Keith Russell's blog

Book on Access to Research Data in the Netherlands

2011-08-08T15:00:00.006+02:00

The book Toegang tot Onderzoeksdata (Access to research data) is the fifth publication which has appeared in the SURFshare series and treats the sharing of research data. In this publication an overview is offered of what has already been accomplished. Existing Dutch and international initiatives are discussed, findings from studies summarized and publishers and funders explain which role they expect to play in encouraging the sharing of research data.

Although the book is in Dutch, two of the interviews are also available in an English translation.

Chapter 7 : Data in Australia and the Netherlands: perseverance and dedication is required
An interview with Andrew Treloar (ANDS) and Jeroen Rombouts (3TU Datacentrum) comparing the situation in the Netherlands to Australia.

Chapter 13: It is essential for research data to be linked to publications
An interview with Eefke Smit (STM) on the role that publishers would like to play in improving access research data.

View the book as a pdf or the translated chapters

Open Research Data Day 18th May

2011-04-08T16:38:00.002+02:00

On 18th of May SURF will be organising a Dutch day for Open Research Data. Speakers will include scientists who have benefited from sharing research data, but also key stakeholders and the Dutch national research funder. The session will close with a discussion on what the next steps should be. Who is going to be bold enough to take these steps. This is not limited to funders, but also the role that research libraries, data centres and (very important) publishers can play. And what about the universities of applied sciences, do they have a position in this?

Registration for this afternoon seminar is still open at: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/bijeenkomsten/Pages/OpenOnderzoeksDataDag.aspx
(The event is Dutch speaking throughout)

Publicatii augmentate - Enhanced Publications in Romanian

2011-02-07T10:08:00.002+01:00

I am very pleased to announce that our film on Enhanced Publications is now also available with Romanian subtitles. I hope researchers at Brasov and in the rest of Romania will find this useful.

Submission fees, a viable option for OA journals?

2010-12-14T10:54:00.002+01:00

Knowledge Exchange has just released a report bearing the title ‘Submission fees – A tool in the transition to Open Access?. The general conclusion is that there are benefits to publishers in certain cases to switch to a model in which an author pays a fee when submitting an article. Especially journals with a high rejection rate might be interested in combining submission fees with article processing charges in order to make the transition to open access easier. In certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experi¬men¬tal life sciences, submission fees are already common.

The report has also sparked a discussion for example on the Scholarly Kitchen blog on whether this might be a viable option for OA journals in the future.

Upheaval on student thesis in Utrecht

2010-11-04T15:23:00.004+01:00

A Dutch news site mentioned that a student´s master thesis was being withheld by the Utrecht city council as it would contain critical information on a Youth scheme in Utrecht. According to the thesis youths with a criminal background would have collected funds for internships without actually doing any work.

See: http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2371071/gemeente-utrecht-hield-kritische-scriptie-tegen.html and http://www.dub.uu.nl/content/omstreden-scriptie-vrijdag-terug-op-uu-site

The thesis is now available on the University library website and I was really chuffed as it was a student from social sciences, so it has been included in the collection I have helped to set up years ago together with the university library.
It is now scoring as best downloaded thesis: http://studenttheses.library.uu.nl/topten.php?language=nl

For the tweets on this see: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23scriptie%20%23utrecht

Video on Enhanced Publications

2010-08-13T13:09:00.002+02:00

Just in case you were wondering what all those SURF projects were about which took place on Enhanced Publications, a video has been made explaining not only what they are, but also how they have taken shape in different disciplines.

I especially like the animation at the end of the film as it shows how this fits in to linked data.
The video is only available in Dutch at present, will be available with English subtitles soon.

Watch the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IT3T9IuNA0

Digiman wins again!

2010-08-13T13:05:00.002+02:00

Sadly not with an embed. The Planets have just produced another brilliant cartoon movie encouraging institutions to follow six steps to ensure materials are saved safely. Enjoy at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGFOZLecjTc

Workshop on creating enhanced publications

2010-03-19T10:01:00.003+01:00

Just a quick plug from my work. On the first of April (no, this is not a joke) we will be organising a workshop on creating enhanced publications (EPs). Participants will learn a little background on what enhanced publications are and hear some first hand experiences from projects done in 2009 on EPs.
And after lunch they will be able to get stuck in creating their very own EP. They will get a crack at using the EP editor developed in the ESCAPE project to create a map linking various objects and entities. We will also show some alternative editors which are in development or should be out soon. These are the LORE editor and the Word ontology add in.
There are still a limited number of places available. Please note that the workshop will be in Dutch and will take place in Tilburg.
Further information

New NARCIS is online

2010-03-18T13:45:00.002+01:00

The new interface for the Dutch portal to research output from all research libraries is online: www.narcis.nl

The interface is improved so it is now much easier to narrow down your search when searching through the over 200.000 Open Access publications available.

Idea management, an interesting tool

2010-01-20T09:46:00.004+01:00

A tip from my colleague Maurice Vanderfeesten: if you are looking for a platform to collect, share, rate and manage ideas: perhaps Spigit? It isn't free but does seem to offer some very interesting and quite possibly valuable tools. Of course there are polls and voting, but you can also keep up 'stocks and shares' of ideas...
Reminded me of a face to face session I had at the computing department at Utrecht University. They have a decision making room with facilities to support just this sort of activity. See the webpage on 'beleidslab' (in Dutch). You can also rent this room with a moderator.

Evaluation of a year of Weblectures

2010-01-11T20:23:00.002+01:00

I left Utrecht University almost a year ago and I was very interested to hear that they had evaluated the first year of the more widely available Weblectures service at Utrecht University. The report (in Dutch) can be found here.
A very quick and dirty interpretation: Students and staff do not all fill in surveys ;-) response rate was 33%. Students are enthousiastic, teachers slightly less but they are too. Teachers are not changing their teaching to adapt to the new possibilities. They are interested in learning more about the opportunities on offer.

Thoughts on request for information by OSTP

2009-12-15T21:57:00.003+01:00

The American whitehouse Office for Scientific and Technology Policy has issued a request for information to discuss options for improving public access to results of federally funded research. Interestingly this is not on whether publically funded research should be publically available, but rather on how this can be achieved.

They ask a large variety of questions which I will not even begin to address one by one. It did start me thinking what my own personal humble opinion could be on this matter. Regarding a policy on open access I would have a number of suggestions: publications should either be directly available in open access or with a delay of no more than six months. A sustantial part of the funding (10%) should be dependent on this public availability. If it is not available for another six months then the funding should also be withheld for these six months. A fee should be reserved for paying for a publication fee if the journal requires this. I do not feel it is necessary for the policy to demand either the green (repository) or the gold (OA journal) road. This is something the market will also adapt to.

It would be valuable to have an overview of all the research results. The funding council could provide an overview of research, not the actual publications but persistent links to the articles offered by either a journal or a repository.

In the request for information they clearly don't ask for policy on data. This would be an interesting next step....

LORE a tool for creating enhanced publications?

2009-12-04T15:04:00.002+01:00

A tool (firefox pugin) called LORE will allow you to register relationships between resources and thus constructing a compound object. This could be used to create Enhanced Publications. There is a great blip video at http://www.blip.tv/file/2132990/

Autumn School a success

2009-11-05T11:17:00.002+01:00

The Autumn School on Tools for researchers finished yesterday. This proved to be very interesting. Though the topic was rather broad this also allowed for the exchange of insights across disciplines and at different levels of tooling. Common issues are: responsibility for the tool (is it for the IT department, the research group itself or the library), how to discover and manage researcher demands (usually come up with just in time requests), sustainability (how to ensure maintenance, development and archiving) and open source vs closed source software.
Typical for the Netherlands is the challenge faced by the universities of Applied Sciences (HBOs). They have only recently been given the responsibility to undertake research. This raises questions on: which research should we be doing, what is our position relative to the research universities and which tools do we need.

Animation on the Elements by Tom Lehrer

2009-10-15T13:45:00.004+02:00

This does bring back memories. Having a chemist as a dad means you learn all sorts of strange quirks of science. Excellent animation by the way :-)

Tools for Researchers Autumn School

2009-10-14T13:36:00.002+02:00

Just a quick plug from my work ;-)
Sorry, this is in Dutch, but the actual activity will also be in Dutch...

Van 2 tot 4 november 2009 organiseert SURFacademy in samenwerking met de Universiteit Leiden de Autumn School ‘Tools voor Onderzoekers’.

Er zijn veel (generieke) tools die handig kunnen zijn bij zowel het verrichten van onderzoek, als het communiceren over en publiceren van de resultaten. Deze Autumn School biedt de gelegenheid om kennis te maken en ervaring op te doen met deze tools. De Autumn School richt zich op onderzoekers en ondersteuners voor onderzoekers, werkzaam aan universiteiten en hogescholen.

De school start met een inleiding op het onderzoeksproces en geeft een overzicht van het brede scala aan tools dat van belang kan zijn. Vervolgens worden hier vier thema’s uitgelicht. De tools zullen in de vorm van presentaties en workshops worden uitgediept.

· In het thema e-science/grid computing wordt uitleg gegeven wat deze technologie inhoudt en de mogelijkheden die deze biedt voor onderzoek. Aan de hand van voorbeelden wordt getoond hoe deze techniek in projecten is toegepast.

· ICT biedt ook mogelijkheden om onderzoeksdata gemakkelijker op te slaan en te delen. In dit thema worden voorbeelden gegeven van faciliteiten voor het online opslaan en delen van onderzoeksdata.

· Onderzoekers werken meestal samen in nationale en internationale teams. Deze samenwerking kan met collaboratories worden ondersteund. Verschillende samenwerkingsomgevingen worden getoond die zijn gebruikt in het onderzoek en ervaringen worden gedeeld.

· Als laatste thema zullen een aantal Web2.0 tools worden gepresenteerd die kunnen worden ingezet op verschillende plaatsen in het onderzoeksproces.

