Ramble On

On Tuesday, I spent a fascinating day at Apple’s EU Education Summit. The summit explored how mobile learning has the potential to act as a transformation agent in European Higher Education. (and in doing so push Apple’s products)

The day started well, with Apple providing all delegates with an iPad for the day, fully loaded with educational applications. A nice touch was that Apple had contracted CampusM, a company specialising in educational app development, to develop an iPad application to support the conference. The app provided personalised information such as timetables, attendee lists, maps and presenter bios. It even alerted you of where you needed to be.

The day was a mixture of presentations and hands-on sessions from Apple employees, Apple Educational mentors and case studies from European Universities. Almost all the sessions focused on mobile learning, usually with the emphasis on Apple products.

The non-Apple presentations started with Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, developer of Mathematica and best known to iPad users around the world as the ‘Theodore Gray’ of ‘The Elements’ fame. The presentation focused on developing ‘coffee table’ books for the iPad. Although relatively interesting, these ‘coffee table’ books are little more than the CD-ROMs of the 90s repurposed for the iPad. Diverting, but little more. Theodore then went on to demonstrate his latest project, ‘the Solar System’. A product that gave me deja vu. I’m sure he must have seen my final year degree project. Other than higher production values (mine was developed on an Amiga), it could have been my project, right down to the animations of flights across the surface of Mars.

Following Theodore was Genevieve Short from Pearsons. Pearsons, like many publishers are struggling to understand how to make the transition from the book to ebooks and Genevieve’s presentation covered some of the approaches Pearsons and Ladybird were trying with and without success.

One issue UK Universities have is that we are a different market to the US, with UK students purchasing far fewer books than their US counterparts. Instead many UK Universities purchase significantly higher numbers of core texts and license much more materials on their students behalf. I’ve often felt that many educational publishers would prefer us to move to the US model. I think tablet-type devices open up the opportunity to move books away from shared licensing models to a personal licensing model utilising stores such as the iBooks store to market directly to the student. If Apple wish to support Universities, they will have to look at different licensing models for books sold through the app store.

Next it was the OU. The Open University has been at the forefront of technology based learning for 40 years and it’s the UK’s biggest, with over 200,000 students. Martin Bean their Vice Chancellor burst onto the stage successfully drawing everyones attention away from their iPads. What’s interesting is that Martin isn’t an Academic, having previously been a General Manager of Microsoft’s Global Education Products group. There’s few UK Universities that would take the bold move to employ a non academic in such a role. But it was clear to everyone in the room through his passion for education and his complete understanding of how fundamental technology is to the OU, that more Universities may have to start to look elsewhere for the next generation of Vice Chancellors.

As a learning technologist, Martin’s presentation is similar to presentations I’ve given myself (mine with considerably less passion and skill). The OU have to adopt new technologies to improve their support for their students, for them it isn’t an option. But it was refreshing to hear somebody speak with passion about how adopting appropriate technology helps us improve the whole student experience.

He also briefly discussed something that’s started to be discussed in hushed whispers within my University. Is it right to continue to expect students to fit into the way we’ve always worked? Instead should we be standing back and recognising this is a new generation of students who have different skills and aspirations than the ‘notional’ student we continue to develop our courses around.

This can (understandably) be difficult for a educational institutes that build courses around the notions of ‘academic excellence’ (assessment) and ‘academic quality’ (assessment regs). Instead of lamenting that students are coming out of school with poorer maths skills or are unable to complete a traditional 5000 word essay, the argument is that we should recognise this generation comes to us with a whole range of new skills that previous generations didn’t have. For example, why shouldn’t a student be able to submit a short video instead of a 5000 word essay? As long as they demonstrate the same level of knowledge and understanding, the medium is unimportant. Understandably, these are very difficult concepts for Universities to tackle.

The final speaker was Bill Rankin, Director of Education Innovation at Abilene Christian University. He’s one of Apple’s regular Educational presenters and an excellent and interesting presenter. I’ve seen Bill before. His work of restructuring the curriculum at Abilene University to increase the flexibility of their educational delivery, is a model many Universities are looking to follow.

