There is an interesting debate taking place on Steve Wheeler’s blog about disruptive technologies. Steve says:

Disruptive technologies are those that change the market and in most cases replace an existing technology. They are characterised by their capability to do so over a relatively short period of time. Some are known as ‘killer applications’ because they completely wipe out the opposition due to their placement in the market, their greater appeal, availability and lower price, to name just a few of the key factors.

Welcome though the debate is I think it is overly simplistic and veers towards technological determinism. Technology progress is seen as an inevitable and to take on a life of its own in terms of social impact. In counter to this there is a long tradition or research and thinking, especially in The Nordic countries and in Germany which sees technology as being ‘socially shaped;. Researchers such as Engestrom, through activity theory, have seen technology as a mediating factor within a human activity system. German researchers have referred to the idea of ‘Gestaltung;, a difficult word to translate, but variously used to refer to ‘social shaping’ or ‘design’. Technology is designed by humans and has social impact. In the area of vocational education, researchers form the University of Bremen have pointed to the interaction between ‘competence is use’ (Beruf – another almost impossible term to translate) and work organisation in shaping the use of technology. This is an excerpt from a paper called “The social shaping of work and technology as a guiding principle for vocational education and training” which totherw ith Gerld Heidegger I wrote around 200) and was subsequently, published by CEDEFOP, I think.

Social shaping and the perspective of an open future

An important counter-argument against the shaping approach challenges the supposition of the possibility of influencing production technology as well as the concomitant work organisation.

Very often, and currently again with increasing intensity, technical change, or technical innovations, are thought to be determined solely by the progress of knowledge within the technological and natural sciences. Such a technological determinism would signify that only the most effective path existed for the development of production technology, for technical progress, and it would also determine the path to be taken to the future of work. Such a view is one-sided, as has been shown from historical studies (Kuby, 1980; Hellige, 1984; Noble, 1984). If one looks at technical development, one sees there were situations with forks in the road in the past where development could have taken different directions. The development of technology is also a social process (Bijker et al., 1990). In other words, technology is influenced by social conditions, both in its application and in its inner principles. As far as applications are concerned, this topic was discussed some time ago (Cooley, 1980). It seems apparent that the economic conditions of capitalism have influenced the specific way of applying technology in the production process. And this is, of course, still the case. But relating only to this would mean maintaining an economic determinism. There are, however, other societal influences that have tended to be consistently overlooked in recent discussions. According to the view of the authors cited above, that which can be considered to be a ‘successful’ technical solution – there is no ‘right’ one, though there are a lot of wrong ones – depends on cultural parameters; that means, it is also influenced by the form of human social life.

Hellige (1984) in particular introduced the concept of ‘horizons of technological problem solving’ which vary during historical development. This means that the engineers themselves take into consideration only the restricted set of criteria which lies inside their horizon of thinking. This horizon, however, varies according to ‘industrial culture’ (Ruth & Rauner, 1991). If the shaping of technology aims at really new solutions it is necessary to overcome these boundaries. Here non-experts can show considerable imagination because they are less influenced by the ‘normal’ thinking of the community of engineers. Therefore, devising new technical ‘outlooks’ might well be possible in secondary education. At the very least, future skilled workers should be able to discuss certain aspects of technology with the engineers. The same should be true for the participation of persons as non-experts in general discussions regarding technological policies.
Speaking within the scope of a more theoretical orientation, the development of technology not only owes a debt to a ‘material’ logic, ‘techno-logic’, but at the same time to the opposite element of social ‘development logic’, with this the former forms a ‘dialectical unit’. One cannot refer to social ‘development logic’ until one also assumes an ‘inner logic’ of development for social conditions. But, on the other hand, in the social field the unforeseen is a daily experience.

According to Luhmann (1984), this can be attributed to a basic condition of human communication, ‘double contingency’. In the case of communication between two people, this means that ‘each of them knows that each of them knows that one can also act differently’.
Technology in its interaction with chance results in a partially predetermined, partially unforeseeable progress that can be termed technical change. Accordingly, the interaction of social development logic with ‘contingency’ leads to social change. The latter takes place on a less spectacular, though no less profound scale than the former, especially since it is a question of interpretation whether one attaches greater weight to the persistent or to the changing aspects. This becomes plain particularly for the goal of social shaping of work and technology. Rauner & Martin (1988) interpreted socially shaped technology as a unity of the elements of that which is technically feasible and that which is socially desirable, as a regulative principle at any rate. That which will be feasible is, even in the case of technology, not that much a question of forecasts; because there, too, is great uncertainty concerning the change in this field. Therefore scenario pictures of the future can mislead. Just think of some of the grotesquely exaggerated forecasts of the past, prepared by ‘scientific futurology’.