Naast de tools in deze thema’s wordt u bij deze Autumn School ook gevraagd een eigen tool mee te nemen die u kunt delen met de andere deelnemers. Dit kan een tool zijn die aansluit bij de eerdere voorbeelden, maar het kan ook een hele andere tool zijn.

Voor meer informatie, waaronder het volledige programma en de mogelijk om je op te geven, zie: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/bijeenkomsten/Pages/AutumnSchool.aspx

Het SURFacademy programma wordt gezamenlijk uitgevoerd door SURFnet en SURFfoundation, in samenwerking met de Nederlandse universiteiten en hogescholen. De bijeenkomsten van de SURFacademy staan open voor iedereen die werkzaam is binnen het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs.

Datum: maandag 2 november 2009 t/m woensdag 4 november 2009

Kosten: € 150

Locatie: Leiden

Open Access week: activities in the Netherlands

2009-10-14T13:32:00.004+02:00

19-23 October is the international Open Access week. There will be a lot of activities in the Netherlands to promote Open Access. You can find a (hopefully quite comprehensive) list here.

Video on Open Access

2009-10-14T13:30:00.001+02:00

A great little video on Open Access, created by Sparc...

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Can I reuse research data? The answer according to Dutch law

2009-08-21T12:54:00.003+02:00

A new report has just been published on the legal situation regarding the reuse of research data, according to Dutch law. This report was commissioned by SURF and has been written by CIER. The report (in Dutch) can be found here.

Of course this is quite complicated legal stuff, so to keep it simple there are a few standard questions which have been answered. This straightforward explanation can be found here.
(Don't forget to read the disclaimer though)

Great holiday in Slovenia

2009-08-12T22:09:00.004+02:00

I have just returned from a great holiday in Slovenia. I was very impressed by the beautiful landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, lakes and hills. Ljubljana is a small but very attractive and friendly capital. The mediterranean was hot but beautiful. Piran was very pretty, yet rather busy. But most of all I was impressed by the original Karst: rills, gulleys, Dolines, huge sinkholes, natural bridges, a veeery large Polje and of course the caves. I was especially impressed by the huge canyon in the Skocjan cave.

A golden road with a green lining?

2009-08-11T22:07:00.003+02:00

As more and more organisations are realising the benefits of open access a discussion is still taking place on the road to take to Open Access. I do wonder where we will go? Perhaps there will not be two separate roads, Green and Gold. Perhaps the future is Gold OA, if enough publishers will adopt this model. This would certainly make it a lot easier for researchers, rather than having to also add their publication to a repository. A number of publishers are past experimenting on switching their business model to earning their income from article processing costs. It would be helpful if the research funders mandate Open Access to all their funded research. This is now taking place, as the NIH, Welcome trust started off and now also EUROHORC and ESF have taken position.

However (Institutional) Repositories will probably continue to exist. Not all materials are published in journals (take grey literature, data and learning materials for instance). However: nobody wants to refer to the same publication in different places. The journal is where the articles are and where traffic and publicity goes to.

Institutional Repositories can still perform a valuable function for archiving reasons and can form a place to collect all the research materials together. The questions remains who will provide aggregations which collect usage statistics and citation scores and will provide persistent identifiers.

Comparison of Costs and Benefits of Open Access for UK, Netherlands and Denmark

2009-08-11T21:48:00.002+02:00

The Houghton studies on the costs and benefits of Open Access from the UK (commissioned by JISC), the Netherlands (commissioned by SURF) and Denmark (commissoned by DEFF) were compared in a study commissioned by Knowledge Exchange. Noticeably in all three countries benefits can be achieved by switching to an open access model. The benefits are different in the three countries though, these are mainly due to difference in scale between the three countries and how the education is organised in the three countries.

On the 22 June 2009 this combined report was discussed in a seminar with various members of the European commission and other European bodies present. At this seminar not only the report was presented, but responses from various stakeholders and implications for funders were also discussed. Two speakers from the European commission gave a presentation on the activities they are undertaking in the field of Open Access.

For the details please see : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=316
The photographs of the seminar can be seen at: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=321

Video on the archiving of enhanced publications

2009-08-10T16:05:00.007+02:00

The video below was created as a part of the European DRIVER II project. In this animation created by Eugene Durr for the royal library and Delft University you can see how the archiving of enhanced publications is organised. The main challenge is to archive the text, the data and the relationship between these two quite different files.
You might recognise the voice over ;-)
See: http://www.surfmedia.nl/app/video/D5CHvHq2d27nAnHDhOrbxaOo/play?format_id=GyhlyRi8C5t5dzDRwit19kDf&mode=object

Houghton study on OA benefits for the Netherlands is now out

2009-06-10T21:05:00.003+02:00

This afternoon we went to the Dutch ministry of education, science and culture to present the report written by John Houghton on the Costs and Benefits of Research Communication in the Netherlands. You can read the press statement and the report here.

It was interesting to hear the responses by the various stakeholders in the process. The were quite positive on the findings in the report. The big questions remains: how to start the reshuffle in funding that is required to make this work. It is quite interesting to see this in the perspective of the UK and soon Denmark and Germany. The UK findings certainly pointed in the same direction.

The report was attracted quite a lot of media attention.

Data sharing statement in journal

2009-05-08T10:27:00.002+02:00

The BMJ is asking authors to end their article with a Data sharing statement.
See: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/338/mar25_1/b1252
It does not oblige the author to actually share their data, but it is a first step in thinking about the underlying data and also to make the underlying data slightly more transparent. I wonder when further journals will follow.
(Off the SOAN blog.)

Video on Digital Preservation

2009-05-07T15:00:00.002+02:00

An absolutely brilliant video on digital preservation. How to make a slightly dull topic quite exciting :-) This was created by Digital Preservation Europe.
"To learn more about DPE or to access their suite of preservation resources and tools, please go to http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.org."

information behaviour of the researcher of the future

2009-04-17T09:15:00.003+02:00

I just was pointed at a report commisioned by JISC and the British library on the information behaviour of the Google Generation in the future. This can be found at: http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf. It has been around for a while (since January 2008) but still seems quite applicable.
One trend they discern is 'power browsing': quickly scanning materials across the broad collection of information on offer. Information literacy is and remains extremely important.
Interestingly they fear that there will be less of a role for the library. I am not sure that I share this worry. I feel that it is up to the library to change and offer a new physical space which matches the demand of the student and researcher of the future. Their walls no longer hold a monopoly so they must give the user a good reason to come and visit. And as the netgen is also a social generation, certainly offer them room for social interaction.

I do find the report is slightly more applicable to students than to researchers. Some points (e.g. power browsing) they acknowledge are not unique to the Google Generation but actually have been adopted by researchers of all generations.

How to cite tweets and keep them available...

2009-04-07T09:37:00.005+02:00

Twitter is definitely taking off as a popular medium despite the brevity and 'media-poorness' of the messages. If you are going to train your students in correctly quoting the internet, how about tweets? In the article http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-cite-twitter-how-to-cite-tweets.html the author links to some nice articles.

He also raises a far more challenging question. How to keep twitter messages retrievable. The author describes the 'Webcite' tool which will archive citations on the web for you.

To try it out I have just created a Webcitation of a tweet I sent out a few days ago. It is a little work, especially adding the metadata, but at least you are assured that the webpage will be retrievable. I do wonder how long the webcite service will be available.

Is there one Generation Y?

2009-03-19T09:15:00.003+01:00

I just skimmed through the ACRL 2009 strategic thinking guide. This is interesting input for my present work, although some points are related to the situation in America. I did find three interesting observations regarding students:
" • Increasingly, multiple generations make up the student enrollment at most colleges (either virtually or physically). This trend is likely to persist as the unemployed return to retool and reskill."
This combines nicely with the ideas regarding Life Long Learning on this side of the Atlantic...

"• We are all “becoming” Generation Y (also known as the Net or Millennial generation). New research shows that increased access to sophisticated technological social tools and increased connectivity via smart phones, laptops, and other handheld devices is changing the behavior of several generations; other generations are taking on the characteristics of Generation Y. Frequently cited generational differences are beginning to blur."
I like the 'we' in this quote. Does this mean that this is not a generation as in an age group, but rather a portion of the population? This would connect nicely with the findings that there are large differences within the young age group regarding technology uptake and attitude. This also matches the findings that older generations (e.g. the old X gen) are taking on social networking, gaming, twittering etc. more and more seriously...

"• The gadget-savvy Millennial students do not fully comprehend the complex networked
information world: “students may have confidence because they are unaware of the complexities involved [in using the Internet effectively] or just because they have grown up with technology. This potential gap between actual and perceived skills and literacy is important to understand and factor into strategies for teaching and learning at the institution.”
OK, I interpret this as follows, but correct me if I'm wrong: they think they are smart, but they do need some training in Information Literacy. This is a point which does keep on popping up.

Open and Shut?: Open Access: Whom would you back?

2009-03-11T09:25:00.001+01:00

A very interesting blogposting and article by Richard Poynder. For all those out there trying to get an overview of the current state of affairs regarding Open Access: Green vs. Gold Road, Article Processing Charges vs. Institution Fee replacing the 'Big Deals'. It takes the discussion one step further than the first argument for Open Access: Accessibility. OA can also be used as a means to change the dependancy of Universities on publishers: Affordability. In the subscription model the library pays the institutional fees and the researchers are kept away from the pricing. At present a researcher simply chooses a journal by topic and of course citation index. Journal pricing does not play a role in selecting a journal to publish in. Simply changing the model to Open Access with an instution fee will consolidate this situation.

Open and Shut?: Open Access: Whom would you back?

