Random Acts of Learning

So it's farewell

daveymelbourne — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:39:39 +1000

So I’m ending posting to this blog.

I’ve decided to move onto a new role in a new institution, and so my involvement with this project comes to an end.

And it’s a good time to leave the project. The sites are built, the technology is in, and new the exciting phase of learners using these spaces can start.

Me? I’m off to deal more in educational technology, in a learning and teaching centre. My stay in IT for the last couple of years has been fun, and eye opening, but daddy’s coming home. Look out baby.

Builders have left, AV comes in.

daveymelbourne — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:55:33 +1100

Builders have left, AV comes in.

One done, final pics.

daveymelbourne — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:27:28 +1100

One done, final pics.

One down cont 2…

daveymelbourne — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:23:45 +1100

One down cont 2…

One down…cont.

daveymelbourne — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:18:16 +1100

One down…cont.

One down and one nearly done

daveymelbourne — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:05:01 +1100

One down and one nearly done

One down and one nearly finished

daveymelbourne — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:59:33 +1100

18 months ago, I started working on a spaces project. The Learning Spaces of the Future is an attempt to work with academics and teachers, architects and facilities to create learning spaces that promote a range of learning approaches and pedagogies, in environments which are technology rich, but are creative and foster creativity.

And we are nearly there. The builders leave are now finishing up and leaving. They started building work in October, and are ready to sign off. At the end of the week the AV integrators come on in for a couple of weeks and then the space is ready to go.

We have been brave with aspects of the space. Using Ideapaint on all areas of the walls, and the whole of the floor. Something, that I think hasn’t been done in Australia, was something that facilities and the builders weren’t quite sure about, but it has worked. The paint looks great on the floor. The zoning of the space in large areas and smaller ‘pods’, creates an area that can be used in multiple ways by multiple disciplines. The use of comfortable bright bean bags, and chairs that get away from being institutional add colour and vibrancy. The use of lighting shows off the space, even the retractable lighting in the space gives texture and interest to the space.

We wanted it to be like Alice in Wonderland, and I think we’ve got it. The AV next - which includes TelePresence in three locations, LED lighting that can give any colour, HD projection in six sites, digital signage, and a multimedia experience gets install in the next two weeks. In the meantime enjoy the pics, I’ll be posting shortly.

Learning Space build coming to an end…

daveymelbourne — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:39:06 +1100

Learning Space build coming to an end…

Just a few days till the Learning Space of the Future is...

daveymelbourne — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:36:13 +1100

Just a few days till the Learning Space of the Future is completed

Learning Space of the Future build coming to an end…

daveymelbourne — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:08:00 +1100

Learning Space of the Future build coming to an end…

The building work on the Learning Spaces of the Future...

daveymelbourne — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:55:16 +1100

The building work on the Learning Spaces of the Future continues.

The Learning Space of the Future is now a real building site.

daveymelbourne — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:53:36 +1100

The Learning Space of the Future is now a real building site.

The building work started on the Learning Space of the Future...

daveymelbourne — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:33:03 +1100

The building work started on the Learning Space of the Future last week…

The Nespresso of Learning

daveymelbourne — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:52:00 +1100

I was having coffee at lunch with a colleague. A guy walked passed with a Nespresso bag. ‘That’s the coffee equivalent of BlackBoard’, I said. Well not just BlackBoard but any proprietary Learning Management System. OK, so he gave me a quizzical look and I explained. ‘You know those coffee machines that you have those coffee pods, and pop them in and coffee comes out.’

I’m sure they are very convenient, those Nespresso machines. Pop in a cartridge and off you go - coffee. But not lavazza, or illy, or my green, forest friendly Nicaraguan blend I get from my local coffee roaster. If I want coffee I have to have Nespresso. I can imagine if you work in an office, and you don’t want the fuss and the waste issues of an espresso machine you might think this is an excellent solution; except that in most cities in the world you are never more than 2 meters away from a rat, in Melbourne you are never more than 2 meters away from a coffee shop.

My espresso machine died a couple of weeks ago, so I got out my old Italian stove top coffee pot. I’d forgotten how good the coffee was that this thing produced. This pot in two parts, where you just add coffee, water, and heat. Simple, elegant, and easy to use. I think it cost me $30 too.

I don’t think I’ll be buying another $1000 espresso machine.

Staff Development - has it been worth it?

daveymelbourne — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:26:00 +1000

The Dearing Report was published in 1997; it was one of those big reports. Most reports are big, but this one covered student funding of HE, quality, credit transfer, credit frameworks, professional development, and proposed that academic staff should undergo a profession qualification during their probationary period.

I was, for unknown reason thinking about this report today, and reflected on how or if HE has changed in the last 15 years?

