There is a fee of 60 € (650 SEK) if you are not a SC36 delegate or a member of the Nordlet consortium. This fee includes coffee and lunch. The conference is free of charge for Nordlet consortium members and SC36 delegates.

The theme for the conference is ICT, Competency and how this is related to the educational systems:

To cast light on the challenges of competencies the conference will arrange four tracks with a focus on the use of ICT (two in parallel) with the following themes:

Pedagogy

• How would the demand for measurable competencies influence the pedagogical practice?
• In a world where everyone have equal access to education – how to make sure that the chosen pedagogy matches the preferences and needs of the learner?
• Which pedagogical practice leads to a competency proven outcome?

Portfolio

• How to demonstrate your competency?
• Is the portfolio your evidence of how competent you are?
• What is the content of a portfolio?
• Different portfolios for different competencies.

Virtual Learning Environment

• How could the learning environment help development of competencies?
• VLE showcases – different vendors do the same task to demonstrate comparable functionality?

Curriculum

• When the curriculum is competency based – what does that imply?
• How would competencies be expressed in a curriculum?
• Is all competency measurable with regard to the curriculum?
• The relationship between curriculum, competency and assessment?

If you would like to give a 15 min talk within one of these topics, please send a short abstract (max 1 1/2) page to conference@nordlet.org.

See the Nordlet Open Forum website (http://www.iml.umu.se/nordlet/) for more information and for registration!

Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.

See the abstract for the seminar below.

During the twentieth century, the focus of pedagogical research and practice has gone frombehaviourism, via cognitivism, to learning theory based on constructivism. Changes in learning objectives and an increasing cognitive complexity of learning tasks are likely to have contributed to this evolvement. This puts new requirements on the design and implementation of pedagogical instruction (instructional design) and its application to learning technology. Using instructional design together with technology requires the pedagogical process to be predetermined, which is partly contradicted by the nature of constructivism. Many constructivist approaches require social interaction and dynamic learning environments that can adapt to changes that are required by different pedagogical approaches. Those requirements have been met using modular approaches for content, i.e., learning objects, implemented in non-modular web-based virtual learning environments (VLE), like learning management systems (LMS).

Modularity promotes adaptability and adaptivity, but that the current practice of using learning objects and LMSes is too restricted to fulfill the increasing needs for flexibility. The reasons are that the learning object concept is still too ill-defined to function as a component framework, and there are complex and unsolved issues regarding the representation of pedagogical instructions. This is especially complicated from a constructivist perspective where pedagogical instructions cannot always be assumed to be predetermined, which needs to be encountered for by technology. Using an abstract model that supports a modular approach that address both functional and technical properties, and that includes both digital learning content and VLEs, the software architecture of learning objects can be addressed in order to separate data, logics and presentation – including the separation of the representation of pedagogical process from the components that implement it. This facilitates the combination of modularity and representation of pedagogical instruction that utilizes machine-processable semantics, enabling the utilization of modularity at composition time as well as at run-time. This approach resulted in a SOA-based architecture framework that was used as blueprint for implementing a prototype for a modular VLE. This research has shown that it is possible to incorporate learning content and the VLE into the same modular framework in order to provide the flexibility needed for learning technology to better adapt to changing pedagogical requirements.

It was also shown how pedagogical processes benefit from being represented using machine-processable semantics in being able to better utilize the flexibility offered by modularity in keeping the components of the VLE together by representing context and structure. This was illustrated by adding semantic annotations that were used to dynamically connect pedagogical instruction to annotated learning objects, using machine-processable semantics.

Higher education institutions and continuing education centers face a growing number of challenges in delivering competency-driven educational content with their learning services. The current lack of widely accepted standards and their adoption hinders the effective implementation of learning technologies.

Driven by a consortium of key players in the European arena iCOPER will access to a critical mass of more than 15,000 hours of integrated educational content. Based on this beneficial infrastructure the project will systematically analyze the implementation of existing specifications such as IMS RCDEO, IMS LD, SQI, and QTI. iCOPER’s underlying pedagogical framework will guide a consensus building approach to developing Best Practices, addressing issues such as (1) exchange of competency models in a cross-cultural educational context, (2) collaboration around learning designs, (3) integration of content via federated search and harvesting, (4) reuse of instructional models and content in learning deliver environments, (5) interoperability of item banks for assessment and evaluation.

iCOPER will provide mechanisms to ensure European-wide user involvement, cooperation, and adoption of standards within a large community to support all phases of standardization. Liaison management will condense findings into an iCOPER Reference Model which will be fed back to standards bodies and disseminated via the iCOPER Institute for Training, Consulting & Piloting.

The thing that makes iCoper interesting is that it deals with the big picture, which is something that is usually missing when working with technology standards and the pedagogical perspective. By that, iCoper fits the profile and research at IML very well.

10 Weblog Engines Reviewed

Choosing blogging software can be a scary process, especially if you are new to blogging. There are many different types of engines and content management systems (CMS) that could be used. Picking the software that you’ll need is not an easy task, given the wide variety and types on the Web today.

Investing in laptops for all student is an utopia for many educational institutions and schools. The emergence of Netbooks (or ultra portables) is obviously an exciting development that will make it more affordable and by that contribute to increase the computer availability, but it one laptop per student will still be an utopia for many educational institutions. Fortunately there are budget alternatives. These alternatives don’t give every student his/her own laptop, but at least it gives them a portable alternative that let them bring their own documents, desktop, applications and configurations wherever they may go. They only need to find a piece of suitable hardware. Both budget alternatives are based on USB sticks, and I have tried them out during the summer. They both work just fine in most situations that I have encountered so far. It would however be interesting to try them on real students…

Alternative 1: Portable Applications

Portable Applications is the simplest alternative, but it still goes a long way. Portable applications are a (large) set of applications that have been adapted to be install and ran from a USB stick using an application launcher, such as PortableApps. In fact, many applications doesn’t even need the application launcher, but that is another story.

