ALTC - Users and Innovation Project Presentations
This publication showcases nine projects from the JISC Users and Innovation Programme which presented papers at the 15th annual Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) in September 2008.
Presentations made by JISC Users and Innovation Programme projects
ALT-C, Leeds, September 2008
The JISC Users & Innovation Programme is a £4.75M development investment funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which aims to transform practice in UK higher education by developing technologies and innovative processes based on the needs of individual users working within institutions across multiple domains.
The programme has funded 23 major projects and a wide range of benefits realisation and community development activities. Emerge is the support and synthesis project for the Users and Innovation Programme. The aim of the Emerge Project is to support the JISC’s forming of an “effective and sustainable community of practice” (CoP) around user engagement processes. The Emerge Project runs a networking website and organises activities to disseminate, share and implement the benefits of the programme.
User-centred design, like many other-centred practices, traces its lineage to community development learning pioneered by Paolo Freire (Freire 1996). A Freirian approach emphasises activities that are authentic to the participants’ cultural context. The Emerge project aimed to test the hypothesis that by using community development processes, the quality of educational-technology projects might be improved. We have been using an asset-based approach to community development (Mathie and Cunningham 2003) that grows from Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987), emphasising the strengths of the bonds and bridges between people and networks.
We hypothesised that:
- Developing projects in a context where there is awareness of the wider activity in a field and an understanding of the alignments and gaps in that field will lead to better projects being developed.
- By using community development processes and social networking, the general quality of educational (learning) technology development projects may be improved, bringing benefits not just to the JISC but more widely to all sectoral funding agencies and stakeholders.
The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) is a professional and scholarly association in the UK, which seeks to bring together all those with an interest in the use of learning technology. The annual ALT Conference (ALT-C) is one of the largest academic learning technology conferences in Europe. It is an important venue for information dissemination and exchange about leading-edge developments in learning technologies for higher, further and community education.
These nine projects represent the range of innovation within the programme. They are working in novel ways combining technologies and practices in innovative ways. All the projects put their end-users at the heart of their development processes. Real users (not abstractions) are involved in development teams and the projects are having real impact in institutions. User interfaces are considered as important as data models, control programs and work flows. Perhaps most importantly, these projects are making their own ongoing, reflexively self-aware, purposeful community of collaborators visible, leading to the wider adoption of user-centred educational development practices.
Argosi, Alternate Reality Games for Orientation, Socialisation and Induction, addresses four research objectives, asking whether an Alternate Reality Game is an effective and appropriate medium for enabling students to: meet the intended learning outcomes of the library and information skills induction; create social networks during the induction period; improve their confidence in navigating the city and university campus; engage in, and enjoy, the induction experience.
ASEL, Audio Supported Enhanced Learning, is developing, implementing and evaluating the use of audio within next generation technologies to support, enhance and personalise the learner experience in three key areas: self reflection, assessment, and collaborative learning.
The Awesome (Academic Writing Empowered by Socially Mediated Online Environments) dissertation environment (ADE) is using social software both to develop a reflective, critical voice and provide networked social support for undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation writing.
Evolve is a benefits realisation project that is designed to bring together and support researchers from different countries and different disciplines who are engaged with contemporary issues in education using social networking and Web 2.0 technologies.
Moose, Modelling of Second Life Environments, investigates the scaffolding and processes needed to enable groups of students in Higher Education to establish productive information and knowledge exchanges and learning through the medium of online 3-D multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs)using Second Life.
Open Habitat aims to encourage students to use multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life as a means to making creative online collaboration an integrated part of their learning. The Open Habitat project is running a number of pilots integrated into the teaching of Art & Design and Philosophy.
PreView, Problem-based Learning (PBL) in Virtual Interactive Educational Worlds, is investigating, implementing and evaluating a user-focused approach to developing scenarios and materials, linking the emerging technologies of virtual worlds with interactive PBL online to create immersive collaborative tutorials.
SkillClouds is addressing the issue of making skills more visible to undergraduate students who are participating in a career development course, through an exploration of the use of social bookmarking software and tagging, and in particular through the tag-cloud data visualisation technique that has become a distinctive feature of Web 2.0 sites. The hypothesis is that the skill cloud will be an engaging way of visualising this information for students.
Sounds Good, is building on previous small-scale work using MP3 files for summative feedback on one programme. The Sounds Good team will widen the focus to both formative and summative feedback in various disciplines at different educational levels. The experimentation will include delivering digital sound files containing feedback to students via a virtual learning environment, email and widely available mobile devices such as MP3 players.
I would like to thank the nine project teams who presented their findings at ALT-C and then wrote them up for this publication; all the projects and people in the wider Users and Innovation Programme, especially the Programme Manager, Lawrie Phipps and the Director, Craig Wentworth; the Emerge Project support team, some of the most creative people working in learning technology, anywhere; and Emma Anderson, who is heading up the process of disseminating the results of the Emerge project and the Users and Innovation Programme, and who has edited this volume. Thanks also to Helen Swain for her proofreading and design skills.
George Roberts
Director, Emerge Project
References
Cooperrider, D L and Srivastva, S 1987, ‘Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life’, Organizational Change and Development, vol 1, pp129-169.Freire, P 1996, The pedagogy of the oppressed, Penguin, London.
Mathie, A and Cunningham, G 2003, ‘From Clients to Citizens: asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development’, Development in Practice, vol 13, No.5, pp474-486.