It seems that the governance and quality agencies have been put in place (the QAA in the UK), and that the credit framework is now pretty much agreed, in the UK as well as the EU, that students do indeed (greatly) contribute to the cost of their education, and that the Foundation Degree is knocking around (after a huge amount of cash spent on them, and I doubt they differ much from the HNC/HND). But what about that qualification and staff development thing. Has anything really changed?

The situation in Australia is pretty similar. Added layers of quality management, and crippling funding contributions. The Australian system though seems completely incapable of coming up with a credit framework, and the relationship between the governments and universities seems a little to close, down I think to there being a funding agency such as Hefce that protects the system. But, the staff development, teaching qualification issue is also here.

Is teaching any better than it was 15 years ago? Is learning anymore diverse than it was 15 years. Have we adopted new technologies and used the old paradigms? Where there is innovation, there is some great innovation. In some courses there has been a real effort to shift from the didactic to the constructivist. But enough? Too slowly?

What we’ve managed to do, I think, is to create lots of bureaucracy - some good, some bad, but we’ve managed not to completely force (yes, force) change in learning, teaching and assessment.

A few years ago, I was talking to my then DVC Academic about why we bother making students jump through hoops when it comes to assessment. My argument went along the lines of ‘some students don’t want a first (HD), so why do we give them assignments that allow them the potential to do it? If a student just wants to get a pass give them an assessment that caps that. Heavens haven’t we just created a system based on learning outcomes that stipulate the minimum for a pass?’ (something else we have been exceptionally bad at explaining to students what make an essay 58%, rather than 61%, which is impossible in a regime of learning outcomes, anyway…). You know what? I think he actually thought about it. He even had my write a briefing paper on it. But it went nowhere, which is probably what I thought would happen.

My point, yes a point…We created a system where we could have changed education. But mostly we tinkered with the administration and bureaucracy of how many hours equal how many credits. We didn’t say, ‘…and this will mean new approaches, new markets, new learning, new assessment.’ We rolled out professional development on credit frameworks and matrices rather than how to be innovative with curriculum. We provided Graduate Certificate in HE (universally loathed by staff), that not all that intellectually engaging, and bent to one type of ideology (I wonder how many copies of Learning to Teach in Higher Education were sold in that last 15 years…).

So what is the answer? I’ll address that next time…

Conference paper at University Planning and Design Conference:Part 2

daveymelbourne — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:26:50 +1000

Oh my. It has been some time. Mostly down to my leaving the country for six weeks leave to be honest - but no excuses. So technology. I was at a meeting the other day, and I was asked what technology should be put in a new building. I sat there and asked that question. What sort of pedagogies and approaches are you going to use? It wasn’t quite stund silence but it was awkward. This hadn’t been figured out just yet.

And so it is. People from facilities, or estates will tell you that they want to be responsive and build great learning spaces, but they just don’t get the requirements. Or the requirements are, ‘oh, you know, lecture’.

We also have the ‘we must have…’. ePortfolio is one of those. So we have a committee, decide, pay for and implement. Do many staff and students use it? Well probably not. Why? Because academic staff don’t really see the point of it. Mainly because it hasn’t been integrated into the curriculum. If it ain’t in the teaching, learning and assessments of the programme or course you have little chance of it being used throughout the institution.

I can think of one technology (ignoring the VLE/LMS, which is mostly used as a repository) that is pretty well used in Australian HE; the lecture capture. I’m not going to go into the whole lecture capture bad/good here. For me the technology merely catches and makes available the lecture. Would I like to see fewer people lecture? Yes. Can people be more imaginative with that lecture space? Yes. Will it happen without thinking about the curriculum. Not really.

It captures the lectures, posts it somewhere and the student and look at it again and again. They like that. They like it so much they have an expectation that all of their lectures will be available. And why not? This is the cue for the anti-lecture capture cult to jump into action…

But in this space, the Learning Space of the Future, I think we have thought about the activities and the pedagogies that can be deployed. And we asked students.

There is a certain unsophisticated approach to pedagogy in Higher Ed. Constructivist or Didactic. Get them to do group work or tell them what they need to know. There seems to be a lack of awareness by some colleagues that Constructivism is one of a number of cognitive theories. Humanistic, and Critical pedagogical theory seems to have disappeared completely. I guess, for me the Learning Space in hand here, needs to accommodate a whole range of approaches (even didactic) and start to experiment with some new approaches.

So the technology in this space does that. Take for example the emerging field of Place Based Learning. Sometimes described as the bringing together of critical and ecological pedagogies. How can you use technology to connect different cohorts of students with different experiences of life? The group of biology students in Melbourne with a group of students living Florida to discuss a project the students might be doing on water ecology. It pretty clear that good interactive videoconferencing is one aspect. Another would be a virtual collaborative tool, where the students could work together in real time on object - maybe something like the Microsoft Surface.

Technology ultimately should drop out of the conversations between educators, architects, builder and technologists. Think about the curriculum, pedagogy, and use cases and technology becomes the incidental.

