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This has become a bit of an abandoned blog – I have split personality and am now saying a bit more at http://ochre.wordpress.com

LAMS v2 launch

I went to the launch of an updated version of James Dalziel’s LAMS software at the London Knowledge Lab (July 4th). James as usual was very good with a great mix of grounded ideas, real implementations and ambitions. The enhancements look well worked out so that it should be possible to build much more attractive sequences witin a friendlier interface. As well as getting the basics right LAMS has added some interesting features including scope for notes and insttructions helping to capture the ideas and intebt behind a sequence. Diana Laurillard followed up by describing the LKL’s part on one of JISC’s pedagogic planner projects; with these improvements LAMS 2 looks like a very good starting point for such a tool. We discussed this idea when James visited in February but didn’t get the bid together so well done to both James and Diana for their work on this.Another major feature of this version is the tools contract. Alex Little explained how he had worked through an example. While he did not get quite as far as he hoped in the couple of weeks he spent on this in Australia he did a thorough job of documenting his work on the wiki and I am sure this will be abig help to anyone else trying to use the tool contract. James commented that it would be great to get more innovative tools emerging as VLEs have been stalled with the same 10 tools for the last 10 years. A very good point indeed.James also mentioned the RaMS project with R for research replacing L for learning. There wasn’t enough time for much about this but I had looked at the sildes available from educause beforehand and it looks interesting.At the end I had a chat with James about possible connections.1. Get our open content into LAMS. As LAMS runs in Moodle there is a chance that this might be part of the project but a more likely option is to rework some examples once they are available and load them up on the lamsfoundation.2. Work with the new RAMS project on a research environment for open content. As this is my area of responsibility this is possible and James offered to pass on more detail about the proposal.

CALRG Conference

The annual CALRG conference took place on 27th and 28th June.As a member of this research group I try to play an active role but had to miss the first day as I was external examinining at Heriot-Watt University. On 28th I presented a talk about the Open Content Initiative “Transforming for Open Content”. In the talk I covered four aspects: background and examples; the overall research area and how open content links through to so many research issues; a look at the work we are now carrying out on using patterns to support the transformation process; and, how we need an environment to support this sort of research. I used ochre as the concept for the tool that are needed.The talk went very well and resonated with presentations that followed. Jonathan San diego was reviewing how to analyse use of simulations in Mathematics teaching and had mad good use of eye-tracking and video analysis while Andrew Brasher had updated his work on data gathering with portable devices. Andrew’s work could map to an experiment where we send mp3 recorders out and gather audio reflections. I mentioned using podzinger as automated transcription which raised a lot of interest though I am not sure of its capabilities. Tony Hirst put me on to looking at and its purpose is to build an index of podcasts by automated transcription of public audio sites. My suggestion is that if this is s good as it looks at first glance then we could carry out interviews, publish them via an open feed and then get back the transcipt from podzinger. Sounds too good to be true but I have a lot of respect for BBN who sre providing the technology behind the scenes. Mary Taylor from AEM spotted an even better application to generating transcripts to audio in our materials for accessibility reasons. Once these are on open content we can forget about the copyright issues and take advantage of these approaches. I think it was Mary who also suggested Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as an alternative where humans will do this sort of thing at low cost.

Other presentations at CALRG were also very good and deserve checking out.

Smartphone or not

My mobile has stopped working. One second it was fine, the next all it does is flash. This has prompted me to put the SIM card into the HP. So far though I am not so impressed by the performance as a phone. Annoyingly it doesn’t seem to be able to see the numbers on the SIM and while my Nokia would go for a couple of weeks between charges this is barely going to manage two days. Add to this that I can’t hear the ringing, that it feels strange actually it, texting is a bit obscure; and I am no t so sure tht this will really make it as a phone.

Geolearning

Going geocaching has got me thinking about the way it could be used to support learning this is not a coincidence as that was the justification for getting them. A very specific use is in Gill'.s PhD where she is now setting up a nice experiment usiing

Birmingham
University's Caerus system. However I also think there is scope for something like geocaching.com but rather than physical caches hidden you have information based tasks. Unfortunately geolearning.com has already gone but geolearn.com is available or maybe geolearning.org is better? Essentially the idea is that you should be able look for challenges and have different categories such as history, science, nature etc to guide what you end up having to do. Not fully thought through yet, but having experienced using this HP I am sure location based learning has a future so I have added it to the activities that can be investigated within the Open Content Initiative!

Going caching

We got ourselves organised for the Easter break, Our first cache was in Brickhill Woods and at first I was not impressed as the position kept moving about, and it was raining. However Cheryl spotted it and we were off! We soon did two more near our house in MK. A bike ride to Caldecotte lake and a walk across fields to a hidden lake behind Woburn Sands. The great thing is that we had never down eiither of those trips before and we really enjoy them.

We have now done a few more caches including three outings on a visit to my parents in Nrthumberland. We are not always successful but it has been great for finding places  for a nice walk. On ome of these I took along a much simpler GPS a Garmin Geko borrowed from a student at work (thank you Gill). I did get it working ok once I downloaded the manual but I think I have been spoilt by the HP.

Geocaching

A big success as family outings has been our discovery of geocaching. This sport is really family walks with a mission. What made it work particularly well was being able to get hold of an hp hw6510 which is a GPS equipped smartphone/pda. It comes with TomTom and a free map so it is like having a sheet map centred on Milton Keynes. Ok for driving but better than that is an application called Navio. This was also free thanks to a voucher in the box. It turns the hp into a great navigation device especially combined with gogle map images as basemaps. Those were fiddly to set up at first now much easier thanks to new features on geocaching.com.

Virtual conferencing

At the moment I am presenting at a virtual conference – the 2006 JISC online conference. No need to travel from my office, on the other hand no need to stop working on other things. It started yesterday (27th March) and the session that I was running with James Dalziel went quite well: about 50 posts. Today though our strand is on its second day and most of the action is with the other areas so things are a bit flatter.

Thoughts that are coming out for me are that there is a lot of overlap and the Learning Desig/Design for Learning is feeling fairly mainstream but not actually adopted very much. There have also been a few technology blogs. The one that I feel I should know more about is Gabbly http://gabbly.com. It looks like you can add synchronous chat for all page visitor by tagging the URL on to a gabbly page – like this http://gabbly.com/http://openpatrick.wordpress.com/. Then anyone who goes there sees the chat – very straightforward. There is also something that can be done to embed in a pade you own.

The other thing about the conference was the question of who blogs: hence a new entry.

Opening up

Ok – I have joined the world of the bloggers. Why? Well there are two main drivers at the moment. One is that now I am involved in the Open University’s Open Content project, see http://oci.open.ac.uk/ , I really feel that I should become a participant in this new world, though I have along way to go to catch up on some of the stars in the movement. The other reason is that for one of our current courses I have created an activity where the students must writ a blog. Again I need to know what it is like and first pass I used an internal OU-supported blog based on Moveable Type. It has accessibility issues though so we need to look around for something better. A quick search of opinions said nothing is great for this but WordPress is the best option.

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