HBO Kennisbank Widget

2009-03-05T16:34:00.003+01:00

Just a quick snippet out of my new job: The HBO (Universities of Applied Sciences) in the Netherlands are now also adopting repositories. Interestingly they were later than the research universities who each built their own repository. A number of HBOs have chosen to make use of a central repository service offered by SURF. This is called the HBO kennisbank. It is a big success, especially in collecting and offering Student theses.
You can access the HBO knowledge bank at: http://www.hbokennisbank.nl but you can also add the widget below to your blog/portal/website.

HBO-Kennisbank.nlgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

A Wordle off my blog

2009-02-03T17:31:00.003+01:00

Just tried out Wordle, this really is a quick and easy way to generate a tagcloud, really straightforward and very nice results!

New job at Surf

2009-01-20T22:10:00.002+01:00

A blog entry for all the people out there that hadn't heard yet, or that don't follow my tweets. Starting the first of February I will be leaving Utrecht University and starting a new job at SURF foundation. Half of my time I will be a community manager for the SURFshare projects, ensuring that the information and experiences learned in the projects are exchanged amongst the projects and brought to all those interested, mainly in the field of higher education in the Netherlands.
If you haven't heard about SURFshare: it is an initiative to improve the access to scientific knowledge making use of IT facilities. Examples are projects in the field of Open Access publishing, Virtual spaces for researchers to collaborate in or projects that aim to improve the accessibility of research results from professional universities in the Netherlands.
The other half of my job I will be the community manager for the Knowledge Exchange. This is a collaboration between JISC (UK), DEFF (Denmark), DFG (Germany) and SURF (Netherlands) aims at making 'a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on the Internet'. One of my tasks will be to try and channel and exchange experiences learned in the various working groups that are working on one of many topics.

Utrecht is getting a VLTE=ELDO

2009-01-20T11:56:00.004+01:00

A just read the brand new strategic plan for the IT facilities here at Utrecht University. After all these years we are actually getting a Virtual Learning and Teaching Environment (in Dutch an ELDO: Electronische Leer- en Doceeromgeving). I had trouble suppressing a small chuckle. Haven't we always had a VLTE? Haven't we been using WebCT and Blackboard as just that? The teacher-centreredness of both systems has always meant they have been used mainly as a teaching tool. Student learning usually takes place elsewhere.
Does this mean we are making a strategic choice of putting the teacher in the centre of the learning process? No, I don't think this is necessarily the case, in the general strategic plan of Utrecht University this is not mentioned.

Website Lecturenet is now online

2009-01-19T10:14:00.003+01:00

Not only is the Lecturenet service now up and running, the website for the service is now also online. It can be found at: www.lecturenet.nl.
(There also will be a university url available soon...)
The website is only available in Dutch and isn't quite finished but aims to provide links to pedagogical advice on the use of Weblectures and also links to various reports on implementing Weblectures.

Feasibility study: automatically archiving and sharing learning objects from Blackboard

2009-01-12T13:24:00.004+01:00

Last year I set up a pilot study with the University Library here at Utrecht University. Courses in Blackboard are normally only accessible to the teacher of the course and the students. After a few years they get cleared up. Any archives are not accessible to anybody other than the system admin. This means teachers cannot see each other's materials and learn from each other.
In a previous project (the KIP project) we discoverd teachers were not interested in adding metadata to improve the 'findability' of archived materials. So this time we decided on a different approach:
- We created archives of a number of courses using the Blackboard interface (this can be done in batch)
- These archives are ZIP files consisting of XML files describing the course, files, links and XML files descrbing these files and links.
- The library wrote a script which analysed these XML files, stored certain files and retrieved the associated metadata from the XML.
- The files and links were saved in DSpace in a separate repository.
- A search interface was written so that teachers could search in the repository.

Once this was built I performed a test with six teachers at Social Sciences with various attitudes to computers and the sharing of knowledge. The results can be found in the following pdf document (in Dutch I am afraid).

A number of interesting findings arose. In general teachers were quite pleased to have this facility. They were not out to copy other teacher's materials but would like to be able to see what other teachers are teaching in their courses. There were not all that enthousiastic about sharing their materials with the whole world. They would like to know what others are doing with their materials.
On the technical side: It is technically possible. The Blackboard IMS packages contain a lot of information, not enough to fill all Dublin core fields, but it certainly is a good start.
This facility is not yet in production (other projects took priority) but it could be taken into production without too much work. All the difficult work has been done.

How many student theses public?

2009-01-06T13:32:00.005+01:00

In the past year I have been responsible for a organising a system to archive all the students' master theses here at Social Sciences, Utrecht University. The university library programmed a very practical web interface which acts as a front end to the rather more complex interface of the repository itself. I must say I am very pleased with the system they came up with.
The challenge was to think up a procedure which would comply with all the checks the management required (had to be a real student, truly graduated, and indeed his/her real thesis). At the same time the teaching staff did not want to have spend any time on the process at all. This resulted in the workflow described here. (in Dutch I am afraid)
From June onwards the system was taken into production and a large number (587) theses were submitted. These were not all of the theses. We missed a number of the theses of students which had been handed in before the 1st of June. I also expect that the late adoption meant that a lot of teachers did not submit the theses they had received earlier on in the year. We still managed to collect 77% of all the theses. For a first attempt I am not certainly not dissatisfied, the coverage should go up in the coming years though.
I was very interested how many students would choose to make their thesis public and how many would choose to keep theirs private. 69.5% chose to make their thesis public. The main reason not to make it publically available was that they wished to submit the thesis as an article in a scientific journal and in many cases publishers will not accept it if it has been made public on an earlier date. Some students also indicated that they wish to continue in the field of research and do not want to others to take over their ideas... In fact even some abstracts were not made public for this very reason.
The report on the implementation can be found here (in Dutch too I am afraid).

Lecturenet service has started

2008-12-15T22:00:00.003+01:00

Officially the 'Lecturenet' service will not be starting until the first of January. We had a kick off meeting and had a cake to celebrate. There will be four recording sets available at Utrecht University for recordings. One for Arts and one for Social Sciences. The other two sets are available for all the departments of the university. All departments can request recordings at a fixed rate. Recordings are made by student assistants which are employed by a employment agency. The service is working hard on getting the website online with more information.
So finally a basic service has started, I do wonder how demand will develop.

Scenario 2020: what will the virtual and real learning landscap look like?

2008-11-27T09:40:00.007+01:00

In the run up to the Onderwijsdagen I was asked to think along in developing scenarios for the learning landscape in 2020. The resulting four scenarios were presented as a keynote at the Onderwijsdagen. Our group was asked to fill in the situation for an institution directed curriculum and a student owned VLE. It was a bit of a puzzle to match these two conditions but we came up with the following history:
Europe goes through an economic crisis in which Asia comes out as a winner. In the field of knowledge they truly are competetive with European education. This calls for drastic measures. The European education system is forced into a period of harsh competition. European governments rally and decide on a strong standardisation of curricula. A Bachelor degree in Psychology consists of the same modules in every country. To encourage competition and exchange students can choose to take each module wherever they please, they can attend a local university, take a module abroad or follow an online course. They receive coupons for their life of learning. (Naturally this also creates a trade in coupons). All courses are allowed, as long as they are certified. Institutions can employ coaches from a pool of teachers, which also have to be certified.
We took the exchange of standards much further, there will be more than just email and RSS protocols, many more exchange standards will have been agreed upon. There will be standards for the delivery of content, various communication tools and of course testing tools. This will allow students to 'plug' their course into their personal virtual living environment (PVLE) (facebook extended). As soon as they plug in their course the widgets required will be available for the student in their PVLE. In this age of fierce competition these PVLEs are being offered by commercial parties, Monroom is just an exmaple we came up with, but there are many more. Students are not interested in institution VLEs as they are constantly taking modules in different institutions, sometimes even simultaneously.

So this was our view, now all we need is 12 years of patience to see whether we got it right...

A number of students created a video to illustrate what 2020 would look like according to each of the four scenario's. Our video can be found here.
The overview of all scenario's (including the newspapers) can be found here.

Presentation on Weblectures at the Onderwijsdagen preconference

2008-11-27T09:29:00.003+01:00

On Tuesday the 11th of November (yes, rather a while ago), I gave a presentation on the Weblectures pilot which ran at Utrecht University in 2007. This was part of a more technically minded preconference on implementing Weblectures. The two more interesting slides in this presentation (compared to previous presentations) are our findings on criteria for a recording system. Reliability proved to be a key criteria for us. One criteria which was notably absent was price of the system. Of course this is of some importance, but we also found out that there were so many more costs involved that this cost was only a small part of the total cost. The other criteria proved to be much more important.
The other interesting slide is the slide regarding organisation. Setting up an organisation for Weblectures requires getting people involved from all corners and departments of your institution. The trick is not to create an unwieldy large consultation body but to keep all the varied partners involved...

Presentation on Weblectures at the Onderwijsdagen

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ict in)

SURFmediacore presentation

2008-10-29T20:32:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I attended the surfmediacore presentation. A long name for a soon to be available facility to store video's which can be accessed from a homegrown application using Webservices (REST calls to be precise). SURFnet will soon be calling for pilots to access this service. Institutions can connect with the service if they have a wish which is not a standard facility in Surfmedia.
An interesting meeting and off the cuff I suppose you could think along the following lines as an example of an application you could build:
1. A building block in Blackboard in which a teacher can directly upload a video in Blackboard and it will be directly embedded in the course.
2. Large uploads for the media libraries we have at present in our institutions. Possibly combined as a service with the university library. Drawback is the upload of copyrighted materials (same goes for 1.)
3. Alerting service for teachers. There has been an alerting service for years for researchers showing latest research. What about an alerting service for teachers showing the latest teaching materials which correspond to certain keywords/phrases. This is based on the ideas in the Zoep project. The university library could search the Surfmediacore collection and show the latest relevant video's as part of a larger alerting service. I do wonder whether you really need surfmediacore to do this. Probably the university could also do a harvest using the OAI exchange which is also available on the surfmediacore.

Utrecht University is now in the SURF-federation!

