Lately I’ve been at ITK 2007 in Hämeenlinna, Finland (see also my presentation slides) where we had an “Unconference Track”.

What is an “Unconference”?

Teemu Arina proposed this idea to Jarmo Viteli and the organizing commitee of ITK07. The basic idea is to have an empty track where the conference visitiors can setup their own agenda. Often you have good ideas at the conference, not before the conference, so it is a kind of user driven conference with ad hoc meetings. Also there is much more brain in the audience than on stage, so why not give the people a more interactive format? There is quite a lot of information about “unconferences” on the Web, they form a subcategory of “large group didactics”. The most prominent method probably is Open Space and also World Café. To get more info on this, read the Unconference Blog, there is a Wikipedia article with a lot of other links, also look at Why unconferences are Fun conferences for more insight.

“My” unconference session

OK, an unconference session is a collaborative session of individuals interested to discuss some topic and to share the process and the outcomes with other people. To get started, head over to Flickr to see the slideshow for tag itk07unconference. Hans Poldoja from the LeMill team in Helsinki was kind enough to take the pictures of our session.

Session protocol

I proposed the unconference session much to early in the morning (the ITK come together was the night before and most participants didn’t get much sleep before 5 a.m.):

We started with 3 persons to grow into around 8 or 9 – small group, rich interaction. First we tried to identify criteria of content to make it more prone to be created in open settings:

• Open Content can be both of more basic or advanced level, they are all attractive to be open
• We identified a lot of potential authors: students, teachers, researchers, “amateurs and hobbyists”, experts, grassroot journalists, freelancing media producers.
• Why do they do it: besides altruism or citizenship, often it is about personal gain, be it learning, teaching, understanding, clarification, fun, excitement, promotion of something important to oneself, customer education, and especially recognition and making oneself known. So open content probably is not just about an obligation to society, but to make it work, people doing it should gain something by creating something other people can benefit from.

We then looked at the audience size, but came to the conclusion, that Open Content can be both SuperSpecialInterest (e.g. just a few people worldwide interested in something) up to mass audience (e.g. learning maths), from 5 readers to 5 billions, so to say. In SSI often the opportunity costs of making something open are low anyway (not much of a market), in mass media the recognition potential and the level of contribution to society is enormous). Loosely coupled with this dimension is the marketability of the content: if a lot of people want something, you end up with commodity contents and this is probably where the big foundations should put their money into to create excellent open content there. If you have very special interests with a low price sensitivity such as market reports there may be not too much potential for open content.

DRY(AO) and Snippets

I think we really got onto something when we talked about the ideal size of contents for open content. As Wikipedia shows, smaller “snippets” are much easier to start and collaborate on than to create monolithic contents, such as books. BUT obviously, having thousands of small snippets make it much more difficult to create coherent collections of content, so just having large repositories of content snippets does not ensure good textbook like quality.
We need those repositories or specialized search engines, though, because we have to implement D’ont repeat Yourself (DRY) and Others = DRY(AO) – don’t let all the energy of open content authors get wasted on repeating the old stuff again and again, so collaboration and open access to editing is a must.

Commented collections

With half of the LeMill development team in our session the idea developed to say Goodbye to open content books and say Hello to “commented collections” of open content snippets to build interesting content in short time. A very interesting idea and it resonates imho very well with all the hoopla about Personal Learning Environments, which could help to create some kind of “shared commented personal learning collections” trying to become Textbook 2.0.
Connecting content should be possible in the process of reading and collecting:

Copyleft/-middle/-right & developing minds license

In the discussion about copyright questions I really gut enthusiastic about a kind of “Developing Minds License”, meaning that you could partially open a content for educational use and make it proprietary for business use, but the other participants felt that Creative Commons already start to get too complicated.

General thoughts about the value of closed books

We closed the session with the question, if there is already enough content and we should start to clean it up and create meaningful collections. Depending on the subject the answer was a wholeheartedly “Nes!”, meaning that there will never be enough good content but that there is also a lack of using the existing materials. See the discussion above (snippets, DRYAO, PLEs).

