Category Archives: professional development

Notes and observations from the PESC Data Summit

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The PESC Data Summit Fall 2011 took place in San Francisco from October 12-14, 2011. It is a regular meeting of organizations that come together to discuss and further interoperability between educational systems. PESC, the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council, “enables cost-effective connectivity between data systems to accelerate performance and service, to simplify data access and research, and to improve data quality along the higher education lifecycle” (PESC info sheet).

In order to achieve that PESC develops XML standards that are community driven and open for anyone to use. Because of the involvement of institutions of higher education as well as vendors / producers of software for that sector, it is hoped that the standards that are being developed have high relevance and are a result of actual demand and thus are more likely to be implemented by vendors in their products.

PESC has a number of workgroups and taskforces. I participated in the ePortfolio workgroup and learned a great deal about how PESC views ePortfolios and what academic institutions in the U.S.A. and Canada expect of an ePortfolio. PESC looks at an academic ePortfolio for which tracking of competencies and assessments are important components. Furthermore, the academic ePortfolio will be used in academic advising, e.g. for future career paths or further studies. Therefore, it must be machine- and human-readable. Transcripts that are moved from one institution to another and can be stored (or a link to them) in the ePortfolio are a necessity. Thus, the ePortfolio is not entirely learner-driven, but it has a number of prescribed content that it must contain in order for an in-taking institution to get a more complete picture of a student.

Besides discussing the ownership of the portfolio, we particularly looked at standards for portfolio data exchange. PESC does not have to come up with its own standard if there is already one that is in use and that is usable for PESC purposes.

There are not too many ePortfolio schema around. Leap2A and Desire2Learn’s XML export structure were put forward. The IMS ePortfolio standard was put aside as not being suitable because PESC does not only require the moving of content artifacts but also of assessment information.

As PESC tries to implement XML standards, Leap2A would not work exactly because it is based on ATOM feeds. However, it was discovered that CETIS is working on a Leap2R standard that converts Leap2A into an XML structure.

There is more analysis needed to look into how Leap2A/R could be implemented and what kind of data can be pulled from other systems. Even though it would be quite handy to get everything automatically in an easy-to-read and easy-to-process format, I think that not everything can and should be done (in the beginning). Implementing web services that assist in the transfer of information is not to be taken lightly. If every software involved in the process is expected to support these web services, uptake may be slow as high costs may be involved in developing the necessary interfaces.

I think it is important to define a priority list for connectivity, exchange of data, and export of ePortfolios. Being able to pull in transcript information into a university’s portfolio for advising purposes is all well and good. However, if the purpose of the advising is to find a graduate school for the student that will take him away from his current institution, then being able to export his portfolio and import it into the other institution may be more important to the student and he’d be happy to include his transcripts as secure PDF documents only instead of having them transferred automatically.

A pragmatic approach may be useful in order to get an initiative started and to see how it is being received instead of trying to accomplish everything.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education is funding the LMS-MyPortfolio Interoperability Project which aims to connect the major LMSs used in NZ schools to MyPortfolio, which is a Mahara installation. The main areas of work are:

  1. account provisioning
  2. notifications
  3. moving content

In order to achieve this, a web services stack has been implemented in Mahara which allows other LMSs (and also Student Management / Information Systems) to consume these web services and thus connect to Mahara.

The account provisioning project part is the most advanced. Sometime during the discussion of what to enable besides account provisioning, group creation came up. However, the actual implementation of total group management via the LMS was not activated for MyPortfolio because group admins should still have the possibility to add users from outside of their institution who have accounts on MyPortfolio to their group or remove users without having to check back with the LMS. The attempt to manage everything via the LMS would have been far too complicated and would have had to take a number of exception as well as special rules into account. The “low-hanging fruit” was the implementation of account and group creation via the LMS as well as initial group membership provisioning. However, the updating and deleting of groups was abandonded for MyPortfolio because it is a Mahara instance that is used by many schools (over 810 at the beginning of October). Had it been a Mahara with just one institution, the group management via the LMS would have worked better.

