My experience in OCW

A few years ago I found the OpenCourseware initiative launched around 2000 by MIT. The idea is at the same time simple and a bit difficult to convey. Shortly after its successfull take-off in MIT, numerous universities around the world joined the initiative and today there is a massive amount of educational material available in numerous servers hosted at different unversities.

My university (Carlos III University of Madrid) joined this program a few years ago and regularly opens a call for participation. In 2007 I submitted one of my courses on Computer Architecture, a first year telecommunication engineering course. I never thought carefully about the reasons that took me to participate, but after a couple of years, I find myself preparing a presentation to give to my colleagues explaining why I decided to join the program.

OCW Presentation in UC3M

View more documents from abelardo_pardo.

By preparing the material for this talk I realized that OCW has multiple reasons that are not apparent when you read the information you find in the different sites. They are hidden behind the huge headline saying "Open Content". They could be sumarized as:

• It promotes the use of ICT. Both on the side of the teaching staff and on the side of the student. The more material openly available, the more interaction with it, the less traumatic will be the use of these resources.
• An implicit communication channel is opened. Your course has your name. People may contact you asking questions. I'm not referring to students clarifying an exercise, but other teachers that saw your material.
• Derived from the previous one, there is an implicit forum for degree adjustments. The task of putting together a degree is typically dealt with a commission. By publishing courses in the open, anybody could point to improvements or adjustments in various courses toward a better overall degree.
• Promotes the continuous evolution of the material. This is the most important for me. Educational material improves over several editions. OCW does not force you to modify your courses, but derived from the material being in the open is the notion of incorporating improvements.

These aspects were surprisinly in synch with my approach to my courses, thus my disposition to share one of them in OCW. I'm currently involved in another one, and I count on it to be out in the open after the second edition is done.

PS: And here is the talk:

An the winner is... Let me check my Google SpreadSheet

In one of the session in the course I'm teaching, students working in a project in teams of 4 people need to present the final product. It is a great opportunity for them to prepare a presentation and give a short talk (we only have 10 to 15 minutes per group). But must importantly, students have the opportunity to see their talk compared with five or six others. In my experience, both things are equally important. I've learn a bundle not only giving a talk, but looking at the talks around mine.

To make the experience a bit more intense, we decided to run a quick poll at the end to rank the presentations. The voting would take place at the end of the session and students need to rank the top five presentations and assign values from 1 to 5. The whole drill looses a lot unless the results are viewed instantly. Of course there are plenty of so-called "clickers". Each student would get one, vote and then there is a program that tabulates the results. Then we have surveys in LMSs that allow you to do the same. But, as it typically the case in these experiements, you loose half the effectiveness for each step you take. So the objective is to deploy this setting with the smallest amount of pain.

Here comes Google SpreadSheets. A sheet can have a Form attached to it. The form can be created by a simple editor and Google automatically produces the web page to be used to introduce the data. When data is introduced in the form, it is automatically inserted in your spreadsheet. The form is publicly available (no login) and the spreadsheet reflects the results instantly. Collect the results in one sheet, create an extra sheet, add a few formulas to tally the results, add a graph plotting these numbers, export such graph into one of your web pages and voilá.

The way Google processes the data in the form is fairly simply. As long as you use the proper URL to send your results and follow some naming convention for the input fields,  you may submit data from any page. Here is an example of the form seen by the students to send the rank.

One of the question formats accepted by Google is called grid. It is perfect for this scenario. You offer a scale from 1 to 5 for each presentation. The web page is prepared to send the data to the Google entry point (which I lifted from the official Google Form). Here is a capture of the result:

This scheme can be used live in a class. You only need to have a publicly available Web page (probably better to have it unreachable from a link and directly show the URL in class), ask students to submit their voting, and refresh this graph in your computer. In the sessions where students present their projects, first all the presentations are shown, then students point to the voting URL (Google has a switch in the form to accept results), cast their votes and the result is shown in the screen. Look ma, no clickers, no server, no JavaBean, no PHP...

Shortest path from Kubuntu 9.4 to YouTube

A while ago, I published a guide for the students on one of my courses showing how to perform certain operations in Eclipse. I tried to include a few screen captures, detailed description and try to bring them quickly to a point where true code development was easy.
The result was quite surprising. Despite the effort to make a detailed guide, the number of questions and clarifications was unusually high. It was not due to the absence of details, but, if I have to guess, I was pretending to show how a highly visual tool works, with a highly detailed and dense document. Two opposite resources. Somehow, it seems that when you are performing a visual task, you may learn faster if you have visual (rather than textual) support.
So I decided to craft some videos showing screen captures of some additional procedures (creating a debugging configuration). The premises: open-source tools, and what is more important, really quick path to publication. If I create a cool video, but it takes me two weeks, forget it. It should be under an hour even at the expense of some quality. My take on this, there is no need for George Luca's quality for a guide that you'll view once and that's it. Here is the tool combination I've used.

Screen capture

This was the trickiest part. The problem is not yet cleanly solved, but xvidcap was the solution. It put my patiente to the test, until I tweaked with some obscure option with name Manually set XDamage. Interestingly enough, it should be enable. Go figure.
I've selected MPEG as output format and avoided completely capturing at the same time video and audio. I found much more confortable to quickly draft a script of what I plan to say, capture the screen, and the add the audio on top

Audio manipulation

Tools here are up to the challenge. Audacity came to the rescue and performed perfectly. I needed, though to first install PulseAudio, the new Audio framework in Ubuntu that despite some criticism I've seen in some blogs, it works like a charm in my machine. It allows you to control all different sound "threads". For example, if you are hearing music and a video pops up in the web, you may control the volumes separatedly.
Audacity allows you also to perform fairly useful operations such as cutting silences, shifting the wave, etc. Also, you may record (as it was my case) two tracks for the same video in the same project. You simply mute one of them and export the other. Which brings me to the final touch with Audacity, exporting to MP3. It works without a glitch. An MP3 file is created and is ready to be merged.

Merging Audio/video

This is the most obscure part that I haven't figured out completely. I use mencoder which looking at the number of available options, you could think it is capable of pretty much everything. After several trials, the final command is (brace for impact):

mencoder \
  video.mpeg \
  -audiofile audio.mp3 \
  -o video.flv \
  -of lavf \
  -oac mp3lame \
  -lameopts abr:br=56 \
  -ovc lavc \
  -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=500:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 \
  -srate 22050

Does it work? Yes. Do I know what is doing? Not even the slightest idea. The audio is far from perfect, and there is some drifting in time, but it did the trick of producing the videos in less than an hour. I need to polish this last step, because the audio sounds perfect when played alone. I might post again if I improve the recipe.

As for the result...

Our current research activities

I presented the research activities in which our research group, the Gradient Lab is involved. The occasion, the yearly research meeting of the Telematic Applications and Services Group

It is difficult to create a somewhat coherent presentation from all these activities. Each one of them might need a single hour on its own to be fully described. Quite a summarizing effort. If I had to choose the main keywords included in there, these would be: elearning, adaptation, mobile learning, 3D scenarios.

T-1.5M and counting

We are quickly approaching September 7th 2009. That is the first day of classes of 09/10 course in which the new totally redesigned, done from scratch, 180 degree change in strategy course I'm prepary will start. The amount of work is just enormous which together with the already large amount of things popping up (projects, research, thesis, etc.) makes this time of the year specially stressful.

But in the middle of the storm, there are still a few reflections worth mentioning. I'm tasting how does it feel to really prepare a course. To carefully think about the learning objectives (or outcomes), how to tie them to activities, how these need to be carefully dimensioned such that they don't turn into some mere impossible exercises courtesy of the wacky professor.

I now understand why is so difficult to teach a good course on technology. The level of planning you need is extreme. When setting the stage for a program that will, for example, dump a data structure in a file and then restore it (sorry for the not techies, this is the tough part), you need to make sure you have the rest of the details taken care of for students to focus only on that aspect of the activity. Of course, in your regular engineering life, you must take care of ALL the aspects, but activities in a course, at least a third semester course, still need a bit of narrowing the interest in order to achieve depth of understanding.

The course is shaping up nice, although orders of magnitude slower than expected (will, to be hones, it was expected). Yesterday, in an event totally unrelated to my techie life somebody told a story about a daughter asking her father what was an utopy. The father answered that it was something similar to the horizon. You keep chasing it, but it keeps escaping your. The daughter then asked, so then what is an utopy used for? And the father replied, to keep advancing. How timely! I'll try to remember the story the next time I have the tenth million argument about why should we change the way we teach.

Do you want to travel overseas? Structure of learning material

At a conference in Monterrey, Mexico, I came across a person working for the Connections Project. The conversation was about how to improve the sharing of open educational resources (or OERs). One of the problems that needs to be solved is how to organize material at a low level of granularity such that it can be easily searched.

Lookit a bit closer at the problem I realized that professors tend to neatly organize educational material but at a higher level of abstraction. Most teachers carefully divide their courses in chapters, modules, lessons, etc. There is a huge variety of vocabulary, but everybody is doing more or less the same. The reason behind this organization is to better find what we need, for students to better follow a learning experience, etc.

But the interesting observation is that, below this level, that is, inside the documents and resources that make out a chapter, section, session or whatever similar unit, the content is mainly disorganized. Exercises are just put together in a Word document, additional resources in another HTML document that gets published in the course web page, etc.

The overall picture then is that a course has a neat organization at a higher level and is fairly caotic at a lower level. My perception is that this is mainly due to the type of tools that are used in the creation process. Sorry to say, but the culprit is mostly Microsft Office.

The tools contained in this suite maintain their information internally in a format impossible to manipulate easily outside of this programs. Let me put an example. If I write a collection of exercises with let's say 50 exercises. Let us assume then that due to some course reorganization, some of those exercises should be in a different chapter or session, some of them can be used in another course, or even that the collection can be divided into three tracks that can be used as learning material for students having different learning styles. What would you need in your material to solve this situations quickly? If the material is structured internally, then it would be easy to take the collection of exercises and select each one of them individually with some tool. That is extremelly complicated for Microsoft Word documents.

Another example. Let's supose a teacher relies mostly in Powerpoint slides. In one of them there is the coolest animation about an extremelly complicated process. The professor has realized that the animation greatly helps students to understand the process. Now the teacher would like to take just that animation and publish it in an HTML document in the course website. With structure content, it should be possible to identify this animation, extract it from the document and place it somewhere else.

This problem has been solved in some other domains, and some of them extremelly close to you (either if you are a techie or not). This page you are reading contains text that is internally structured. It contains marks identifying its internal parts. The better and more thorough this marks, the easier is to manipulate the text.

Is teaching staff ready to create structured content? Mostly no. Why? Mostly, because there is no tool out there that provides a simple authoring procedure to create structure content. Most of the teaching staff is using some tool inside Microsoft Office.

To finish with an analogy. Microsoft Office Tools give you a nice and powerful set of tools the same way a car can give you lots of possibilities to travel. You may have a huge amount of tweaks and knobs to turn in your car such that your driving experience is easy, pleasent, efficient (add your favorite adjective). But, what happens if you want to travel overseas? No matter how powerful, confortable, efficient your car is, you won't get there.