Flexible education is seen by many campus-based Universities as integral to our development over the next decade. Access to tutors to support student learning is something that is unique to campus courses so arguably the contact time should be used in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, academia is still ‘wedded’ to ‘chalk and talk’. The chalk may now be Powerpoint, but an inordinate amount of contact time with students is wasted in one way information delivery. Even my University, where most of our staff use technology, the majority of tutors still ‘lecture’ their students. Many still fail to question why they lecture and are happy continuing with an outdated approach that many would argue has never been the ideal pedagogical approach.

The goal for many of us who work with ‘Learning Technology’ is to build better systems and services to help staff understand and adopt different approaches to teaching by utilising appropriate technologies to replace some of their ‘instructional’ delivery, to make better use of their contact time. For example, why lecturer a classroom full of students when you could record a podcast beforehand and then work with the students in class on group work activities.

Most UK Universities are dipping their toes into true flexible learning. But Abilene are already well down the road to developing true flexible campus-based learning. Like many US Universities they aren’t as financially constrained as UK Universities. So at Abilene, every student is given an iPod Touch or iPhone during their first year and this allows them to deliver a range of services and teaching resources such as videos and podcasts to their students.

Abilene are still in the early stages of their new curricula. But there’s already some interesting results. One was that the engagement of students using the iPhone was higher than those who opted for the iPod touch. Because of the social aspects of the iPhone, students were more likely to carry it around with them and so were more likely to engage with learning materials outside of the classroom. They were also introducing flexibility to their assessment strategies allowing students to submit work in different formats.

Overall, the day was extremely interesting. It’s great to see Apple strongly supporting education. I just wish our other system vendors were as fully engaged with education.

Posted in Apple, Education

This blog post has been a long time in writing.

From about 1998, my team was responsible for supporting learning technology projects within the University. The range of projects was diverse from programmable computer chip simulations to supporting more traditional computer aided learning packages such as CD-ROMs or web-based ‘interactive’ learning objects. We also had a responsibility to identify technologies that could be implemented as University services.

A number of our early distance learning projects had requirements for on-line support. Our manager heard of a project running in Engineering that was using something called ‘Lotus Notes’ to support their distance learning course. Despite some misgivings on my part, Lotus Notes was adopted for our projects. I have to admit, my first impressions (and continued impression) is that the Notes client is awful. I’m probably the only Domino developer who’s never developed for the client. Luckily as a group, we weren’t interested in proliferating clients around the Uni and were more interested in the ability for making Domino database available to students through the web.

As it turned out, I didn’t work on these early Notes projects. Watching colleagues develop the early projects, I really wasn’t impressed by development for the Notes client. It seemed to me that to make something work through the web and client was far too time consuming. It also seemed that the design of the web side was compromised by the client side (for example using framesets). The early projects also seemed to involve too much training and support, such as showing users how to use the Notes client and setting up users accounts. But, importantly, it also appeared the Notes offered a very easy to learn development platform where you could create complicated web interactions, much more easily than with Perl, PHP, or ASP. Something that was very useful for a team of Learning Technologist with a mixture of academic, technical and design backgrounds.

As we moved into 2000, we re-evaluated the work the team were doing. It was clear that the targeted ‘learning object’ developments were not working. We’d develop ‘learning objects’ with reasonably high production values and staff found it difficult to maintain the content. We even had a few projects cease after the academic we worked with left. Often interesting pedagogical solutions we would suggest were undermined by the need of staff to maintain them and to be perfectly honest, in 2000 few academics we worked with could think beyond a linear ‘book’ approach to teaching online.  However, the systems we’d built to support these projects had worked better than we expected. So as a group we took the decision to focus on developing a University-wide system that would support staff in their teaching.

At the time, most Universities were looking at ‘Learning Environments’. The two obvious choices were Blackboard and WebCT. We’d played with both, but they appeared to be focused on the academic ‘technology leaders’ and not the average academic, many of whom were still getting to grips with email (I know hard to believe). So as a team we resisted buying a solution and opted to develop our own with the idea that everything should be as simple as sending an email. To be honest, it was a selfish decision. I didn’t want my job to turn into an admin job, just setting up courses and adding students. Developing our own system would be more interesting and we could design the admin ‘out of the system’ by tying everything to our student system and academic structures.

It was at this point our group disintegrated. The manager left and wasn’t replaced. Our web manager left and although we’d recently employed the Notes developer from Engineering, they also found a new job. So as 2001 approached, we were left with two learning technologists and a graphic designer, a promise of more staff, and a commitment to the University to release a University-wide pilot in September 2001. It was important that the technology allowed us to work quickly.