Besides the administrative concerns, other thoughts need to be heard. MyPortfolio (and Mahara) is a learner-centered portfolio application and thus the users should have as much freedom as possible. Therefore, governing all groups via LMSs would be in direct conflict with this ideal. Of course, the students who use MyPortfolio are connected to a school and thus have to follow certain rules, but MyPortfolio should still be different from a LMS.

That does not mean that no formal assessment documents can and should be included. However, the amount of information or group membership making it into a learner’s account is the question.

Coming back to PESC: Being aware of the work that is going on in the U.S.A. and Canada as well as thinking about possible connecting points for future development work in Mahara is beneficial in order to advance possible integration work with other systems.

Inspire and be inspired: Emerging Leaders Symposium 2011

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A big THANK YOU to the crew from Albany Senior High School who organized the Emerging Leaders Symposium from April 28-29, 2011. It was a great (un-)conference that brought together up-and-coming educators from around the country to discuss leadership in schools and how (young) educators can be assisted to become leaders in their school communities.

Though I am not a teacher in a NZ school, I could still attend the symposium and am happy that I had the opportunity to do so because I learned a great deal, talked to teachers who do amazing things in their schools, and also got a glimpse of Albany Senior High, which is not your typical school. ASHS embraces openness in a number of ways: open education, open classrooms, open teaching, open source, open learning spaces. In an unconference session, Stonefields School, a primary school in Auckland, presented the thoughts behind their new building. It is great to see that some schools break away from the tradition model of organizing school and follow alternative roads.

Thursday, April 28, 2011, was the conference day with a keynote by Mark Osborne, followed by World Café where we discussed how leadership inspires, motivates and supports us, and how we can be more effective leaders ourselves. In the afternoon, 10 of us took the plunge to present in the pecha kucha style of presentations.

Coming up with 20 slides for 20 seconds each was a major challenge for me because I tend to have fewer slides in 400 seconds. It was great fun to lay out the presentation and think about the time restrictions as well as the photos and graphics that I wanted to use to represent what I was saying.

As I am bad at knowing when exactly 20 seconds are over, I added a small circle at the bottom of my slides to which I assigned an action so that it would run across my screen in exactly 20 seconds. Thus, I knew how much time I still had left and whether I needed to cut my sentence short or prolong a little bit (the ball can’t be seen in the recording as I stitched it together with the slides and the Flip’s audio). I got that idea from Ignite Wellington where a ball moves across the screen all the time indicating when a slide is going to be switched.

When setting up my presentation, I forgot to take into account that the transition added another second to my presentation. Thus, I went a bit over pecha kucha time. :-( For next time I also know that I need to test whether screen recording works with the projector. I had the most difficult time connecting and in the end had to turn of my screen recording software. Luckily, Mark recorded all sessions so that I could use the audio from his recording and add my slides to it. The slides can also be viewed on Slideshare.

The topics of the other presentations included for example what education can learn from cricket, lessons learned from travelling that are applicable in school, gamification of learning, game theory in education, social media for learning, minimally invasive education. After the pecha kucha session we did “speed dating” to talk to a number of people in a very short time reflecting on the presentations.

This first day was a high-powered day filled with many different impressions and activities (I shouldn’t forget the introductions: 3 words that I identify with and only then could you say your name) and still enough time in between to chat with attendees.

Friday morning was reserved for 9 unconference sessions around the topics that the symposium participants were interested in. This unconference also gave us an idea of what it feels like to teach / learn in a Learning Common at ASHS.

After the unconference we got together in focus groups to prepare short presentations and also questions that we wanted to pose to Secretary of Education, Karen Sewell, who joined the symposium in the afternoon. The focus groups were on M?ori achievement, collaboration, science, personalizing learning, and leadership.

ELS11 was a great conference with the right number of people in a fantastic location where innovation could be tasted. If I were to draw a conclusion, I would say that these two days were all about sharing, connecting, collaborating sincerely (the vision from my focus group) and building community not just within a school but across schools. Schools already have great emerging leaders in their midst. These need the encouragement, space to grow and possibilities to show what they can do.

