2ndMeetingNotes

CETIS Pedagogy Forum 2^nd Meeting: Notes

25 July 2003, University of Huddersfield.

· Introduction & welcome by Lisa Corley, Pedagogy Forum Co-ordinator

· Apologies for late start due to technical problems.

· Overview of Agenda – reordering of first two presentations, with Gerry & Fiona first, James second. This is because James Dalziel has managed to incorporate (this morning) the scenarios that Gerry & Fiona will be discussing, into the tool he will be demonstrating, so it would be more useful for him to present these after they have been described.

Online Learning Scenarios and Learning Design

Fiona Andrew f.andrew@ltscotland.com
and Gerry Graham, g.graham@ltscotland.com
Learning and Teaching Scotland

Fiona and Gerry discussed Learning and Teaching Scotland's Online Events, a series of e-learning scenarios ran over the past few years for Primary and Secondary Schools. The events covered a number of topics, a Virtual Oil Spill, All About Rubbish and The Versailles Experience, which is included as a Use Case in the IMS Learning Design Specification. The most recent event, Ticket To Space, ran last year over an eight week period and is to be repeated again later this year. They discussed what impact they see the IMS Specification Learning Design having on future events, and they felt Learning Design (LD) is a key development for the sustainable future of events such as these.

About LT Scotland
Their remit covers all matters relating to the curriculum in the pre-school, primary and secondary education sectors in Scotland. LT Scotland is required to advise the Scottish Executive on any aspect of the learning experiences of children and young people up to the age of 18, and on any issue that may have an effect on those learning experiences. The remit also highlights the importance of the effective use of information and communications technology (ICT) in education and learning. This aspect of the remit is not restricted to young people. Rather, LT Scotland is charged with providing advice, guidance, products and services relating to the use of ICT in any area of education and lifelong learning.

- Interested in interoperability across other sectors & rest of UK. FE & primary/secondary shared curriculum in Scotland too.

- Interested in LD spec because it might support the work they do.

- Susan Linklater (ex-LTScotland, now with British Council) was present & also knows a lot about cases used in the presentation

- IMS uses use cases; show some of LTScotland use cases. Versailles (in LD spec already); Virtual Oil Spill; All About Rubbish; Ticket to Space (all online events for schools; schools throughout UK and worldwide took part.

- All ran inside a VLE called Pioneer (see slide for details); implement IMS CP 1.1.2 in 2003. May implement IMS LD or wait for v.2.0. Want to show that what we do with elearning can also be done with other systems.

- Fiona’s presentation: what we did and what teachers thought of them.

o The Versailles Experience (done a while back, no case study/feedback available)

§ See slide.

§ Was difficult for secondary schools to timetable it in.

o All About Rubbish (primary schools)

§ See slides.

§ Screen shots: Home Waste Audit

§ Case study slides (1 school used all 3 online events)

o Virtual Oil Spill

§ See slides.

§ More of an interactive role play. Classes divided into a variety of roles.

o Ticket to Space

§ See slides.

§ Popular event; running again this year.

§ More structured event than the others, not much scope for teachers to do their own thing.

- Gerry’s presentation: Online events & IMS LD

o See slides.

o Want to do next: take one event and run it in different ways. Usually run it in such a way that schools have to be bound to LTScotland’s schedule, bound to their pedagogy. Using the same set of resources, but allow teachers to use different resources too if wanted.

o So want a tool to run these things, maybe also end up with a library of them, so look to IMS specs for this.

Questions:

BO: Time to setup?

FL: Resources took longest time. Time going out to support schools took the most time. But the actual time to put the content on wasn’t much time.

GG: Developing the content took a long time. But some teachers felt the ones with less content more activities were better. Could also pick up content from others and build activities around it.

Mark Stiles: Experts? Was that difficult; how did you do it?

FL: Approached experts first, got them to log on; fitted in well with videoconferencing. Would have been nice to have them reply sooner.