Structured content is the view that will allow you to travel overseas with your learning material. It'll allow you to solve problems and adapt your material in ways that are beyond the capabilities of current Office tools. It is complex, yes, the same way a jet airliner is more complex than a car, but it'll allow you to travel overseas, right?

MToB. System Architecture 1: General Objectives. T - 9M

After may be a too large time span (3 months), I report again in my quest for the perfect course. In my previous MToB post, I was about to delve in the always intricate world of curriculum guidelines. The objective: finding the perfect set of objectivies for the second year course. The more I read about these issues the less clear the picture. There are way too many notations, very few works talk about concrete issues, you never find an example of a course close enough to what you are designing. Instead, lots of blah, blah, blah about trivial objectives. Things such as "oral communication skills", "teamwork skills", etc. appear way too often. Concrete examples adapted to your course, well, that's another story.

Luckily for me, once again, Miguel Valero came to the rescue. After spending quite a few hours and crafting a couple of documents trying to make sense of the process to obtain the high level course objectives, I wrote an email to my colleague expressing my frustration when searching for this type of information. His response was exactly what I needed: "before wasting all your energies searching for the perfect methodology to create the course objectives, here is this document that I did devoting lots of hours to what you are doing so you can save it for more interesting things". Excellent.

The document Miguel Valero sent me is a methodology (as good as any other) to follow the path from abstract objectives (those that appear in the curriculum guidelines) to more concrete ones. After this trip through the land of competencies, objectives, recommendations, and so forth, I think most of the complexity comes from the fact that it is a continuum of abstraction layers with a tendency to stay always in the higher levels. In other words, different documents talk about objectives, competencies and all these ingredients but at different levels of abstractions and always with similar terminology. The topic does not lend itself nicely to a clearly organized taxonomy of terms and abstraction levels (or at least I haven't encountered a clearly stated one).

When designing a course, there is one crucial first step though that puts you in the right direction: designing the course general objectives. Course general objectives are recommended to be wide in scope but within the course and should be only a few of them. This means that you first need to clarify the level of abstraction in which you need to position yourself, and then, write them. After quite some thought and taking a lot of inspiration from the previously mentioned document sent by Prof. Valero, here are the Course General Objectives:

1. Design programs to run in mobile devices. This objective contains a small principle declaration. Programming is required for the type of degree where the course is placed, but programming mobile devices is a more specific environment. For example, special tools such as cross-compilers need to be used. The idea is to deploy a complete application in one of these devices.
2. Use the most common tools for the development of mobile applications. These tools might include (yet to be decided) IDEs such as eclipse, version control software, memory profiling, tests, etc.
3. Work effectively within a team. This is one of the most challenging objectives. It amonts to a huge departure from conventional course organization and embracing it means re-think a large portion of the course. The tasks need to be conceived to encourage positive interdependency and individual accountability.
4. Learn autonomously. This is also a tricky one to bring to life. The type of tasks assigned to the students should be designed as to emphasize this attitude. Students now search for lots of new information on the net. Tap into that potential and elevate to the category of autonomous learning is no trivial task

Although they might seem trivial statements, they provide the boundary conditions from which to derive now the rest of the course structure. When building a house, you need to first mark in the land where all the pieces should be placed. The next step is now to decompose these objectives into much more specific ones within the course. The list will be much larger and detailed. Long journey ahead!

Staging You vs. Marta/José Luis

A few months ago, I took a course titled "How to achieve the formative objectives in the new ESHE" by Alfredo Prieto Martín. One of the first exercises was based on the paper "What the Student Does: teaching for enhanced learning", published by J. Biggs in "Higher Education Research and Development 18: 57-75". The scenario was two students, Marta and José Luis. Marta was very thorough in her study, she usually goes deeper than required when understanding the course material, she is interested in all the topics, etc. On the opposite side of the spectrum, José Luis is not convinced he should be at the university to begin with. He quickly skims through the material to see if he can make the minimum score to pass the course.

Based on this scenario, a few questions were posed along the lines of what to do to improve the overall learning experience in such setting. There are multiple aspects to consider here. Typically, the further appart the learning profiles of the students in a class, the more difficult to teach at a level that is appropriate.

But when I first saw the example, I started thinking if such example, with a twist, could be given to the students themselves. After a few days thinking about it, something solid came to light. The situation in the scenario, with very minor changes can be taken to a place more familiar to the students. Here is what I tried in the very lasts minutes of my first class of the semester.

The first step was to warn that the following exercise was not directly related to the course topic, although I considered it interesting because it is something that they might find in their near future working for a corporation. A job offer was published in the newspaper (I showed the actual offer taken from the paper a few weeks ago, to add more realism). The offer contained some of the topics covered in some courses and mentioned explicitly the need to have a telecommunication engineering degree. I proposed the students to follow me for a while for some hypothetical thinking.

They took the offer and sent the CV right away. Sure enough, a few days later they had the interview with somebody we'll call "Big Boss", and they got the job. The conditions for the job were to make sure a team of two subordinates and you managed to keep a set of tools working seamlessly for the company, solving problems, fixing bugs, etc. The salary was fairly high on the condition that the team performed well. This is to convey certain pressure to make sure everything goes smooth.

The team is made of Marta and José Luis. A month down the road, problems appear. Certain problems take longer than usual to solve, users are beginning to complain, not all bugs are fixed, etc. Marta is an incredibly thorough person. Smart, quick to analyze a problem, even quicker to propose solutions, creative, reliable, etc. José Luis, on the other hand, was the opposite. Unreliable, sometimes a tad irresponsible, detached from the main problems. The services to maintain were divided among you three, and obviously, those taken care by José Luis were greatly lagging behind.

"Big Boss" calls you to the upstairs office and says that the department is not performing as expected (add the line that "your job is at risk" to increase tension). The conversation is a bit delicate and quickly you mention that José Luis is the culprit. "Big Boss" wants solutions, and although you were quick to point out that he should be replaced or transferred, the actual situation in the company rules that completely out of the picture. Big Boss expects YOU to solve the problem and ... you got three minutes to talk in groups of two or three to propose the most effective measures you would take to solve the problem. Anything goes except firing or transferring José Luis.

As mentioned before, the exercise was done at the very end of the first class. The interaction had been close to null. My students usually go to that first class mainly to pay attention to the rules to pass the course. But at that point, the three minute period translated into a sea of conversations.

After the time was up, I kindly asked each team for the proposed solutions. The first pleasant surprise was that they were mainly all on board with the role playing. They saw themselves sitting on that office with Big Boss feeling that either they fix the problem, or they will be fired. It follows a summary of the main actions that popped up (in no particular order):

• Talk with José Luis to find out exactly what is happening.
• Re-distribute the load among Marta en José Luis to see if that made any change
• Have Marta work closer to José Luis to see if he learns how to improve
• Fix a date between Marta en José Luis to see if they exchange (at least) some tips on how to work more efficiently
• Pay José Luis extra money if his performance increases
• Behave more as a coach for José Luis rather than as his Boss
• Get together with José Luis regularly to address his shortcomings
• ...

Students were really decided to attack the problem. Many solutions came up and they were more than willing to discuss them. So, at least as an ice-breaker, the exercise was a success. But by the time solutions are discussed, the time is up. Class is over, but before leaving you drop the punch line.

Explain that this example is not only useful because it could happen in a real situation to them and they need to perform on something that is not covered in any course, but it has a second interpretation. "Big Boss" is the University authorities. The person that was hired to make the most out of the team is the teacher! And turning to the students, you say: "it remains to find out who are you going to be in this course... I'll see you next Friday". And you leave.

Agile Open Source Content Production. (and III)

After a few situations in which I had to design non trivial learning material (meaning lots of exercises, guides, supporting documents, study guides, objectives, etc.) I'm more convinced than ever that the production process is far from ideal. Sophistication when creating content is advancing both in complexity and in variety, but users are not advancing at the same pace. As it was discussed in previous posts, the need for some intermediate processing is growing.

If on top of this situation we add the lesson the web is teaching us every day, that is, collaboration is inherent to the human being, and usually means better outcome; then the mixture translates into an even more complex scenario.

By looking at how big large collaborative projects are organized, there is always something that strikes me: there are lots of successful projects with organizational schemes fairly loose. Loose when compared to typical exhaustive collaboration platforms that force users to use only certain tools. The net is going in the opposite direction. The freedom to use one tool or another, in general, I perceive it is growing, and at the same time, the amount of material, or generically "objects" that are produced keeps growing.

A few weeks ago I started an effort to translate this observation into something more concrete in the area of learning content production. The result is ADA a rule based toolkit that tries to provide a powerful and scalable division between different content production phases, and at the same time, rely almost entirely in open source software.

The idea is to simplify as much as possible the work on the user front, but keeping some basic procedures to facilitate the automatic processing of as many production steps as possible. An example. I teach a class with one group in Spanish and another one in English. Any document you write in Spanish, it must be translated to English. The same applies to figures, charts, animations, etc. (unless they have no text). At the same time, while teaching a course, handouts need to be reviewed, polished and published at certain times. The reviewing process is a bit tricky with both versions. Not only that, the date to publish a handout might move one or two days back and forth. Bottom line: the production of the original document is a small portion of the entire content management. ADA provides some common rules that can be easily invoked to automate this processing: producing PDF files from powerpoint, 2up PDF files, derive Spanish/English versions from the same document, copy auxiliary files from one location to another, detect dependencies such that when a document changes the derived content is refreshed, etc.

The following figure illustrates the philosophy behind ADA. A community of authors have some raw material to produce content. With the description of some combination rules, the task of deriving an entire web-site from the material of these authors can be fully automatic.

To be totally honest, I'm pursuing this out of simple observation of my own production cycle. I am trying to convince more users to adopt this paradigm. So far I went as far as a plenary meeting for my research group. At least there is one additional user (and developer).

The one hundred mile trip...

My take on Bologna (MToB). System Architecture 1: T - 12M and counting...

I´ve previously written about the upcoming changes facing Spanish Universities to comply with the Bologna Declaration. But the closer the deadline, the more clearly can be seen the dimension of what we are facing particularly at Carlos III University of Madrid. So much so that our upper management has decided to advance the adoption of the new degrees for the 08-09 academic year.

The movement has lots of implications which are too complex to describe in a single post, but when it comes to my department, it means that there will be new courses adapted already to the Bologna Methodology starting during these days (September 2008). Planning and designing a course is quite a challenge no matter who you ask (see "How to Prepare New Courses without Losing Your Sanity" for a good reference), but it is even greater when the course includes on top of potentially different syllabus, different methodology (we are supposed to be embracing some sort of student centered learning), new teaching load, new schedule, etc.

All these turbulences are nothing compared with the huge delays inflicted in decissions such as which professors will coordinate which courses. In my department, the Bologna phase starts this coming February, because only the first year starts now and no course is taught in the fall semester.