Luckily, the previous summer, I had to develop my first ‘Notes’ project. Unlike colleagues previous Notes projects I took the decision to remove the Notes client from the equation and to design something that could form the basis of a future learning environment. So everything on the website had to be configurable by staff through a web interface. Everything from registering students, selecting functionality, to setting up groups had to be done through a web interface.

With this forming the basis of the main teaching areas and with the support of a senior manager who thankfully developed the basic integration with the data from our student record system, by May we had a portal structure that could be connected to a series of modules. i.e. the basics of a learning environment.

Luckily at this point we employed a Notes Administrator who was able to point out some massive flaws in my design that would have crippled any large roll-out. I have to say, we hit the jackpot with our Notes Admin. We didn’t want an administrator to administer ‘Notes’. There are no Notes clients. We don’t use Domino for email. We wanted a administrator who would be an integral part of the development team who would provide the tools to integrate our system with data from other systems, something he was more than happy to do. With his advice, some minor restructuring, we managed to release a scalable prototype and my colleague was able to start the immense task of training hundreds of staff before the September roll-out.

The amazing thing with Domino is how easy it is to set up simple ‘form-capturing’ type websites and this meant that we could create a wide range of resources very quickly. So by the time of release we were able to provide a wide range of functionality from classifieds and discussion forums through to integrations with our library catalogue. So by (late) September we managed to achieve what few thought we would, we rolled-out this new environment to every student (20,000), every member of staff (2000+), and to every module (4000) in the University.

Although I was working 100+ hours every week for 9 months, I’m not sure such a small group of inexperienced ‘developers’ could have achieved such a tight timescale with any other technology available at the time. This to me has been the greatest thing about Domino. It’s amazing what you can achieve with just a little bit of knowledge. This project was testament to that.

It’s now ten years later and we’re still continuing to expand and develop our learning environment. The majority of it is still built in Domino. Our single Solaris server is now part of a cluster of three (two live, one backup). It’s extremely well used, with 13000 students and 1500 members of staff logging on daily, with an average of 1.4 million page requests per day. Our module website functionality has expanded with blogs, wikis, tests, better group work facilities, podcasts,etc and we now handle about 150,000 assignments submissions each academic year. We now have over 30,000 databases that provide websites for the various academic components (i.e. module websites, programme websites etc). There’s even a simple mobile interface. I could keep quoting numbers and features. But on reflection I’m amazed by what we’ve been able to achieve with Domino in the last decade. Especially as we were told by ‘experts’ across the University that Notes was ’ageing technology’ that would never scale and wouldn’t be around in 5 years time, never mind 10.

So where does the project go from here?

Although I still think Domino can still form the basis of our environment, increasingly, we’re storing data in relational databases for more complex work and we’re building more facilities outside of Domino using ‘cheaper’ technology. 

We’re not yet using XPages. When we have hundreds of thousands lines of code, we’re unlikely to ‘convert’ to XPages, just create new additions as XPages. Plus we’ve learnt the hard way that Domino on Solaris is never reliable at a x.0 and there’s usually something that causes us issues at the x.1 release (usually virus checkers) so we’ve not yet moved all our servers to 8.5.2. Equally, the team’s composition has changed and staff are more development focused and rightly concerned about limiting themselves to a technology that doesn’t transfer elsewhere.

I’m also concerned by Lotus’ apparent decision to not develop a 64 bit version of Domino on Solaris. With us already struggling with memory limitations this could ultimately force us off the platform and if this happened we would have to move to a commercial or open source solution, away from the in-house development.

I also have to state that Lotus’ support for education compared to other vendors has been awful throughout the last decade and hopefully this will also improve. 

But personally, despite some misgivings when we first started to use the technology, I hope that Domino continues to provide us with the tools that we require. So that in 2016 I can write another update on how well it’s served us (I would say 2021, but I don’t think Uni’s will still need learning environments)

Posted in Domino, Reflection

I bought an iPad on the UK day of release so have now been using it for about 6 months. So I thought it was about time to reflect on how the iPad is working for me.