What is desirable, however? The answer is the subject of controversy and will probably remain so. Is it, at the same time, that which is reasonable? And what is then the latter? An attempt will have to be made to obtain, as has been said, compromises between different wishes (Romanyshyn, 1989). This does not mean harmonious assent, but rather a restructured dissent which has to be discussed and disputed over; from there on, one should hope, one would become able – to some extent – to act jointly. For the task of shaping work and technology this perspective does not allow for objectively valid criteria. Instead teaching should aim at developing orientations for deciding on different alternatives, and to enable young people to develop their own orientations.

The point we were trying to make is that vocational educatio0n should provide young people with the ability themselves to shape technologies for the future. Such ideas are not a long way from recent work by Ceri Facer looking at the future of education. Ceri says:

The developments in remote interactions and in disaggregation of content from institution; the rise of the personal ‘cloud‘; the diagnostic potential of genetic and neuro-science; the ageing population; all of these, when combined with different social, political and cultural values lead to very different pedagogies, curriculum, institutional arrangements and cultural dispositions towards learners.

She suggests that

the coming two decades may see a significant shift away from the equation of ‘learning‘ with ‘educational institutions‘ that emerged with industrialisation, toward a more mixed, diverse and complex learning landscape which sees formal and informal learning taking place across a wide range of different sites and institutions.

Rather than try to develop a single blueprint for dealing with change we should rather develop a resilient education system based on diversity to deal with the different challenges of an uncertain future. But such diversity

will emerge only if educators, researchers and communities are empowered to develop localised or novel responses to socio-technical change – including developing new approaches to curriculum, to assessment, to the workforce and governance, as well as to pedagogy.

Thus rather than view technology as inevitable and to wait to see what disruption it brings we have the ability to shape its future. But this in turn depends  on reshaping our education systems and pedagogies to empower both educators and worker to themselves co-determine their futures.

The first blog of the new year looks at what I see as something of a contradiction for those of us wanting to change and hopefully improve education. Lets look at two trends from 2010.

In terms of the use of technology for teaching and learning we saw limited technical innovation. OK, the UK saw an increasing trend towards providing Virtual Learning environments (mainly Moodle) in primary schools. Applications like Google docs and Dropbox allowed enhanced facilities for collaborative work and file sharing. However neither of these was designed specifically for educational use. Indeed the main technical trend may have been on the one hand the increased use of social software and cloud computing apps for learning and on the other hand a movement away from free social software towards various premium business models. Of course mobile devices are fast evolving and are making an increasing impact on teaching and learning.

But probably the main innovation was in terms of pedagogy and in wider approaches to ideas around learning. and here the major development is around open learning. Of course we do not have a precise or agreed definition of what open education or open learning means. But the movement around Open Educational Resources appears to be becoming a part of the mainstream development in the provision of resources for tecahing and learning, despite significant barriers still to be overcome.  And there is increasing open and free tecahing provision be it through online ‘buddy’ systems, say for language learning, various free courses available through online VLEs and the proliferation of programmes offered as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) using a variety of both educational and social software. Whilst we are still struggling to develop new financial models for such programmes, perhaps the major barrier is recognition. This issue can be viewed at three different levels.

1. The first level is a more societal issue of how we recognise learning (or attainment). at the moment this tends to be through the possession of accreditation or certification from accredited institutions. Recognition takes the form of entry into a profession or job, promotion to a higher level or increased pay.
2. The second level is that of accreditation. Who should be able to provide such accreditation and perhaps more importantly what should it be for (this raises the question of curriculum).
3. The third is the issue of assessment. Although traditional forms of individual assessment can be seen as holding back more innovative and group based forms of teaching and learning there are signs of movement in this direction – see, for example the Jisc Effective Assessment in a Digital Age, featured as his post of the year by Stephen Downes.

These issues can be overcome and I think there are significant moves towards recognising broader forms of learning in different contexts. In this respect, the development of Personal Learning Environments and Personal Learning Networks are an important step forward in allowing access to both technology and sources of learning to those not enrolled in an institution.

However, such ‘progress’ is not without contradiction. One of the main gains of social democratic and workers movements over the last century has been to win free access to education and training for all based on nee4d rather than class or income. OK, there are provisos. Such gains were for those in rich industrialised countries – in many areas of the world children still have no access to secondary education – let alone university. Even in those rich countries, there are still big differences in terms of opportunities based on class. And it should not be forgotten that whilst workers movements have fought for free and universal access to education, it has been the needs of industry and the economic systems which have tended to prevail in extending access (and particularly in moulding the forms of provision (witness the widely different forms of the education systems in northern Europe).

Now those gains are under attack. With pressures on econo0mies due of the collapse of the world banking system, governments are trying to roll back on the provision of free education. In countries like the UK, the government is to privatise education – both through developing a market driven system and through transferring the cost of education from the state to the individual or family.