In response to a number of questions, Karen Sewell asked: “What’s stopping you?” Apparently, nothing much because ELS11 was an initiative that was born out of the wish to connect with other people, the science focus group is going to organize an unconference for science teachers, and there will be an ELS12.

If you want to read another participant’s reflections and summary of ELS11, you can do so on Tara’s blog.

Agile undercover

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Agile software development is still a bit obscure to me. As I have been hearing a lot about it recently, primarily through company presentations at the Meet & Greet in preparation of Summer of Tech, I went to a presentation today to find out more about “agile”.

The Agile Professionals Network organized the presentation “Agile Undercover: When Customers Don’t Collaborate” given by Rashina Hoda. Her presentation, as already suggested by the title, focused on the customer and what an agile team can do if the customer is not fully on board.

She has identified 6 types of customers in agile projects in her research in India and New Zealand that she placed on a continuum:

  1. Product owner: That’s the perfect customer, a rare breed (in any project). :-)
  2. Story owner: The project is split up into multiple stories (in non-agile words: parts) and each one has a person responsible from the customer side. That means that the responsibilities don’t have to be centered in one person who may not always have time, but different people from the customer side are involved at different times.
    This ensures that a customer representative is there at all times. However, I see the danger in not being able to tie everything together. This type of customer requires that the individual story owners talk to each other and keep each other informed so that decisions are made along the same lines.
  3. Just demos: Sometimes agile development projects can be happy if the customer shows up for the demos (no other interaction willingly or out of necessity). They then try to sneak in a discussion at the end to go over the development and receive feedback on it as well as some pointers for further development.
  4. E-collaboration: Sometimes it’s not possible to meet face-to-face. That’s when e-collaboration comes in handy so that the developers and the customer can still see each other and discuss work. Video-conferencing where possible, but also text chat help greatly to stay in touch and involved.
    I would have placed e-collaboration before just demos because I sense a greater involvement than in the just demos part, but of course, that always depends on the project.
  5. Customer proxy: If a customer can’t be present, somebody else from the development team or closely related can act as stand-in to lead discussions and then communicate the results back to the customer, receive their opinion and feed that back to the team.
  6. Extreme undercover: That is the worst-case scenario. This can happen when the development team decides to use agile methods, but the customer is not aware of that and thus is not involved in the process. That is often the case if the customer as too scared of using agile or opposes it.

These types of customer are not new because I can also see them in “regular” projects. However, Rashina pointed out that customer involvement is particularly crucial for the success in agile projects, and a team has to find ways of compensating for not-ideal customers.

As I just got a brief glimpse into agile software development / agile methods, it would be great to actually see such a project work and compare it to my project work experience.

This presentation was based on “Agile Undercover: When Customers Don’t Collaborate” by Rashina Hoda, James Noble, and Stuart Marshall which they presented at XP 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2010.

EYC unConference (Part 3)

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After a wonderful lunch and small talk at the lunch buffet, we had two more sessions at the EYC unConference today. You can read part 1 and part 2 before continuing if you haven’t already done so.

Low budget user testing

Courtney Johnston offered to facilitate a session on user testing and how to do that on a shoe-string budget.

A lot of user testing can be done by using paper and web site mockups. You also do not need hundreds of users, but can often already get an idea when you ask about 6 people to participate in a card-sorting activity or give them a task to complete on a web site. Some professional usability testers may bury their head in the sand when they read these lines, but here were are talking about testing web site for communities that operate on a very low till non-existent budget who cannot afford to have sessions in a usability lab and use awesome, but expensive software and setups to conduct their testing.

Often, even only with a few number of people, you can get an idea of whether a certain navigation works, whether menu items are named logically etc. However, when you only have access to a small number of people, you should be acutely aware of their ICT background to interpret their answers correctly and not make false assumptions and objectifying these.