I know many people have bought the iPad and then found that they had no use for it. But I find that I’m always pawing at it and on reflection, I think with the iPad, content is king. Out of the box all it really does is email, video, music and web. It does them very well, but I’m not sure the basic functionality is enough to justify it’s price. Many of the people I’ve met who don’t like it, never download content or applications and so judge the iPad on the installed software. In my case, I already consumed the majority of my media through the internet and the iPad makes accessing this information so pleasurable.

The most obvious change is that I’m reading more ‘traditional’ media, albeit, electronically. I had stopped reading newspapers and I although I still have a few magazine subscriptions, I rarely buy magazines or newspapers from a shop. The iPad has transformed this through two applications, Zinio and PressReader. These two applications provide an easy way to buy newspapers and magazines. Zinio offers a wide range of magazines from across the world, often cheaper than the printed version. PressReader is the newspaper equivalent. Purchasing is very simple. You open up the inbuilt stores, select the item you’re interested in and purchase. PressReader’s purchases are charged to your iTunes account. Zinio’s slightly more complicated because you have to setup an account on Zinio’s website before you can purchase.

Newspapers and magazines are really suited to the iPad’s form factor. The large colour screen shows magazines at their best and you can zoom in by double tapping or through a simple mutlitouch gesture. With PressReader you can also view a text version of an article, ask the iPad to read it to you or even email the article to friends. It’s amazing how natural all of this feels and I can’t see me ever buying another physical newspaper and the few magazine subscriptions I still have, will soon be cancelled.

The second area where the iPad has caused a change in practice is reading books. As with newspapers, I find I’ve been reading more. Through iBooks and the Kindle reader, it’s easy to download most books. Not everything is rosy with using the iPad as an ebook reader. Ebooks are often more expensive than their paperback cousins. But with several eBook reader apps available, it’s possible to shop around to find cheaper options. I find the iPad’s screen perfect for reading books. Possibly too perfect, as I often read in bed with the brightness down and with the lights out and this probably isn’t good for my eyes. One issue with the iPad screen is that it’s very glossy but so far I’ve not found this to be much of an issue.

Although the iPad was a personal purchase, I use it regularly at work and I’m finding it works really well in meetings and means you don’t have a table full of people sitting behind laptops.

I’ve tried a number of note taking applications. Penultimate, was one of the first note taking apps available.  Penultimate captures hand written notes. It works reasonably well allowing you to jot down ideas and capture graphics with your fingure. I did briefly flit with using a Pogo Stylus to improve the quality of my note taking, but after a while I found that I preferred typed notes, something Penultimate doesn’t support. So I switched to applications that allowed me to use the iPad’s keyboard to type notes and I have been using Evernote to store and organise meeting notes. These are then synced back to all my devices connected to my Evernote account. This means that my notes are available on all my computers as well as the iPad.

Recently I’ve started to use a new application called ‘SoundNote’. SoundNote records both the audio and the time you type a word or add a sketch. So after a meeting, if you can’t remember what your note refers to, you simply click on the word and the audio from that point of time is played back. The amazing thing about the app is that even in big rooms, the recording is often clear enough to be listenable. At the moment there’s limited functionality for sending documents, with file sharing via Wireless and a facility to email documents. The lack of syncing and organisational tools, means that I continue to use Evernote on a day to day basis.

I bought the camera connector kit hoping that the iPad would become my route for uploading photos to Flickr when away from base. The kit provides a USB connector and a SDHC card reader. The USB adapter is very useful, allowing you to add a card reader for compact flash and memory sticks. But it also allows you to plug in other USB devices such as keyboards and microphones.

Inserting a memory card opens the iPad’s import interface. This works like iPhoto with options to import everything or selected photos. Unfortunately, iPhoto isn’t yet available on the iPad. So once imported you are reliant on third party photo applications.

I photograph in RAW and it’s saved me on a number of occasions. I use Aperture on my Mac to edit these photographs before uploading them to Flickr. The iPad is able to import the RAW files from my Sony A700. Unfortunately, there appears to be a bug with the RAW processor for my Sony NEX5 which causes applications accessing these files to crash. Although there is RAW support, I don’t think RAW is supported natively. I believe the files are converted to JPEG when used by applications and this defeats the object of using RAW. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find any applications that mimics my current workflow, or even provide the equivalent to iPhoto. Some of the best applications available are Photogene and Photo fx Ultra and Adobe’s PS Express. They’re all pretty decent applications but they’re not yet mature enough to replace my current setup. So apart from processing the odd photograph, I’ll continue to take a laptop with me when I’m away from base for several days.