GG: Found with Ticket to Space, over 300 schools participated; how to moderate the discussion forums? Sometimes 20 people per schools; too much for one moderator. Could have “trigger points”; get another moderator when a certain number log in; run multiple instances simultaneously instead of all at once.

Forums become learning object themselves that future teachers could use.

GG: Could build up FAQs out of them. Susan?

Susan: Was difficult to get experts. Ticket to Space almost ended up having an FAQ. But kids would’ve liked personal response from experts.

GG: So: we want a tool!

Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) demo

James Dalziel, Adjunct Professor and Director, Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE), & Executive Director, WebMCQ Pty Ltd

james@webmcq.com

NB: No slides publicly available; summary slides were distributed to meeting participants.
James has led the development of the “Learning Activity Management System” by WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an IMS Learning Design “inspired” approach to the sequencing of learning activities. James demonstrated the LAMS system from the perspectives of students, teacher monitors, and authoring, including discussion of recent ideas in the Learning Design community and the implications for future development. James also discussed early feedback from LAMS user groups within Australia and the UK, and the implications of these findings for the future of e-learning. In the afternoon, James provided an update on the COLIS project, and the recent launch of the Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) – a university research centre devoted to research, development, and implementation of e-learning architectures and infrastructure using open standards.

Tool and how the LTScotland scenarios mentioned fit in.

Looking for solutions for reversing the trend of technology driving what happens in education.

- See slides.

- LAMS is LD-inspired, not a reference implementation.

- LD uses play/act model to describe learning activities.

- James uses 3 parts (can describe any kind of learning under this framework/LD framework):

o Who is involved?

o What content is needed?

o How is the activity conducted? (tool)

o Starting to think about 4^th part: When (- runtime behaviour etc.)

- LD will have big impact in next few years because it enables description of learning in a simple way.

- Simple example of LD: “What is Greatness?” (see slides)

o Discussion in whole class; review of content; small group discussion of specific questions reporting back to big group; prepare final report for marking.

o Showed live demo of course in LAMS. Discussion forum. Web pages with section at top with instructions for what to do. Simple way to give context that teacher wants to give. Chat tool; gives specific questions and posts results to whole class; motivates students stay “on task” as they often have difficulty with this when using chat. Report upload section. Monitoring environment- synchronous activities running together- helps teachers monitor this. New monitoring stuff since last time: Active sequences and Archived sequences available; Live- tells you how many learners are online; green dots on learning design screen show where learners are; click on them and get names; click on name and see what student is actually doing. Alternative view- students’ activities all in rows. This goes beyond LD spec, which doesn’t talk about monitoring much.

o Showed authoring environment. Authoring screen; tools (like typical VLE tools but with strong collaborative bent). Repository of activity sequences; private; departments and institutional levels. Opened up one activity; showed Greatness sequence from previous demo. Can modify it in two ways; can go in and change content or can change sequence. Showed example of changing the question for small group chat discussions. Could also change whole thing from “What is Greatness?” to “What is Jazz?” and change the content throughout. Changing the sequence: put content at the beginning then have discussion after.

o We thought LD spec is wonderful but at present teachers need to edit XML doc: so we wanted to create a user-friendly tool to give an idea.

o Then showed examples from LTScotland presentation. Ticket to Space example: Noticeboard intro; Small groups; Solar system resource; Offline activity intro; Pictures and discussion sharing. So can take this and roll it out whenever I want. Also could change it to suit my students/teaching style/whatever. Could then give it back to central repository at LTScotland to share it and experience with it good or bad. Versailles Experience example: (difficult because large and complex use case; first attempt to capture in LAMS; James did it this morning). Noticeboard intro to Versailles; split into country groupings; given country objectives; show country resources/search; country discussion; cross-school groups (all the different ‘Poland’s’); task: decide priorities for negotiations; discussion environment to talk about that; introduction to negotiating; recorder area for negotiations; then six parallel chatrooms for private negotiations, then post back to asynchronous negotiations; schools go back and reflect on what they learned, resources, etc. At present cannot quite do all of country grouping needs.

