I remember back in the mid 1990s, when I was first employed as a researcher at the University of Bremen, I used to travel every three months to Surrey university, whi9ch at the time had the easiest university library to reach from Bremen.I would run a series of searches on their computerised reference system, collect together a pile of journals and then buy a photocopying card to frantically copy all the articles i might need for the next couple of months. Fortunately this was in the days before airlines restricted baggage weight, so i could copy all I could carry.

Time have changed.  Most researchers I know rely on online sources these days. Despite attempts by some publishers to prevent open access, many authors place a pre-publication copy of their work online anyway. This is merely anecdotal. But  a new survey (pdf downland) by the UK Jisc covers a range of areas from how academics discover and stay abreast of research, to their teaching of undergraduates, how they choose research topics and publication channels, to their views on learned societies and university libraries, and their collections.

The survey comes up with some interesting findings. According to Jisc the “Overarching themes are an increasing reliance on the Internet for their research and publishing activities and the strong role that openness is playing in their work.” They go on to say key findings include:

• Access limitations – While 86% of respondents report relying on their college or university library collections and subscriptions, 49% indicated that they would often like to use journal articles that are not in those collections.
• Use of open resources – If researchers can’t find the resources or information they need through their university library, 90% of respondents often or occasionally look online for a freely available version.
• The Internet as starting point – 40% of researchers surveyed said that when beginning a project they start by searching the Internet for relevant materials, with only 2% visiting the physical library as a first port of call.
• Following one’s peers – The findings suggest that the majority of researchers track the work of colleagues and leading researchers as a way of keeping up to date with developments in their field.
• Emergence of e-publications – The findings show that e-journals have largely replaced physical usage for research, but that contrasting views exist on replacement of print by e-publications, where print still holds importance within the Humanities and Social Sciences and for in-depth reading in general.

But these are just the headlines. it is well worth delving into the full report, based on over 3000 respondents.

Researchers were asked “Typically, when you are conducting academic research, which of these five starting points do you use to begin locating information for your research?”

Although there were variation between researchers form different disciplines (as noted above) some 40 per cent replied general purpose search engine on the internet or world wide web. About 25 per cent use a specific electronic research resource/computer database, up to 20 per cent their online library catalogue, 18 or so per cent a national or international catalogue or database, while less than 10 per cent physically visit their library.

That is a massive change in a relatively short time period. I will try to read the report thoroughl;y in the next few days and work out what it all means!

The whole debate over Google Glass is a bit of a puzzle. There is certainly plenty of coverage of the initial limited public trails. The tech press is generally in raptures, perhaps because they have at last an innovative new toy to play with (or at least to dream of playing with).

The popular press has run a series of rather contrived stories about how Glass can give you headahes, is dangerous for drivers, is a threat to privacy and how users are showing no respect to others etc. etc. Oh, and someone comes up with an unsupported (and probably non working) plug in that takes a photo when you wink and gets aches of coverage.

What there seems to be no discussion of is the potential for serious applications for Glass. We are looking hard at the possibilities of wearable computers for vocational education and training. We haven’t got our hands on a prototype from Google (we aren’t rich or famous enough). But there are other manufacturers who have already released production versions of glasses with similar if more limited functionality and we hope to be trying these out at Bau ABC, a construction industry training centre in North Germany. I am especially interested in the potential for informal learning.

And there are a whole series of research groups looking at the potential of Glass like products in the medical field.

It would be nice to think that Google would be working with such research. But instead its policy of releasing a number to “Glass Explorers” who pay 1500 dollars each for the privilege looks more like a publicity stunt than any serious attempt at research.

I’ve spent a couple of days last week in Dublin at a conference on Big Data. Or rather, I spent a couple of days in Dublin trying to get access to data over the internet.

At the conference, held at the quite upmarket conference centre at headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Croke Park, it was the usual story. You can imagine the conversation.

Conference organiser: Will you be able to provide us with wireless internet for all our participants?

Conference Centre staff: How many people do you expect at your conference?

Conference organiser: About 200

Conference centre staff: Yes that is no problem

Conference organiser: Are you sure?

Conference centre staff:  Yes, we have had many conferences with more people than that and have had no problems

Except that of those other conferences perhaps 30 per cent were on line. And at tech conferences we usually have 98 per cent on line and most with two or even three devices.