Summing it up

Hey, this was a great session and I liked it very much. We should have done some inpromptu blogging and the conference should set up a wiki for the unconference, but all in all it was a very fresh experience to be able to discuss things which came up just over the course of the conference. There should be an unconference track at every conference!
Other questions I am still struggling with is:

“What is the special value of Open Content other than being free?”

The answer probably lies in the openess and the collaboration and the discourse, plurality of opinions, being building block for more content etc. The OSS scene has good answers to this.

“Is there still a place for Closed Content?”

I have recently become interested in R (the statistics package) to complement my statistical tool set (SAS JMP, Mathematica, KnowledgeMiner). I am very happy about this OSS project, but I was also very thankful that there a lot of excellent books about R and its application (especially in time series analysis). While there is a lot of material on the Net on R these (proprietary) books gave me very compact introductions and saved a lot of time for me – so I was willing to spend part of my book budget on them. Having written books and articles myself, I know what enormous effort went into the production of them. Would the authors have done it with no compensation? In the area of research and science: probably yes. But with the same effort? Probably no. Is the book as an artefact (which costs much more extra-budget money to produce than an online ressource) a more worthwhile object to produce? What is Your opinion? I will try to start some open book about using R in educational research to get more insight. I will keep you updated.
Happy content producing and DRY(AO)!

There is a interview with me in SeOPPI magazine from Oili Salminen in Finnish. Here is an english version of the interview:

State of the union: eLearning

Q1: The use of eLearning is growing much at least in the countries where ICT has become a part of every day life. Why does it happen?

KDW: As soon as people have access to ICT on a daily basis it becomes very natural to use these resources for learning. E-Learning is much broader defined than just a few years ago, when eLearning was mostly about taking some kind of web-based course. Today informal learning at the workplace using the Internet is probably the most important way of eLearning. Knowledge intensive jobs are demanding up-to-date and often very specialised information. Without access to internet-based learning resources and the sharing of knowledge in online communities it becomes nearly impossible to cope with the tasks at hand. Also the technology has become a non-issue and media-rich content is just happening. The most important reason is probably that it has become much easier to create, provide and find content. Now with a critical mass reached more and more people understand that sharing is creating returns.

Q2: What are the most important skills (competence) to be able to learn and to study with the help of eLearning methods and environments?

KDW: While there are some basic computer skills needed, the mainstream of web-based technology provides a very easy to use array of tools. A bigger problem is how to combine some of these tools to support one’s own learning. So the most important skill is the self-learning competence of a user. This means identifying needs of learning, setting goals, devising strategies to reach these (learning) goals and implementing them with the help of (eLearning) tools. Additionally, media literacy skills become more important, such as adhering to a Netiquette in an online community, knowing when it is appropriate to share what information, to be able to assess the quality of an internet resource and the like. With all the resources available, the biggest problem is to filter and select the relevant information. Some people just drown in the sea of information, get lost in the details or get lured into some kind of infoholic way of checking news sites, RSS feeds or their mails every few minutes.

eLearning design and Web 2.0

Q3: eLearning environments are challenging and complex. Could you describe some general design guidelines for a good eLearning application?

KDW: In a recent article together with my colleague Helge Städtler I tried to come up with some basic rules of novice user – computer – interaction. Here they are:
(i) The more time-consuming an action is, and the less the user feels savvy in doing it, the less will he try it again, if it fails the first time.
(ii) If some action cannot be done immediately and easily, it is neither done now nor later.
(iii) The more important an action is, the easier it has to be to accomplish.
(iv) To get people engaged, a system has to be as easy and non-frustrating to use as possible.

These rules have been shaped by my work for the school of education at the virtual university of bavaria in Germany and also in my day-to-day teaching practice at the university of Bremen. The users we are working with don’t have very specialised computer skills. They do basic word processing, check their emails and surf the Web. That’s it. And that’s ok, because the technology should serve the user. To be more specific about eLearning, I would like to add that eLearning applications should empower the user to create and share content and get into some meaningful discussions. I like to think of five Cs of eLearning: let the users create their own content, communicate with each other, construct meaning by setting up some structure, cooperate by asking and answering questions and ultimately collaborate with each other to create public entities and common understanding. But this is just the learner’s side being active. The teacher’s side is all about giving meaningful feedbacks and supporting the learning processes (see question 2) and help to improve the self-learning ability.

