Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:54:24 +0000

I have been extremely busy for the past couple of weeks… During the second week of March, I attended NERCOMP (North East Regional Computing Program) Annual Conference. I am a big fan of NERCOMP because it is a fabulous organization for the like minded people and it’s annual conference and the SIGs provide an excellent way to meet others and exchange ideas and learn. I took a couple of days off that week after the conference and played some golf with my older son – the temperature was in the high 40’s and low 50’s, not really golf friendly weather. But, you always look for something to blame in Golf and weather was perfect for that!

I am a member of the program committee that evaluates all NERCOMP proposals. We had a lot of terrific proposals, so it was very hard to pick and choose the few for which we had spots. Overall, the conference was really nice. I met with several colleagues with whom I continue to interact even after I moved to Pace. Of course, everyone wanted to know how I am handling my commute! A few of us had volunteered to tweet from the various presentations as a way for others to understand what has been going on in sessions that they were unable to get to.  I took the time to summarize the tweets in various ways. Please go to: http://sites.google.com/site/nercomp2010/

As you can see, the Wordle analysis shows the proportion of area based on how relevant the different words that were used is. Despite the fact that I tweeted a fair amount, I was by no means the topper! Next year, I am going to try to improve my rank

Dave Wedaman from Brandeis University and I communicate a fair amount through Twitter. I chided him for using paper at a few instances during the conference. He picked up on this and has convinced the Board members of NERCOMP to experiment with a paperless evaluation of NERCOMP SIG and has asked me to lead this initiative. He has provided an excellent pointer by suggesting a markup language that simplifies the attendees texting their evaluation. We may end up calling it – Instant Evaluation Response Markup Language (IERML)! If you have a better name, please let me know. Once we develop this further, I will write about it.

I was part of a lightening round presentation where each of us got 5 minutes to talk about a topic on how to do things cheaply. I spoke about hoe we used the Amazon cloud for testing the open source Mahara Platform for our e-Portfolio project for $60! This session was the most attended in the conference. It was really a lot of fun. I got more than 5 minutes because the YouTube video I used was streaming slow until we switched to a wired connection!

Talking about Mahara, we had a fantastic Dyson Day last Friday. The focus was on ePortfolios. We had the keynote by Trent Batson, who has been a leader in the ePortfolio area for a long time. His organization AAEEBL (The Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence-Based Learning) is now bringing together those who are interested in ePortfolios. He did a great presentation followed by really thoughtful discussion where faculty members were really engaged.

We also had faculty and students from Pace who have been using ePortfolios. This was really well done and very encouraging. The students were really fantastic and very confident during their presentation.

I also did a piece on Google Docs during our Expo where four others presented on other topics. Finally, David Booth from St Olaf’s College in Minnesota talked about his e-Portfolio experience, while Joe Seijo presented on Blackboard 9. I really loved David’s presentation. What a great speaker!

You can see all the tweets from Dyson Day to get a flavor of what was going on : http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=dysonday&page=1&rpp=150 and I am attaching the Wordle analysis below. Notice how Students and Reflection consume the most area, indicating that is exactly what ePortfolios can do that the other tools we have in place cannot!

Interview with Bogaziçi University

Last week I got contact by a member of  CET Department 3rd Grade Education & Research Club at the Bogaziçi University who asked me some questions about the implementation of moodle in our school.

What are the main advantages of learning management systems? How can an LMS contribute to the quality of education of a high school?

A conclusive measurement for quality of education does not exist, so it is very hard to make any claim regarding the contribution of  LMSs to the quality of education. Common sense tells me though that quality of education is primarily determined by the quality of the educators. Teachers make or break quality education with and without LMSs (or with and without
well-equipped classrooms, specialized labs, high profile libraries etc.).