To the point. I´ll be in charge of coordinating a course to be taught during the first semester of the second (sophomore) year in the track that leads to four different degrees on Telecommunication Engineering. The course is cleverly called "Arquitectura de Sistemas" (Systems Architecture) in a trick to fit pretty much whatever we want. The boundary conditions though are pretty interesting, namely:

• 6ECTS course.
• Meets twice a week for 90 minute sessions. One weekly session is with a so called large group (up to 120 students, but there will be way less than that), and the second with a small group of 40 students. There is also the possibility of meeting up to four times in a semester with the group of 20 students.
• Some sort of student centered methodology, or should I say Inductive Teaching is supposed to be used.
• Final exam value is capped to 60% of the final grade.
• Syllabus is about C programming and operating system concepts. 
• Students arrive with two semesters of Java Programming only. No clue on any other programming language.
• C programming is required for several courses down stream (it´ll be difficult to tweak things regarding the core material).
• No other course in the degree is devoted solely to the study of operating system concepts.

On top of these official boundary conditions, and just to make things interesting (as Rober Browning quote says "Your grasp must exceed your reach") I indend to take a serious shot at:

• Start preparing the course with enough time to do it properly (I guess this post entitles me to tick this one.)
• Provide students with a truly genuine learning experience based on real-life motivating examples.
• Connect the course content with their future tasks as engineers.
• Follow the well documented guidelines on how to properly design an engineering course from the ground (and I mean "the ground", reading the white book of the degree) up.
• Make the course one of those students would remember as an Exapin ("Unforgettable Learning Experience" as defined by Miguel Valero in ¿Cómo nos ayuda el Tour de Francia en el diseño de programas docentes centrados en el aprendizaje?.
• Handle a team of teaching staff colleagues and massive amounts of learning material as effectively as possible.
• ... and of course, use technology to handle this workload and probably enhance the experience as a whole.

The amount of ideas populating my head right now is very large. Summer is ideal for brainstorming. One cool thing about this job is that it allows to work while your are walking on the beach? I plan to use this blog as my reflection tool, dumping my progress as well as my decissions both when going forward but also when going back to the drawing board.

Next stop: "Checking the white books of the degrees" T - 12 Months and counting...

Virtually Speaking

Any teaching activity requiring any amount of experimental work faces the problem of replicating the appropriate experimental setting for all the students involved. In a course in biology, this might mean a complex environment in which several work spots need to be deployed with a complete set of tools and measurement instruments. If the course is in programming, the requirement is usually a properly equipped computer (or several of them) with the appropriate programs previously loaded.

The common difficulty for these environments is that the starting point for all the replicas should be identical. The reason for this strong requirement is to facilitate the support by the teaching staff. By providing a common starting point, students then might reach situations that could be easily analyzed by the staff, because the starting point is well known.

In the context of experimental environments that rely on a computer, there has been multiple articles which cover how to provide a fixed, common, well known environment to work. The measures to achieve such property can go as far as to provide every student (or workstation) with a newly installed version of all the tools. This means students work every day in a computer with tools installed just minutes away. The reason behind this (apparently) extreme decision is the trade-off between the amount of administration power given to regular users and how easy is to keep the computer with the tools properly installed. If a laboratory requires experimenting with the installation of new tools, users must be given these privileges. But then, these privileges can be used to completely re-install all the applications. Thus, the solution is to do a fresh install, say every 24 hours. There is a market for tools that automatically replicate the configuration of a given operating system in a large number of computers through a network. They greatly simplify this administration task, although in most cases, this solution is a bit drastic in the sense that at it might take a long time to synchronize a large number of machines (think a university with 20 labs each of them with 20 computers).

Virtualization technology (a concept that was conceived in the early 70s) offers the possibility of embedding one complete computer as single application running in a second computer. This second computer is what is usually called the physical machine whereas the first one is the virtual machine. This trick is pulled thanks to two functions. The first is that the monitor used by the virtual machine is embedded as a regular window in the physical machine. The second is that every resource needed in the virtual machine, the petition is passed along to the physical machine.

For example, the virtual machine needs disk, it uses a chunk of disk in the physical machine. If it needs a network connection, it uses the connection in the physical machine. The same applies for USB devices, keyboard, mouse, etc. The keys you type in the keyboard are read by the virtual machine if the window with the virtual screen is selected.

The crux of this scheme is in what is usually called the virtualization layer which is the one absorbing the complexity of translating all the internal requests in the virtual machine to the proper requests for the physical one. Of course, this layer takes some time to perform such translation, and as a consequence, performance problems may arise.

But with the current processor speeds, disk size, bandwidth, etc, virtualization has emerged as a perfectly valid paradigm to execute any equipment in any hardware platform (at least in theory). One of the companies that has been around for quite some time is VMware. The business model that they have envisioned focuses on those companies that need to equip a large number of programmers with several virtual machines simultaneously installed. Another area in which these machines are very useful is to guarantee compatibility of a product across different platforms. Any team member developing a product may try it almost instantly in a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms by using as many virtual machines.

As a consequence, VMware offers the tool to create a virtual machine from scratch (which means installing the operating system) and the program to virtualize its execution in a physical machine (commonly known simply as a player free of charge. This means that anybody may create a virtual machine, save it (it is simply a folder with several files), and distribute it under certain conditions (you may distribute your virtual machine, but not the player).

One of the courses I teach requires programming in a Linux environment. Not all the students (although the percentage is increasing significantly) have Linux installed in their personal computer. The solution I've adopted consists on creating a virtual machine at the beginning of the semester, make sure it has all the required software installed, I even through a couple of files in the desktop specific for the course I'm teaching, burn a DVD and distribute it among the students (I simply give one of them the DVD, they then apply the extremely effective distribution channel they are used to).

With such approach, the installation problems are all fixed at design time with the virtual machine, I have the guarantee they are all using the same versions of all the tools (which rules out some occasional annoying bugs), and if anything goes terribly wrong, the machine can always be re-deployed by simply replacing the folder containing the virtual machine by its initial values.

VMware is not the only virtualization engine. In fact, there is a powerful open source project called Xen that offers similar functionality, very competitive performance, although reduced compatibility.

The use of such technology in a learning environment is very promising. More and more disciplines require special tools that require special operating systems or packages. By confining these requirements into a virtual machine, the special environment can be immediately available to all the students at a low cost.

Of course, as you may already imagine, when crossing virtualization techniques with licensing schemes, things are complicated. In principle, you might purchase one single license of a tool, install it on a virtual machine and distribute the virtual machine. Vendors have long been aware of this possibility and the licensing schemes have evolved to factor this in. If all the tools you use are open source, there should be no problem. As soon as you use a tool with some sort of license, distributing a virtual machine with that program installed might not work as expected or get you in some trouble.

Close encounters

The university in which I work, Carlos III University of Madrid, has decided to deploy the new degrees fully adapted to the Bologna Declaration the upcoming course. This might seem as a minor fact unless you've spent some time as teaching staff in a University. Changes are very delicate, and if the change involves degrees, schedules, number of groups, calendar, methodology, etc. then we are clearly facing a huge challenge. This transition will be a matter of a later post, but I'd like to comment on something derived from this situation.

Due to the need to adapt quickly to teaching methodology which is "student centered" instead of "professor centered" there has been a few talks and courses at the University. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting in this talk by Miguel Valero a professor of engineering at a school in the Barcelona Area. Interestingly enough, I sat on one of his classes when I was in college. It was back on 1987, and both of us went a long way so as our paths crossed again. The topic of the talk was how to adapt engineering courses to a collaborative teaching methodology.

I exchanged a few remarks with him, and one of them was along the lines of how this type of activity, that is, studying how to better teach concepts, involve students, etc. is considered as a second class research. Leaving that feeling aside, I asked him for interesting references, and he mentioned Richard Felder. I know about the work of Richard Felder at least since 2000. Heck, I even started this blog with a post on how the Felder test was run in one of my classes. Bit it was not until Miguel Valero pointed to him as the source for teaching techniques that I started to pay close attention to his work.

Luckily (and is an example for the rest of the scientific community) Prof. Felder keeps a very organized and exhaustive list of publications on his web page. I started to read some of his work and I must say that I now understand the expression drinking from a fire hose. His studies are, in my opinion, very well sustained in empirical evidence, which is so hard to obtain in the area of instructional technology.

But the thing that impressed me the most are what he calls his strong opinions. After reading some of his pieces in Random Thoughts, I came to the conclusion that I also have strong opinions similar to those ones. Most of them I keep to myself because I consider it would be rude to air them. Some other, I've made visible in some occasions and were not received with enthusiasm. The shift toward student centered learning is something long overdue. I cannot believe how teaching staff lives so comfortable in the state of minimum energy of grabbing the 5, 10, 15 year old slides and put students through a slow process of (as Felder would say) Death by Powerpoint.

This transition to the Bologna Declaration seems to try to achieve once and for all a change on this mentality which is clearly obsolete and is putting universities and students light years apart by the second. Yes, I think is good to have collaborative sessions, I know you are supposed to do that with the same staff, but it is still good for the students. Yes, you have to keep the attention of students in 90 min. sessions instead of the old 50+50mins. But, hey, it's simple, its YOUR JOB! And yes, you have to motivate the students, is it difficult? Yup. Is it becoming more and more challenging? Yup. Do you have to multiplex these problems with your particular take at Publish or Perish? Right again. But again, these are the rules of the game. All these problems are the basic premises to work with. And if you are not part of the solution..., you are part of the problem.

Version control in a first year course. No news is good news

I've been teaching a first year course since its first edition, seven years ago. The main objective for students is to be able to write a somewhat complicated program with non-trivial data structures in the assembly language of the IA-32. Controversies aside (is it a suitable platform? suitable topic?), the course has a fairly common structure. A few theory sessions at the beginning of the course, and then a period where students have 1 lab in which they work for 7 days, teaching staff tries to grade it as soon as possible, and feedback is returned.

There used to be a time where this effort had an automatic translation into some percentage of the final grade, but due to some serious difficulties with plagiarism (which would be material for another post), the decision was made to not take into account these labs directly, but as a consequence, design the final exam clearly along the lines of the exercises presented in these sessions.

Trying to emphasize on the need for quick feedback for students, an automatic platform was deployed that tests all the received submissions and produces a small report. The application runs every 15 minutes and is available through the entire work week. The results are published in a publicly available web page where students are identified by a nick. The effect of this application has been fairly dramatic, although to be entirely honest, I cannot sustain such claim on empirical objective observations, but simply on my perception as the course coordinator.

One of the stumbling blocks we were hitting with this paradigm was the large turnaround time between a student having some serious doubts about a portion of the code, and the time help was given by any member of the technical staff during the week they were working in the assignment. Although teaching staff have fairly frequent office hours, the burden of setting up an appointment, discuss the exercise, get some suggestions, go back to the machine and implement the changes would usually amount to at least a day.

We saw students coming to our offices with no previous appointment, the printout of the program in their hands and expecting some quick advice on how to proceed. Version control turned out to be of great help for such situations. No more code going back and forth as email attachments. A question in the course forum has a name attached to it, from there you get the code, take a look at it, take your time, think about the answer, and finally post it on the forum. Nice.

Another interesting new situation popped up by chance when this new tool was coupled with a chat application. Students have access to a chat application (with a web based interface which simplifies its deployment and adoption). Teaching staff occasionally connect to the same chat. In several occasions, students were working on their assignments and was able to assist them as if I was sitting next to them. The version control system offered the code to both ends of the conversation, and the chat allowed us to talk about this line of code or that data definition (with precise line numbers).