But maybe this is a very constructivistic point of view. There are a lot of other learning models available. For example screencasts are a new way to share the knowledge how to use computer software or how to program. While this is just some kind of “look over my shoulder” didactics, in the context of the web it becomes a powerful tool because you can easily choose what shoulder to look over and what for.

Q4: Web 2.0 concepts are presented and discussed in public very often nowadays in the context of social media, information sharing communities and so on. Is there in Web 2.0 something new and important issues for innovative practices and user generated content on education?

From a pedagogical point of view the whole constructivist discussion in educational technology has been talking about these ideas for about twenty years. Just have a look at the work of people such as Seymour Papert, David Jonassen or Carl Bereiter. You will find it there and in a lot of other places. Nevertheless, it has been long in the coming, but now it really is there – mass user generated content. So what is new or important? Short term consequences are, that there is much more content, super-special interest channels and a much shorter time of information circulation. Long term consequences are in my opinion ever more important. We need to think about how we can put all the learning time students at all level of education to improve our own educational system. If all the content generated by people learning can be shared – how can we organize that to get high quality learning material for the next generations of learners? Will we be able to accelerate their learning? Will we be able to build some kind of open access learning repository just by giving learners Web 2.0 tools and harvest their output? Probably we need to go beyond Wikipedia to solve this problem, but the potential is clearly there.

Q5: Do you see some “killer applications” in the near future in the eLearning domain/sector?

Actually I do have some ideas, but I want to implement them by myself 🙂

But here are some directions:

• If you have a look at the eLearning sector, we will see a lot of integration to avoid using patchwork-environments. Google and Yahoo! is trying to bundle sets of services to make this happen. Just think of a combination of blogs, wikis, newsgroups, social bookmarking, personalized search and networking tools – the support and enablement of online learning communities will be a very important business. There are also some open source projects such as Elgg trying to go into this direction. It is not about the money to be made by offering the tools, but by getting access to the members and their knowledge.
• One killer application will be to pool the right resources into some kind of learning stream, both digested and fed by learning communities. Getting the right filters and support meaningful learning will be the key to success.
• Mobile learning combined with social software and geographical information systems will become even bigger than using computers – but it will take a few more years. Ask me next year about this again 😉 (see also my book chapter in the Dijkstra/Jonassen/Sembill book about ubiquitous learning environments)

Your research and study

Q6: You have studied gender differences in computer usage and interest, ease of use, usage, motivation and interest, and in learning outcomes. Could you shortly desribe the most important differences? And can they be generalized to concern different countries?

KDW: There are not so many. Please refer to the summary:

“While there is good progress in didactical design and usability requirements for gender-inclusive online courses, much research has to be done regarding the gender aspects of the tutors’, students’, and peers’ interactions. The high amount of written or recorded interaction makes e-learning an ideal field for further study of these effects. Both the positive and negative roles of gender awareness are not fully understood yet. Is it for example possible and desirable to learn collaboratively in a gender-neutral environment?
From an implementation point of view, the online course presented in section 9 proved to work both for women and men. Didactics seems to be of prime importance for successful gender mainstreaming of e-learning courses. Technology has to be reliable, very simple to use and should, above all, support the didactical design, empowering the students to create, communicate, and collaborate. The positive results from the study support the claim for concentrating on gender inclusiveness in didactics, not so much on dramatizing the differences [3]. This is especially important because the differences in technological skills and attitudes relevant for e-learning are (at least for teacher students) non-existent. This means, that a further discussion of gender mainstreaming of e-learning in the form of worrying about women not being able or willing to participate is itself a form of gender stereotyping. The biggest problem for e-learning right now is that it is still perceived as technology-driven.
Starting to worry about boys and young men because of their lower level of reading abilities so important for e-learning, and their love of time-consuming and non-educational types of games, would be another form of doing gender stereotypes. One should not forget that especially with the rather small differences reported in the short review of important meta-analyses, the variations within a gender are much more significant than between genders. Blowing up little differences into stereotypical roles is counterproductive. Creating rich learning environments open for diversity, student participation and individual expression should be the goal.”

Q7: CV

Q8: Have you visited Finland before? How do you see the eLearning development here in Finland?