o Current state of IMS LD:

§ Feeding back to Valkenburg Group

§ LAMS v1.0 beta is now final and ready for use

o LAMS trials

§ Trial groups K-12 schools & Universities

§ Feedback positive: teachers & students like it. Ease of authoring- make pedagogy questions central. Learning a lot about difference between synchronous and asynchronous activities; synchronous activities are very engaging for students; students more willing to answer questions online than f2f; boys school in tough area in London secondary school, boys much more willing to answer online than in class- 85% not wanting to offline; 85% willing to online. Classroom facilitation experiences (coordinate vs. mentor); gone all the way to the heart of classroom teaching experience- why do it in classrooms if we are all there? While we did it online teacher went round and mentored as debate happened online- teacher was very moved by ability to go and give advice and mentor while the system does stuff they would normally have to do at front of class. This could be a major impact of the LD approach! We do not know how frequent that would be.

o Wizard demo

§ Some like to start from blank page in design tool, some don’t. So provide alternative way “Activity Sequence Wizard”; steps teachers through process. Starts from asking what teacher’s goal is “Are you trying to deconstruct a concept” then drills down through possible approaches. Suggests tools, gives examples, template sequences.

Questions:

JC: Can see the strength, but it looks more like teaching design than learning design. In HE there’s more than one route through and learner chooses. How to do it?

JD: Show examples; have only shown linear examples but we have done work with this, using Optional Activities. Students can choose which one and in what order they can do it. There is no need to set order. You may want some kind of structure but not linear, can do that. Transition can be between two sets of optional activities. This is not the same as very sophisticated learning scenarios; this is more about collaborative learning activities. And ability to transition.

RE: Very impressed. Instantiation of LD as a concept. Coding LD files?

JD: Quick answer; when we tried to implement LD spec with Greatness, couldn’t get all the things in use case to work with LD so had to add things. Been having discussion with LD spec authors about how to harmonise and add new features into the future. New spec, not many implementations; need to pool experiences to go forward. Authoring environment spits out an XML document to run in runtime engine. Need to align XML with LD spec. Different at nuance level rather than conceptual.

??: Looking at that; learning styles- can direct along lines of learning styles?

JD: Two ways; one to have branching within system. Didn’t implement in first version- because it meant you could break the system. Will be in later system. Two: Could put notice board in directing them to do different activities based on learning style. Not automatic. So they can choose if they don’t agree.

LB: Lurkers? How to deal?

JD: System steps them through process. System records whole experience; teacher can see that someone did nothing and take it from there.

LB: Accessibility?

JD: Flash; done a lot of work on accessibility. Web pages. Haven’t done a lot of accessibility testing yet. Authoring environment for teachers will be most challenging because it is so visual. Work with experts in future.

??: FE testing to start soon? Where?

JD: Client here in UK will roll out in both HE and FE. School environments like linear. HE like its sets of activities, less structured. Don’t know about FE yet.

Learning Creativity Profile Generator
(LCPG)

Prof Glenn Hardaker, University of Huddersfield

g.hardaker@hud.ac.uk

Glenn presented his latest work at Huddersfield, a tool aimed at capturing a wide amount of information about learners and their preferences.

See Slides.

The underlying design principles are based on empowering educational culture through directly supporting equity of pedagogy in our educational institutions. ICT design process in building the LCPG is intended to proactively facilitate inclusive educational environments and where appropriate challenge our formal thinking as learners but also as educators.

The LCPG operates both as a stand-alone piece of software and in conjunction with our Open Learning Environment Tool (OLET) in supporting life long learning. The aim of the software is to generate a rich profile for learners that will be used with our LMS software and/or by a mentor such as a tutor or trainer. The specific aims of the LCPG are directed at gaining depth of understanding of the individual on various levels concerning the learning and creativity interface. The LCPG is modular based focused on the following:

 The individuals general interests, attitudes and desires – by which the mentor may gain a better knowledge of the learners perspective.