2008-10-29T20:25:00.004+01:00

Finally it has been arranged: The Utrecht University authentication is now connected to the SURF-federation. The reason why I am so happy is that we can now advertise SURFmedia in our institution. No need to create an own account for teachers and now finally teachers can easily limit access to their video's: students can access them using their university ID. If you enter the url to the embedded video students are neatly requested to enter their ID. Sadly, if you enter the url of the page describing the video students do not get a clear request.
We are working on a teachers manual and then we can get on with advertising. The main limitation is of course the fact we cannot upload copyrighted materials. A large part of the videos used in classroom settings are copyrighted materials (which can legally be shown in a classroom, but cannot be copied to a streaming server....)

Who owns teaching materials?

2008-10-27T09:27:00.003+01:00

Only a week ago I ran into an interesting question which arose for the first time. A member of the teaching staff had left university and removed course materials from his/her Blackboard course. Staff preparing the course site could not find the materials which were in place last year.
We have not got our Learning Objects repository in place yet, otherwise this would have been the perfect place to recover these documents. It does clearly show that a discussion on the intellectual property rights of teaching materials created by teachers is worth while. Actually: the discussion itself is not all the interesting, if a teacher has created materials while being employed by the university, the copyrights belong to the university. I practice however not everybody feels the same way about this and that is why it would be a good idea to raise this discussion.

Read my blog in Dutch

2008-10-27T09:19:00.001+01:00

Thanks to a posting by Willem van Valkenburg I now have the Google translate widget on this blog. You can find it in the column on the right, half way down. The translations are reasonable, they sort of make sense. (I wonder how it will translate that sentence.)
This is of course also specially for Ineke who complained about my English at the last Blackboard user group meeting: Ineke, I hope this will help you out :-)

Do Weblectures require a new pedagogy?

2008-10-24T23:00:00.003+02:00

I have been rather busy lately, and been away from my blog awhile. It is about time I posted some news. To start with I would like to respond to a discussion back in June which Rino Zandee posted on his blog (and Wilfred Rubens also wrote about) in response to an article in the NRC (and a posting on this blog).
Their position was: Weblectures require a new pedagogy.
I do not agree with them, but I think this is mainly a matter of definition. In the approach we have used at Utrecht University we have started to record lectures according to two models (both of which are called Weblectures):
1. Recording the F2F lecture for the students in the class. This was a very basic approach and has proven valuable. Students value the recordings as they can check part of the lectures, use them for revision and do not miss a lecture if they were ill. For students with several handicaps the recordings are extremely valuable as this allows them to follow the lecture again and improve their notes. For proof of this please read the full report.
Please note that trying to watch a full hour and a half of lecture is extremely boring, students only choose to do this if they really missed the lecture. We have never intended these weblectures as learning objects in their own right. In using this approach you do not need to change the pedagogy of the lecture, although of course a lecture can always be improved. In fact: teachers have improved their teaching by looking at their performance.
2. Creating a learning object specifically for online viewing. This is a completely different approach. An online lecture should be short, concise, rich in illustrations, 20 minutes max, preferably less. At least as important as the lecture is the embedding of this learning object in the learning process. Students do not generally learn by simply offering them information (a hint of a slight euphemism here ;-). They learn through activities in which they are required to apply the information acquired (assignments, discussions, essays and of course the classic exams). If this is your definition of a weblecture then yes: please do change your pedagogy before you stand in front of a camera.

A webbased editor for recorded lectures for teachers

2008-09-17T09:29:00.002+02:00

An interesting selling point offered by Echo360. They are now offering their recording boxes. We had one concern when looking at this recording solution. The boxes are thin clients and they require a network connection to the server to operate. In several cases we have had to recordings in spots where there was no network connection present or the firewall ports where not open. This does limit the application of a capture box.
One thing I am intrigued by is the option of allowing teachers to edit their own presentation through a webeditor. This certainly does allow for easier adapting by teaching staff to their pedagogical approach. Editing a recording allows for easily creating reusable learning objects, rather than full lectures. At present our editing has to be done by (busy) audio visual staff. Of course allowing teachers to edit also means administration, giving each teacher access to his/her own recording.
For more information check out their website: http://www.echo360.com/verbatim/

Presentation at Surfnet on Weblectures

2008-09-09T22:41:00.002+02:00

Surfnet has just started a pilot in which institutions of higher education in the Netherlands can participate in evaluating three different systems for recording and broadcasting lectures: Mediasite, Presentations2Go and a solution built on Apple podcast server. I was a little saddened to see that the Apple podcast solution still does not offer true navigable content by slide. The video still is being delivered as picture within picture. I remember a presentation years ago where Apple explained this was possible but nobody had built it. Today I heard that it still isn't quite available yet...

I was asked to give a presentation on our findings regarding Rich Media (is it worthwhile?) and criteria we found important in the choice for a Rich Media system.
You can find my presentation below.

Presentatie Weblectures voor Surfnet

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: weblectures lectures)

Academic trained teachers in the news

2008-09-04T15:04:00.006+02:00

The National news showed an item last Monday on the ALPO (Academic Teacher Training Course Primary Education) which has just started here at Utrecht University. I tried to distill the right snippet using the Virtual Cutting machine and it seemed to work. Theoretically you should be able to watch the snippet below:
However the paramaters start=584&end=721.6 are not being passed through properly. The result is that you do not see the entire news, only a selected amount of time starting at the beginning of the video.

ALPO in NOS Journaal 1 sept 18 uur

Animation on Surf media

2008-09-02T14:05:00.001+02:00

I have finally got round to trying out Surf Media. It does actually seem to work. As a proof here an embedded video (original was Quicktime). The animation is a product created for the Partner Project to illustrate the concept of a Virtual Knowledge Centre. The animation itself is also quite interesting.

The new strict style?

2008-09-01T15:40:00.003+02:00

This morning I attended the introduction lecture for all the students of pedagogical and learning sciences entering the faculty this year. It was extra exciting as the first group of ALPO (Academic teacher training course for primary education) students was present. This course is a first in Dutch Higher education and is a cooperation between the professional (Hogeschool Utrecht) and academic (Universiteit Utrecht) university in Utrecht.

The vice dean did warm all students present about the new 'strictness' which they can expect in their courses. Students are expected to pass enough modules in their first year, plaguerism is a serious offence which will not go unpunished and there is a Dutch language test for all students. This is not compulsory, but is strongly advised. Essays containing several mistakes will be returned ungraded.

And now all the hallways are bustling with firstyear students.

Manual Blackboard Grade Center

2008-09-01T15:34:00.002+02:00

Having switched to Blackboard 8 our teaching staff is confronted with the new grade book, now renamed to Grade Center. We have written a quick manual (in Dutch) which can be found here.

Some small observations:
- Uses AJAX technology, and works fine on all platforms. We had slow loading on our (rather old) test server, but this is not a problem on our production server.
- Offers a lot of facilities that teachers do not all need and does confuse a little
- Finally teachers can view and grade the grade list by group(s). This does require creating a 'Custom view' first.
- Does not offer a decent calculated final grade on a score of 1 to 10.

Tip for more manuals and instructions

2008-08-26T22:17:00.002+02:00

Kelly Sonora was kind enough to send me a link with lots of valuable manuals and instructions for teaching staff using Blackboard. And these are all in English!!

The address of the posting is at:
http://www.smartteaching.org/blog/2008/08/the-ultimate-guide-to-blackboard-100-tips-tutorials/
They certainly have done a great job! I see they are also using the Teams LX building block as a Wiki solution.

Wiki in Blackboard - yet another manual

2008-08-26T22:05:00.003+02:00

A well known drawback in most traditional VLE's is the lack of possibilities for structured input by students. One tool which can allow students room to add input in a structured fashion and collaborate on a collection of knowledge is the Wiki.
Sadly Blackboard does not offer this in the core code. Some teachers have requested a Wiki but in first instance it would be best to have a closed wiki for groups of students.
In order to gain some experience we have decided to try out the Teams LX building block offered by Learning Objects. I have ran it through and it seems to be very comprehensive. It allows for private group wikis which will automatically become accesible to the other students in the class after a predefined date. It also allows for commenting and exporting the final product to a public website.
I will be following a number of courses using this Wiki and am very intrigued how students and teachers will respond to this new tool.

The teachers manual (in Dutch) can be found here.
The students manual (in Dutch) can be found here.

Sign up sheets in Blackboard

2008-08-26T22:03:00.002+02:00

We are also using the Blackboard Sign-up sheets building block. The teachers manual (in Dutch) can be found here.

The new Peer review module in Blackboard 8

2008-08-26T21:38:00.003+02:00

We are now running Blackboard 8 at Utrecht University. On of the great improvements is the Peer Review tool which has been added. It really does seem well thought out and connects well with the practice of Peer reviewing that a number of our teaching staff have adopted. I see a great advantage in the way it can save teachers time in organising the whole process: it enforces deadlines and distributes essays anonymously.
The teachers manual (in Dutch) can be found here.
And the students manual (also in Dutch) can be found here....
If anybody would like the original files, please contact me.

Back from the Queyras

2008-08-26T21:21:00.003+02:00

I have just returned from a great holiday hiking in the French Alps, in the Queyras region to be precise. It was great. Amongst other things we hiked to the rifugio Granero and the Rifugio Jervis (both excellent Italian meals), clambered up the Col Selliere, Col Lacroix, Col d'Urine, Col Vieux and some others but finishing off with the peaks: Pic de Foreant and of course the Pain de Sucre. To keep ourselves amused we also did a lovely klettersteig and some very child-friendly rafting.
And now its back to work....