So time after time, the wireless fails at ed-tech events. I don’t know what can be done about it, other than get internet access written into contracts with penalty clauses if it is not delivered.

In face free wireless access is pretty good in Dublin. However the quality of that access is pretty bad. Limited bandwidth and intermittent connectivity. I suspect this is the future, as more and more people require free wireless and enterprises feel forced to provide this to remain competitive. In London pretty much every pub and café offers free access. But as more and more devices go online the infrastructure will start to squeak and bandwidth may actually decline. I hope I’m wrong. I still think connectivity should be seen as basic infrastructure and can’t really imagine that it is efficient to have so many companies fighting for business in the main urban centres whilst in Wales some areas cannot even receive a G3 signal let alone wireless internet.

Project websites are usually pretty dire. A short piece about the project taken from the project application, a list of partners, news updates of meetings and links to downloadable products.

And that was how we started our website with the Learning Layers project. However, we soon realised that this would not suffice. Our aim is to dramatically scale up the use of technology to support informal learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. To do that we need a forward facing web site -something we can show off to SME managers and be proud of. But that in turn requires content which they will understand and engage with. That is a much trickier part. We need more of a newspaper or journal type website than a traditional project site. This has led to a lot of discussions and we haven’t got all the issues resolved yet. But one thing we have done is moved to an editorial model where instead of having a web site moderator we have an editor. His role is to commission content from the different partners in the project.

And I have been messing around with how to write about project development in a way that it is understandable to those without an advanced knowledge of the technologies, processes and ideas that we are developing.

Here is my first attempt – about one of the design ideas we are pursuing codenamed ‘Sharing Turbine’.

“The Learning Layers project aims to develop a number of new applications to support informal learning in the workplace.  In the first stages of the project we are working with Small and Medium Enterprises in the Construction sector in north Germany and in the healthcare sector in north England.

We are aware that for any applications to gain widespread take up, we have to work closely with managers and workers from the industries. Therefore, we have adopted a user centred design process for iterative development.

What does this mean? We started out with a series of interviews with a wide variety of people from the sector. In construction e gave now made over 50 interviews, looking at work organisation, learning and peoples present use and attitudes towards technology. This was followed up with what we called Application Partner Days in both the UK and Germany, where we visited the workplaces and held a series of workshop activities with different practitioners.

The third stage in the development process was a two-day design workshop held in Helsinki. Building on the ideas from the interviews and visits we started to sketch out a series of design ideas for new mobile applications. The working groups for the four design ideas that emerged at the workshop brought together researchers, developers and industry practitioners.

Since then, the working groups have continued to meet online and are using a wiki to develop the design ideas.

Each of the design ideas has been given a working name. The idea for the Sharing Turbine design idea came from the construction industry but we hope it may also be of use in the health sector.

Apprentices in the construction industry in Germany learn their trade in three different locations: vocational schools, on the job in companies and in a training centre. At the north German training centre – Bau ABC – they undertake a series of practical projects. These last from o0ne to three days and may involve working individually or as a team. They are given project briefing sheets and save the report of their work on paper which is collected in a white ring bound folder. This has a number of practical disadvantages. Obviously paper folders do not last well on a building site. And although they can use photographs in the report on their work, the folders are predominantly text based. The use of multi media could allow much more detailed and rich reporting. It could also allow a richer representation of the different physical objects and tools used in construction. In fact one of the reason that elearning has been slow to take off in the workplace may be just this issue of how to combine learning through digital media with the physical nature of much work activity.

So the first idea behind Sharing turbine is to transform the present folders produced at the training centre into an electronic portfolio. This would also have the advantage of making it much easier to update the task sheets. Trainees could use a variety of different media directly from heir phones including audio, photos and video.

However the idea behind Sharing turbine goes much further. One of the aims of the Learning Layers project is to capture informal learning. Obviously when apprentices are working in their companies much of this informal learning takes place on the building site. And if they were able to use mobile devices and multi-media learning on the site could be linked to the skills and knowledge gained at the training centre. The portfolio could also become a resource both for dealing with practical problems occurring when undergoing training, but also after they have qualified. At the same time they can be linked to personal social networks, both as a means of sharing learning and knowledge, but also as a human resource for getting help and advice.

