Not so grumpy?

Not so grumpy today. That might be because the sun is shinning. (For those in Swansea, I'll take some photographs so you can see what it looks like ;-).

Started today with two really good sessions. One from Andy Ramsden on QR codes - could be really useful. The other was by the ever excellent David White on the 'Visitor-Resident principle.' It's always good to see Presnky's Digital Natives ideas get a bit of a kicking but rather than just rubbish the idea the Visitor-Resident principle gives a much more useful view of how people use the Internet. It has implications for educators and staff developers. Great stuff!!

Today was also my poster session. I had some interesting discussions and the '12 steps' seems quite popular.

ALT-C once again........

I must confess I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with ALT-C. Whilst there are lots of interesting people to meet and much to talk about, there is an awful lot of twaddle and people admiring their navels. For example, there was a really rather pointless session on 'the VLE is dead' - all a bit playgroundy IMHO - let's get on with what we're doing rather than throwing stones at each other because of the technology we're using. That only leads to this. As Seymour Papert said, "If there is a why, any how will do."

There was a great keynote to kick of the conference by Michael Wesch, which I guess will be online at some point. The Chair then spoilt it a bit, in classic ALT style, by appearing to only take questions from people he knew. That seems to happen every time I come to ALT-C. I wonder if it's a policy or more an indication that ALT has an 'in' crowd so it's all about who you know?

Hmmm...... this seems like a bit of a moan. However, I am looking forward to tomorrow's sessions on QR Codes , the 'Visitor-Resident' principle and using Appreciative Inquiry with ePortfolios.

Excellence in Learning and Teaching?

Tuesday saw the first Swansea University Excellence in Learning & Teaching Conference - part of a post RAE plan to raise the profile and status of learning & teaching. I only got to attend half the conference as I was chairing the sessions in one of the breakout rooms. Although it wasn't a technology enhanced learning conference, over half of the presentations involved the use of technology in learning and teaching. What I particularly liked was that, in the presentations I saw at least, it was about the teaching and learning use technology was put to not the technology itself. Technology Last - yay!

Reflective learning seemed to be an underlying theme of the conference and I really like Michele Raithby's idea of reflection as a pensieve.

"The Pensieve is an object used to review memories. It has the appearance of a shallow stone basin, into which are carved runes and strange symbols. It is filled with a silvery substance that appears to be a cloud-like liquid/gas; the collected memories of people who have siphoned their recollections into it. Memories can then be viewed from a third-person point of view. "
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Pensieve

Could be a useful analogy for the PDP work here.

Overall a pretty successful day - the sun was even shining :-)

And so, the end is near..........

My Facebook/Twitter gloating about the great weather in Riga and the rain in Swansea yesterday has come back to haunt me. It's pouring with rain and Riga has gone the kind of grey I thought only Warsaw could achieve. I'm told it will clear up later. Quite how long later will be I'm not really sure.

So, it's may last day at the University and it's a case of cleaning up the model and agreeing the direction to go in next. It's been great working here with different people who work in quite a different way. I've learnt a lot and hopefully we have the makings of a future collaboration. When I arrived in Riga I thought 3 weeks would be a long time but actually I could easily have stayed for twice as long. I've been made to feel very much part of the team here and I've already been exploring other funding options for a return visit :-) There have also been some subtle hints that I could stay and do a PhD here and I can't say I'm not tempted........

You're a bad man and you can't go in there on your own!

I was too embarrassed to tell this story earlier but now that the end of my stay is near :-( I'm usually the first in in the morning, so I collect the keys to the office from the rather officious looking woman in very dark glasses at the front desk, who I always speak politely to in Latvian. (That doesn't mean I'm then rude to her in English) There are two keys on the very large, about 20cms long key fob. One for the office I work in and one for the the smaller office, where the coffee machine is. Not long after I arrive someone else usually turns up so both offices are generally open and whenever I've wanted a coffee I've just gone into the other office. On this day there was no one else in for quite a while. After doing some work I thought I would grab a coffee. There was no one in the other office so I used the second key on the very large key fob. I heard a slight buzzing and then all hell broke loose with the loudest alarms I've ever heard! After a short while a porter arrived and I was taken downstairs to be shouted at in Latvian. I was made to wait by the desk while a series of frantic calls were made. Maybe I was going to be taken to meet the Belarusian border guards after all! I was then taken back up to the office and given a long and angry speech in Latvian. Although I don't understand much Latvian I got the gist that I'm not allowed in the room with the coffee on my own. I must only go in the office I work in. I'm a very bad man and I'm not allowed in the office with the coffee on my own. And finally - I'm not allowed in the room with the coffee on my own!