Yes, I’ve been to the Eden conference in Helsinki in 2005 and to the workshop on Human Centered Technology in Pori in 2006. I also have a research cooperation with Prof. Eero Pantzar from University of Tampere (Informal learning across the lifespan) and also with Antti Syvänen from the Web-Seal team (Mobile educational blogging). We are visiting and skyping each other regularly and I participate in a summer school at University of Tampere this year. So there is quite a lot of cooperation going on.

I am always amazed by the level of competence and commitment of my Finnish colleagues in the eLearning field. I am looking forward to work with them this year. Especially in the field of mobile learning I think that I can learn a lot from their exciting research. This time I will also visit Jarmo Viteli and the Hypermedia Laboratory at University of Tampere to discuss some ideas.

Hier erstmal das Video:

Link: sevenload.comUnd hier die Kommentare:

• Getestet von Helge Städtler
• Fängt so richtig an um 1:30
• Brutal schlechte Audioqualität – ein englischer Pub um 22:30 ist nix dagegen
• Herrliche Papierfiguren –Paperprototyp vollkommen liebevoll gestaltet
• verlangt nach einem 24″ Monitor sag ich mal 😉
• ich frage mich: wie wurden die tollen Figuren so in Masse produziert? Outsourcing in der Grundschule oder eine mir nicht bekannte Technik der Mehrpapierbeschneidung?
• Sehr schöne Idee der Visualisierung
• Schön wäre nochmal ein Kommentar der Projektgruppe bzw. ein Link auf den entsprechenden Blog, weil die Feinheiten der sehr ausgetüftelten Benutzeroberfläche leider nicht zu erkennen sind (liegt nur an unserer quick & dirty Kameraführung = Stativ und gut so)
• Da sich die meiste Aktion im unteren Bereich des Screens abspielt, müsste man diese Anzeigen größer machen und ggf. über die Klasse (halb transparent) legen
• Ab 9:25 kommen gute Vorschläge von Helge
• Außer dem Ausrufezeichen wäre eine weitere Visualisierung der Zustände der Schüler/innen gut
• Ab 12:00 nochmal weitere Vorschläge von Helge
• Ab 12:35 weitere Entwicklungsideen für die Sim vom Team

Schöner erster visueller Gesamteindruck, spannende Idee und ab 12:00 ein Haufen klasser Ideen für die Weiterentwicklung. Ich seh schon, dass nächstemal starte ich am Anfang des Semesters sofort mit dem Paper Prototyping.

Hier ein interessanter Prototype zum Thema Diagnose von Schülern. Klasse Artwork sag ich schon mal im Voraus:

Link: sevenload.com

Hier die Kommentare:

• Spannend und zieht einen sofort rein
• Tolle Zeichnungen!
• Gute Audioqualität (alle anderen waren schon weg 😉 )
• Denkpause: 2:35 – 2:54
• Schlechte Kameraführung 3:50
• Besser 4:09
• Schocker bei 5:20
• Intensives Nachdenken ab 6:30 bis 7:31
• Lautes Denken ab 7:31
• Rückmeldung zum Prototyping ab ca 8:40
• Diskussion leider nicht mehr auf dem Tape

Deshalb hier noch ein bisschen weiter gedacht. Klasse finde ich die Idee des Vergleichens, welches die Aufmerksamkeit und Achtsamkeit schult. Ebenfalls die Fallhintergründe. Schön wäre es, ein theoretisches Hintergrundmodell einzubinden, wie es ja im PP2 geschehen ist.

Die beiden Themen Diagnose und Intervention sind hier schön aufgegriffen und spannend verpackt. Durch die vorgegebenen Auswahlmöglichkeiten könnte man sicherlich auch die Komplexität in den Griff kriegen. Der Bereich bräuchte noch ein paar PP-Iterationen. Ach so, und hab ich schon gesagt, dass das Artwork klasse ist?

Hier nun ein Paper Prototype für ein Serious Game zum Thema Kopfrechnen.