The German so called Dual System is rightly admired in Europe for providing high quality apprentice training> one of its bedrocks is combining practical training on the job with theory gained from block period in vocational schools. However, in practice it often proves difficult to link the different phases of training. Sharing turbine could be a critical tool in allowing these different phases of training to be brought together.

The use of Learning Analytics, a process of recording and analyzing learning as it happens – could also allow apprentices and trainers to understand what learning has happened and what new learning is needed – and to develop and refine curricula and training and learning opportunities and processes.

At the moment the Sharing Turbine working group is at the phase of developing wireframes. Wireframes are graphic mock ups of applications. They can be developed rapidly and used in design workshops to test and refine ideas, prior to programming prototypes.

In the next month workshops are planned with companies to get feedback from apprentices and skilled workers. These are not confined to project partners. If you are interested in our work and would like to contribute please get in touch.”

Remember Google wave? As Wiikipedia explains Google Wave is a web-based computing platform and communications protocol designed to merge key features of communications media such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.Communications using the system can be synchronous or asynchronous. Software extensions provide contextual spelling and grammar checking, automated language translation,^[3] and other features.

Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. Google accepted most requests submitted starting November 29, 2009, soon after the September extended release of the technical preview. On May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public.

However Wave proved to be short lived. On August 4, 2010, Google announced the suspension of stand-alone Wave development and development was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation which started to develop a server-based product called Wave in a Box.

What went wrong? Certainly Wave felt clunky to use and was not always particularly reliable. The interface felt crowded and sometimes confusing. But I think the main problem was that we just didn’t get the idea. Now only three years on, it might have been so different. Just within one project I am working on, Learning Layers, we are using Flash Meeting and skype for regular synchronous communication, Doodle polls to set up meetings, dropbox to share files, Diigo to share bookmarks, Google docs for collaborative writing, to say nothing of the project internal media wiki site and the public wordpress based web site. And of course a list serve which bombards us with ever more email. We all complain that communication is not good enough and simultaneously that we have too much communication.

In reality communication has moved from being episodic, where email replaced snailmail and online meetings replaced face to face – to a stream. Managing that stream is problematic. And that, I think, was what Wave was designed to do. Sadly it was ahead of its time. Come back Wave, all is forgiven.

Another in my occasional series of infographics. I have tried several times to make infographics myself but have never managed to do anything I am happy with. I particularly like this one as it tries to answer a question which few people I asked could give me a clear answer to. And it also shows the amount of effort it takes to produce a good App. I guess that Pontydysgu is going to have to enter the app market this year.

Incidentally, Kinvey, the company behind this infographic who seem to be selling Back end as a Service (a new term to me), also provide access to downland a free ebook, ‘How to make an Android App‘. This seems to be a growing trend of providing free ebooks in return for providing them with your email address. I don’t mind this as long as they use their database sparingly!

I think this is important. For day to day work – both research and teaching and learning – we use a lot of different social software programmes. We  know we cannot rely on these in the long term. Intrusive and inappropriate advertising can render applications useless. Services may disappear. Others move from being free to being paid for. And yet others change the conditions of use. But with a multiplicity of services and with new applications appearing almost daily, it is usually possible to find something which will do the job.

At the same time for more critical services – such as web sites or database services – we use our own leased servers. That too works fine.

The problem comes with longer term development projects – such as the Learning Layers project. On the one had we need the advanced infrastructure that better funded social software providers are able to offer. But we also need some guarantee of longevity and stability in terms of service provision plus an openness to allow us to develop on top of these platforms. And here we have a problem.

Mozilla seems to be developing an answer to this problem. According to webmonkey, Mozilla’s “newest Social API demo removes the need for social websites entirely, tapping emerging web standards to create a real-time video calling, data sharing app — one part Skype, one part Facebook, all parts web-native.”

The Social APi is built through WebRTC, which is a proposed web standard that Mozilla and others are working on in conjunction with the W3C. The RTC in WebRTC stands for Real-Time Communications, and the core of WebRTC is the getUserMedia JavaScript API, which gives the browser access to hardware features like the camera and microphone.