Another player on the mini laptop market

2008-07-24T10:38:00.005+02:00

An add in a local newspaper pointed me at the Acer Aspire One. It is yet another mini notebook. With a weight of under a kilo and 8,9 inch screen it seems quite a nice product. I found a review at cnet. It certainly is a nice price at 299 euros, shame about the trackpad buttons and the weak battery.
I am still happy with my Asus Eee, but the 7 inch screen is still rather small and I am disappointed with the updates Asus has provided for the Xandros operating system. I do hope Acer will do a better job with the Linus Lite OS they are using on the Aspire One. It is interesting that the hardware manufacturers are the ones responsible for supporting open Source operating systems...

Utrecht University has chosen for Blackboard as VLE

2008-07-11T10:18:00.004+02:00

It is now (sort of) official: Utrecht University has chosen to use Blackboard as its Virtual Learning Environment. Blackboard is already in use at a number of departments besides WebCT en BSCW.
The decision was prepared by a project group which was asked to compare (the shortlisted options) Sharepoint and Blackboard Next Generation. Important arguments in making a choice where: Blackboard offers all the required functionalities out-of-the-box, whereas using Sharepoint would require a lot of programming and customising. This would not only make it a very expensive option in the short term, but also requires upkeep and adaptations in the longer term. Sharepoint was also considered less suitable due to the steep learning curve for staff. This is related to the fact that it is not purpose-built for teaching and learning and does not fit in the 'classroom metafor'.

The decision is notable if you take into account that Utrecht University will be using Sharepoint for the public website, intranet and (in the future) teamspaces.

Article in NRC on Weblectures

2008-06-22T00:19:00.003+02:00

It is rather frustrating to write a blog entry on a newspaper article which is not freely available online, In this saturday's NRC (Education and Science supplement) there is an article on recording lectures. In this article you can find references to the Dutch 'entrepeneurs' in this field (TU Delft and Triple-L) and to the findings we published at Utrecht University.

In Twente VLE team advises Blackboard

2008-06-21T23:46:00.004+02:00

The quickscan report on Blackboard as a VLE for Twente university is now pulic and can be found at: http://www.utwente.nl/elo/. It is a very interesting report for the Dutch VLE watchers. After havng looked at Sakai and Sharepoint, both received a very critical quickscan. Neither were considered suitable as a VLE for Twente. And at the end of the process Blackboard popped up as an option, and very interestingly students had an important role in this decision. Based on this quickscan Blackboard has proven to be the best option as a VLE for Twente, though the decision will still have to be made by the university board.
Utrecht will be presenting its advice to the university board very soon, the question will be if they arrive at the same conclusion or advise reconstructing Sharepoint into a VLE....

Presentation at Biology on Weblectures

2008-06-15T22:56:00.005+02:00

Wednesday the 13th of June I was asked to give a presentation on Weblectures at the Biology department. Elly Langewis was kind enough to record the audio during the presentation. Using slideshare I have created a slidecast, you can find it embedded below.
I am very interested in the outcomes of the evaluations after the final exam of the Biology course that has been recorded. In this course both weblectures and audio podcasts were offered. I am very intrigued how students have used these two different solutions and which they preferred.

At the end of the presentation I was not surprised to find that the teachers present were apprehensive. In the past the worry they conveyed was that students would not come to lectures anymore. The evaluations in previous courses quickly dispelled that concern. They found an other worry in its place: Weblectures would prevent students from acquiring the academic skill of sitting still and taking notes in two sittings of three quarters of an hour. This argument was a little strange for me. In evaluations students have answered that they do not make less notes due to Weblectures. As one of the teachers stated: in the old days we had to concentrate for three quarters of an hour, let them learn to do the same... It felt as a slight fear of modern technology and its possibilities. Fortunately slides, overhead sheets, powerpoints and video have already been incorporated into lecture halls, so I do feel that the teachers will need to have the chance to adjust to this new technology and make it their own. A forceful approach does not feel in place in a setting like this one.

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One VLE: the preferences from Social Sciences

2008-06-06T17:04:00.002+02:00

Here at Utrecht University we are in the process of deciding on one VLE for the university. I have been busy collecting opinions of teachers, students and supporting staff in the previous months. Our findings and some comments students made can be found here.
Some of the most surprising comments: they would rather have clear courses which are easy to navigate, teachers using the same headings for the same matters, don't mix personal with study related matters, the teacher is respected for his expertise: his/her contributions should be clearly distinguished from the contributions of fellow students...

Is creative learning better than competence based learning?

2008-05-26T22:43:00.005+02:00

I ran into an interesting announcement of a PhD defense at the University of Tilburg (sorry in Dutch). Paul Denooz decided on a different learning concept than the competence based learning which is so popular in Dutch professional universities. He complains that competence based learning is turning out to be very teacher controlled, students are merely ticking off the skills which the teacher has prescribed. Students are not being creative and they are not being properly prepared for society (although I was under the impression that was exactly what competence based learning was intending to do...)
He has run an experiment for three years in a row using his 'Creative Action Methodology' in which students are encouraged to approach a challenge and use creative thinking. This requires logical and non-logical thinking and being critical of knowledge and reflect on the knowledge acquired.

Slight reflection on my part: It does make me wonder whether the principles of competence based learning are the problem or whether any new methodology for teaching and learning seems to run into the same problem in the end: it is the teacher and the school which has to put it into practice. If a teacher is not willing to offer students the 'learning freedom' required by the methodology, any new approach is bound to fail, certainly in a large scale application...

Presentation of Accordent recording solution

2008-05-25T21:47:00.006+02:00

Thursday JNV and GoTelecom were kind enough to organise a presentation of various technical solutions interesting to those recording lectures.
To start with we had a presentation of the Accordent solution for the recording of lectures. It was a pleasant surprise in many respects. I was impressed by the options for recording and editing a presentation. It does work cross platform. Monitoring is possible, though slightly less central to the recording than in the Mediasite box. By the way don't be limited by the fact they offer it in a big box, you can also get a portable box. One aspect that didn't quite seem to satisfy our demands was the possibility to administer and organise large numbers of recordings. As we are already running three recording boxes at present, we must think ahead and make sure we can find all the presentations.

Besides looking at Accordent, we also came to have a look at a very different approach to recording lectures. Rather than equiping every hall with an (expensive)recording box, you could also choose to screw in a video conferencing set which supports the sending of content as a separate stream and an other set which supports the sending of content as a separate VGA signal (for example a Lifesize box). Of course the total is more expensive than just a recording box, but it offers more facilities: the lecture hall is also equiped for video conferencing and video-linking to a neighbouring lecture hall. It will also facilitate remote monitoring of the capture.

And in the line of automatic capture we had a look at the Vaddio system. This allows for camera tracking of the speaker, either using presets or using track and trace. I am looking forward to glueing our speakers' portable mikes to a small transmitter which the camera can trace (although there are many other solutions).

So perhaps some interesting links for all those people out there working on the recording of lectures. And perhaps interesting input for a Webstroom community ;-)

Virtual Knowledge Centre, the new VLE for academics

2008-05-21T23:25:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I had a very interesting presentation on the state of affairs regarding the PARTNER project which has been set up by Utrecht University Library. They showed me a very amusing video, but I can't find it on the web. I wrote about their start up session with Etienne Wenger years ago...

I was especially interested because it seems to offer a meaningful alternative to competence based learning for academics. In their approach students all are busy becoming members of the academic community. Society demands knowledge workers that can cope with large amounts of information critically. To achieve this goal students are offered a Virtual Knowledge Centre in which they collaborate on constructing knowledge and building products. Alumni remain members of the community and are requested to remain involved. Experts in the field are welcome to join and contribute to the the Knowledge Centre. In my opinion this can be a frail connection, so it will be important to offer them enough in return for their input into the community. The teachers, experts, alumni and fellow students review the products produced by the students.
The project group realises that critical review is an important skill which is required in the learning process and especially in assessment if you use this approach. The presented pedagogical model is intended to be added parallel to the existing curriculum and the existing assessment. This makes it a safe option, but also could be regarded as a non-assessed extra by the students, which could die a slow death just like the portfolio did.
All in all I find it a very interesting approach to a new type of learning which is specifically suitable for an academic education. The technical solution has been built in Sharepoint, which seems ideal because it offers the very important groupware facilities which are so important for creating a community.

Presentation Blackboard 9 - The next generation

2008-05-19T21:08:00.002+02:00

Today Emmanuel Clemot, a Solutions Engineer from Blackboard came to Utrecht University to show off their plans for the Blackboard 9 - Next Generation product. We even got a prototype to look at, a short video will be available on the Blackboard website soon.
A few things that struck me:

Process
- First common APIs so both products can start using intermediate tools (community, content, portfolio and outcomes system).
- Then moving features into Blackboard 8 (is already out)
- And finally building a new shell to access either Vista, Learning system or one of the other tools mentioned above...
That really means as an institution you can choose to keep the old VLEs up and running and migrate gradually. I am not quite sure I would want to, but it is possible.

Look and Feel
Slightly more confusing than Blackboard, but not a lot. Teachers will be quite happy, they will recognise the system. The drag and drop looks good, the contextual menus are alright but they do hide options until teachers find them. Fortunately NO annoying Java Applets (they have learnt their lesson).
I had a big laugh about the WebCT view and the Blackboard classic view feature.

Features
What I like (some of its already in Bb 8) is social bookmarking (Scholar) continued, the facebook connection (though for Holland it is only a start), wikis and blog in the code, add a number of mashups, social learning space in community system, personisable pages, course homepage with more than only announcements (should Sakai or some other VLE sue them? ;-).
They claim Content System allows for student collaboration with versioning and comments. We do not use it at present and it made me rather curious.

All in all a good presentation and an interesting option for Utrecht University, certainly because it allows teachers a careful transition.