Link: sevenload.com

Und wieder ein paar Kommentare:

• Farbig
• Ich finde die Baustellen 🙂
• 1:20 der fehlende Weiter-Knopf
• Wirklich klasses Prototype der Bedienoberfläche
• 3:10 – oh, keine Combo-Scores
• Sehr pfiffig und schreit nach der Umsetzung

Insgesamt eine klasse Idee und eine sehr gute Umsetzung. Hervorragendes Beispiel für ein Serious Game.

Und hier das nächste Video eines Prototypes:

Man beachte:

• Schöner Hintergrund für die Screens, fast Web 2.0 😉
• Den Text kann man im Video nicht lesen und ich habe nicht vorgelesen… 🙁 Es geht um verschiedene Konfliktsituationen.
• das theoretische Modell gibt es ca. 3:12
• 4:05 “Ein bisschen Herausforderung muss ja sein”
• Kommt leider im Video wegen der Textlastigkeit nicht rüber, macht aber wirklich Spaß
• ab 5:36 – die Wissensbasis dahinter
• Konfliktforumab 6:11

Insgesamt ein schöner Prototyp mit recht tiefem Entscheidungsbaum – gut gefällt der theoretische Hintergrund und die Möglichkeit (im Video nicht zu sehen), eigene Fälle zu schildern und zu diskutieren. Dies ist auch die interessante Idee bei dem Prototype – die User Community zu nutzen, um neue Fälle zu sammeln und zu diskutieren, also eine Kombi aus Training und Community!

Okay, over the next weeks this blog will become a bit mixed up with German and English stuff, but I try to focus my blogging on this Blog, so stuff like this will take over this former educational blog used for a seminar “Serious Games and Sims for Education”. My work blog will continue to be a kind of blogfolio of my recent activities at University Bremen, for example the abstract of my upcoming presentation about “YOU learning – the impact of user generated content on education”.

Enough of this shameless self-advertising… Somehow I got into Aggregator mode last evening, so I became serious with Google Reader, which is still in the labs, but much improved since my last visit (now if they would only support search in your feeds…). Expect more stuff to be shared there in future, look to the right bottom of this page for new shared stuff.

While happily aggregating all my newsfeeds into Google Reader, I saw Grahams report about Developing an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure. It is always good to know, where this lucky bastard fellow is hanging around, because he has a knack for being at very interesting places. Sitting just one floor above his office in Bremen for six months has proven to me, that it is easier to catch his blog than himself 🙂

Back to the point – Graham blogs from Texas about the presentation of the Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities – a very interesting read, for commentary on that please also read Grahams blog entry.

What I found striking is that I was just wondering: “what all of the great names of the constructivist educational technology movement are doing right now?” – “What has happened to Jasper Woodbury and all the other projects?” – “Where and what is the new stuff?” – “Is Web 2.0 the poor man’s constructivist toolkit?”.

And then I read Graham’s blog and – KAZAAM – one of them is directly back (well, maybe he wasn’t away at all, but have a look at the link below for some proof) into my field of vision: John Seely Brown is one of the co-authors of the report.

Now what fresh food gives that to my inquiring mind? User generated content (UGC), Open Something and Web 2.0 is the technical reflection of constructivist thinking in the educational technology discourse from A (Alan Kay) to Y (Yasmin Kafai) – brought to the masses via GooTube, Wikipedia and everyone else trying to get his/her five minutes of fame on TechCrunch.

It will be very interesting to see, if the old problems of constructivist education to become mainstream schoolthinking will be solved by providing tools which are cheaper and easier to use than for example StarLogo or Squeak. Maybe the constructivist old school was too keen on using tools (programming environments) to make stuff, empowering people to redefine and rebuild everything in a very smalltalkish way – often loosing the teachers in the process. In contrast, UGC and Open Educational Resources is more about content and knowledge, which are products of design processes.

It is funny that a resource question (there is just not enough money for good educational resources for all)
may finally bring constructivism or even constructionism into the educational mainstream.

A lot of big questions need to be answered, such as how to nurture quality in open settings without getting spammed away? How many shades of Open are needed? Not to be answered today…

Update #1: New John Seely Brown Sightings!
OK, maybe I just didn’t pay attention enough. There is a nice presentation from JSB at the MIT iCampus streamed for you here. It is a nice talk, nothing earth shattering new, but with nice examples. The content is drawn mostly from this article New Learning Environments for the 21st Century: Exploring the Edge in Change. See also Stephen Downe’s critique on John’s report. To follow up on that, re-mixing would have been a better approach than repurposing. I don’t see too much value for repurposing in education. I would like to have better resources, but not one resource repurposed for everything. For ages in books we are doing quoting and re-mixing, why not in Open Educational Resources?