Getting started with user testing

Courtney Johnston provides tips of how to do low-budget user testing; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Feeding back to software developers

Tim McNamara offered the last session that I went to for this day of learning more about community involvement online. It was on how to give useful feedback to software developers. That was a dear topic to me as I get frustrated sometimes when people write forum entries or send me emails from which I cannot really make out the problem and try to solve it. It always takes a lot of effort to figure out what the issue might be and how to solve it.

The Google Project Hosting issue tracker is a good example of how to guide users in providing constructive and useful bug reports. When you open a new issue, you don’t just get an empty text box, but depending on your bug report, you can choose a template which then gives a few suggestions of what to include in your bug report. The template for a “user defect report” has the following items:

What steps will reproduce the problem?
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

What browser (or hg/svn client) are you using? On what operating system?

As these questions are written directly in the text box, people can’t overlook them. ;-)

I will have to check if we could also add such pre-populated text in Launchpad for people filing Mahara bugs. That would be very useful.

Now what?

Currently, I am still in the processing phase because there was a lot of information today, a number of web sites to check out, things to try out for myself and wrapping my head around. It was great to meet people who create web sites for non-profits and a lot of times use open source. Joomla was talked about quite a bit as a person ran two sessions on it whereas other CMS were hardly mentioned (we should remedy that next time). However, as was pointed out when the Wordle was shown: Drupal sits on top of Joomla and has “brain” right next to it. ;-)

Words shouted out during the closing session of EYC unConference to say what was important

EYC unConference in a Wordle; created by Wellington ICT

A big Thank You to the organizers and volunteers as well as the participants of the unConference who made that day a great learning experience.

EYC unConference (Part 2)

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As written in the previous post on the EYC unConference, everybody could propose a topic for a session and gather people to discuss it. After my initiated session on how to actually get people to use a community web site in which the attendees greatly participated and did not need a lot of facilitating, I went to a similar session. There the focus was on the use of social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook.

Online communities and social media

People saw the purpose of Twitter and Facebook differently and it always came down to finding where the people you want to reach hang out and picking them up from there.

Another important point that was raised was that not everybody is using social media and should not be forced to do so in order to join a community, but they should have alternative means for engagement. though that does not mean that the lowest common denominator should be chosen. It is worthwhile to educate community members about the possibilities of social media and offer them training so that they can become literate in its use.

Despite that, especially established community members should not be forced to go out of their way to continue engaging. Somebody came up with an analogy to a restaurant that was picked up by Joanna McCleod. When regular patrons come to a restaurant, they should not be made to go out again to find a flyer that is being distributed on Lambton Quay in order to be able to dine at that restaurant. They should still be able to just go inside without any detours.

The session attendees agreed that it is about the way of communicating and not necessarily the tool. Twitter and Facebook can change rather quickly in this day and age. So you may have to switch to another service. However, the idea of the social networking will persist. And you should not be afraid to pull the plug and discontinue using a tool when you realize that your community does not take to it. Your efforts can be used elsewhere more productively.

group discussion about using social media with communities

Never mind the nice weather outside. Community's social media use is as good. CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Web accessibility

Robyn Hunt talked about what everybody could do to improve their web sites to embrace accessibility. That does not only mean that people with disabilities can get more out of a web site, but it also means that the web site is improved for everybody as accessible web sites often also include looking at usability issues that might frustrate “regular” users as well.

I know that I have to improve the accessibility of my blog here, e.g. give meaningful alternative text and not just my picture caption and probably improve a whole bunch of other things that are normally hidden to the eye, but help people greatly who use screen readers.

Learning more about accessibility is a project on my ToDo list for which I will have to set aside a time and either participate in a workshop or read relevant texts.

One thing that particularly stuck in my head was that Facebook is not a good page in terms of accessibility because it is quite busy among things. However, when viewed on a smartphone, people with disabilities can participate as the content presented in the smartphone apps is basically clutterfree making it easier to use. Thus, though the service was not changed, a change of device suddenly enables a number of users to finally participate. And the internet offers independence and freedom to a great many people with disabilities as they can now get information that they had previously no access to and they can also engage in online conversations.

I cover the rest of the day in part 3 on the EYC Conference.