Students have led an impressive (and largely unexpected) fightback in the UK and the outcome of this struggle is by no means clear. Inevitably they have begun to reflect on the relation between their learning and the activities they are undertaking in fighting the increases in fees and cutbacks in finances, thus raising the issue of the wider societal purposes and forms of education.

And that also poses issues for those of us who have viewed the adoption of technology for learning as an opportunity for innovation and change in pedagogy and for extending learning (through Open Education) to those outside schools and universities. How can we defend traditional access to institutional learning, whilst at the same time attacking it for its intrinsic limitations.

At their best, both the movements around Open Education and the student movement against cuts have begun to pose wider issues of pedagogy and the purpose and form of education as will as the issues of how we recognise learning. One of the most encouraging developments in the student movement in the UK has been the appropriation of both online and physical spaces to discuss these wider issues (interestingly in opposition to the police who have in contrast attempted to close access to spaces and movement through he so-called kettling tactic).

I wonder now, if it is possibel to bring together the two different movements to develop new visions of education together with a manifesto or rather manifestos for aschieveing such visions.

What better way to end the year with lots and lots of new ideas for teaching in the classroom. Here is a collage of what the NY Times has put together. There are some quizzes, puzzles, pictures and lots more that you can use in your classroom.

Here is the link to some great ideas:) Enjoy

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/looking-back-at-2010-teaching-ideas/

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The Pontydsygu team is hard at work in Helsinki working on multimedia at the European Conference on Educational Research. The idea is three fold – firstly to start a process of turning the conference, which attracts over 200 delegates every year, outwards to those unable to attend face to face. Secondly we aim to enhance the conference experience through the use of social software and multimedia and thirdly to produce a rich record of ideas and discourses surrounding the conference.

ECER is a traditional research conference, organised through a series of different disciplinary and topic networks. It will take more than a year to change such a culture but we have made a modest beginning.

We now have a shared flickr group and a Twitter account. Both of those are integrated into the ECER web site. Compared to an educational technology conference, the us eof Twitter is limited but some delegates are beginning to ‘get the point’ and are using the conference #ECER2010 hash tag.

We are producing twelve videos based on interviews with the link conveners who coordinate different networks. Video is a new medium for many of these researchers, used to expressing tehir ideas through research papers, books and symposia. But I am happy with the interveiws we have undertaken so far and think hey will add a new dimension to explaining and sharing ideas.

I have mixed feelings about the video streaming. At a technical level we have learnt a lot. One of the things we wanted to do was provide high quality video. This is very different from the adhoc streaming from a webcam to ustream or Justin.tv. For one thing we felt that the advertising on these channels would be unacceptable to many of our potential audience. And the quality is simply not good enough. After a lot of investigations, we bought in streaming services from a Canadian company, Netromedia. Netromedia is not a portal, but instead provide a feed which can be embedded within a web site. And we have embedded Flash viewers in the ECER conference web site. We agreed to stream the keynotes from the conference. We patched the stream from the audio system in the rooms the keynotes were held, and mixed that with our video feed. The quality was on the whole extremely good. I am less convinced with the content. that is not to detract from the scholarly content of the keynote speeches themselves. I am just not sure that a 45 minute academic keynote is the best content for streaming from a  conference. Better may be to focus on more interactive sessions, in which we can involve remote participants. More reflections on this in a future blog.

But now for the next interview…

This presentation by Steve Wheeler has been causing some comments around the edubloggers networks. George Siemens responded saying “The development of the semantic web, linked data, and open data, coupled with location-awareness, recommender systems, augmented reality, data overlays, and similar developments is having a dramatic impact on how people interact with information and each other”.

I’ve just spent some time organising my Google docs into folders. Why? Because I have so many of them.

I used to use a very old version of Microsoft word for mac on my desktop machine. When I found it would not deal with docx formats I moved over to open office and Neo Office J. But at the same time I started using Google docs because of the ability to share documents. In fact I had already been using Wordly before Google bought it. However, it seems that Google sat on Wordly for a long time. Although Docs sort of worked it was still clunky compared to a desktop word processor. But with the latest upgrade to docs it now seems a better working environment than any of my local word processors. And off course I can access it from any of my computers or from my phone.

But what excites me is the casual and simple collaboration that online documents enable. Of course wikis always had that functionality. But somehow most of my experiments with collaboration with wikis didn’t quite work. People were unwilling to change another person’s work. And the mark up code was off putting for many.

Furthermore it is very easy to see who you can build an online portfolio using google apps or even a Personal Learning Environment.

So what is the downside? In one word – Google. Do we want to trust our working environment to a mega large multi national corporation making most of its money out of advertising. I sued to be sure that I did not. But now I guess I am getting more pragmatic. Google apps offers a lot of functionality and is free. Especially in present economic times free is good. Of course Google could disappear or do something I hate so much I do not want to use their software any more. But I am backing up my docs to a local version anyway. In some ways the debate is similar to the issue raised at the PLE conference in Barcelona as to whether institutions should be providing PLE applications for learners. My conclusion was that I do not really care who provides a Personal Learning Environment, as long as it is controlled by the learner. And as long as Google continues to allow that degree of control I can see myself increasingly using their applications. At least they are not Blackboard!