Final report Weblectures - experiences of one year of recording

2008-05-18T15:29:00.005+02:00

The final report is now out and public. In 2007, with funding from the central IT policy department we set out a pilot for the recording and broadcasting of lectures. When I say we, I mean a collaboration of Social Sciences and Arts, the audiovisual department in the centre of town with the audiovisual department at the Uithof campus.
In the course of one year we recorded approximately 250 hours of lectures. We surveyed students from a number of courses, amounting up to over 1400 students.
Their responses were extremely positive: recorded lectures were seen as a valuable addition to attending the lecture in person. Weblectures were viewed a lot, either just after the lecture, or as revision for the final exam.
You can find the surveys and all the responses from the students in this final report. We have also examined the use of Weblectures in education for parttime students; they were offered recordings of the lectures which were given to the students in full time enrollment. This proved to be a well received approach.

We used Apreso/Echo 360 in the year but also tested two other solutions: Mediasite and Presentations2Go. At the end of the report we give an overview over our findings and explain why we have chosen not to continue using Anystream Apreso/Echo 360.

Links:
- Project website
- The final report (in Dutch)

Back from the Ardeche

2008-05-18T15:04:00.005+02:00

As most readers wil have noticed, it has been very, very quiet on my blog during the past few months. There are a number of reasons for this. For one: I moved house back in February. Although it was only a short move and there was not a lot that needed doing to the house, it still took up a lot of my time (and still does).
At work I have been very busy in a number of projects, some of the final reports are now appearing, but in other projects I am still very busy. To give you an idea:
- Recording lectures for students with a handicap
- Recording lectures: report over 2007
- Use of blackboard at Utrecht University
- Automated archiving of teaching materials in Blackboard
- One VLE/portfolio and assessment/evaluation tool for Utrecht University (trying to find out the point of view from the Social Sciences faculty)
- Archiving students thesis's in a library archive
- etc...

And you must also relax every now and then, so we spent a week in the Ardeche with some fellow potholers. Although I did not do a lot a caving I did my first canyon and had a great time. We went for a few walks around Vallon Pont d'Arc. Walking part of a GR we bumped into this sign which goes to prove that it can be a lot busier in summer ;-)

Roger Scruton in Utrecht on higher and lower art

2008-05-18T13:51:00.005+02:00

Thursday the 15th of May Roger Scruton gave a lecture on higher and lower art at the Academy building in the centre of Utrecht. It was organised by studium generale.
I attended the lecture with two friends from my reading group. It was great to see Scruton in real life. Years back we read his book 'Modern Philosophy' and it was great to see him in action and hear more about his background and ideas.

Central to his ideas is in my opinion the preposition that there are a set of traditional morals and values everybody should aspire to. These morals are strongly rooted in the Christian tradition, with two central pillars: sacrifice and irony. Under irony he classes a broad concept: being able to stand back and view ones attitudes and behaviour with the view of the outsider. As an example he gave the story from the new testament: those who are without sin, throw the first stone.

The reason I am writing about him in this blog, is that he posed a number of very traditional ideas about teaching and learning. Teaching should be available to those that have the intelligence, a pupil is a black box that should be filled with knowledge, the teacher is holder of knowledge and should be respected. He did not support teaching models in which the student should collect information or learn independently. In his set of values a teacher is central to learning.

Truly understanding art requires being taught the information required to fully appreciate the story behind a work of art. Children should be taught to appreciate high art. Strangely enough he could not define what high art was, other than: what has proven to have survived the test of time. On the other hand: what the majority of people appreciate at present does certainly not have to be high art, it often is not. Relativism does not get his support.
Looking back on his lecture my general impression was that his view of the world is looking backward into a small scale, quaint countryside with traditional values. The community is very important. I have trouble applying his ideas to a global society in which various cultures have different morals, information is not strictly bound to persons and groups of people are packed together in geographical space.

Research into recording lectures for students with disabilities

2008-05-11T19:12:00.003+02:00

From September till November 2007 we recorded all the lectures in the first year Psychology course. One of the goals was to find out whether this facility would be valuable to the 23 students with disabilities taking this course (out of a total of 570 students). The disabilities were varied ranging between Dyslexia, Migraine, Hyperactivity or chronic fatige.
We collected data by conducting a written survey among all students and interviewing 15 of the students with a disability.
The results were very positive. All the students in the course were pleased with the facility. The students with disabilities could be split into two categories: the first was students having problem concentrating and taking notes during the lectures (e.g. Dyslexia, concentration disorder). They were very pleased to be able to watch the lectures again to write or improve their notes. The other category of students were students that weren't able to attend the lectures and could watch them at home in their own time. This also gave them the peace of mind that if they did have to miss a lecture due to their disability they could still watch what was discussed.
Follow these links for the summary and the full report (both in Dutch I am afraid).

Lecture on Internationalising education

2008-05-11T15:44:00.003+02:00

At the annual 'Onderwijsparade' at Utrecht University (back on the 3rd of March) the organisers had invited Marijk van der Wende (CHEPS and VU) to talk about Internationalising Education. You can read an account (in Dutch) at the UU website.
At present Dutch government is focussing strongly on improving international cooperation at all the universities and all the universities are of course following suit. However, for many institutions it would be wise to sit back and first define the goal(s) of the internationalising efforts. Are you out to generate more income through foreign students, are you out to share knowledge and research or are you trying to attract and bind excellent students and researchers from around the globe?
The four approaches she defined were:
- mutual understanding (university as an institute of education)
- skilled migration (university as an employer)
- capacity building (socially engaged university)
- revenue generating (higher ed as an export product)
It was an inspiring lecture, it is a shame the slides aren't on the internet somewhere....

Use of Blackboard at Utrecht University

2008-05-11T15:06:00.004+02:00

We have analysed the logs of the Blackboard server over the past few years and this gives an interesting insight into the use of the VLE. The results (in Dutch I am afraid) are reasonably comparable to outcomes of research at other universities. An interesting note is the fact that all courses at Social Sciences have been supported by Blackboard for a number of years now. That accounts for the early growth.
We have also tried to gain some insight in the use of different tools using the log data. Interestingly the use of discussion boards really has grown and is still growing. This doesn´t give an immediate answer as to how they are used as they are used for general FAQs, debating, collaboration, file sharing, etc.
All in all the results nicely mirror the use of Blackboard as a tool use to support all F2F learning, with the odd exploit into blended learning. The outcomes come at a great time as we are in the middle of an process to make a decision on a future single VLE for Utrecht University.

Workshop designing a Knowledge portal

2008-05-11T13:19:00.002+02:00

Last Thursday the 8th Renee Filius asked me to help me out in a workshop. I did and it was great fun. I do enjoy getting people inspired and watching ideas rub off and start to live a life of their own. The challenge was to redesign a website (vraag Sofie) for personel advisors and experts on social security employed at universities in The Netherlands. The idea was to facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge through a portal. The challenge is to find a way in which the audience can and will easily participate. There are plenty of technical solutions, but are the users ready to rewrite each other's texts in a wiki for instance?

The photo's are out there on Flickr and if you look carefully you will notice I took them using my new Sony Ericsson mobile which has a quite reasonable lens and chip.

Innovatium,

2008-03-05T14:43:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was my first visit to the Innovatium conference, here some very quick notes of my general impressions. The presentations came mainly from the field of professional universities in The Netherlands. The examples were often quite practical, some were more interesting for me than others. Again quite noticeable is the focus these institutions have on competences.
Sharepoint is a popular solution as a virtual learning (and working) environment. The professional universities are applying this system to address various problems (teamwork, sharing knowledge, presenting a curriculum portfolio which can serve for the accreditation of the courses, etc). Surfgroepen is regarded as a valuable tool because it is so open and can be opened up to external parties, whereas institution systems often have much more limited access. This for example will allow related companies to have access to a teamsite which plays a role in the learning process. A comment which reappeared in several sessions and in the hallways is the large amount of facilities on offer in sharepoint, this can lead to a confusing teamsite/workspace.
The last session I visited was given by Gijsbert Erkens from Educational studies at Utrecht University. Although I have helped him out in his course I never got round to really hearing what his intentions were in adding more and more learning ojects to his course module. The result is a large, varied and attractive collection of materials. Interestingly enough students appreciate the large collection of learning objects but they still have their primary attention directed at the summaries offered of the compulsory reading. He has also created snippets of the lecture recordings. These form an interesting application of this facility.

The first news regarding Bb next generation 9.0

2008-02-08T19:24:00.000+01:00

On Willem van Valkenburg's blog I ran into the very first news regarding the long awaited next generation product presented by Blackboard. This was posted on a blog maintained by the Midland User group. Blackboard 9.0 is what was code named Omni and is the product that is supposed to satisfy Blackboard and WebCT customers. This is all very preliminary and I wonder if Blackboard aporves the fact that an institution has been leaking information, they can be rather secretive.
The release has been planned for January 2009. As far as features are concerned, this is what the Midland User Group lists on their blog:
[start quote]

New user interface - sections that can be dragged and ddropped around on the page, different pane for editing and viewing.

Engagement
* bought a communications company, so looking at provision of bulk SMS, email and voice messages through Bb
* page shown with wiki and chat in one area - very much the look of learning objects!
* iGoogle integration
* facebook integration
* RSS

Assessment
* instructor and student dashboard - shows you what is new, who is late, who has submitted work,
* assignment tool redesigned to match more clearly to learning outcomes, can deploy rubrics for marking
* portfolio - new system taking best of all three available systems, launch later than Bb 9.0

Openness
* APIs opened up
* enable multiple platforms to run together - moodle and sakai can be added seemlessly (single sign on) and with access to course documents across both
* iPhone interface, other mobile devices in planning

[end quote]
All in all quite interesting although it doesn't quite feel like a next generation VLE to me. It probably is a next generation product for the Blackboard company though. A few thoughts:
- I hope the drag and drop isn't relying on Java applets running on the client, we saw what issues that gave in WebCT Vista.
- iGoogle is nice, facebook is not all that interesting for the Dutch students, linking to Moodle and Sakai is surprising, mobile support was inevitable, otherwise not a lot of surprises.
One of the major things that does not make it a next generation VLE is the lack of the support of learning in a community through groupwork,sharing materials, openness to outsiders (becoming a member of a worldwide (scientific) community). There are a few items there but it will take a little more. On the other hand it will also take more to change the way teachers teach....