Probably the thing my iPad is used for the most is to consume what I consider ‘the basics’, web, email, twitter, RSS feeds etc. The basics that keep me up with what’s happening in the world. The instant on nature of the iPad, like the iPhone before it, means that these information channels are always a touch away.

The official Twitter application on the iPad is fantastic and possibly the best twitter client available on any platform. There’s a fantastic RSS feed reader called ‘Reeder’ that makes good use of the iPad’s multitouch interface. Even the basic email client and web browser functionality are more than adequate for my needs. The lack of Flash support can be an issue. But the reality is that most websites that use Flash, use it for video, and most big web sites provide iPad alternatives video streams so it’s not too inconvenient. But it is still one of the major omissions from the iPad.

One of the most impressive aspects of the iPad is the creativity it’s generated from grassroots programmers. One area I’ve been impressed with is the solutions developers have designed for consuming feeds of information and presenting them in different ways. There’s a number of interesting applications. Pulse is highly regarded by many, but my personal favourite is Flipboard. This application can consume feeds from Twitter and Facebook but presents them in a way that makes them more interesting. It does this by taking several tweets or Facebook status updates and presents them on the same ‘page’, giving each items an appropriate amount of space. The really clever thing is that if the item contains a link, Flipboard requests the page and presents a summary of the page. This approach constantly throws up interesting articles that I’d missed through my convential readers so I now use Flipboard at the end of each day to review the each day’s tweets.

The recent release of iOS4.2 makes a number of applications much more usable. With access to the beta through Apple’s Developer portal, I’ve been using iOS4.2 for several months and the update has helped alleviate many of the niggles I’d had with the ‘single task’ metaphor which the original iPad was based around. This meant that you had to be careful switching between applications because often they would restart causing you to loose your position or even your work. With 4.2 I can seemlessly switch between applications in meetings without worrying.

Until the iOS4.2 update, music on the iPad had been a mixed bag. The built-in iPod was the only application that could play music in the background. Most apps exited as you switched applications. With 4.2 these applications stay active in the background and the native sound controls now controls the current application. There’s a number of excellent music applications. Leading the way is Aweditorium. Aweditorium is a music discovery service. It’s remarkably well done, presenting a screen of tiled images of bands. Clicking on the band plays a track from the band with links to iTunes and Youtube. Very simple to use with a great selection of bands

Other applications I regularly use:

• WordPress – Good for quick writing short blogs.
• KeyNote – now ‘sketch’ presentations using iPad’s KeyNote then finish them off on my computer
• Pulse – RSS reader that’s especially good for image streams
• BBC News (News24)
• TV Guide
• TuneIn Radio – Hundreds of internet radio feeds
• Air Display – Turn your iPad into a second monitor for your laptop. Useful when you’re away from base
• VNC Viewer
• Junos Pulse – VPN client.
• GoodReader – PDF reader
• DropBox – Access to files in your DropBox folder
• Sketch – Drawing package
• TabToolkit – Guitar tabs
• iMockups – Great wireframing application.
• (Plus some great games!)

One of the standout features of the iPad is the battery life and I think this has caused the biggest change.Regularly achieving the 10 hours battery life Apple advertise. This means that I have instant access to a whole range of information, tools and games without the need to open a laptop and after a day or two, you quickly question the continued need for a laptop. The worry I had with the introduction of multitasking was that the fantastic battery life would be reduced, but this hasn’t been the case.

Despite all this praise. The iPad is far from perfect. This blog entry was written on my laptop. I find writing long passages using the iPad’s keyboard frustrating. The lack of a ‘drive’ to store resources in means that applications don’t really share data beyond images and it’s frustrating that you have to use iTunes to transfer content. It would be great to plugin a disk drive to access more content. This lack of functionality isn’t a problem at base, I have a MacPro at work, it’s away from base that this lack of functionality has proved to be an issue. Hopefully the iPad 2 will tackle some of these issue. Luckily until then,  Apple’s provided me with a good compromise. The new MacBook Air and iPad provide the perfect combination.

Posted in Apple