Part two of my new paper on Personal Learning environments, focusing on context, and written for the PLE2010 conference in Barcelona next week.

How can the idea of context help us in designing work based Personal Learning Environments? First, given the varied definitions, it might be apposite to explain what we mean by a PLE. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how. In terms of technology, PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others.

As such, PLEs offer some solutions to the issue of the fluid and relational nature of context. PLEs, unlike traditional educational technology are mobile, flexible and not context dependent. They can move from one domain to another and make connections between them. Secondly PLEs can support and facilitate a greater variety of relationships than traditional educational media. These include relationships within and between networks and communities of practice and support for collaborative working. PLEs shift the axis of control from the teacher to the learners and thus alter balance of power within learning discourses. And, perhaps critically, PLEs support a greater range of learning discourses than traditional educational technology.

PLEs are able to link knowledge assets with people, communities and informal knowledge (Agostini et al, 2003) and support the development of social networks for learning (Fischer, 1995). Razavi and Iverson (2006) suggest integrating weblogs, ePortfolios, and social networking functionality both for enhanced e-learning and knowledge management, and for developing communities of practice. A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity.

So far we have stressed the utility of PLEs in being flexible and adaptable to different contexts. In a work based context, the ‘Learning in Process’ project (Schmidt, 2005) and the APOSDLE project (Lindstaedt, and Mayer, 2006) have attempted to develop embedded, or work-integrated, learning support where learning opportunities (learning objects, documents, checklists and also colleagues) are recommended based on a virtual understanding of the learner’s context.

However, while these development activities acknowledge the importance of collaboration, community engagement and of embedding learning into working and living processes, they have not so far addressed the linkage of individual learning processes and the further development of both individual and collective understanding as the knowledge and learning processes (Attwell. Barnes, Bimrose and Brown, 2008). In order to achieve that transition (to what we term a ‘community of innovation’), processes of reflection and formative assessment have a critical role to play.

Personal Learning Environments are by definition individual. However it is possible to provide tools and services to support individuals in developing their own environment. In looking at the needs of careers guidance advisors for learning Attwell, Barnes, Bimrose and Brown, (2008) say a PLE should be based on a set of tools to allow personal access to resources from multiple sources, and to support knowledge creation and communication. Based on an scoping of knowledge development needs, an initial list of possible functions for a PLE have been suggested, including: access/search for information and knowledge; aggregate and scaffold by combining information and knowledge; manipulate, rearrange and repurpose knowledge artefacts; analyse information to develop knowledge; reflect, question, challenge, seek clarification, form and defend opinions; present ideas, learning and knowledge in different ways and for different purposes; represent the underpinning knowledge structures of different artefacts and support the dynamic re-rendering of such structures; share by supporting individuals in their learning and knowledge; networking by creating a collaborative learning environment.

People tagging

However, rather than seeking to build a monolithic application which can meet all these needs, a better approach may be to seek to develop tools and services which can meet learning needs related to particular aspects of such needs. And in developing such a tool, it is useful to reflect on the different aspects of context involved in the potential use of such tools.  The European Commission supported Mature project is seeking to research and develop Personal Learning and Maturing Environments and Organisation Learning and Maturing Environments to support knowledge development and ‘maturing’ in organisations. The project has developed a number of use cases and demonstrators, following a participatory design process and aiming at supporting learning in context for careers guidance advisors.

One such demonstrator is a ‘people tagging’ application (Braun, Kunzmann and Schmidt, 2010). According to the project report “Knowing-who is an essential element for efficient knowledge maturing processes, e.g. for finding the right person to talk to. Take the scenario of where a novice Personal Adviser (P.A.) needs to respond to a client query. The P.A. does not feel sufficiently confident to respond adequately, so needs to contact a colleague who is more knowledgeable, for support. The key problems would be:

• How does the P.A. find the right person to contact
• How can the P.A. find people inside, and even outside, the employing organisation?
• How can colleagues who might be able to support the P.A. be identified and contacted quickly and efficiently?

Typically, employee directories, which simply list staff and their areas of expertise, are insufficient. One reason is that information contained in the directories is outdated; or it is not described in an appropriate manner; or it focuses too much on ‘experts’; and they often do not include external contacts (Schmidt & Kunzmann 2007).

Also Human Resource Development needs to have sufficient information about the needs and current capabilities of current employees to make the right decisions. In service delivery contexts that must be responsive to the changing needs of clients, like Connexions services, it is necessary to establish precisely what additional skills and competencies are required to keep up with new developments. The people tagging tool would provide a clear indication of:

• What type of expertise is needed?
• How much of the requisite expertise already exists within the organisation?”