When the others arrived later they all knew the story, Latvian grapevine, and thought it was very funny. They now joke whenever I go near the door to the office with the coffee that I'm not allowed in on my own.

To be or not to be..... the actor's role.

While we've been developing the various EKD models we've also been looking at the research basis for what we are trying to do. One interesting piece or research from the USA is about non-credit courses in US Community Colleges. The article explores the use of non-credit education as a bridging mechanism to allow students who have performed poorly in high school to enter community colleges. They argue that noncredit programs have many advantages including "lower cost; greater accessibility, flexibility, and responsiveness; and greater access to immigrants." They cite a number of cases where learners have moved from non-credit courses into success in the mainstream college. This fits well with one of the concepts in our model that knowledge is free but accreditation costs and that making the barriers to entry as low as possible can lead to greater engagement.

Today's task is to look at the Actors and Resource model. This is used to describe how different actors and resources are related to each other and how they are related to components of the Goals Model as well as to components of the Business Processes Model (BPM). For instance, an actor may be the responsible for a particular process in the BPM or, the actor may pursue a particular goal in the Goals Model. The Actors and Resources Model usually clarifies questions, such as: who is/should be performing which processes and tasks, how is the reporting and responsibility structure between actors defined?

I actually left the office at 5pm yesterday and took a 30 minute train ride out of Riga to Jurmala and had a very pleasant evening strolling along the longest beech I've ever seen by the surprisingly calm Baltic.

Art and fish?

Spent a bit of time at the weekend in two very different parts of Riga. The Art Nouveau district and the fish market - I get to go to all the best places!

Riga managed to escape the fate of many cities during WWII and it's medieval Old Town and Art Nouveau district are largely intact. The Art Nouveau district is fascinating and gives much of the city a very Parisian feel.

The fish market is part of the city market which is housed in 5 old WW1 zeppelin hangers. The fish market fills one of these and contains an amazing array of fish. The fish is all very fresh. As I entered the market I meet a fish trying to flap his way to freedom along the floor. All to no avail as he was quickly captured and returned to the stall. The fish are actually kept in tanks behind the stalls and the placed on the stall for sale. Very fresh indeed.

Is perfection possible?

So, the perfect use of yesterday's model. Today we moved on to the Goals model, where we attempted to apply goals, then actors who would achieve these goals, to yesterday's concept model. We are also using the concept of eBig3, an RTU concept that follows on from some work in Ambient Learning and has some similarities with Glamorgan University's Work-based Access to Learning through E-Services. We've covered two of the Big3 but still have the web-based component to look at. This is where most of the issues with the model lie. Web-based e-learning has promised the earth but in many cases has failed to really deliver a significant return on investment or expectation. It is all to often the Creepy Salesman from Dr Ebenezer, who tells you that "e-learning can transform the learning experience, save you so much time you can do twice as much research, improve you students grades and it will even improve your sex life." Also, as Atis has often quoted Peter Chatterton as saying, "all e-learning projects are successful - once!" How come they never seem to last?

How many presentations of wonderful e-learning projects have you been to and then never heard of again? How much money has been spent on shiny new toys and expensive software, all shown off with impressive presentations to nodding administrators? Even though some projects show some seemingly impressive outcomes, most don't even come near to giving a real return on the huge investment put in. There seems to be a real disconnect between what would really benefit learners and what actually gets developed. Part of it is down to greedy software companies pushing the latest product but I don't think that is the main issue. Often those that make the decisions about where the money is spent and on what it is spent on don't really understand the consequences of the decisions they are making. A bit like the hospital administrator who wants to see the machine that goes 'bing'. I think the video pretty much sums up most major e-learning projects, with the doctors as the learning technologists and the poor patient as the learner or maybe an academic, depending on your point of view.



So before looking at the goals and actors for the web-based component, in a change to my beloved Appreciative Inquiry approach (it's always good to have your own assumptions challenged - so I'm told), we looked at the barriers to sustainability in traditional e-Learning (or TEL if you are reading this in Wales).

