functionality directly to the browser.” Ate the initial synchronisation which takes a few seconds if you have a lot of docs, the offline use of Google Docs is exactly the same as online, with the exception that data is stored locally and updated the next time you log into Google Docs. Working well for me at the moment but I wonder how it will deal with versioning between documents with multiple owners making offline changes and then syncing.

How much longer will we need separate word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation applications on our computers rather than use the functionality offered by browser extensions?

Dr David Hodge, President of Miami University, Ohio: Audio visual, full paper.

This practitioner conference brought to life the full breadth and diversity of the inquiry-based ‘movement’. From problem based learning in a medical context through to action research in the workplace there was an invigorating feeling of university staff striving to make learning more relevant for their students and of students responding to the challenge of complexity and uncertainty, but with the reward of authentic learning that these approaches tend to bring.

David’s keynote was a highlight for me as a compelling vision and strategy of how a learning experience for students can be transformed at an institutional level. Informed by Kegan’s personal development theory (1994) - a sequential process through which individuals can move over time from the first to the fifth order of consciousness over their lifetime, and the the ‘liberal arts’ tradition from US undergraduate education that encourages us to focus not simply on the subject but the broader development of the individual’s intellectual skills: criticality; ethical judgement; civic responsibility; collaborative problem solvng, etc.

“Student as Scholar Model represents the far end of the educational spectrum, specifically progressing from an instructional paradigm that emphasizes telling students what they need to know, to a learning paradigm that emphasizes inquiry in shaping how students learn what they need to know within the traditional academic context, and culminating in a discovery paradigm that encourages students to seek and discover new knowledge, emphasizing inquiry with no boundaries.”

David’s rigid application of Kegan’s theory overlaying a four year undergraduate experience from age 18 to 22 made me feel uncomfortable, coming as I do from a belief that individuals develop at different rates not necessarily correlating to their age. However, the BIG idea that learners can be “authorities and creators of knowledge” is something I believe to be true as demonstrated by the action research undertaken by undergraduate student researchers on the Ultraversity project.

The newly validated Masters in Learning with Technology at University of Bolton, Institute for Educational Cybernetics - recognised globally through its long-running Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS) are recruiting for new students (researchers).

When I lead the Ultraversity project at Anglia Ruskin University and in particular the development of the highly successful BA, Learning, Technology and Research, it was always our intention to validate a Masters level programme using the same approaches (work-focussed learning, online community, action-inquiry, patchwork-text assessment, etc.). However, politics got in the way of that particular development so it is with great satisfaction that this is now achieved as a part of the idibl framework.

Researchers will join the IEC community of 20 plus technologists, programmers and pedagogy specialists. It is this in-depth experience and community that students will be joining to help them through their studies.

This may be the course for you if:
* you want to design your own Masters
* you need to combine study with work
* you value learning with experts
* you prefer assessment by portfolio

The course is designed for students who are working full-time and want to study using an inquiry-based approach. This programme can complete in 15 months.

This works by researchers identifying opportunities or issues in the workplace and constructing inquiries around them, that require the taking of an action to improve the situation.

This course is delivered and supported entirely online and will suit people working in schools, colleges, FE, HE, as well as companies, charities, etc. where the role of the researcher is to develop the use of learning technologies in their organisation.

Anyone interested in studying with the IEC can email me at s.j.powell@bolton.ac.uk or stephenp.powell@gmail.com

This the idibl-framework-academic-proposal-revised.doc behind programmes using the IDIBL framework.