At a technical level the demonstrator includes:

• A bookmarking widget for annotating persons, which can be invoked as a bookmarklet
• A browsing component for navigating annotated people based on the vocabulary
• An employee list and profile visualization of annotated people
• A search component for searching for people
• A collaborative real-time editor of the shared vocabulary that allows for consolidating tags and introducing hierarchical relationships
• An analysis component for displaying trends based on search and tagging behaviour.

The application seeks to meet the challenge of aligning the maturing of ontological knowledge with the development of the knowledge about people in the organization (and possibly beyond).

Early evaluation results suggest that people tagging is accepted by employees in general, and that they view it as beneficial on average. The evaluation “has also revealed that we have to be careful when designing such a people tagging system and need to consider affective barriers, the organizational context, and other motivational aspects so that it can become successful and sustainable. Therefore we need to develop a design framework (and respective technical enablement) for people tagging systems as socio-technical systems that covers aspects like control, transparency, scope etc. This design framework needs to be backed by a flexible implementation.”

Technology Enhanced Boundary Objects

A further approach to supporting Personal Learning environments for careers guidance professional is based on the development of Technology Enhanced Boundary Objects (TEBOs). Mazzoni and Gaffuri (2009) consider that PLEs as such may be seen as boundary objects in acting to support transitions within a Zone of Proximal Development between knowledge acquired in formal educational contexts and knowledge required for performance or practice within the workplace. Alan Brown (2009) refers to an approach to designing technologically enhanced boundary objects that promote boundary crossing for careers practitioners.

Careers practitioners use labour market information in their practice of advising clients about potential career options. Much of this labour Markey information is gathered from official statistics, providing, for example, details of numbers employed in different professionals at varying degree of granularity, job centre vacancies in time series data at a fine granular level and pay levels in different occupations at a regional level, as well as information about education and training routes, job descriptions and future career predictions. However much of this data is produced as part of the various governmental departments statistical services and is difficult to search for and above all to interpret. Most problematic is the issue of meaning making when related to providing careers advice, information and guidance. The data sits in the boundaries of practice of careers workers and equally at the ordinary of the practice of collating and providing data. Our intention is to develop technology enhanced boundary objects as a series of infographs, dynamic graphical displays, visualisations and simulations to scaffold careers guidance workers in the process of meaning making of such data.

Whilst we are presently working with static data, much of the data is now being provided online with an API to a SPARQL query interface, allowing interrogation of live data. This is part of the open data initiative, led by Nick Shabolt and Tim Berners Lee in the UK. Berners Lee (2010) has recently said that linked data lies at the heart of the semantic web. Our aim is to connect the TEBO to live data through the SPARQL interface and to visualise and represent that data in forms which would allow careers guidance workers and clients to make intelligent meaning of that data in terms of the shared practice of providing and acting on guidance. Such a TEBO could form a key element in a Personal Learning environment for careers guidance practitioners. A further step in exploring PLE services and applications would be to link the TEBO to people tagging services allowing careers practitioners to find those with particular expertise and experience in interpreting labour market data and relating this to careers opportunities at a local level.

There has been considerable interest in the potential of Mash Up Personal Learning Environments (Wild, Mödritscher and Sigurdarson, 2008). as a means of providing flexible access to different tools. Other commentators have focused on the use of social software for learners to develop their own PLEs. Our research into PLEs and knowledge maturing in organisations does not contradict either of these approaches. However, it suggests that PLE tools need to take into account the contexts in which learning takes place, including knowledge assets, people and communities and especially the context of practice. In reality a PLE may be comprised of both general communication and knowledge sharing tools as well as specialist tools designed to meet the particular needs of a community.

Conclusions

In seeking to design a work based PLE it is necessary to understand the contexts in which learning take place and the different discourses associated with that learning. A PLE is both able to transpose the different contexts in which learning takes place and can move from one domain to another and make connections between them. support and facilitate a greater variety of relationships than traditional educational media. At them same time a PLE is able to support a range of learning discourses including discourses taking place within and between different communities if practice. An understanding of the contexts in which learning takes place and of those different learning discourses provides that basis for designing key tools which can form the centre of a work based PLE. Above all a PLE can respond to the demands of fluid and relational discourses in providing scaffolding for meaning making related to practice.