Tomorrow we'll see if our model can address the barriers and stop wasting money on the machine that goes 'bing'.

A new career in modelling?

One of the areas the Riga Technical University are exploring at the moment is the use of Knowledge Transfer models and their application to the using technology to support and enhance learning. The task we have set ourselves for the next two weeks is to see if we can produce a new model for sustainable lifelong learning. We are using the Enterprise Knowledge Develpment (EKD) method as tool for building the model as this is something the team here have used many times in project planning.

EKD was developed by the Sorbone, UMIST (now Manchester) and SYSLAB/DSV in Stockholm. They argue that -

• EKD is an integrated collection of methods, techniques, and tools that will support your process of analysing, planning, designing, and changing your business.
• EKD supports your thinking, reasoning, and learning about the business.
• EKD leads to more complete and consistent business designs.
  

And that EKD is not -

• a “magic method” that relieves you from thinking and acting
  
• a “software tool”
  
• an approach that necessarily leads to a software system
  

There are various sub models within the overall model and we started with the concepts model. The Concepts Model is used to strictly define the "things" and "phenomena" that are being talked about in the other models. They are presented as enterprise concepts, attributes, and relationships. Concepts are used to define more strictly expressions in the Goals Model as well as the content of information sets in the Business Processes Model. The Concepts Model usually clarifies questions, such as: what concepts are recognised in the enterprise (including their relationships to goals, activities and processes, and actors), how are they defined, what business rules and constraints monitor these objects and concepts.

The planning process begins as a sort of organized 'thought shower', outlining the key concept preconditions that will underpin the model, which are written on pieces of coloured papaer. These are then stuck on a wall that has been covered in plastic so that connections can be drawn between the various concepts, as you can see from the photograph. Once complete, Visio is the used to keep a permenant record. I found the process a really useful and productive one - really quite engrossing. So much so that it wasn't untill 8pm that we decided to call it a day! The plan for tomorrow is to see if we can create a 'perfect' implemetation of the model.

Down to work......

My first full day in the office. We started with a meeting to discuss type of projects we could proceed with over the next two weeks with ideas about peer supported lifelong learning – will have planning meeting tomorrow.

I was asked to take part in the weekly e-learning seminar. Atis then said would I mind presenting. Then could it be 45 mins to an hour. The seminar was at 5pm and included Liepaja University by video conference. I began by presenting a Swansea University shield and bottle of Scotch Whisky. Not knocking the shield but the whisky appeared to be the more popular! I talked about our experiences of e-learning/TEL at Swansea and there was a lot of discussion, which finally finished at 7pm.

I strolled into Old Town to get something to eat and hardly anyone there. I was the only person in the restaurant. At least the British larger idiots have gone.

It's the weekend!

My first weekend in Riga and a chance to explore the Old Town. In the morning I met my new flat mates – 3 Spanish Erasmus students. Seemed very nice.

On Saturday I had a general stroll around the Old Town and visited the Occupation Museum and the War Museum and saw the Old Soviets celebration of end of war at riflemen memorial. They celebrate a day early for some reason.

Some time after I returned my new flat mates went out at for the evening at 1am They returned at 7.30! Spanish people are nocturnal?

On Sunday morning I went to what I thought was a Lutheran Church. However, there seemed to be rather a lot of crossing and sung responses – not very Lutheran at all. It turned out, of course, that I'd gone into one of the few Catholic churches in Riga. Very welcoming though, although they thought I was German :-)

Off my trolley?

In the coffee break before the final session, I was chatting with a delegate from Estonia about her bother, who is a footballer in England. I didn't realise at the time but her brother is actually Mart Poom the former Derby and Arsenal goalkeeper, who has played over 100 times for his country.

The conference closed with the normal thanking everybody etc. I know it needs to be done but.... Next years conference is in Paris - could be worth a paper?

We were driven back to Riga via Livani and Cesis, both of which were very interesting. I arrived back in Riga at about 11pm and fulfilled a life ambition (well kind of) by travelling on a trolley bus, which seems to be the main form of public transport in Riga.