In certain situations, the chat session morphed into a fairly effective debugging session. Not simply pointing students to the mistake, but guiding them to see more details about the location in the code where the anomaly is happening. Having such type of sessions, in a traditional learning environment, would require to schedule a lab, announce the session, prepare some material, etc. It would not be as effective as the type of right-here-right-now interaction you achieve combining chat and version control.

And finally, another interesting (and again informal) observation is the difference in expressions and conversation flow between a face to face in-class interaction, and a chat session. From what I could gathered, the media is natural for them. They quickly write fairly colloquial expressions. Things that you would never hear or see in a conventional classroom. I'm not talking about distasteful remarks, they are just simply highly colloquial expressions specifically used in this type of communication channels.

So, to conclude, despite thinking that version control was a sophisticated tool, simply because I got to use it when I was out of school, students use it with astounding normality. Just by chance, the adoption of this tool was paired with the presence of a chat room turning into a new set of scenarios fairly productive to solve questions, doubts, etc. I was expecting a fair amount of email questions at the begining of the course about how to use the version control program. Instead, I simply had "no news", which in this case, they were indeed "good news".

LMSs are NOT the center of the universe

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) have evolved as to behave as typical all in one solutions. But such battle is bound to be lost sooner rather than later. In the recent years, LMSs have moved a few steps behind regular Internet culture. When the net had massive amounts of pages published, the LMSs were offering basic document publishing capabilities. Now, while the net is going toward social applications, personalized environments, collaboration, etc. LMSs are still a few steps behind and still offer fairly closed environments in which either you log in and perform all the tasks within the platform, or else...

But in my opinion, the emerging Internet culture is to take things from different locations and shape them in a personal environment in order to obtain a fully customized window to the net. In these scenarios, LMSs are fairly rigid. Almost no platform offers a service oriented approach such that the functionality of an LMS may be seamlessly integrated in a neutral personal environment. Widgets are new appearing as a first creature of this family, and although still in an "emerging" phase, they are clearly outlining the future for accessing services in the net.

Dai Griffith, Paul Sharples and their team have released a tool called Widget Server. They have interesting scenarios where widgets not only are used for learning experiences but integrated in the design of conventional Units of Learning. Kudos to the Bolton team.

Agile Open Source Content Production. (Part II of III)

The extra step

From the analysis of plain HTML file production, we reached the conclusion that rather than having the author directly producing the final product, a better approach would be to use a simplified input paradigm and obtain the final material as the result of some generic transformation. This generic authoring paradigm is usually how most of the material in the net is produced. However, when it comes to producing learning content, there is this tendency to let the teaching staff take care of everything. That is, from conceiving the first ideas to producing the final product to reach the students.

My theory is that from observing the rest of contexts in which authoring is a key part, this approach of one person does everything is dangerously limited. The type of material that can be produced is extremely rigid, and therefore, the slightest change or increment in functionality is doomed. A more effective authoring paradigm for learning scenarios would be one based on processing paths. A simplified and highly specialized set of formats are provided as entry points. Examples: a template for regular course notes, another for submissions, something for tests, another template for group interaction, something equally simple for simulations, etc. From that pool of processes the author would pick whatever is most convenient and forget about the details of how such material is actually produced.

Of course, looking at how similar all teaching staff behaves, they'll ultimately want to control every single detail of the presentation, but that could be provided gradually through a more sophisticated interface conveniently hidden for regular users yet accessible for power users. This scheme is nothing really new. It's being used in multiple scenarios. The aspect that I think it can be greatly improved is the information exchange between authors and the "entity" that process such content.

In a recent experience, we set off to produce massive amounts of on-line material. The final product could not be considered as media rich material. Once the material was received by the production team, the final product was made available to students in the learning management system. The exchange between authors and the production team was massive, since each of the modules contained a fairly large number of images, figures, graphics, etc. Now, out of all the possible formats out there, old, new, good, bad, ugly, etc. the one chosen for the material to leave the author hands on to the production team was... yes. Microsoft Word.

So the question that I cannot take out of my mind is, why when facing such a complex creation and production cycle, requiring a significant effort on both parts, such a format was chosen? Authors were fine with the decision, after all, it's probably one of the platform they're most familiar with, but the production team seemed like they had no other better alternative to offer. Word is fine.

Why is word so fine for such a complicated process? What happens if the material really moves on to the "multimedia intensive" category? The answer still remains an unknown for me. Are we producing the best material given the circumstances? Or is our production process severely limited by the design cycle and the tools that were chosen? If I ever get the answer, I'll make sure it pops up in this blog. In the meantime, I have to go back to my "word authoring" (I'm one of the authors).

Combining Personal Learning Environments and Insitututional LMSs

There is an interesting post in Scott Wilson's blog titled PLE and the institution that discusses how the conventional learning support tools deployed by institutions can be reconciled with emerging personal environments. The answer is called a personal learning environment or PLE and it seems destined to integrate with current platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and similar platforms.

In the web pages of the courses I teach, I get more and more the feeling that what really matters is not so much the content itself, but how to make the information available to the right tools. Let me give you a trivial example. There is a page that contains the detailed schedule of the course. I am pondering now the possibility of serving the properly formatted calendar data to facilitate programs in the student side to use it. If there is something that internet is putting to a limit is information efficiency. Why should I create a page with its header, footer, tables, etc. if the only information I want to convey is a simple schedule?

I agree with Scott's vision that learning management systems need to evolve toward service serving entities. Still, some minimalistic infrastructure needs to be put into place to jumpstart the exchange of relevant information among participants (forum RSS, blog URLs, etc.) but then serve all its content in a way that is friendly to any personal environment. After all, my students are paying attention to many other things, not only my course, and therefore, its presence in their personal virtual spaces should be according to its significance.

It is interesting though to see how we have platforms are going in opposite directions. Some LMSs are going to great distances to provide functionalities such as blogs, wikis, etc. with the irony that students already have such tools, and what is worse, with way more bells and whistles. The only advantage would derive from functionality that is simplified because of a tight integration with the LMS, but several services do not withstand this test. Email is a good example. Very few LMSs offer an email solution. The reason is because it is assumed that users already have their email needs properly solved, and therefore it is up to the platform to accept that fact and adapt to it (by keeping an email for each users to then send notifications).

LMSs should now be offering numerous widgets or RSS feeds. I actually see RSS feeds as a special case of a Widget. It is just that in a widget you control both the information exchange and the visualization capability at the destination. With an RSS, you only control the information exchange, and let some other program (the reader or aggregators) to do the visualization. LMSs have plenty of information suitable to be served through widgets. Think of assignments, tests, suggested reading, notes, etc.

The course page as such would almost disappear, perhaps a simple page publishing the required information to use the widgets, and the institutional application would interact with the users mostly through services.

Agile Open Source Content Production (Part I of III)

Open Educational Resources seem to finally get some serious momentum. It might be because there are several initiatives (OpenContent, Creative Commons Education, Conexions Repository, MIT Open Courseware, etc.) all of them pushing in different directions such that the presence of this philosophy in the net is beginning to reach a wider audience.

So much, so wrong

Although the amount of what it could be called open content in a not too strict sense currently available in the net is significant, the same cannot be said for its organization, licensing, and distribution. I think part of the problem is reaching a level of maturity in the creation, distribution and most importantly licensing processes such that pushing a properly created open educational content in the net is trivial.

In this series of posts I'd like to focus solely on the content production phase using only open-source tools. . Educational content is constantly produced all around the globe. Reusing, though, is not so popular, and it seems like the gigantic effort deployed to formalize content reuse seems a clear case of useless over-engineering (see the post "David Wiley on Learning Objects" in this blog). A down-to-earth analysis of what is already happening at other contexts such pictures, videos or audio-clips is in needed to try to replicate such effectiveness in the context of learning material.

A Thousand Mile Walk

Let us start with the basics. Educational material can range from plain simple HTML documents to top-notch multimedia material. But at the basic level, creating a text, including some pictures, organizing the text with some structure such as sections, paragraphs, lists, enumerations and tables is the bread and butter of the initial stage at content production. It is at this level that we encounter already the first tough choice. Which is the right tool/methodology?

Let us assume you ask a set of authors to produce each one some not too advanced digital learning material for a degree you're planning to put together. What is the most probable tool these authors will use? In my experience, the least common denominator (and I would emphasize the word "least") is Microsoft Word (MSW). I find such editor suitable for certain tasks, but extremely unsuitable due to its unpredictable behavior derived from the multiple aspects of a document structure that are hidden (have you ever tried to perform "creative" changes on a table?).

If the goal is to facilitate content production and at the same time allow for easy reuse, the editor that I'm using right now for this post might be the answer. A WYSIWYG editor that produces simple HTML. Allows for basic enumeration, font effects, links, images and that's it. But using this editor already introduces one of the crucial factors: processing the source.

My take is that there is no way to scape from some level of "source processing". That is, hoping that an author produces content in a way that can be directly published in the right place is, in my opinion, an utopia. So, once we introduce this processing step, we might as well reflect on what would be the right format to produce code at a first level. But first, what exactly should be done in this processing step? I would include all issues related to framing, style, font selection, etc. This is nothing new, is simply adapting what is being considered now as the right approach to html page design (moving all style issues to style sheets) to content production.

I use for my content production a transformation from the source in Docbook to final HTML contained in XSL stylesheets. It is similar to the environment I just described, and what's more important:

• You may edit the source files with any plain-text open-source editor. You find these for any platform.
• There is a comprehensive set of stylesheets that transform the source into HTML. The structure of these stylesheets is highly modular, which means that you may use them out-of-the-box, or if some customization is required, only the relevant modules may be easily "extended" (that is, modified) and the rest remains untouched.
• There is also an open source xslt processor (xsltproc) which can be used to execute this processing phase and obtain the final HTML.

Hello Reality!

Going back to the initial scenario, your set of authors would produce what it could be called a simplified HTML (Docbook can be seen as highly complex, but the basic elements are highly intuitive). A team of style experts would then design the proper stylesheets and process the source files to produce the final result. Although such scenario might be considered far fetched, there are advantages, the relevance of which is increasing with this tendency to open-sharable learning content:

1. Simplification of the content creation phase for authors. This is very important because lowering the complexity of the production stage to the author would surely increase the material finally produced.
2. Extremely flexible production stage. This is something that is seriously undermining the current production cycle. Introducing changes in an already produced material seems like climbing Mount Everest. I think the main reason is the lack of automation in the processing step. With the proposed scenario, this complication would be greatly reduced.
3. Reusing content would be very easy. You would have two levels of pain. The first one is sharing directly the produced HTML, which is far from ideal, but is what is happening now at the level of Internet. But on a second level you may as well share the source files and stylesheets separately. The problem of adapting the material to your new environment would be in the right starting point, modify the processing step to suit your needs.

The moral of the story

So if the evolution of content production is toward a simplified user interface, plus a (more or less) complex processing stage, we may as well slightly orient them toward facilitating a more effective re-use of the results. Bite the bullet and use a simplified input platform for authors an a highly customizable and flexible processing stage.