References

Attwell G. Barnes S.A., Bimrose J. and Brown A, (2008), Maturing Learning: Mashup Personal Learning Environments, CEUR Workshops proceedings, Aachen, Germany

Berners Lee T. (2010) Open Linked Data for a Global Community, presentation at Gov 2.0 Expo 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga1aSJXCFe0&feature=player_embedded, accessed June 25, 2010

Braun S. Kunzmann C. Schmidt A. (2010) People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management, In: David Randall and Pascal Salembier (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design Selected Papers from COOP08, Computer Supported Cooperative Work Springer,

Brown A. (2009) Boundary crossing and boundary objects – ‘Technologically Enhanced Boundary Objects’. Unpublished paper for the Mature IP Project

Lindstaedt, S., & Mayer, H. (2006). A storyboard of the APOSDLE vision. Paper presented at the 1st European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Crete (1-4 October 2006)

Mazzoni E. and Gaffuri P .(2009) Personal Learning environments for Overcoming Knowledge Boundaries between activity Systems in emerging adulthood, eLearning papers, http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=14400&doclng=6&vol=15, accessed December 26, 2009

Schmidt A., Kunzmann C. (2007) Sustainable Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development with Ontology-Based Competency Catalogs, In: Miriam Cunningham and Paul Cunningham (eds.): eChallenges 2007, 2007, http://publications.professional-learning.eu/schmidt_kunzmann_sustainable-competence-management_eChallenges07.pdf, accessed 27 June, 2010

Schmidt, A. (2005) Knowledge Maturing and the Continuity of Context as a Unifying Concept for Integrating Knowledge Management and ELearning. In: Proceedings I-KNOW ’05, Graz, 2005.

Wild, F., Mödritscher, F., & Sigurdarson, S. (2008). Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. elearning papers, 9. 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.elearningeuropa.info/out/?doc_id=15055&rsr_id=15972

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Johnson, M., Beauvoir, P., Sharples, P., & Milligan, C. (2006). Personal learning environments challenging the dominant design of educational systems. Paper presented at the ECTEL Workshops 2006, Heraklion, Crete (1-4 October 2006

Buying in Moodle – Jenny Hughes and Dirk Stieglitz

As a primary school governor, one of the issues I have been wrestling with recently is the installation of Moodle in the school. I have a particular responsibility for IT – so I want to make sure it works and does what we want it to and as a member of the Finance Committee, I want to know how we get best value for money. I suspect this is a position that lots of others are in right now.

We have decided that we are not going to host it ourselves – we simply don’t have the time or expertise to do it so in our case this means we have joined a consortium of schools with the local university acting as a full-service host.

However, when I asked to see the service level agreement, it was a little ‘thin’ to say the least. This is not to say that what being offered was unsatisfactory – just that a lot of issues were not addressed in the SLA.  In case others find themselves in this position, I have jotted down a series of questions you really need to be asking your host provider and why you need to ask them.  How – and if – you then want to include these in your service level agreement is really up to you.

(I have to say, it might not make you a desperately popular client…)

You also need to remember there is no ‘definitive’ list. If you are a small primary school, you will probably want your Moodle host to do everything and not have to worry about lots of the detailed questions whereas a large secondary school with an IT support department wanting to do more advanced things, will need to ask more technical questions.

So, in no particular order ….

Do they provide the Moodle admin AND the server admin – i.e do they support Moodle as a software package as well as providing and maintaining the server it runs on?

There are different people involved in a Moodle installation. There are users – these are your teachers who just want to use Moodle to create and teach courses.  Then there are people who take care of the Moodle “back end”, the Moodle ‘admin’, which could be someone in your school or it could be someone provided by the host organization or the Moodle admin could be shared between them.

Someone must also be responsible for ‘server admin’ that is, managing and maintaining the server and stacking the software that Moodle will run on. This person will work for the host providing the server.  Ideally, there should be a group that brings all these together so that the Moodle admin and server admin understand the classroom teacher perspective.

You need the following things to make Moodle run.

• a web server (often, but not necessarily Apache),
• PHP,
• a database engine (often but not necessarily mySQL),

The Moodle code itself will run on top of these.

There is an enormous variation in what web hosts actually provide for your money and the costing model they use. (Think mobile phone companies and te different contracts they provide!!)

So they may be offering:

A total package, which means providing and maintaining the server, supporting other server side packages as well as providing full technical support for the Moodle software and direct support for end users such as providing training or advice on content building or a help desk.

These are usually called full-service hosts and probably what you need if you are a small school with no in-house IT backup. However, you will almost certainly have an SLA in place for IT support either with a private organization or your local authority – it is worth checking out what support they can offer so that you don’t end up paying for the same thing twice

A limited Moodle admin without the server admin which just manages Moodle but not other software packages on the server, such as database management and php, cron, email (for more about why and if you need this, there is a geeky bit at the bottom of this post) This may be enough for you but it means you will have to do a lot yourself and you will need to talk to your IT support people to see if they have the capacity to do this.

A minimal package which may be just provision and maintenance of the server which Moodle will run on without much in the way of supporting the Moodle software package itself.

Are they a registered Moodle partner?

