Diana Laurillard views on trends that impact in education

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Diana Laurillard is a Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education, University of London. I recently found at the Future Classrooms Lab (EUN) website, a video where she talked about some trending topics in education. I had to read papers during my Master Degree  where she was cited very often. It was wonderful to find her talking about topics as for example:

  • The role of teachers,
  • The role and weight of technology infrastructures for education
  • Her opinion about the huge potential of MOOC for enabling Teacher Professional Development online
  • Her vision of a future 2025 classroom

She starts the interview defining teachers as learning designers. Then, she recognizes the important role of ICT for education as the ‘sine qua non‘ but at the same time, she tries to limit their weight alerting that not all innovations must be guided by technologies («there are much more things to thinks about not just ICT»).  

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Display your OpenBadges Backpack in Moodle with LTI

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Link to OpenBadges Backpack from Moodle with LTI

How to use LTI (External Tool Activities) in Moodle

These days I’ve been playing around with LTI (Learning Tools Interoperavility) and Moodle. I wanted to test what else could I do with this tool beyond providing a WP blog account to my School. The number Edu Apps built on LTI that we can use in our classes are increasing more and more everyday.

Where to find collections of learning apps built on LTI™ ?

In theory, LTI allows us to connect to that Edu Apps from our Moodle site using our ow data (e-mail) to create an account without having to log in again. Actually SSO or OpenAuth already provide similar funcionalities but the best of LTI would be the possibility to retrieve grades from these tools. I couldn’t still test whether it actually works as it’s expected but if it’s confirmed it would be very useful.

To show how easy is to access to external tools through LTI I recorded a videotutorial in English. The tutorial shows how to embed an already existent Open Badge Backpack into a Moodle Course as a LTI external activity. This example is only for a demo about how to use an LTI tool. Displaying a backpack from Mozilla OpenBadges is already possible as a Moodle core feature without using LTI. On the other hand if your Moodle admin didn’t setup badges you can follow this tutorial as an alternative.

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My virtual attendance to #mtmoot 2014

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June is usually a busy month for teachers. Final exams, grades, school reports, meetings with parents are the usual stressing tasks for all of us. So as soon I begin my summer holidays, I start to pay attention to many other forgotten activities  and hobbies. One of those activities is to read about what’s going on in the Moodle Community.

In addition to read some interesting threads in the Moodle forums, and have a look to some selected blogs, I usually go to my Moodle list in Twitter to follow a large group of moodlers around the world. And it’s usually around the first two weeks of July when some Australian or American moots are taking place. The last two years I followed in July the Australian moots and this year, as I finished a bit later my professional duties, I focused my attention on the Montana Moodle Moot 2014. The hashtag #mtmoot gathered hundreds of tweets in a vibrant timeline from participants at that event held at Helena (Montana).

The flow of  tweets was constant and as you’ll see below, most of them were very interesting too. This time I decided to write a summer post about this particular way of virtual attendance to a learning event which occurs at more than 4,700 miles away from where I live.

Through the hashtag (#mtmoot) I could read messages (tweets) posted since some days before the beginning of the event to now (24h after the end of the event). As early as on January (maybe earlier), some organizers started to tweet about #mtmoot. Some weeks before the event the mtmoot crew confirmed a physical attendance of «over 150 folks from 23 states and 3 countries«. Of course I was not in their lists, but now they can add me up as a virtual attendant and Spain as a new more country. 😉

I can say that I have a good idea about what they were talking about. My knowledge came not only from the text messages (tweets) but also from a lot of multimedia files they attached to their tweets. Most of keynotes were reported by participants with nice and funny pictures, videos, useful links to valuable websites and slideshare presentations. Some tweets were replies to others so as soon as you organised them in a thread gave me a valuable landscape of their discussions. Microblogging with 140 characters is difficult but once one  gets used to write them, some messages become even more concise and descriptive than it’d be ever expected.