Implementing a new VLE as a motor for change???

2008-02-07T09:14:00.000+01:00

On the new surfspace site I ran into an interesting article in the University of Twente magazine (sorry, it is in Dutch). In this article Pløn Verhagen and Petra Fisser contest the very frequently stated causal relationship: New VLE > Improved pedagogy.
I can't agree more: if you wish to change teaching, change the teaching and don't expect teaching to change simply by implementing a new tool. Of course if you do wish to change the teaching one aspect of the change process is making sure that the necessary tools are available and in working order. However, do not start with the tools and expect the rest to change automatically.

Oh dear, not more plaguerism...

2008-02-06T10:22:00.000+01:00

Yesterday in a meeting of the directors of education at the faculty I heard a worrying complaint. We are trying to educate students in correct citation and not taking other's work and presenting this as you own. One of the aspects of this measure is the use of a tool to detect plaguerism. Sadly the complaint was uttered that too many cases of plaguerism where being detected and especially the follow up on each case was taking up time and resources. Nobody argued that we should stop checking for plaguerism, on the contrary. The sad fact is that students are still copying off the internet (without citing the source), and perhaps worse still: are entering other students' papers from previous years...

Just some new Open Source VLE names

2008-01-28T20:16:00.000+01:00

And for all those out there looking at the broadest possible approach to a learning environment, and are into open source: I just heard about Zarafa (a linux based collaboration environment which will work together with Outlook and MS Exchange).
Taking it from the other side some clever people have built some extra features into the really popular Content Management System Joomla to turn it into a Learning environment. Although there are many out there that simply state: why bother if you have Moodle which does it all anyway.
PS: This company also offers a Sharepoint 2007 LMS, why do I feel that all sorts of lines are coming together ;-)

More experiences using the Asus Eee

2008-01-20T16:52:00.000+01:00

I have now gained some more experience on the use of my Asus Eee. It really does work a treat. I especially appreciate the VGA out, with its accompanying software. This allows you to go up to 1600 by 1280 pixels and will clearly show you which of the screens you are sending the signal to. (Beats banging on the Fn F5 combination and waiting for the beamer to pick up the signal).

I have also got the Utrecht University VPN working. I have not used the Cisco VPN client but installed VPNC. It took some puzzling and if I can find the time I might write it all down. If anybody is having troubles, do contact me.

Various solutions for recording lectures

2008-01-14T22:21:00.000+01:00

As I have noticed there are a lot of people out there wanting to start recording lectures, but not quite sure where to start a few suggestions for tools for creating rich media presentations, Please note: these are presentations combining streaming video with html so the student can navigate through the presentation by choosing slides in the presentation.
Please note: this is a very personal view of a number of products. I cannot claim to be complete or completely informed. If anybody has any suggestions or corrections please do send a comment. This is based on the Dutch market for ICT in higher ed, in other countries there might well be other optoins.
A good place to start is Microsoft Producer: the software is free, most institutions will have a laptop and a digital video camera lying about. It is a very time consuming process but a great to get teachers and students to warm to the idea. You can even use the Surfnet Videotheek to stream the .wmv video produced.
If you intend to take the recording and broadcasting more seriously there are plenty of companies out on the market offering solutions. Expensive but very comprehensive is the Mediasite solution. Other solutions on offer are Apreso/Echo360, Accordent (no experience with it yet, should see a trial on Wednesday) Tegrity (no experience with that either) and Presentations2Go. Presentations2go is a Dutch product developed by Wageningen University, but now for sale. An interesting aspect of the presentations2go solution is the pricing model, the server software is expensive whereas the software for the recording sets is cheap. This encourages the use of more recording sets.
Googling about I ran into an Open Source solution for recording lectures. I have no idea how it works, but the pricing certainly is very competitive. It is called ePresence. If anybody has any experience using it I am certainly intrigued.

Recording lectures in 2008

2008-01-13T15:35:00.000+01:00

In the year 2008 we intend to continue recording lectures at Utrecht University. The central IT policy department has offered funding to keep us going together with two faculties. This will keep the Weblectures project available. We have evaluated the experiences of students and teachers who used this facility. They were all very positive, most comments were about the reliability of the service: students get used to it and expect it work every time. If we wish to ensure a decent service which will work throughout the university a larger scale approach is required. Our main effort will be focussed on writing a plan to set up a structural service in 2009. We will be offering a final report on the Weblectures website.
On the technical side of things we will be not be using Apreso Classroom in 2008. We have decided to try out the mediasite mobile recorders in combination with the Mediasite EX server software through the Dutch reseller Mediamission. Apreso has proven to be a great solution to get us started and gain some experiences with the required hardware for recording lectures. The limitations which proved decisive for us where the lack of monitoring of the incoming signals, the fact that the hardware was not portable and the fact that editing is not possible at all. For a lot more money Mediasite does also offer some other facilities, e.g. live broadcasting. I will keep you posted on our experiences. We have already made our first recordings with the recording sets and are hard at work on getting the server up and running.

Cold dip to start off the new year

2008-01-13T15:33:00.000+01:00

Just clearing up some old news: I started off the new year on a fresh start: we took a dip in the North Sea... With a great big thank you to the life savers at 's Gravenzande which make this possible every year. Follow this link to get to the photo's.

Experiences with the Asus Eee

2007-12-17T22:53:00.000+01:00

Back in December was the big day: I got my Asus Eee in the post, all the way from Taiwan. It isn't on sale in The Netherlands yet. It really is tiny. I have dropped it in my bag and forgotten it was there. The keyboard is not a problem, it just takes some getting used to. The screen could be bigger, but is quite reasonable for most websites. The storage is not very large, but who cares if you can push in an SD card, which neatly disappears in the slot and can stay in there when you move it about. The webcam is straightforward but works a treat. The Skype has been updated and quite probably should work with the webcam, nobody has skyped me yet, so if there are any volunteers?
Sadly the built in webcam capturing software seems to work, but the outputted video (.ogg format) doesn't make sense, it is far to long and slow.

The big bonus is that it truly works out of the box with its built in Open Source software. If all Linux was this easy a lot more users would be using it. Out of the box you get a browser, a mailclient, messaging software, skype, open office antivirus, video and audioplayer, picture manager, a number of games (some of them educational) and some other things. The drawback is that it does take a little puzzling to get other programs running. For example: I am have trouble getting our university vpn installed. A commercial party has finally decided to offer a computer running on open source software preinstalled. It is certainly easy to get started with.

One of the reasons I have not got round to writing this earlier is that everybody kept grabbing it out of my hands. Especially the kids are great fans. They love it for its small size, all the built in games and Pidgin messenger. it has already featured on Wilfred and Pierre's Blogs and already has found its way to Flickr...

General feelings on the Online Educa Conference in Berlin

2007-12-14T11:29:00.000+01:00

I finally have found some time to get to cleaning up my blog and clearing up some old concepts I still had lying around.
To start off, some almost ancient history: My general feelings on the Online Educa conference. To start off, I was a little disappointed: I did not hear a lot of new things and I still feel the concept doesn't work: Four presentations in one session is a lousy concept. Usually 1 is worth while, 1 is a waste of time and two are usually not all that interesting or relevant. It was definitely worth while meeting up with the many Dutch at the conference. As so often I mainly gained inspiration through conversations rather than presentations.

And in an attempt to overlook a few developments and giving each their spot on Gartner's Hype Cycle:
- Podcasting is well and truly over its hype peak
- Web2.0 is here to stay, but it is over its hype peak
- Virtual worlds is running up to its hype peak
- Institutions are becoming more realistic about Services approach
- The general feeling regarding VLEs is 'agnostic'. Believing in one VLE is out of fashion
- Theories and technologies applicable to Informal Learning are still being applied to formal teaching situations (without judging whether they really work).

Virtual Worlds - some valuable findings to take home

2007-11-30T15:14:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I visited a session on Virtual Worlds. It did not seem really exciting at the time, but after having had some time to digest, there were some points I would like to jot down for my own memory.
- Sun Microsystems is developing a virtual world which will be called Wonderland.
- Surprisingly Second Life has been used for language learning. I guess that the exchange of language was mainly in text and not the spoken word, but it was not discussed further.
- People are expecting Web2.0 to be followed by Web3D, I am not sure I agree at this point in time...
- They gave the sensible advise: Only use 3D when it really adds value to learning and teaching, otherwise it is a pain. A mix (hybrid model) is much more likely using 3D tools in certain tasks and other tools in others. For example combining the use of Xing.com and Second life.
- An important step will be adding content and integrating other media in the virtual environment.
It will become truly personal if your avatar's expressions are fed by input from your webcam. This will make avatars a lot more lively and make the virtual world much more real. This feature will surely be available in the future. (With special thanks to inspiration from a business proposal in the Dragon's Den programme on the Beeb.)
- 'Just building a stadium (ed: in a virtual world) is not enough. You have to organise it's use'.
- Perhaps a smaller and more straightforward meeting place than Second Life can be offered by Qwaq.

As a clear example of the use of Second Life they suggested training oil-rig staff on escape routes during emergencies. It certainly seems to extremely suited to this use. Running around on an oil rig with virtual fires all around is a lot safer than in real life.

Moodle in distance ed

2007-11-30T12:34:00.000+01:00

Eric Clarke, with a lovely Irish accent, from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin delivered a session on the use of Moodle (and how much it costs to run). Yes, for all those out there still going after Open Source because it is free: Sorry to disappoint you, but there are enough other costs in keeping a VLE up and running. He gives a lovely description: 'What are we really going on about: is it all about lawsuits and : 'My VLE is bigger than yours' or is about teaching and learning?