So, der Video ist auf der Platte, in den nächsten Tagen tröpfeln hier die Videos ein. Die Audioqualität – und das ist für mich als empirischen Unterrichtsforscher natürlich doppelt peinlich – eher schlecht, gibt aber einen guten Eindruck vom aktiven Gewusel im Seminarraum 🙂 Bald kommt das mobile AV-Lab mit extra Mikros etc.

Hier nun aber das erste Video, ein Serious Game Prototyp zum Thema Zahlen und Zufall in der 3. oder 4. Klasse: Glücksrad:

Link: Download hier

Die beteiligte Gruppe ist gerne eingeladen, ob der schlechten Audioqualität eine Art “Director’s Cut” zu machen mit Developer Audio-Kommentar 🙂

Man beachte:

• Hammer Paperversion eines Säulendiagramms (7:08)
• Ausprobieren fängt bei 3:10 an!
• Superklare Farbgestaltung
• Getestet von Helge Städtler
• Genialer Re-use eines Drehrades aus “Spiel des Lebens”(?)
• der Computer ist nen altes Modell und bisschen behäbig 😉
• Insgesamt ne klasse Idee und weiter ausbaufähig!
• Ab ca. 9:30 ist der Tester voll im Spielfieber
• “Na bitte, es geht doch” (ca 10:20)
• Rückmeldung ab ca. 12:30

Sehr schön gemacht – und durchaus ein Projekt wert. Gerne betreue ich Examensarbeiten zur Implementation und Evaluation solcher Systeme.

Achtung: ich teste hier gerade mal den deutschen YouTube Konkurrenten Sevenload – da tummeln sich momentan eher “Definitely not work safe” videos als interessante Mitschnitte aus universitären Seminaren. Naja, wir heben halt mal die Qualität!

Heute ging es um Paper Prototyping und andere Formen der prototypischen Implementation von Software zu Zwecken der Usability-Überprüfung. Die Folien gibt es hier zum Download: PaperPrototyping Folien, die schönen Videos gab es natürlich nur live in Farbe 🙂

Nächste Woche basteln wir alle an unseren Paper Prototypes, dafür haben wir heute schon die Vorbereitung gemacht:

• In ihrer Gruppe zusammensetzen
• Idee in‘s Gedächtnis rufen
• Entscheiden: Welche Sequenz wollen Sie im Paper Prototype umsetzen?
• Überlegen, welche Materialien brauchen wir für das Paper Prototype? (Schere, Kleber, Bilder, Zeichnungen, Screenshots, Folien, etc.)
• Das alles zum nächsten mal mitbringen und basteln!

Hier schon mal für all diejenigen, die nicht (mehr) in die Karrierejagd reinkamen – einigen ist es doch noch gelungen und haben einige hervorragende Analysen geschrieben:

• Ausführliche und differenziert
• Ebenso
• Kurz aber deutlich
• Ebenso
• Ein paar positive Aspekte gibt es hier
• Generalkritik
• Sehr schön
• Der Top-Beitrag!
• …neben dem hier, ebenfalls Top!
• Deutliches Statement
• fundiert gemeckert
• Mitten in der Jagd unterbrochen vom Server

Ein Zwischenfazit: Enttäuschung allenorten, selbst wenn man reinkam, war man(n)/frau wenig begeistert bis entgeistert. Nächste Woche schauen wir uns das Teilchen trotzdem nochmal kurz an (falls ich wieder reinkomme) und überlegen uns kurz, was wir Geniales besser gemacht hätten.

Honorable mentions für die ohne Zugang aber vielen Versuchen:

• Seminar Simulationen und serious games
• Benutze deinen Kopf!
• gamesforall
• kommentar
• Mit Bild von der Leere
• Noch ein Opfer
• Trotz Ausschluss ein Treffer!
• Redlichst bemüht
• swonni
• Bine123
• simulationenfan