Self Visualization Cloud

I just found this many-eyes.com, a site that lets you visualize datasets in many different ways. I just tried it with the content of this blog up to this post and here is the result when showing 2 word values.

I think the result is quite impressive. The main topics in the blog appear there, learning objects, learning design, teaching staff, learning experience. The possibility of choosing between 1 and 2 word tag cloud is crucial. With one word grouping, only very generic things such as learning, student, teaching, time and so forth appear as relevant.

Several observations derived from this little experiment. I would be more than comfortable if the blog hosting application rates my blog automatically with an application similar to many-eyes and obtains the keywords automatically. Also, another advantage of this type of visualization is to have a second opinion on the topics you write about and also very important, on how do you write about them. Seeing expressions like "highly questionable" appear in the cloud seem to suggest a tendency to abuse them.

Another potential application of these type of tools is to automatically generate a summary for a given document. Think of the latest and greatest survey on <fill with your preferred topic> elaborated by the most prestigious institution you can think of. Is is worth plowing through it? May be the cloud gives you a very good initial answer.

David Wiley on Learning Objects

I just came across this talk given by David Wiley about Open Content. Very refreshing to see the (almost) father of the Learning Object terminology reflecting on what happened in the last 10 years and how come learning objects started as an intuitively powerful idea that has yet to be fulfilled.

I love the part where he partly blames an engineering invasion for how learning objects have become a huge acronym soup with specifications and standards that everybody claims they comply with, but nobody actually does it faithfully. As an engineer, I'm sorry, but I have to agree with him. More often than not, we place these things called "generality", "comprehensive", "flexible", "powerful" way in from of this one "simplicity". Not only that, but then we tend to be shocked when we see that the fruit of our effort is not considered as a real breakthrough. We engineers, at some point in time, always think that the idea we are working on is a breakthrough. The problem is that we are too busy working on it to realize what is happening around us.

But the best part of the talk is when learning objects are compared with the overall evolution of internet. For every complex specification that is supposed to be used in learning out there, there is its equivalent in regular internet culture that provides something fairly similar, just orders of magnitude simpler. Then you're faced with the choice of joining the 0.1% of content creators that actually use these specifications, or instead follow the remainder 99.9% and go straight to the point and use current tools such as RSS syndication, wikis, blogs, etc.

I think a simplification of the overall learning object paradigm was long overdue. Specially when the rest of internet users just figured out how to "reuse" bits and pieces of information from one context to another. Can you guess what is the crucial property that is behind these trend? Open content, of course. Now the question that comes to my mind is: How can it be that a huge number of scientists with all the time in their hands trying to figure out how to take the concept of learning objects to its full adoption fail miserably and the internet as a whole has simply solved a similar problem? If any area should be the first to solve the reuse, it should be education (may be the second behind software, but anyway).

The claim that Open Content is the only way left to evolve when producing content is also very compelling. The internet has changed a lot in the last few years, but all these changes are pointing to a direction in which content needs to be made available, personalized and with flexible rights that allow adaptation. Who knows, now that we finally figured out what a learning object should be and how it should be created, the so anxiously expected revolution in learning content is finally arriving. I just hope we don't have to wait another 10 years for it.

Size does matter. Snack Learning

I recently read an article describing the tendency toward Snack TV. Entertainment is changing very rapidly and it seems like there is a tendency to reduce the size of the "entertainment packages". The longer a show is, the more difficult is for a viewer to stick watching it for the entire duration.

I think this tendency is partially due to the amount of information that is surrounding us. There is so much to see and so interesting, that spending a significant amount of time viewing one single piece of entertainment seems like a waste, because we are missing so many others...

I"ll push a bit the analogy here. A similar situation is happening with learning, at least in the area of technology (which is the one I maintain a daily contact). There used to be a time in which the concepts, techniques, theories a student needed to know, that courses would cover them with no problem. Today, the story is very different. For example, there are so many programming languages, tools for designing circuits, simulators, emulators, etc. that instead of going for a complete coverage, educational institutions need to prepare students to deal with an ever increasing body of knowledge.

An alternative approach could be to provide small content educational bits. Very focussed in one single concept, explain it straight to the point. Craft a clever example that exposes the concept clearly. I recently came to produce a couple of this (shall I call it) learning resources and I feel they are more likely to capture the attention of the learner then conventional slides, notes and text book chapters.

The piece was a simple screen capture explaining the behavior of some strange programming language construction. It lasts less than five minutes, it shows a window with an editor and a set of commands and lines that are manipulated to expose the resulting behavior of this construct. I have no quantitative evidence, but watching the screen cast, I think the average student would get the concept quickly.

In their paper Re-Learning e-Learning, Reggie Van Lee and colleagues seem to suggest that this tendency can be deduced from the evolution of the e-learning industry in the last years. They argue that the e-learning consumer is practical and task-focused. The so called "single-serve" education provides resources that are targeted to one single concept.

This tendency should make us teachers carefully think about what is the best way to organize concepts to be understood by our students. My guess is that teachers are willing to try new ideas if they significantly increase the effectiveness of their classes, and this type of material could be one additional dimension to explore.

Get a real digital life first!

Aside from other interesting features, Second Life has a pretty good marketing department. Although the functionality of the application has remained unchanged over the last months, you still see a sustained presence in the press as well as several blogs. I recently read a post in Scott Wilson's Blog about how these 3D universes are a bit too close to the real life to the point of inheriting its limitations.

I have my iGoogle page. At first it was a bit of an experiment, then I found a couple of meaningful gadgets and kept going back to it, then I set it as my starting page when I fire the browser, and now it has become as familiar as my own living room. After thinking the reasons for this change, I came to the conclusion that in that page, I go across several links, articles, headlines, agenda, weather, etc in a matter of seconds. If I had to process all this information one page at a time, I would probably spend hours. So, at least in my "one person experimental setting", such type of pages have allowed me to process more information (another issue is if I really increase my productivity derived from this information processing).

I'll say up front that I haven't tried SL. When I reached the form that allowed me to download the client and saw that there was no Linux version, I bailed out. So my SL experience comes mostly from reading about it. Having said that, one of the things I'm not willing to give up is this wonderful capability that the new Web 2.0 is allowing me. This is bending the cyberspace and be in many places (that is information sources) almost instantly. This is probably the biggest single advantage of the way cyberspace is shaping up with this 2.0 stuff. But that is precisely something you do not have in SL. Sure, you may go from one place to another no matter the physical distance but that is the equivalent to browsing from one web page to another. And that's something I do less and less. So my take is that SL would be 3D Web 1.0.

Another drawback that I saw in several posts recently is the fact that from the marketing point of view, the numbers simply don't add up. The success of many business models in the web are based on massive access to web sites, but that is precisely a limitation deep in the design of SL. As far as I understand, the geographical distribution corresponds with server load distribution, therefore, you may not have a huge crowd watching a show, unless you have a huge amount of computing resources. An article that I read about this issue was quoting an engineer from SL stating that this limitation was part of the core of the design, and they knew well in advance that the current approach would not scale at all.

So, I personally am beginning to perceive SL as a cute application but in itself not very useful when compared with pure Web 2.0 Cyberspace. Perhaps SL is what AltaVista was for search engines, an early arrival to a field that needed significant innovation to finally explode and gain momentum.

A different issue though is when SL is applied to education. Many institutions have opened a venue in SL. It is not clear exactly what for, but, as this person from the marketing department from Coca Cola said, "we are Coca Cola, we must be there". Student interaction is at the crux of how to deploy an exciting educational experience. This interaction is probably the aspect that has changed more dramatically. SL is yet another channel in front of us, although we have not a clear idea on how to take advantage of it.

A few additional goodies are coming together that could potentially crack the nut of using these 3D environments in education. Mashup Tools are popping all over the place and a large percentage of them rely on geographical information. When mixed with 3D virtual environments, a few nice applications may appear such as virtual labs really closed to reality, 3D design tools for houses, chips, plants, mechanical devices, nanotechnology , etc. But I am sure most of you would agree that although easy to imagine, we are still far away from these scenarios to become regular educational material. As always, some very exciting times ahead of us.

Nerds not alone in Net

A study carried by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya co-directed by Manuel Castells and Imma Tubella just revealed that the persons that most regularly use the net, are more sociable. I find the conclusion surprising, because there is this tendency to identify net surfers with these lonely persons that have to resort to the net to complement an otherwise pathetic social life.

Au contraire. Netters are more sociable, have more friends and have less depressions. I'm sure these statements as such do not appear in the nitty gritty details of the study, but the newspaper carrying the article crafted the statement.

My reflection on this is that the Internet is a phenomena much bigger that we think. For starters, it is no longer restricted to a small bunch of nerds hooked to their computers. It is reaching an immense amount of people and this is shaping the way the net is evolving. The cool thing about this trend is that the more people participate, the more powerful it becomes. Take the on-line dating services. If it were used by three or four singles out there, there would be no point on trying them out. Currently, there are several services making good money with such service, which by the way, did not have such a wide market before the net arrived.

Turning to the educational field, which is what I'm more interested in, we have yet one more data fact that shows us how much the new generations are different from a few years back. The study says that 83% of of youngsters between 15 and 24 are regular users of these technologies. In principle we could think that with such audience, universities would make heavy use of them in their classes, but the reality is much more complex. Of course students have (almost all) their class notes published in the university platform, receive scores with SMS, and teaching staff make heavy use of PowerPoint, but these technologies were hot 15 years ago, but the technological pace is much higher. The net is telling us that people are moved by social recognition, they like to work together, they enjoy sharing their experiences, etc. With such new habits, it seems to me that making the most of the students is about to take a completely different meaning.

It is not the message, nor the messenger. Do something!

A study shows that in a sample of US universities 50% of all self-declared engineering majors drop out. The GPA of those who leave are identical to those who stay. The study mentions a near-universal antipathy towards the first year instructional experience as pointed out by Mayo in Games for science and engineering education. "Almost all (98%) of those who leave engineering and 86% of those who stay cite poor teaching by faculty as a major concern". Under these premises, you teach engineering courses, you are loosing audience at a way passed alarming rate. Do something! Although these figures are derived from educational institutions in the US, this trend is equally present in my educational institution. Sometimes I get the feeling that what I'm achieving with my first year engineering course is not part of an engineering education but simply put, discriminating those students willing to tolerate the current lecture formats from those who don't. The reason given to justify current lecture formats is simply economical, the number of students may raise at almost no cost.

The previously mentioned article refers to one of the few quantitative studies to verify the effect of the pedagogy (or the lecture format) in this incredibly high drop out rate. It is part of the book by Elaine Seymour "Talking about Leaving" (Westview Press, 1997). In this study a metric is given based in pre and post-tests to measure how effective is a learning style. The interesting conclusion is that the most effective courses are those that use "interactive engagement", and what is even more surprising, the quality of the lecturer does not matter. As pointed by Mayo, "Even a superb highly entertaining lecturer appears to make little difference to the depth of understanding achieved by students".

So, If I get it right, it is not the message, because the topics covered in these courses were not under discussion. It is not the messenger, because lecturer quality was not the determining factor. What is it? Seems like it is the channel used by the messenger to convey the message: the lecture format. All right then. Now that we know where is the problem, let's do something about it.