Dancing Latgalian style

Day three of the conference and there was a very interesting presentation in the e-learning strand by Peter Purg. He talked about time as a resource ans students perception of the workload being dependant on how engaged they were. More to come on this. There was also an interesting presentation by Janis Kaperniks on 'just in time' learning using mobile phones.

The evening meal was very pleasant and then we were told we would be enjoying something typically Latgalian. Largale is a distinct region of Latvia which has had different influences over the years and has quite a distinct local dialect. We were encouraged to move to the next room where a band was set up to play. We were then lined up and spent the rest of the evening doing increasingly complicated Latgalian folk dances. The more complicated they were, the faster the band seemed to play and the more mistakes we made but that was all part of the fun - I think.

E-learning by the people, for the people, of the people

Today was the reason I was at the conference, to present as part of the e-learning strand. E-learning was new to the conference this year and had two sessions with eight paper presented. My topic was "E-learning by the people, for the people, of the people" about developing an e-learning community of practice. There was a fair bit of discussion afterwards and I was surprised that by presenting I had become a member of the Baltic and Black Sea Circle Consortium and formally given my membership card.

The musical entertainment in the evening this time was a very good solo violinist. However, after the meal the Estonian group sang some impromptu Estonian folk songs, which sparked off a number of other groups so we had Finish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Hungarian folk singing. No British signing obviously!

I was invited back to the cabin in the woods again. This time we got completely lost heading straight for those boarder guards. Worryingly, I was the only one who had any idea where to go and was thus made the guide!!

Still alive!

I'm still here - I survived my experience on the Lativian roads. A bit rough in places and a few hairy moments but it was OK. We arrived at the conference just as the keynote was starting. Atis said he'd planned it to avoid wasting time :-) The Conference is a little out my my normal area but as the keynotes progressed I realised that a lot of what we are trying to do at Swansea in building a community of practice and the follow up from the benchmarking, fit well with the concept of making things sustainable - in all senses of the word.

After the keynotes we had dinner followed by a recital by a local opera singer, who also sang some very impressive jazz.

Although I had booked into the conference hotel my colleagues from Riga Technical University told me that they had decided to rent a small house by a lake. The invited me to spend the evening there with them. What they had actually rented was a house in a former complex for Latvia Communist party apparatchiks deep in the woods near the Belarus boarder. Before we left Atis said I should take my passport with me as one wrong turn in the woods and we would come up against Belarusian border guards and that would be something we didn't want to do.
They complex was actually very nice, as you would expect for party bosses although the two rows of fencing each with an imposing set of gates was a little unnerving.

First Day at work!

First day of work. Met some of the team and was given a guided tour of the Distance Education Study Centre. Down in the basement is a recording studio, complete with Cubase, a hardware controller, a Roland piano and some very nice Latvian made valve mics. I wonder if I'll get a chance to have a play? I have a lovely view from where I'm typing this in as in Soviet times there were weapons in the room, so they needed a clear shot.

Travelling to Daugavpils this afternoon for the Conference. According to the Rough Guide, the death toll on Latvian roads is terrible. Will I get to post again?

Hello! This is Riga calling. Here are the votes of the latvian jury....

Arrived after a good flight, came out of departures and looked for Atis, who was meeting me. Hmm... no Atis and I only have his Skype and email but no mobile. OK I'll wait for a bit no panic. 20 minutes later – no Atis. Later still and all the other passengers have now left the building – no Atis. OK what am I going to do. I'll wait another 30 minutes, then catch the bus to the city centre and try and try and find where I'm going to be staying. Success 15 minutes later Atis arrives. Latvia is now part of the Schengen agreement and Atis was waiting at the main terminal. Only visitors from 'dubious' countries get sent to the terminal I was at. As we drove the short drive to the city centre I had very similar feelings to those I had arriving in Warsaw for the first time 10 years ago. There are clearly many differences between Latvia and Poland, not least the language, but the Soviets certainly left a mark on the architecture.

The room is OK basic but OK and about a quarter of the price of the hotel over the road.

It's also very close to the Distance Education Study Centre and a large supermarket.

Got some strange looks as I zigzagged around the supermarket trying to work out what things were. I can't remember any of the Latvian I tried to learn. All that comes into my head is Polish and that's not much help in Riga. It might be more useful in Daugavpils, where there is a sizeable Polish speaking minority. A bit like Slough then :-)