Of course I didn’t smell the fresh air of the Rockies mountains, nor taste their beer, nor felt the friendship of the great people who attended physically to the event. That’s what I’m missing but, at least, I feel that, somehow I’ve been there with them too 🙂 Who knows. Maybe one year I can take my wife and my children and drop by there as a real attendant.

Mountain Moodle Moot 2014 event followed through #mtmoot Twitter hashtag

Mountain Moodle Moot 2014 event followed through #mtmoot Twitter hashtag

Below it’s my Tweets Notebook. Some selected tweets I’ve chosen as a summary for this vibrant #mtmoot 2014. There were many others good enough to be selected but my editor limited the pages of my book 😉

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OCL4Ed: 3rd Learning reflection

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This post contains a learning reflection (E-activity)  about what I learned along the micro Open Online Course OCL4Ed (3rd learning reflection).

We were invited to reflect about what we learned and how, connecting previous experiences with current findings. We also have to review our previous posts to personal blogs or microblogging systems.

As a starting point to this final reflection I’m going to follow the thread of my previous post where I began to describe my plan about How to introduce OER and Creative Commons in Schools.  The learning goals for that activity were to create a derivative OER using a set of different alien OER. I had to select at least one extract under «all rights reserved’ restriction to be cited accordingly with citation’s rules. I also had to insert images and text and a video from different sources and with different creative commons (CC) licenses. The final product had to be completed with a learning reflection and the post, as a whole, had to be delivered as a derivative work with the right CC license.

What I actually did is called an E-activity in this course. As soon as we posted our assignments in our personal blogs (or in Wikieducator) we must submit the URL to the course learning platform saying if we want to participate in a peer review assessment. If we decide so, we will have to evaluate peer’s works following a detailed predefined rubric. The same will be done by others with my own submissions.

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How to introduce OER and Creative Commons in your School

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This post contains a learning reflection about using creative commons licenses that I had to write for the micro Open Online Course OCL4Ed (Activity 4.1).

A bit of history

OER

OER Logo (source: Wikimedia) This file is ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain, because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship.

Since some years ago I started to read about Open Eucational Resources (OER). This term was first adopted at UNESCO‘s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries according to Wikipedia.

The goal behind the OER concept is to promote the creation of open reusable pieces of content to be used as educational resources. In addition these OER must be free in order to facilitate their re-use and re-mix without restrictions. Another important concept behind OER initiative is sharing. If people don’t share their works there wouldn’t be OER available.

OER Commons and many other initiatives try to encourage teachers, students and educational institutions to create OER resources and share them globally. There are nowadays in internet many repositories for OER where concerned people about this issue submit their own work to make them publicly available.

When we talk about OER we need also to talk about copyright. We must know that, by default, when we publish our work in internet it will be protected by a ‘all rights reserved‘ copyright license. It means that, if nothing is said about the copyright of our work it can be freely accessible but it won’t be a OER because it’s not openly licensed yet.

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E-Activity-Copyright MCQs for OCL4Ed

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This is an e-activity for the OCL4Ed course. I have to describe a study case related to Copyright issues and create two multiple choice questions about it and the correspondent feedback.

Study case:

A chemistry teacher is asked to create a Lab Manual Resource which will be posted into a course in the School LMS. Students will be able to download the manual and print it at home. To create the manual, the teacher receives from his head of department a pen-drive with a text document and a set of digital pictures taken by a former teacher at home when she was already retired. The former teacher sent by email the content of the pen-drive to the editor of the School Magazine as part of an article to be published. Moreover, the chemistry teacher is allowed to take new pictures of the school lab ware if needed. The teacher is invited to embed some video to the lab manual to best describe some procedures. He searches and finds an interesting video in Youtube. He also recognizes the author and decides to browse the author’s personal blog where he finds the same video under a creative commons license CC BY-SA 3.0.

Questions:

A) Could the former teacher claim for the copyright of the digital pictures if they are include in the Lab Manual?