But as it turns out, the solution is not as near as we think. As pointed out by Marc Prensky, the digital natives are arriving at the higher level institutions, and although some of them come with the perception that the University is an exciting place where they will learning about exciting topics, not much time is needed for them to learn that such images if quite far from reality. Teaching styles are most of them identical. A person at the front of a class talking about a topic that has been teaching for ages exactly in the same way. Why such lecture format seems to be now in a really deep crisis? After all, it has been like that for ages.

Part of the answer I think is due to the radical change in which information is being managed in society. After all, part of the activity in a university by the teaching staff is handling information. Some professors are the gatekeepers letting students delve into knowledge. But now, access to information is virtually free, therefore, classes need to be more about interaction rather than simply pouring previously prepared information. Even if the final set of notes is carefully crafted, students are expecting more.

The profile of these students are 100% digital natives. They probably have their FaceBook account a few years ago, they use IRC more than you use your phone and they have barely no problem adopting new technologies (useful or not, is not the point, they just try it). What is the best way to find that middle point between effective motivation for these students and maintaining the rigor and depth required to absorb the concepts in a course? Using again an article by Marc Prensky, the solution is easy. Ask them! They are the natives. You are an immigrant. May be you don't have the time nor the resources to do podcasting, or chat, or blogging, or metaverses, but they do! So the suggestion is to leverage on such potential and capture its energy to focus on a more enjoyable learning experience.

Because even in these times of continuous change, teachers still have an edge. We have a wider scope view of the entire landscape of education. Ok, the new technologies are making a lot of fuzz, but let's be realistic, writing a blog and handing in some write up can be equally productive or equally useless depending on what? On the methodology behind it. And who is in char of that? Yup, you got it. The teacher.

These are really interesting times. On one hand, I personally perceive that the days of the good old master lecture are over. Or at least, the pressure to get out of such format is higher than ever. Mix this with the upcoming Bologna overhaul, and we have very interesting times ahead of us.

Learning to Design

Within this frantic evolution pace suffered by current learning techniques, one interesting aspect is the ability to capture the events that are supposed to happen in a learning experiences by means of a "script". Course deployment, although a simple task in the past, is increasingly complex due to the variety of interactions and the irruption of technology. From the past scenario in which deploying a course amounted simply to have all the material prepared in advance, go to class on time, supervised the assignments, grading, final exam and producing scores, new courses require significantly more effort.

The simple presence of an elearning platform brings along the non trivial problem of user management. Accessing the material in a course means restricting permissions only to a specific set of users usually including teaching staff, students and occasionally some additional user. For every technological aspect this platform offers, one or several management tasks usualy come along with it. Another example, if a forum needs to be used in a course, it needs to be instantiated, generally, only persons involved in the course are allowed to read messages, so permissions need to be assigned, etc. Most of these tasks are supposed to be provided painlessly by the elearning platform, but reality is sometimes quite different.

The specification called Learning Design proposes to apply to learning experiences the same technique used to replicate a theatrical play or a musical piece: write a script or a score. By creating scripts of learning experiences, the deployment phase would be much simpler, since the elearning platform would (hypothetically speaking, I'm affraid) read the script and perform all the necessary tasks. This specification has seen the light around four years ago and there are some tools out there that support both the authoring phase as well as the deployment phase of learning experiences.

Our research group is playing with one of these tools to automatically deploy one of these scripts. This means that in order to play with it, we need scripts that describe experiences to then see how well the tool is responding. Which brings me to the point of this post. Lately, I've been devoting quite some time to learn how to use such formalism (thus, Learning to Design a learning experience). A quick contact with this idea and are immediately hit by its complexity. The idea is pretty simple though. A learning experience is similar to a theatrical play. The play has a sequence of acts in which a set of actors previously assigned to roles, perform a set of activities. But since the description needs to be such that a machine has to be capable of processing it automatically, the formalism strives for generality, which in turn translated into a very rich and elaborated set of features that make it difficult to master for the novice user.

This is a very good example of a technological framework trying to solve a complex real problem. But as Dijkstra said one time, the real difficulty is to distinguish inherent complexity from artificially create complexity. Specifications like Learning Design are designed to provide a very generic framework. This translates in a large and complex set of building blocks that are significantly counterintuitive for the regular user.

The usual solution for this scenario is that, although this specification is complex, tools will be produced that disguise this complexity from the regular user. In my experience, the promise is still a long way to be fulfilled. The tools that are slowly appearing encounter numerous difficulties to effectively hide this complexity simultaneously to providing a generic design environment.

In our research group a platform for interpreting these scripts has been implemented. We were very interested in checking if the interpreter was up to the challenge of processing the scripts being produced all over the world. To help with this task, we offer an on-line server in which you may upload your course description and see if it behaves in the platform as you initially conceived it at design time.

The received scripts were all extremelly simple. Most of the powerful features offered by Learning Design were not used at all. This leads us to think that right now, although the specification is out there, the tools and the methodology is not simple enough to attract authors and describe their courses in such manner.

And the outlook does not offer much to be optimistic about. The idea of capturing the script of a learning experience has been proven to be useful in other contexts, but the authoring phase is right now so complex, that it is perceived as not worth the effort.

This is yet another instance in which an intuitive idea of how learning should be deployed is formalized and conceived to be done automaticlly, the increase in complexity of the authoring phase, which is systematically ignored, is pushing this formalism toward the realm of ideas that although offering interesting new approaches, they never get off the ground when it comes to widespread adoption.

For those readers interested in playing with this specification, they need first to understand what Learning Design provides, then use a Learning Design editor like the one offered by the Reload Project and then, once you created your own script, try to deploy it in a learning environment such the one in the Gradient Lab.

Climbing to Bologna

One of the hottest topics that occupies a significant part of the discussions at college level all around Europe is the transition to comply with the Bologna Declaration. To summarize it, the declaration is a succint 2 page document where universities of 29 countries in Europe agree to mainly six objectives:

• Comparable degrees
• A system with two main cycles: undergraduate and graduate
• The ECTS credit system to account for the activities in a course
• Facilitate mobility for students and teachers
• Promote co-operation in quality assurance
• Promote the necessary dimensions in higher education

Each of these goals may almost justify a book about them, but in this post, I'd like to focus on the last one, which is, I believe, the most ambiguous. Promoting the necessary dimensions in higher education is abstract enough to allow for wide variety of interpretations.

In my scarce contact with this "Bologna wave", aside from the degree reorganization, durations, etc, the issue that captivates me is how a change on pedagogical methods gets also thrown into the package. After reading carefully the declaration, the only feasible explanation is that this one of those necessary dimensions that needs to change.

The spill generally goes pretty much like this (or at least its Spanish version). Students usually sit through countless hours of plenary classes in which one professor is talking about a topic and students passively pay attention and take some notes. There might be some courses that have some additional experimental work, but the most important portion of the course material is based around these plenary sessions.

Although far from providing concrete measures, the supposedly new education reduces this class time and increases the required time for the students to work on their own. As a complement, the teacher moves out of the traditional "center of attention" into a more secondary role of "facilitator". Techniques such as collaborative learning, problem based learning, etc. are shown as examples in which the teacher facilitates the learning process and lets students discover their own findings rather than giving them the prepared spill.

As explained in a previous post in this blog, the change from the current status quo is going to be difficult and what I want to elaborate is in the obstacles for such transition. The reaction that I see more often among my peers is the always easy trick of "simplifying the argument". If the teacher leaves this role of center of attention by one which is the "facilitator", put this together with an decreasing level of interest on the student side, and the landscape appears pretty bleak.

Most people I've heard talking about this transition are not at all excited with "facilitating" learning to the students. It is much more comfortable to just give the facts and then wait for the final exam to obtain the mandatory score. The main complaint is that if the student motivation is at its lowest (or so they say), "facilitating" is perceived as a measure to encourage even lower motivation rather than increasing it.

My perception of this "facilitating" role is different, and I see it as a much more effective than the current strategy. I would like to illustrate my point of view with a "mountain hiking" example that happen to me a few years ago.

We decided with a bunch of friends to climb the highest peak of the Pyrenees, Aneto (3404m, 11168ft). Given our experience as hikers (amateurs), the hike length (6 hours up, 4 hours down) and the difficulty level, we decided to hire a guide for the climb. I actually compare this climb, challenging but doable for us, with the challenging of learning the topics of a new course at a university level. With the guide, there are still several possible scenarios:

1. Right at the beginning of the climb, the guide starts walking at a fairly aggressive pace. Some of us would follow him for a while, but since he is in better shape, only one of us stays with him all the way to the top.
2. The guide sets a fairly reasonable pace. Keeps looking at all the team members, stops at certain times when he considers fit, explains the upcoming difficulties, the length of each leg, plays some tricks to keep the team motivation high, and gets us all together to the top.
3. The guide takes each one of us in his hands and takes us to the top.

Which one of the three scenarios is the one currently happening in the learning scenarios I described earlier? Leaning too much on the plenary sessions is embracing the climbing scenario number 1. The teacher is the guide. Starts walking. Whoever is able to follow me, fine. Whoever is NOT able to follow me, what do I care? I'll get to the top at the stipulated time put the exam, get the score, that's it.

The scenario that some people use to argue against this upcoming changes is scenario number 3. "Facilitate" does not mean to take the students on your own hands and drop them at the top. They have to do the walk, but this walk is tricky, long, painful at times, it might be discouraging. The climb needed some technical gear at some point (crampons). The guide new when to use it, gave us a few tips, explained why did we need them, but he did not put the crampons to each one of us.

Pushing the analogy a bit further, when we reached the last stretch to the top, known as "Mahoma's bridge", things got complicated. The bridge is a thin rocky ridge that we crossed all tied up with a rope. The guide carried the rope, tied us up and lead the pack. Gave us again some tricks and suggestions as to how better approach the ridge and we all made it to the top (check the pic)

The interesting anecdote about the whole drill, which is in part why I chose it for the analogy if teaching techniques, is that, once at base camp, we unanimously agreed that without the guide, none of us would've made the top. Having a person that knows all the details of the route next to you is much more important than what we initially thought.

I envision a teaching scenario shifting from the teacher saying "Catch me if you can", to a scenario in which the teacher plays the guide role. Know the route in advance, anticipates difficulties, analyzes possible problems, but takes not a single bit of realism nor effort from the whole experience.

Should I stay or should I blog?

What kind of blog is this without a post wondering about blogging itself? There seems to be this tendency of sooner rather than later commenting the reasons that brings you to have your own blog. I thought I would get it over with as soon as possible and enter the hall of fame of the introspective blogs. Here we go.

I basically have two reasons, which could be reduced to one. Mumbling ideas is probably one of the things that most of the people do with more or less frequency. Being in an academic environment where you are supposed to devote a significant part of your time to teaching and research, mumbling is actually a habit. Cross this habit with technology and an adoption threshold virtually non existent, and you have the right mixture. My blog is the place where these mumblings are forced out of the informal realm of abstract thoughts into the wild.