This is a financial and legal issue – as well as a moral one! Moodle is Open Source software and can be downloaded free off the web. Similarly, any web hosting service can host Moodle for their clients. However, in order to contribute to the development costs of keeping Moodle up and running and constantly improving, organizations who advertise themselves as providing a full service hosting facility for Moodle and who want to use the Moodle name and logo in their marketing, are expected to become Moodle Partners. This means they pay a (small) percentage of their income, like a royalty, to the Moodle organization in Australia and become part of a world wide network of Moodle partners. Personally, I think this is very important – not only does it give them access to the expertise of a huge community of practice but it gives them a lot of technical support from the Moodle organization itself. Anyway, I just think it’s fair and ethical – they are only going to pass the cost on to you anyway – and as this is likely to be the most popular choice, especially in a small school, it is an issue to consider.

What other packages, extension and add-ons are possible to extend the features and functionalities of Moodle?

In addition to the basics, Moodle offers many modules that allow the integration of external (third party) applications and access to web services.  So you need to ask, if you want additional modules, which ones they provide in the package. Do they provide them automatically?  Do you ask them to provide them? Do they install these extra packages or will you have to install them yourselves?  Is there a cost implication?

Most importantly, will they ALLOW extra packages?  Do they have fixed policies on this or are they negotiable?

For example, teachers my find Mahara useful – this is an Open Source e-portfolio / social networking module which will be integrated into Moodle2 but under the current version of Moodle is an add-on. At least 2 web hosts I have dealt with will not provide this.

Check which of these they do or can provide

For example….

• aspell – is a useful (and free) spell checker.
• dragmath – is a free “drag and drop” equation editor. It is a Java applet that can simply run within a web browser on most computers.
• asciimathml – ‘translates’ figures into maths symbols / notation – your maths teachers will love this one!

Or you may want to integrate access to flickr or youtube. If so you will need to make sure that your Moodle installation enables communication through API to these services.

In many cases, the host provider has already decided what packages they are prepared to install and you are stuck with that – whether you want them or not. Others have a menu from which you can select but the modules appearing on the menu may be pre-determined. In my experience, the modules the tech. people might select might not be the same as the teachers may have chosen : (

What training does your host provide, if any?

Who will do it? Some techies are excellent trainers, some are not. Find out!

How long does it take? Are they day time sessions, evening sessions, fixed dates or on demand?

How much does it cost? What comes free as part of the package? Can they provide additional training if you need more than that? How much will it be?

What will it cover?  Entry level training may just cover how to set up users, courses, upload materials and not much else. Useful and necessary but there are some very good on-line tutorials that can cover the basics.

Are there people who will help to create content? Does the training cover this? This is really important and really useful if teachers have no experience of creating web based content. It is not just about uploading stuff they do face-to-face in the classroom!

Also, you will probably want to customize the appearance of your front end – will they help you with layout, graphics, images and overall design?

In the longer term, what about support for development? Sometime in the future you may want to increase the functionality of your Moodle installation – do they have developers to work with you on this?

Updates – how often are they going to update the software and ensure compatibility?

Software is not static, it changes all the time. Moodle software sometimes changes daily! Software may be altered to fix security issues or to make improvements.

Also Moodle is not the only application that will be updated. As we said, Moodle is not “just” Moodle – it relies on a set of software applications and any time you are trying to keep multiple applications current you are bound to run into compatibility issues. Sometimes a fix in one respect causes a bug in another.

Also a BIG issue – as of writing this, Moodle is currently available as Moodle version 1.9.9 i.e the original version with updates. However, Moodle v2 is likely to be available in the near future.  When I asked what impact this was likely to have, I was told that they were not planning to upgrade to v2 at all. Hello? Does that mean that ten years down the line when Moodle v3, 4 or 5 is available we are still tied to an SLA that is using an out of date platform?

Access – what are you allowed to do?

You might like to ask what access (if any) you have to the back-end of the Moodle installation, including the database. (Typical access would go through FTP and phpMyAdmin.)  Access means, for example, that you can customize the appearance of your own site, you can access all any files uploaded on your installation and can back up your own data. Your host may or may not allow you to do this.

Backups – a BIG question!

How often will it be backed up? Who is responsible for backing up what? Who is liable if data is lost? What is the back up regime?  – these are just the basics!

You will also need to know when they are backed up and how long they keep the data.

A backup regime, including course backups, software backups and database backups is important so find out exactly what sort of back ups will be provided.

• Some web hosts provide “snap shots”,
• Some provide site wide backups.
• Some offer shell access and tell you to do it yourself

Moodle can do some of it’s own backups but they are only a small bit of a full backup programme that has to take into account all the different types of data that is held by a Moodle site. Each data type needs a different sort of backup regime.

Here are some further issues about back ups that you might want to address.

Front end back up facilities

Built in to the Moodle front-end is a function that allows your site administrator (i.e the person at school level who is responsible for the site) to back up your courses. There are several possible settings that can be turned on and off which control how often and what is stored, and, most importantly, where this data is to be stored

Some host providers over ride and turn off this facility. Or they may limit where the data can be stored.