As the Firefox blog explains:

Prior to WebRTC, video calling applications were either stand-alone, isolated apps (like Skype) or browser plug-ins which lacked the tight connection to the browser internals to guarantee a good quality call.

We share data in WebRTC using DataChannels, which Mozilla is the first to implement.  DataChannels is a powerful component of WebRTC that can be used by itself or combined with an audio/video chat to send almost any data that the browser can access.

This could have huge potential for developing new applications – both for business and learning – and free us from the dilemma of either using proprietary applications or being forced into substantial infrastructure development..

Online Educa Berlin was hectic for us. We produced two 40 minute magazine radio programmes from the main bar at the conference, a 40  minute Question Time radio programme and organised a symposium around the recently launched Learning layers project. We will get posts up with recordings of the radio and presentations from the symposium in the next couple of days.

And we still found time to talk to friends new and old. Online Educa Berlin is a great meeting place, a chance to catch up on the latest personal and work related news and gossip from the educational technology community worldwide.

And it is also a good place to pick up on the emerging debates and on the latest in technology. In the conference, somewhat unsurprisingly, all the buzz was around massive Open Online Courses. And despite a recognition of the potential benefits in extending access to education, most delegates I spoke to were fairly dubious of the benefits of the emergent so called xMOOC model. Firstly it was hard to see a viable business model behind the new MOOCs, other than selling accreditation. And many delegates were sceptical about the pedagogic model underpinning the xMOOCs from the likes of Coursera. One person said to me that MOOCs are taking us backward ten years in pedagogic approaches to using technology for learning.

it was encouraging to see the growing strength of the business strand at the conference and an increased focus on work based learning.

The exhibition at Online Educa Berlin always provides a good snapshot of trends. Whilst there are a number of stands from national organisations and form projects most of the 90 odd exhibition stands are from vendors and companies, big and small. Whilst a few years ago the largest stands were usually organisations like the UK Jisc and Surf from the Netherlands  this year continued on last years trend of Middle East countries dominated the larger exhibitions pace. Last year Saudi Arabia took centre stage, this year is was EgyptOn, although it was a little hard to see what their stand was about, other than perhaps announcing their arrival in the community.

Last year was the year of the interactive Whiteboard. This year I did not see one stand promoting whiteboards! Trends change fast. This year was the year of the video with perhaps as many as 15 per cent of stands featuring video products, hardware and software. Having said that it was a little difficult to see the benefits of many of these commercial offerings. OK, they packaged features nicely. But I didn’t really see anything which couldn’t be done with everyday social software or consumer applications. And although there was some general feeling that we are moving towards a more visual approach to learning, rather than the previous domination of text, there were only limited examples of pedagogic innovation in using video.

Although the  usual VLE vendors were present as always, there was perhaps a feeling that their finest days are over. And it was surprising that there were few vendors focusing on mobile learning, although plenty of iPad apps were on display.

I should add I suppose that this is not based on any scientific enquiry but just is an impressionistic view of what was going on. But it is probably as reliable in predicting trends than the usual rush of end of year predictions to which we are about to be subjected.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who came on our radio shows and with whom we enjoyed a natter. And to those we missed, lets hope we get a chance to meet up next year.

Last Friday, Fred Garnett and I made presentations to the weekly virtual Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLC) organised by Cristina Costa and Chrissie Nerantzi from Salford University. The title of the conversation, which took place on the Blackboard Collaborate platform, was disruptive education.

Fred lives in London and I was also in London for meetings, so we decided to meet up at the Westminster Hub (more on that later this week). And it was great fun! Fred and me both shared our presentations and so it evolved into a genuine conversation. I don’t know about the others, but i learned a lot (including that there is nothing like face to face proximity for a real conversation. We both agreed that globalisation is probably more disruptive to educatio0n at the moment than the introduction of new technologies, which are only an enabling factor.

I will post my slides tomorrow (and a link to the recording which seems to be broken at the moment). Here are Fred’s slides – slightly changed after the session. I especially like his distinction between disruption applied to education, which he says needs

• new distance learning resources
• new business models
• globalisation
• competition
• capitalism
• You!

and disruption applied to learning, which needs:

• critical pedagogies
• new collaborations
• human-scale
• Per to peer
• social
• Us!