José Saramago said in "La Caverna" that "In many cases, the manifested thought is, let us just say, pushed to the front line be another one which did not consider appropriate to manifest itself". The blog is a catalyst in the presence of which some thoughts that otherwise would never see the light become a reality.

Since most of my work involves this type of activities, a blog seems like an interesting instrument. If with such premises, you also obtain feedback on your opinions, then it is even better, but the good part is that even without it, it's worth the time.

There, I Did it!

US vs. Bologna

Much has been said and written about the upcoming full blown University studies reform that derived from the Bologna declaration. Even though most of the uncertainty affects European institutions, how will US Universities react to it? The question is far from trivial, because an important percentage of the student intake of US universities comes from overseas.

I read an interesting post titled Graduate Education, Post-Bologna in which the trend in American Universities toward the recognition of a three year bachelor degree is analyzed.

The crux of the issue is that European universities seem to be heading towards a three year undergraduate degree followed by a two year master degree. The article seems to draw a landscape neither in favor nor against the recognition of three year degrees as regular bachelors in US universities. Most institutions are now realizing that they need to take this decision on a case by case basis.

I think this is good news, because aside from the change in length, in theory, together with your degree at a European university, there is an additional official document stating clearly the type of topics you covered in your courses. With such thing, it'll be much easier for admission offices in US universities to truly assess the validity of a candidate.

Depth vs. Breath.

This is one of the most interesting trade-offs that teaching staff is faced with. The usual ambiguity with which course syllabus are conceived leaves significant leeway for the responsible to design a course and place it at significantly different locations in this space.

My take, sitting on the lower left corner is a shame. If you have to teach a course, it better cover some topic deeply or give a wide overview of it, but neither of them is probably a symptom that the teacher is simply winging it in front of the students. The upper right corner does not have too much interest either. Mainly because time is short, student attention span is shrinking and therefore, covering completely a wide topic very deeply would require more than one course.

So the interesting area is that between the upper left and the bottom right corners. I recently taught a master's course on web platforms. The course was conceived as being clearly in the upper left corner. A platform was selected and the students needed to write a small extension which in turn required to understand its underlying structure. Toward the end of the course, one student expressed his disappointment because he expected for a master's course something more "general", an overview of the current tendencies in web design.

Is there a logical place for the different type of courses? Are courses with one topic deeply covered more suitable for the first years leaving the rest for the upper courses? Something didn't sound quite right in the remark done by this student. In my experience, brilliant ideas that shake the landscape of a topic usually appear when your knowledge of the area is fairly deep. I doubt that by having an overview of the most relevant techniques you can contribute to any of them, because there are many experts already working on many possible directions.

A literature related analogy. Would you read a bunch of summaries of the most relevant novels ever written or would you choose some and read them entirely? I think my position is now clearly stated. By remaining always at the surface level of technology there is a significant amount of ideas and techniques, specially the most elegant ones, that are distorted by distance. By going deeply in one topic, while it is true that such specialization may not be relevant for your future activities (which itself is highly questionable) you still gather important abstract techniques and concepts which very likely will be suitable for other topics you may encounter.

Overviews of a given area, specially a well structured overview, I usually come accros them from an expert working lots of years in the area. In other words, it seems to me that having a "fast food" type of overview is worth nothing. If such overview is given by (deep) experience, that's a different story.

So the final question is, if your responsibility is to prepare future engineers that are supposed to innovate, come up with creative solutions, etc. Where would you place your course?

Ready for diversity?

A few days back I had a question from one of my students. Half the score in one of my courses is based on a True/False test, and she was doing fairly bad on it as opposed to the ot her half (a regular program) which she nailed at every attempt. She mentioned that she was diagnosed with dyslexia and wanted to know if there was something we could do to turn the test in a more accurate measurement for her.

This situation is fairly straightforward in some institutions. There is usually some sort of regulation clearly stating what a student in this situation is entitled to when it comes to exams. So, after searching for the most appropriate course of action, some of the requirements meant that a new version of the exam was needed.

The changes were not related to the content itself, but to the way it was presented. The student will have exactly the same questions as the rest of the class but she needed bigger font, larger boxes to answer, one question per page, etc.

I want to focus on the process of producing a second version of a document in general but with the same raw initial material. Technologically speaking, the problem is solved, but your mileage may vary depending on how is your production flow. In my case, I create exams in DocBook, then I translate them to HTML and finally I print them in a regular PS/PDF printer.

When making these adjustments to the process, you have to think first where is your change going to take place. The final PS/PDF files are out of the question, since changing font size and such things is virtually impossible. The two choices are to touch the HTML or adapt the creation process and give it the flexibility of producing more than one version. The first choice is for a once in a lifetime change, whereas the second is to essentially embed adaptability into your document production process.

Now let's imagine we already have a production flow with such flexibility properly included. Could we use such functionality to cope with generic diversity in the classroom? Dyslexia is a clear case but, What about other types of document adaptation? What if from the same raw material you would produce several styles and let students choose which one they prefer?

Would you do such thing if the cost was almost negligible? What type of versions would you produce? Perhaps this type of diversity could be conceived as an efective pedagogical tool.

Hyperassignments

Today I received a write-up assignment that I previously requested from a student. It was a fairly long document, around 150 pages, and included the typical structure of introduction, state of the art, architecture of the proposed paradigm, history of the project and conclusions.

In the section called "state of the art" I found a fairly detailed description of XHTML, RSS, and several other concepts that were used in the project. Its presence in the document was perfectly justified. The problem was that the writing style changed significantly from the previous section, and also, a large number of terms in this section included hyperlinks. At first I thought it was the fruit of a through editing effort, but the change of writing style made me quickly cut and paste a sentence into the google search bar.

And the expected happened. There it was, number one, the link to Wikipedia. Almost the entire section was taken literally and pasted into the word document. This is by no means a surprise. These situations have been increasingly happening with student submissions. The typical reaction is surprise, anger, and if things get too ugly, retaliation.

But the point is not about the nerve of the student to include a chunk (or several) of Wikipedia, but to reflect on the type of documents that should be produced in the future taking into account that almost everybody has access to the internet and its resources.

My take is that one essential condition for a document to be published was to strive to be as much self-contained as possible. In other words, if a book talks about how a theory is applied, a big part of the document would be devoted to explaining such theory, and then include the important part which was how to apply it.

But those were times where information access was orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than today. In the past, a book needed to include the most important elements of the point being discussed, thus leading authors to re-write with their own words pieces otherwise perfectly explained elsewhere. The reason was that "elsewhere" was beyond the reach of the user.

Today, however, if I have to talk about the derivations of certain concepts, the description of these concepts, although essential for the document, are no longer required to be right there next to my proposed derivation. A link could suffice.

Of course somebody might argue that the special context of a document may require a re-phrasing of the needed concept thus ruling the hyperlink a bad idea. But still, you may include the link anyway, and then the "delta" from such document that the reader should know to follow your theory.

To conclude. Documents in space vs. documents in hyperspace is much more than a simple extension. It could influence the structure of the documents to make them significantly more succinct, and therefore more effective as communication items. Perhaps there should be a set of new style guidelines for publishing documents in hyperspace, and one of its most important consequences would be that the size of all document would be cut by a fourth.

Creating content by the Docbook

All the courses I am responsible for, rely heavily on content made available through the web. I know, big deal! Each course has its own web page containing absolutely all the documents related to the course: notes, exams, labs, messages, schedule, syllabus, etc. This was something I didn't even think about back when I had to organize these courses, but as time passed, it proved to be a more challenging task than initially thought.

Since I have free access to a web site, the initial approach was simply push some files into a directory and let students access them. Then, a bit of HTML, nothing fancy, simply to link the content into sections, each of them with its own HTML page. So far so good. Then it came the need make quick modifications to the documents (up in the vicinity of 100 files when you include figures, additional material, etc). So what I needed was an agile way of taking a change from my own computer and push it to the web site. That was easily done with a dead simple ftp client. But then it came the need to produce large numbers of HTML documents.

That was the turning point in my otherwise happy life of content producer. An HTML file in one of my courses now has a unified prelude (University Logo, a few links to other relevant web sites) and a postlude (including the CC license and some other stuff). The page structure was a template that needed to be replicated for all the documents. Then, rather than resorting to sophisticated include patterns, I decided to write only the essential part of the HTML document and let style processing take care of the rest.

And it was here when I found DocBook. Docbook is basically a way to annotate all the parts of an arbitrary text with its structure. In other words, if a sentence is a title, you simply surround it with <title>, a section within your document would be surrounded by <section> and </section> elements. This procedure is extended to a large number of possible elements. If you write a document with this structure, which is XML, you basically focussed your energy on the structure of your text, and then leave the rest for some additional tool that will take these instructions and create the pretty HTML.

The magic of this step is done by the XSL Transformations. Basically, every structural element in the Docbook file is transformed to the appropriate formalism, which in this case is HTML and is applied identically to all the elements of the same time. This type of processing facilitates changing the aspect of all titles in just one simple step. Of course, there are other tools such as Word that do something similar, that is, you write your document using the styles that appear on the right hand side of the editor (if you choose to) and the editor remembers the format of each portion of text. If you then change the format, all elements labeled with such format change their appearance.

Back to my course web site. So, by writing XML documents containing the course material, I would then process and transfer all of them to the remote web site, and my pages would look all of them the same with a fairly decent appearance. But as the course material grew larger (labs, auxiliary files, more images, etc), so it came the process of producing the entire web site every time a new change was needed. Then, as a techie, some serious workflow tool was needed and deployed ant to capture all the required steps to produce only the required steps to obtain the entire web site and then transfer it (or should I say, synchronize it) with the remote host.

Although it took me quite a while to achieve this, it soon became apparent the big advantages of such approach. I then needed to add a few improvements into the web site, and the structure of docbook + xsl transformations showed a lot of potential.

Common appearance

One very important gain from this approach is to control the appearance of all your pages from a centralized location. Docbook provides a set of default transformations to translate files into HTML. If you are not happy with the outcome, you just simply have to add whatever is new. Doing so, it is a breeze to include a common prelude/postlude to all pages. Each page now has its head and foot with all the proper links.

RSS: Really simple sindication

Things got more interesting when I decided to create an RSS feed for the entire course web site. Since all the required information was contained in the docbook files, it was just a matter of creating a new transformation scheme that rather than producing HTML, it would create the RSS Feed. I have now all my courses with its RSS feed in parallel (another issue is the percentage of students that use it).

The Gadget

The next feature I wanted to add was a Google Gadget. Google allows you to provide a Gadget suitable to be embedded in your personalized home page. Basically, you provide an XML file with an HTML snippet inside, and this is rendered in the middle of a box at a location in a page chosen by the user. Of course the API is much more complicated and allows you to make reactive Gadgets, but I went for the easy catch and basically have a miniature course web page with the relevant links suitable for your Google Personalized Home page.

And now Core Duo

But the real challenge was when it came the time to take the web site (initially only in Spanish) and localized to English. This is when Docbook was a real boost. The two choices I was confronted with were: duplicating every single file that needed a different version in English (that is, 99% of them), or keep both versions next to each other in the same document and pull only the relevant part for each web site.