Conference paper at University Planning and Design Conference:Part 1

daveymelbourne — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:58:00 +1000

There is nothing like the second paper, after lunch on the last day. Absolutely nothing. It really is the conference equivalent of the Monday night date. You want it to be over so that you can just get home and go to bed. And like New York if you can make it at this time slot, you can make it anywhere.

Fiona Young, from BVN and I did a presentation last week, at the University Planning and Design conference. Interestingly, the teaching and learning papers were in this last session. Personally, it may have been better up front to frame the activities that universities are engaged with, so it doesn’t become too decontextualised.

The slides take this blog a little further in examining what the space is going top look like, the way it links to other physical and virtual spaces, and what pedagogies are being engaged with and tested.

We put out gorgeous cards inviting the audience to send in tweet questions. This was not great. Seriously not great. It amazes me that people can continue to have professional identities and not engage in tech forums such as Twitter. People’s choices I guess.

So the presentation pretty much kicked off with the why now type of question which gave some background with our working with Cisco to do something different in this learning spaces area. I know that just about every institution has a learning space of the future but having this partnership gives insights into what’s been developed, and what’s coming along. And for lots of other reasons it is a good strategic fit.

Right up front was the pedagogical underpinning. I believe education has fallen into another pedagogical orthodoxy, that of constructivism. It seems to occlude all other pedagogical approaches, and in Higher Education it seems to be taught to new lecturers to the exclusion of all other. So in the spirit of recognising other pedagogy (which are arguably sub-sets of constructivism) we opened up the space to explicitly test Place Based Learning and Connectivism.

The process of creating this space has been pretty creative. Talking to students, education students at that and asking questions about how they would configure space to teach (a question that they’d never considered). We talked to staff about creating the perfect learning space and not to worry about the cost. And we got creative with the creatives. Talking to musicians, town planners, more students, creatives about how and where they like to learn.

And how do people like to learn? Diversely. From those who lock themselves up in monastic silence, to those who need monastic music, to those that need to be on the beach. Most people aren’t the learn in a study or carrel, most actually prefer to be in places that we might describe as the ephemeral. Learning as a Field Trip, maybe.

The students have been the stars of this process - and we don’t involve them often enough in the process of creating learning spaces. We seem more concerned, understandably in getting staff to use the space, as if they are the important ones in the learning process. They were fantastic coming up with scenarios and thinking about how students could use the proposed space and use technology.

Part 2 of this post will talk about the technology and fit out of the rooms. If you take away one thing from this post it is to think about and talk with the students, rather than think about how will the staff engage with the space.

About to give a conference paper...

daveymelbourne — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:16:07 +1000

Fiona Young, from BVN Architecture, and myself are given a paper on innovative learning spaces tomorrow. We have a question that we want to address during the paper. The question is ‘What do you want to know about experiential learning spaces?’

Reply here or use the twitter tag #innovativelearning.

Thanks, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

Using the IdeaPaint Rooms for Web Wireframes

daveymelbourne — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:09:45 +1000

Using the IdeaPaint Rooms for Web Wireframes

IdeaPaint ready to write on, and budget approved!

daveymelbourne — Mon, 30 May 2011 10:40:00 +1000

I said last week that we had put Ideapaint in a couple of offices to see how it worked out. Idea paint is a paint that you (not really) slap onto the wall and after 7 days of curing you have a surface you are able to write on with board markers. Today was the end of the cure period and time to get those pens out. I have to say it works remarkably well. Our walls are pretty textured in a 70s kind of a way, but the pens work really well on the texture. To get the the pen off to need to apply a little bit of welly, only because the markers get into the crevices of the pox marked wall. I’m really happy with the results, which leads me onto…

…some good news that we got on Friday. The final hurdle for funding my project, ‘The Learning Space of the Future’, has been approved. Done, dusted, and completed. The project is to create a learning space using emerging technologies and materials. In the next few weeks I’ll be looking at a number of these high end and simple innovations. It’s going to be a space that can be used for formal and informal learning, that will link up campuses, and geographic locations around the work using a range of tech.

In terms of Ideapaint, it’s going to be everywhere. 406m2 to be precise. On the walls…and on the floor. Yeap the floor. The ability to move the space around and for it to be pretty agile means the floor can become another space that students can use. One issue that I’m already anticipating is acoustics - lots of glass in the space and with extra glossy surfaces we are looking at doing clever things with amplification.

As well as using one of the more white/grey shades of IdeaPaint we are also commissioning a very bright yellow IdeaPaint to add more life to the space. We commissioned a report at the beginning of the year asking students what they thought about facilities in the institutions . Too grey and not enough colour was the unsurprising reply. IdeaPaint please come up with a range of more colourful paints, please! I’m going to posting some sketches of what the space will look like soon, and will be taking time lapse recordings of the building so should be fun! Have a happy Monday.