Remote back up

If you have the necessary access and are planning to do your own backup, You will also need to find out how your host is going to handle the back ups. They can either script the system to address backups for all the different types of data or another possibility is that they replicate the data, either to a simple store or to a fallover unit. If you are going to do some of your own back ups, mysql replication requires access to mysql commands that some web hosts do not provide.

Back up of additional modules

Assuming they have allowed you to add extra modules (or they have done this for you) who is going to back these up? Do you have to do it yourself or will it automatically be done for you?

If they do back up the additional modules, does this also include backing up the user generated data associated with the modules or is it just the modules?

Similarly, any complementary software that you have integrated should be backed up. Who does this?

GUI (graphical user interface)

Will any themes or customizations be backed up? Your GUI is often neglected when addressing backups. The data that makes your site look like it does, that you may have selected from a range of options, will be stored in your Moodle code installation with any pictures or images in Moodledata. (see note below)

Code – will it be backed up?

This sounds a bit obvious and some providers may wonder what on earth this is to do with you – and almost certainly resent the question!

However, a lot of them figure there is no point in backing up the Moodle code when, if there are major disasters, they can just download it from Moodle and reinstall it.

This causes problems. One is that it will probably lose your customisation (see GUI ) and any added-on modules. The other is that the version of Moodle they download today is going to be different from the same version of Moodle they download tomorrow. A new install often causes problems on a restore in addition to the original problem. This means they will have to work out why what was working yesterday isn’t working today and that slows the whole process and increase the down time for users. You don’t want them to have to recreate your Moodle application – just restore it! See also ‘Downtime’ below

Moodledata folder

Will contents of the Moodledata directory be backed up? The data may be excluded in your Moodle backups but may hold some of your most important material such as media that was sited in Site Files.

Databases

How often is the db dumped and stored? Can you do this manually /remotely ?

Whatever database you are using, it is critical that you dump and store your db regularly, especially because it can be so simple to restore a site if you have a recent db dump. This can be accomplished manually via a GUI as with phpMyAdmin or mysql admin or via command line if the user has access and the requisite skills. It can also be automated via commercial or open scripting (as in HandyBackup or automysqlbackup). ]

Maximum file upload size and storage capacity

What is the maximum file upload size? Some hosts are putting heavy restrictions on this. The maximum size of file uploads for Moodle can be controlled via the Moodle GUI but are also constrained via Apache and PHP. To adjust these you may need to be able to edit .htaccess and/or php.ini. but the chances are your host will not allow this.

How much storage capacity do you get? What is the limit on Email volume, storage space for users and courses? How many accounts are you allowed? If either proves inadequate, can you buy more? How much is this going to cost?

Also, issues of scale can be very important. A relatively small number of concurrent users can generate enough email through forum postings to get you in trouble with your host.

If you have back end access and are planning to do your own back up and costing model includes paying your web host for bandwidth, then you need to remember this sort of remote backup can become expensive.

Downtime – when and how much?

All servers need to be maintained. This means it will not be available for users. You need to ask when the routine maintenance will take place and how long the server will be out of action.

You may get an answer expressed in terms of ‘9’s’.  This is just geek talk for 9%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.99% and so on.

Now 99.9% means the system is down .1% of the time. It doesn’t sound much (about an hour and forty minutes a week) but when does this take place? If this routine maintenance takes place once a week between 3 and 5 am on a Sunday morning, that is unlikely to cause problems whereas the same time could mean that it was down for a whole day once a month. Check it out.

Security – who has access to what?

Moodle holds different sorts of data:

• There is the data Moodle places in the mysql database.
• There is the data that Moodle places in the Moodledata file structure,
• there is the Moodle code itself.

All of these should be protected from unauthorized reading, writing and execution.

Who has what permissions? Who controls this?  How are users authenticated?

Is there a firewall? What level of security will it provide? Don’t think that the higher the level of security the better the service! On the one hand you need to stop porno spam reaching your pupils but there is nothing more frustrating than having to telephone the host every time you want to access a website that isn’t ‘approved’ by them or receive an email from someone the firewall chooses to block.  Anyone with a .mac account seems to be particularly prone to blacklisting.

Are particular ports blocked? For example, some web services and applications (e.g Skype) rely on free access to these ports. Can these ports be made available?

The following are some extra questions for the geeks

What operating system will the server run on? What database will it use?

This is really a question the IT section might want to know. The host server may use Linux, Windows or a Mac platform. This will make no difference to the end user as the Moodle software will stand between the server operating system and the users operating system. However, it might cause some problems for ‘advanced’ users in terms of some additional software they want to integrate. This same group, for similar reasons, may also want to know what the database option is (e.g MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL). Also ask what policy they have on updating PHP.

Well, this is a question many people have been asking me. This is equally a question I ask myself. Simply because it is still hard to articulate my purpose and choices in such a way it becomes clear enough to those who ask. As Einstein once said, if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t […]