The first option appeared the most convenient. Merging content in two languages within the same file seemed a nightmare to understand. But on the other hand, when a change needed to be done, having a paragraph in both languages next to each other seemed perfect. It turned out that docbook comes fully loaded to adopt this second option with almost no effort. The trick is to label each element that needs two versions with an attribute stating the language in which it is written. So, the new material grew almost twice the original size because for each paragraph written in Spanish, another with its English translation would follow. This greatly simplified changing files, because both versions were right next to each other. As for the problem of creating two versions of the site, the style transformations allow for a language parameter to be provided and select out of all the elements in the text, only those that are labeled with the language you provided or with no label at all.

This is exactly what I needed to keep both versions in the same document and yet maintain the capability of quickly generating the two sets of disjoint HTML pages and now publish them in two different course sites.

And this is the scheme I'm using these days. When it comes to writing a new document, a plain old ascii file will do with a bunch of XML elements in there that you come to like. I then include the new document in the chain and voilá, the right HTML page in the right language with the proper links appears in the web site.

Forecasting the Podcasting Storm

I just read the article Podcasting in Higher Ed: Reflective, Disruptive, and Evolving written by Ray Schroeder in which he describes the evolution of podcasting in educational institutions. Every time the topic of using podcasting in a course surfaces in a conversation, it usually derives into a parade of jokes that could have made it into the Saturday Night Live Show. The problem is, that it would be funny in the 80s or perhaps the 90s, but today, when people have at their fingertips the power to select what, when and how to process information, podcasting is, without a doubt, an increasingly popular format.

When talking about podcasting, there are, for my taste, too many implied concepts in the word. As it is usually the case when you ask Learning Management Systems designers if they "support standards", the answer is usually a quick and loud YES! to find out later that there is a wide variety of ways to do such thing. So, if you ask teachers if they use podcasting, they may say a quick yes. Let me narrow a bit what I understand by podcast. Taping your classes in audio and/or video and put then in the net either as downloadable files or through streaming, to me, is NOT podcasting for two reasons. The first is size. Although not written anywhere, podcasts are supposed to be short. This is even more important in a teaching context. There are studies out there that suggest that learning needs to be organized around small bits of information. The second reason is context. It is not the same to talk to students face to face in a room that doing so through their earbuds. The material needs to be specifically conceived and prepared for podcasting.

But the issue here is: Are the improvements that would derive from deploying podcasting in a course worth its effort? And as it is usually the case, it is extremely difficult to provide some solid evidence one way or another. In my previous research life, I worked on digital circuit design. Each new idea had an ultimate goal which was to provide better circuits (as in faster, more compact, less power consumption, etc), and there was always a way to get a hold of some realistic benchmarks, plug your new idea, get numbers and go on the road and defend them in a few conferences. In the teaching/learning context, the ultimate goal is equally clear, improve the learning experience for the students, but when it comes to sustain your new idea with empirical evidence, things get everything but objective.

Going back to the podcasting storm. From all the fuzz I've been seeing, I have to control myself and not let me fall in the easy "with all the big noise about it, there must be something good". The techie inside me pushes in that direction. But, the teacher in me has seen so many other ideas that when included in a course were ruled next to useless that skepticism starts to surface.

Let's look at the problem from a different prospective. Student attention, like everyone else's, is a scarce, limited and tricky to obtain resource (no wonder you always end up "paying" attention). Still, they seem to be willing to devote some time of the day to listen to music and/or other audio material. Perhaps the problem needs to be addressed the other way around. If you need your students to pay attention to you, give them the material in the context in which they are more willing to pay attention to it. This is probably trivial for the marketing people. Don't make people pay for a crappy product, offer them a great product, and they'll pay for it. Attention is also paid, so I think the analogy holds.

So my take is that if you provide additional interesting audio material that complements your course, you might start to increase your student motivation toward the subject. I'm sure most teachers out there have their own little portfolio of anecdotes that usually drop in class to loosen up a bit. May be this is the type of material that more easily can make it in the 4GB hall of fame that students carry in their pockets. Storytelling when properly done, is always captivating. Isn't it?

And to conclude. Would I be using podcasting in my courses? Hmmm. I can now think of a few of these interesting stories which I could easily turn them into a podcast...

The state of minimum energy

Another take at teaching styles in technology. The experience I had teaching a Master course using problem based learning and a few remarks I've exchanged with my co-workers got me thinking about why do we teach technology as we do today (in the context of the degrees I participate). The actual scenario has a pretty robust set of boundary conditions which leave almost no space for what somebody would call innovation without actually re-doing everything from scratch.

The structure of a course is based on a set of topics to cover, mostly taken from different sources (text books, personal notes, etc), a set of lab assignments to complement what it has been covered in class and a final exam. With these premises, there are plenty of possible course organizations, but if you pull yourself out of the picture, they are virtually identical. Labs are optional in one course, mandatory in another course. The number of labs can go from 20% of the course to virtually 100%, evaluation always includes a final exam (due to University regulations) and some courses might take into account what the students did on the labs to compute the final score.

My thesis is that, upon closer inspection, this scenario actually reflects a state of minimum energy for the teaching staff. Your classes are divided into theory and labs. Your theory classes usually mean you are standing up in front of the class with some slides (or simply using the board) and talk most of the time. You might try to foster a bit of interaction, but is simply testimonial, the scheme remains the same, you stand up and talk, they sit down in front of you and listen. Preparation for these classes mainly means making sure you cover one way or another the material, not necessarily all of it, and answers the (usually few) questions from the students. I can see how teaching staff feel comfortable in these type of sessions.

As for the labs, well, get a set of problems/exercises/programs fairly solidly designed, and them you just simply need to be there while they solve it and answer questions. Perhaps a bit more interaction through email, forums, etc. and that's pretty much it. Some more aggressive teaching teams would make students submit solutions and grade them, but they are just simple variations of the same theme.

The exam is where you basically comply with your role requirements, which is to produce a score for each student. In there, you are entitled to ask whatever you feel like (exams in my school are never ever reviewed by anybody outside of a teaching team in a course) and after a probably tedious grading process, a final score is produced.

Now the question. Can you come up with any other teaching scenario (not variations of this one, but a really different one) that requires less energy than this one? Of course, we'll rule out answers of the type just publish the notes and see them in the exam or give everybody an A. You are supposed to respect the schedule and show up in class when planned.

I honestly find it difficult to come up with such scenario. In technical terms, it is like the effort function from the teaching staff has reached a state of minimum energy (and not a local minimum but a global one) and therefore, to take it out of such position will require an enormous amount of energy.

Move along the lines of more personalized teaching and would mean devoting more time to talk and get feedback from students. Continuous evaluation? No way. The final exam is much more comfortable and easy to prepare. Describe objectives, learning outcomes, etc in order to really quantify the effort required by the student? That won't do. It is simpler if I just propose a set of topics and go back to the status-quo.

So, as a conclusion, change is good (or so they say), but if to produce such a change, the amount of energy required is huge, how can you force such change? How do you convince teaching staff that they need to step up their effort? To be honest, I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of anybody trying to change the state.

You're just another brick in the wall

Prelude

I just started a new course fully based on Problem Based Learning (PBL). The idea has been around for quite some time and it is not too difficult to find plenty of literature on how to deploy it as well as justifying its effectiveness. Not long ago a took a course about this technique and I must admit that there was something captivating about it. I gathered a minimal set of documents to know what exactly was this technique about, and once I figured how to separate evangelists from really objective documents, I decided to give it a go.

The beginning

The first choice was to select the most friendly environment I could lay my hands on. In other words, if you want to try a new method to build houses, you don't want to try it in the North Pole, because you want to reduce the number of variables to the ones relevant to the new technique. I'm part of the teaching staff of a second year master's program course on "Web community platforms". Luckily, all the professors involved agreed to give it a try and decided to begin teaching a web toolkit based on this methodology. The other lucky shot was the number of students that was initially 6 and then (who knows if it was due to the new methodology) got reduced to 4, which was close to the recommendations I've read about ideal group sizes.

The sources

One document that helped me shape my opinion on this technique has been "The tutor in PBL. A novice's Guide" by Allyn Walsh. I liked it first because is a fairly "topic-neutral" guide (something not easy to write taking into account that PBL thrives mostly in med education), and second, because it offered plenty of information to guide the tutor. From this document, and following a bit its references plus some web-searches gives you much more information that you can deal with.

The challenges

It didn't take me long to realize that deploying this technique in one course meant a bunch of new challenges, and probably the most daunting of them all was the role of the tutor. Group meetings are supposed to happen (or at least some of them) with a tutor that needs to ensure the group is making progress toward the learning objectives. The tricky trade-off is between butting in continuously thus not letting the group work together, and detach oneself too much from the group activity. That in itself is already difficult enough, but on top of that, the tutor needs to forget about typical teaching resources such as slide presentation, plenary sessions where everybody is paying attention to the presentation, etc. You move away from your typical "prima donna role" which you probably control perfectly by now and feel pretty comfortable, to a more on the side role just to make sure students don't go off track.

And so far...

After 3 sessions with this group, I'm beginning to see the advantages of this technique. So much so that I'll go as far as to try to capture them with an analogy. Suppose you are a teacher and want students to learn about "french movies". One possibility could be for you to visualize the most relevant movies, synthesize the most important aspects, prepare your flashy powerpoint and kidnap your students for several 2 hour sessions in which you covered a carefully crafted program on how to approach the issue, and they just need to pay attention, take notes and prepare the exam. I personally think that the most fun part of this process is the first one in which you visualize the movies yourself and come up with a way to transfer all that knowledge to your students. Well, that's precisely the part in which the students could have as much fun as you, and you're disguising it with your 2 hour sessions. The PBL approach would be for you to prepare the set of movies that they should visualize, pose several questions, shape the overall material as a problem that needs to be solved, and let them go ahead and do it. Of course, you must be on the side to make sure they have as much fun as you and discover all the different aspects of the topic, exchange opinions, compare viewpoints, etc. Traditional sessions in which "teacher talk, students listen" end up disguising the topic and offering a very personal view of the learning process the teacher went through to obtain the conclusions. In this case, the teacher, more than a facilitator, is simply just another brick in the wall preventing students to have fun while learning.

The punch line

So, PBL requires you to step aside and rather than being just another brick in this wall preventing students from learning about a topic that motivates them, become the designer of the ladder they need to climb as a group to reach the top and enjoy the view. Oh, and by the way, the document I've mentioned above earned my respect when I reached page 8 and read "On the other hand, PBL is very resource intensive". Ok. Now we're talking.

... and so it came the test

I've been hearing about the Felder Test for quite some time now. A set of questions to try to draw a picture about what is your learning style. I even had a few implementations within my reach, but I was a bit skeptical at the begining and never consider it seriously. But after reading a bit more about it and getting a well crafted set of questions in a course I took, I decided to take a second look at it.

I deployed it on my first year course web page sometime on a saturday evening, notified through the course email list, and within less than an hour, there were about five submissions. After this first reaction, I quickly inserted a "feedback" scale at the bottom of the result page to find out how useful had it been for the user in a -3,3 scale. -3 is completely useless, zero is no idea and 3 is very useful.

So far, only half the people answered this last question after seeing the test results, and none of them valued the test below 1.