With portable applications on a USB stick, students uses the “host” computer’s operating system, but their own applications and application settings from the USB-stick documents are of course stored there as well. This approach can be used in Mac OSX and Windows, as well as in Linux. I haven’t tested it in Linux yet, but it worked for me in Windows and in OS X. The main reason for not testing in Linux (besides the time shortage) is that the second alternative (below) is a very sophisticated Linux alternative.

Here is an extensive list of portable applications

Alternative 2: Portable Operating System

The second alternative is a bit more sophisticated and the basic idea is that students bring both the operating system (OS) and the applications on their USB stick. It is like having their own laptop, but without the actual laptop:). The main advantage is that students will always be able to work in their own environment, with their own settings, their own desktop, applications etc. In fact, portable OS can even be combined with diskless computers, which makes the computers much easier to administrate. When booting from the USB stick it is exactly the same as booting from the hard drive. The USB stick simply replaces the hard drive. In practice this means that everything that can be done on a ordinary computer can be done when booting from a USB stick – such as logging into and accessing network services, such as printers and file storage.

I have tested to install Ubuntu Linux on a USB stick and it works very well! Linux is the obvious choice here since this is supposed to be a low budget solution. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t well match a computer running Windows or OS X in terms of functionality and usability. On the contrary! Linux, and especially Ubuntu, has become a very user friendly and modern OS that is well suited for educational use.

A good guide for installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on a USB-stick is available from Pendrivelinux.

There are obviously other interesting solutions for increasing the the access to computers and software for students as well. Two alternatives that I will get back to later on (when I had the time to test them) are a budget solution for thin linux clients built from the university’s old scrap computers, coming from our updated computer labs, and software that runs as services in the web browser (sometimes referred to as Rich Internet Applications or RIA), such as Google Apps, Soho and similar.

The thin client solution with Linux can be set up at no cost – provided that you have the right knowledge. The RIA solution can be combined with other solutions, such as thin Linux clients or ultra portable laptops.

Too be continued…

]]> http://www.frepa.org/wp/2008/08/13/one-laptop-per-child-the-budget-versions/feed/ 2 http://www.frepa.org/wp/2008/08/08/larare-ska-aldrig-acceptera-dalig-teknik/ http://www.frepa.org/wp/2008/08/08/larare-ska-aldrig-acceptera-dalig-teknik/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:00:03 +0000 frepa http://www.frepa.org/wp/?p=401 I samband med att min avhandling (Modularization of the Learning Architecture: Supporting Learning Theories by Learning Technologies) publicerades blev jag intervjuad av Skolporten.com. De har nu publicerat intervjun under rubriken "Lärare ska aldrig acceptera dålig teknik".

• På KKS Framtidens lärande: Mer flexibla lärandemiljöer
• På Øysten Johanessens blogg: Fredrik Paulsson har disputert
• På Skolporten, Forskning & utveckling
• På 計畫贊助者 (?)
• På En IKT-pedagogs funderingar

Min förhoppning är att den ska läsas och att det ska bli diskussion. Jag har försökt skriva så att både datavetare och pedagoger kan ha utbyte av att läsa den och jag hoppas att jag har lyckats.

Lärare har länge behövt bra IT-verktyg för att planera och organisera sitt arbete. Men är det lärplattformar som kommunerna borde satsa på? Den frågan ställer sig Fredrik Paulsson vid Umeå universitet.

Läs resten här. 

It is a problem that virtual learning environments (VLEs) are perceived as something that are installed centrally (silo-like) to be used by teachers and students as is (referring back to my last post, Where do VLEs come from and where are they heading?).  VLEs should not just “be there”, they should be assembled when needed, put together and adapted to specific pedagogical needs. And, in fact there is an interesting ongoing development towards modular VLEs. This is actually a trend that affects most application fields of IT. In general modularity (in its most ideal form) means that a VLE are viewed as a (distributed) toolbox from which different tools (or components/modules) can be chosen and assembled to form a loosely coupled learning environment with the look and feel of a VLE, but that actually consists of small parts provided as services by different providers – much like the parts of a machine is forming the machine or like Lego. This is of course still a vision, but it is far from unrealistic and we can already see examples of this happening. As a concept this development can be compared to Learning Objects, which doest really work as supposed (yet?), but anyway, as a concept…

Read the whole post here

You can see my first attempt below. Please, feel free to comment on it!

A historical perspective on TEL. The figure that illustrates "Web 2.0" is the "Web 2.0 technology cloud ".

We just released our concept browser Conzilla in version 2.1 together with our collaboration server Collaborilla 1.0. Both applications are open source and have been licensed under the GPL.

The biggest changes from the last version (2.0) are:

    * Support for collaborative conceptual modeling (publication of and contribution to context-maps), supported by the collaboration server Collaborilla.
    * Support for Dialogue Mapping.
    * Java Web Start support for easy installation and maintenance.
    * Refurbished user interface and usability improvements.
    * Export of context-maps to the formats SVG, PNG and JPEG.
    * Bookmarking functionality.
    * Improved layer management.
    * Color theme support.

Conzilla 2.1 requires a Java Runtime Environment in version 1.4.2 or newer.