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.

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.