The use of Moodle is a great success, but he gave us the warning: do take third party support, network and servers into account (180K euros and that's without the costs of user support.) The problems they are now facing are ironically their heavy reliance on Moodle, and the large amount of materials and tools on offer which confuse students without structure.

Research into a new VLE for the OU

2007-11-30T12:02:00.000+01:00

Steven Verjans from the Open University in The Netherlands has been researching their demands for a VLE. Strangely enough this is taking place as they just have starting deploying Blackboard. They find that Blackboard is, however, strongely based on the classroom metafor and not suitable for their teaching. Students don't meet in a classroom in the OU setting and learn independently and self paced.
Quite understandably the OU is not thinking on a short term adoption, but rather thinking three years ahead.
They appear to have a preference for an open source framework approach allowing for webservices. I do get the slight impression at this point the preference is based on technological innovative solution, rather than students' basic demands.

Podcasts, why bother?

2007-11-29T16:32:00.000+01:00

In the final session here at Online Educa today I was surprised to see that in the three presentations universities are focussing on pod- and especially vodcasting rather than streaming video. The true benefit in my eyes lies in offering materials which can be listened to or watched on the move. On the other hand, it might be a better target to let students to create streaming material which can be shared.
Some of the speakers had taken this into account. Especially the example from the Geography department (impala)attracted my attention: giving students pod- and voldcasts to take with them on fieldwork seems a very suitable application.
An other advantage is that students can relatively easily contribute materials. This has been used to allow citizens to join in various debates in Europe. And now its time for a drink :-)

E-learning for kids, worldwide learning content for kids

2007-11-29T14:56:00.001+01:00

An interesting note at the end of one of the sessions is the e-learning for kids initiative. The aim is to develop courseware for for children aged 5 to 12 years worldwide. This connects nicely with the one laptop per child initiative. Noticeably this does not appear to be webbased but they have chosen to run materials locally.

Thoughts on the broad VLE, from VTE to open groupspace

2007-11-29T14:43:00.000+01:00

Conference lunches are a great place to develop ideas. Here at Online Educa Berlin I had a lunch with Robert Jan Simons and Wilfred Rubens and we discussed the demands on a VLE at Utrecht University. My position is that we need a broad solution, as offered at Wageningen University. On the one end a classic VLE for teacher use (I suppose you could even describe it as a Virtual Teaching Environment, a VTE) which offers teachers the control they need to offer instruction. On the other end we need an open groupware environment which will offer students the room to learn, accumulate and share knowledge. Which of these extremes you wish to use depends on the pedaogical model in use in the course. In fact I know courses in which both models are used in the same course but at different points in time. Through api's (webparts building blocks, etc) the classic VTE/VLE and the groupware environment can be connected. Additional external web2.0 tools could also be integrated in this groupware environment which offer connections to the outside world. This is essential in creating an open environment for knowledge sharing.

I held an Asus EEE!

2007-11-29T14:28:00.000+01:00

A great big thank to Gill Chester for allowing me to hold and fiddle about on her Asus EEE. It really is very small, but is astonishing how much fits on the screen and still remains quite legible. The keys take a bit of getting used to, but I can imagine I could get used to it. So all I need is some patience, I hope it will be out in the Netherlands before Christmas. It does not appear to be in the shops here in Germany yet.

Andrew Keen's keynote: is Web2.0 the cult of the amateurs?

2007-11-29T10:45:00.001+01:00

Andrew starts off his keynote that there is nothing wrong with technology as such. He argues that the ideas behind the Web2.0 however are a danger to the distribution of wisdom. The wisdom produced in Web2.0 is the wisdom of the crowds. He claims that Google lets users decide what wisdom is. I do certainly not agree on this point: What is shown in Google is certainly not neccessarily wisdom.
He goes on by complaining that Wikipedia entries are just as long on irrelevant subjects as on subjects he finds interesting. This makes me wonder whether I would interested in whatever he finds interesting.
The challenge is how to select which information is correct. Students must be trained in medialiteracy, knowing what is correct in the media. This is not a new call, in fact there are teachers training first year students in this skill.

He argues Harvard professors should be busy publishing on the internet. On the other hand this is already possible, so what is his point...
In his retoric internet is a place with its own dynamics, although technology did not receive this dubious honouw. Though the content on the internet is nothing more than contribution by individuals. Would it not be better to focus on the indivivuals and the social processes between individuals when constructing knowledge?

iKids rather than eKids

2007-11-29T10:39:00.000+01:00

The final comments of Patricia Ceysens' keynote were the most interesting. She claims her children will not be eKids but rather iKids.
These iKids have individual needs, however they need to learn in a social context. They want to be interactive. Futhermore they live in a culture of images. They must learn 'Interculturality' as this is a necessity in this age of cultural conflicts. It connected nicely with the ideas on the Net-generation and the Einstein generation.

Hole in the wall in real life

2007-11-29T09:57:00.000+01:00

It was quite suitable, after all the buzz on the hole in the wall project, to hear Professor Sugata Mitra speak on technology and the application of ICT in education. After a keynote on the envoy of the minister on implementation of ICT in ed in Ghana, Sugata defended a very different appraoch. Rather than working on teachers and ICT facilities, Sugata argues that children are capable of learning on their own. They are capable of learning the basic ICT skill of browsing the internet. Children may be able to learn a language on their own, if they want to! Children in the south of India even managed to learn Biotechnology, being triggered to learn on their own, rather than being taught. Put these computers in public spaces rather than in the classroom. Children used their networks to extend their learning.
The final hypothesis: Can children complete the schooling on their own! still remains unanswered.

Instructivism vs free learning - the cultural dimension

2007-11-17T21:45:00.000+01:00

Walking through the university magazine I ran into a short comment in an article by a researcher just down the hall from me. I was especially amused as this added an extra perspective to instructivism vs. free learning debate which popped up (again) at the Onderwijsdagen.
The researcher in question, Mayo Aziza, is doing research on language learning under children from Turkish or Morrocan parents in the Netherlands.
Her comment is:
"Het Nederlandse onderwijs met zijn sterke gerichtheid op zelf dingen ontdekken werkt voor kinderen met een taalachterstand averechts. Die kinderen hebben behoefte aan instructie, maar dat past niet in onze onderwijsfilosofie."
I would translate this as follows:
"The Dutch education system, with its strong focus on discovering things for themselves has the opposite effect for children with a language deficit. Those children need instruction, but this does not fit in with the principles underlying our education."
To add to the debate I wonder whether we are taking the cultural dimension into consideration when we are thinking about different approaches to teaching and learning. There are people that argue that certain types of knowledge and skills can best be taught through instruction, whereas others are best discovered in a more free setting. I would like to argue for also taking the differing cultural background into account when defending the preferred educational model. There must be researchers out there that have been looking at this aspect in more detail.

Weblectures in university magazine

2007-11-16T10:19:00.000+01:00

A while back I was interviewed by the university magazine on the Weblectures project we are running here at Utrecht University. The article is now available in print and online. I was amused to see that the central debate: 'Will students still come to lectures?' was put on the poll. The results at this point in time can be found on the right. I find it quite noticeable that some students easily respond that they will no longer visit lectures, though once confronted with the facility they notice that visiting lectures is actually valuable and a recording does not replace attending the lecture live.

Follow up on Stephen's keynote

2007-11-16T09:31:00.000+01:00

The recording of the keynote at the onderwijsdagen is now online and can be found at:
http://videotheek.surfnet.nl/play_proxy/mmc/39829/downes.wmv.

Wilfred Rubens has written a review of this criticism in the elearning site. Paul Kirschner has written a response (both in Dutch). They can be found at:
http://www.e-learning.nl/subpage.aspx?l1=2&subaction=details&newsid=1671

The SMS wall actually did work!

2007-11-14T22:06:00.001+01:00

It took some effort and some perseverence on the part of Pierre, but in the end the SMS wall did work and was put to good use in the debate Wilfred gave on the more ethical questions regarding the use of blogs and wiki's in education. I heard he will be posting about that soon.

Getting the SMS wall to work
Originally uploaded by kgrussell2

Do we need professors?

2007-11-14T14:07:00.000+01:00

As a last session at the Onderwijsdagen I went and listened to Jacob van Kokswijk, this session had been arranged by a sponsor. I suppose it was a good resume: examples from other sessions came back: he named new findings regarding the links between short term and long term memory, and subsequent theory on students learning differently. Just as Stephen had done he mentoined the hole in the wall as an example of children learning of their own accord (informal learning).
As an example of people becoming organised in multiple virtual social networks he named the Google Open Social api. This is just an example of how we are all becoming connected and sharing knowledge. By the way: I am not quite sure I wish all my networks to be the same. Certain network sites are for certain goals...

But all this was leading up to the conclusion that teaching is going to have to change. However he offers no proof that old learning works (nor does he name proof for a different position). He has picked up all the news circling the web without wondering how applicable all these findings are. It brought me back to the question: do students want to have their learning taking place in their free-time space? This is a point Antoine van der Beemt questioned in his presentation.

For me the question 'do we need professors' was certainly not answered in this presentation. I believe we do still need some kind of professor even if it is a team leader (as in the example of the Kaos Pilot pedagogy....

Teemu Arina's session on slow pedagogy, an alternative in this age of speed

2007-11-14T12:07:00.000+01:00

In his session Teemu argues for room for serendipity adaptability in learning. Teaching should provide students which adapt and adjust their processes. He offers various snippets of information and theories, but does not connect these, but as he explained later: 'Leaves this up to his audience to select the theories they find relevant.'

His session followed a philosophical approach analysing words and their meanings.
'How to cope in this age of information overload?' Marshall MacLuhan claims we can solve this challenge by pattern recognition.
Another point he argues is that in learning we should give room for serendipity: planning everything leaves no room for unintended outcomes. There should be more attention for slow pedagogy, we should concentrate on the learning process rather than the outcome of learning. By focussing on the outcomes we leave too little room for serendipity.