  • a) Yes. If she took the pictures at home when she already was retired she owns their copyright
    • CORRECT
  • b) No because she’s a former employee of the School.
    • INCORRECT: When she took the pictures at home she was retired so there were not a labour contract
  • c) No. She can’t claim for the copyright because she sent the pictures as part of an article to be published at the School magazine.
    • INCORRECT: Unless some kind of transfer of rights agreement had occurred between them, the submission of pictures attached to an article doesn’t remove the copyright from the original author

B) If the chemistry teacher takes new photos to the lab ware at the School, is he free to decide which kind of  creative commons license should they have?

  • a) Yes. If he takes the pictures he will own their copyright
    • INCORRECT: He’s working for the institution so only the School is able to decide the kind of license which should apply.
  • b) No, unless he had taken the pictures using his own camera
    • INCORRECT: No matter if he uses his own camera because he’s taking photos at the school lab ware and he’s working for the School.
  • c) No, never. Although he had taken the pictures he is not the copyright owner
    • CORRECT: He’s not the copyright owner because he’s taking pictures to the school lab ware and he’s currently working for the school
  • d) Pictures are never submitted to copyright rules
    • INCORRECT: Pictures are also submitted to copyright rules

C) What’s the best and faster option to add the video as a multimedia resource to the Lab Manual and upload it to the School LMS?

  • a) Download the video from Youtube and upload it to the LMS as a multimedia resource
    • INCORRECT: Probably nothing wrong could happen if it’s true that the author has the same video downloadable under CC BY-SA 3.0 license, but remember that Youtube doesn’t provide links to download and you’re not allowed to store their videos locally.
  • b) Ask for copyright permission to Youtube in order to download and insert the video as resource
    • INCORRECT: Youtube can’t transfer the copyright of the video because it belongs to the author
  • c) Ask for copyright permission to the author in order to use his video
    • PARTIALLY CORRECT: You can always ask for permission but in this particular case the author already selected a non-restrictive license (CC BY-SA 3.0) for the video already visible in his own blog.
  • d) Download the video from the author’s blog and upload it to the LMS as a multimedia resource
    • CORRECT: This is the faster way to proceed because the author already selected a non-restrictive license (CC BY-SA 3.0) for the video already visible in his own blog. So he can download it without asking for permission
  • e) Forget about that video. There’s no way to use it without paying a license.
    • INCORRECT: In addition to download the video from the author’s blog there was the option to set up a link from the resource to the Youtube video. There’s nothing wrong in linking to a Youtube video.

Licencia de Creative Commons
Este obra está bajo una licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional.

Why to use Open Texbooks

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This short post will be about Open Texbooks. One of the activities demanded in the OERu online open course about Open content licensing for educators (OCL4Ed) was to read the the book #Open Textbook Tweet and to choose those tweets I particularly liked.

The PDF Open Texbook Tweet book (859 KB) contains 119 pages and is available under an open content license. The author is Sharyn Fitzpatrick. The book includes a collection of 140 tweets to cover the next topics related to using Open Texbooks:

  • What Is Open?
  • Why Author an Open Textbook?
  • Why Adopt an Open Textbook?
  • How to Adopt an Open Textbook
  • Why Should Your College/University Care?
  • Driving the Awareness and Adoption of Open Textbooks
  • How Does the Student Benefit?
  • Where Are We Headed?

My list of selected tweets are:

#OCL4Ed 1: No paper was used to produce this plug for open textbooks—just a few electrons were rearranged

#OCL4Ed 8: Open is freedom—freely modifiable and available, not shackled by restrictive copyright.

#OCL4Ed 12: Open textbooks help solve the problem of the high cost of textbooks, book shortages, and access to textbooks for interactive learning.

#OCL4Ed 14: Open is a way to significantly reduce the student cost of education, especially textbooks

#OCL4Ed 28: Pass on the gifts given to you. Leave a legacy.