That being said, LMSs can be very useful to schools that for some reason want to structurally extend the communication between teachers and students outside of the classroom. In its simplest form an LMS might be implemented to disseminate   learning materials, schedules, home work and assessment results online. Not only to students, but possibly also to parents, tutors and fellow teachers. More sophisticated functionality can be used to setup a true online extension of the classroom, where interactivity is achieved trough messaging, blogging, chat, forum, wiki and online (self)assessment functionality. The resulting differentiation of the student to teacher and even student to student relationship and one might provide a learning incentive to students or promote self-organization and responsibility.

From another angle LMSs, when used intensively and school-wide, can provide an insight in the learning process to administrators and parents and allow certain control mechanisms. This is particularly important for schools which feel a need to formalize the accountability to the students and their parents. (Whether it is a good thing to involve parents closely into day to day education of their children is a different question though.)

A pleasant side effect of the use of an LMS is that it usually sparks a discussion on the organization of academic departments as LMSs allow easy collaboration between teachers teaching the same course to different classes. The introduction of an LMS often provides the incentive to get organized and connect islands of knowledge together for the greater good.

Why did you choose Moodle? Can you tell about your experiences of Moodle, it’s difficulties and easinesses?

First a remark: The Koç School currently pilots Moodle and is looking into adding it on top of an already existing set of course management tools. A second use for Moodle in our school is the training of teachers and staff. We are starting to use Moodle as our main personal development platform.

Moodle is free software, it released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. To me this is very important as it directly promotes collaboration, interoperability and in the end: progress. Especially in
education, a clear public good, this is key. To my opinion the level of collaboration between schools is unnecessarily poor all over the world. Educators are reinventing the wheel over and over again and too often treat
each other as competitors.

Being free software also means Moodle is released with open source which makes it possible for individual schools to improve, adjust and add functionality as they like. This has led to a large community of developers that provide free plug-ins to Moodle for almost every thinkable functionality. In this community also our school can contribute in development and discussion about development of new core features.

The existence of a large active developer and user communities is of key importance to our school when selecting an LMS as it guarantees (free) support, translation of the interface, documentation, robustness and
security.

Finally Moodle provides a comprehensive learning management solution to us. It has the flexibility and functionality that potentially can keep our school served for a long time. Proprietary alternatives of similar extend (e.g. blackboard) are expensive and lack the spirit of the Moodle community. Other open source alternatives (Ilias, Sakai etc.) have mainly been turned down for the same reasons.

Are LMSs a demand or luxury today?

If we define luxury as the property of being excessively expensive, than we have to look at the cost of implementing an LMS to answer that question. It is important for schools to realize that implementing an LMS means more than just installing and configuring it. With Moodle that part is actually not very expensive. Implementation however also means training and supporting end-users. This is where the real expense is as it can eat man hours at a rapid pace. Yet another reason to opt for an LMS with a community like that of Moodle where most documentation and support is readily available (and free).

An LMS can be seen as a part of the school infrastructure just like classrooms, labs,  libraries, recreation areas, sporting facilities etc. Whether investing in one of those assets in particular should get priority
should depend on whether your educators have a clear vision for its use.

How do you see the future of LMSs at high schools? Can teachers at state schools also build systems like Koç School?

Despite the fact that the term LMS stopped being a buzz-word somewhere in 2005 or so, I think they are here to stay. In Western-Europe and the US most high schools and universities have some kind of online learning environment.

Of those schools none (or close) have build their LMS by themselves. Schools are not software producers and although almost every school claims to be special in its needs, I doubt whether most of them really are to such an extend that of the shelf solutions become useless.

Schools can and should be encouraged to participate in projects that aim to address issues of education as a whole. In that sense state schools should not be without ambition either. Schools like the Koç School however do have the resources to not only implement an LMS, but to also develop the educational vision and training program that goes with properly using it. To my opinion this gives us the moral obligation to at least feed back our experience into the community, but perhaps also take a more active role in helping other schools implement LMSs.

Tags: Bogaziçi University, interview, Moodle