#OCL4Ed 65: Use resources like collegeopentextbooks.org to find and adopt open textbooks.

#OCL4Ed 140: The digital age is redefining how we learn, get information, and collaborate, engaging students in multiple ways. It is our future.

I’ll be glad to receive comments about my preferred tweet as a way of disseminating the use of OER.

Lifelong learning reflection

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It’s Friday evening and just some hours ago I finished a training workshop for teachers about ‘how to teach with Moodle‘. I spent 12 hours in sessions of 4 hours/day with teachers from Primary and Secondary who were eager to start their summer holidays after a long and hard yearly course. The last effort for them was to become students for some days to learn about a popular LMS called Moodle.

This post will be my first learning reflection for the OERu course #OCL4Ed. The topic will be about my experience in teaching colleagues (I’m also a teacher) about ICT for education. What they feel and how they react when they become aware of the new possibilities provide by tons of ICT tools mostly free of charge and easily accessible.

Let me say in advance that I was lucky because I had a strongly motivated and hard-worker group. We applied strictly the ‘learning by doing‘ motto along the workshop. Their previous level of ICT competences was diverse: most of them followed the intensive learning plan quite well but some needed extra help sometimes. Even so, the group was quite homogeneous if compared with others I’d had.

Although the goal of the workshop was to learn teaching with Moodle, I didn’t miss any opportunity to talk about lifelong learning, 0pen educational resources (OER), creative commons, open-source, informal learning, social media and many other trending topics nowadays. Looking at their faces and how they reacted when  I pronounced these topics usually gives me and idea about to want extent they were exposed these topics.

As I posted in a recent tweet commenting a video of Desmond Tutu speaking about these topics in 2007, there’s still a long way to achieve the Desmond Tutu’s goals. Sometimes I think that instead of closing, or at least reducing, the gap between the evolution of ICT and the digital competencies of teachers, the gap is growing more and more.

I haven’t got the magic bullet to fix the gap but, my long experience training adults (mostly teachers) gave me some guidelines that seem to work better than others. I’m going to list here some of them:

  • Workshops are better than courses: People learn better if doing instead of only listen and taking notes. In workshop based trainings, people have to work more but usually also perform better and retain more at he end. Teacher’s workshops should produce usable learning objects (LO) as the main outcome. Handwritten notes taken in a conference are valuable but a LO are definitely much better because they are ready to be used in class.
  • Become again an student as often as possible is a valuable experience for any adult but particularly for teachers. Trying out the difficulties and challenges of learning from scratch will increase teacher’s awareness of what our students feel. Perhaps the experience as a student can lead to some change in our teaching routines and to a higher sensitivity to assess our student’s outcomes
  • People need to feel that he/she is allocated in a group where the level of required competences are very similar: If we feel that we’re the less competent in a group we will drop out sooner than later. Teachers who give up or have a frustrating experience training course won’t retake easily unless they were forced to do it.
  • Lifelong professional training needs to be carefully planned with the worker: We must stop sending employees to attend to courses massively without a personal learning design. No more courses about how to use flashy webtools like Prezi, Weebly (all of the excellent tools!) for anyone who is still unable to copy, paste, attach, upload or download a files over internet or find out the size of a file.
  • Follow an online course must be part of the full picture: There are tons of free online courses everywhere. Long (months) or just short (a few weeks) courses are on the list to be chosen according to personal preferences and motivations. Doing a short and carefully chosen online course should be mandatory for all teachers as a goal for their annual training plan.

To connect what I’m writing with the goals of the OCL4Ed activity I should point out that doing this course is aligned with what I claimed some lines ago. OCL4Ed is an online course that I chose by myself. The course topics are in my radar this year because I had to deal with creating open learning objects with open source tools.

I hope this post will meet the evaluation criteria declared for the ‘1st Learning reflection’ task. If you disagree with my opinions feel free to post a comment and we can go on debating online.

Toni