 The pre-attitudes of the learner to formal learning – insight into barriers to education

 The individuals learning preferences and the implications for teaching - visual, audio, kinaesthetic, tactile learners.

 The individuals cognitive learning style, highlighting the preferred teaching style – considered in context of physically, emotional and mentally centred.

 The individuals subject specific creativity– explores creativity skills, motivation and relevant expertise.

The data collected may be used by the OLET to develop a learning path that will specifically accommodate the individuals’ requirements in terms of learning preferences, creative abilities and expertise levels. For a mentor the LCPG provides a comprehensive knowledge construct in directly a student-teacher relationship. Certain parts of the system are specifically designed for interpretation by such a person and will allow greater collaboration with the individual.

The general outcome for the learner is a report that provides key indicators and guidance in supporting their educational choices and directions. This report is built dynamically from the results of the learning and creativity diagnostics and matched to our extensive knowledge base. For example, a learner who indicates that they respond best to visual stimulus when learning may find a statement in their report that states something similar to the following:

“When learning you may find that you get the best results from watching a video, studying charts and images, and reading through written descriptions….”

To conclude, a brief outline is provided of our knowledge construction approach toward learning and creativity diagnostics and the underlying design principles in proactively supporting inclusive educational environments.

DfES e-learning strategy – Discussion

Participants split into groups to discuss the Department for Education and Skills (DfES)
‘Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy’ published on 9 July 2003.
The strategy is available for consultation until 30 January 2004.

The main website for the e-learning strategy is: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy

You can download a copy of the strategy and the consultation response form at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy/strategy.stm

Other participants attended a second demonstration by James Dalziel provided an update on the COLIS project, and the recent launch of the Macquarie E- learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) – a university research centre devoted to research, development, and implementation of e-learning architectures and infrastructure using open standards. This was followed by a general discussion of both presentations by James. James is also subscribed to the Pedagogy Forum Jiscmail list (details below) and agreed to continue the discussions about his work on the list.

General discussion and Forum issues

All participants reconvened for a general discussion. Feedback from the afternoon discussions re the DfES e-learning strategy highlighted the need for further opportunities to debate the issues which arose, such as the ‘downsides’ to e-learning and also the need for cohesion with other strategies within the UK. It was agreed that the discussions should continue and that the jiscmail list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cetis-pedagogy) should initially be used for this. The next Pedagogy Forum meeting will be held on Monday 20 October 2003 at Birkbeck College, Central London. Professor Diana Laurillard (Head, e-Learning Strategy Unit, DfES) will be present and the whole day will be devoted to group discussions and responses to the strategy. Further details and registration will be available soon.

With thanks to Sarah Currier for taking notes during the day.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Lisa Corley, the Pedagogy Forum Co-ordinator (Telephone: 01204 903851).

Pedagogy Forum


Contents Home & News Events Events Forum Details About the forum Contact or Join the Forum Resources Documents Frequently asked questions... Links		2ndMeetingNotes Pedagogy Forum Notes 25 July 2003 CETIS Pedagogy Forum 2^nd Meeting: Notes 25 July 2003, University of Huddersfield. · Introduction & welcome by Lisa Corley, Pedagogy Forum Co-ordinator · Apologies for late start due to technical problems. · Overview of Agenda – reordering of first two presentations, with Gerry & Fiona first, James second. This is because James Dalziel has managed to incorporate (this morning) the scenarios that Gerry & Fiona will be discussing, into the tool he will be demonstrating, so it would be more useful for him to present these after they have been described. Online Learning Scenarios and Learning Design Fiona Andrew f.andrew@ltscotland.com and Gerry Graham, g.graham@ltscotland.com Learning and Teaching Scotland Fiona and Gerry discussed Learning and Teaching Scotland's Online Events, a series of e-learning scenarios ran over the past few years for Primary and Secondary Schools. The events covered a number of topics, a Virtual Oil Spill, All About Rubbish and The Versailles Experience, which is included as a Use Case in the IMS Learning Design Specification. The most recent event, Ticket To Space, ran last year over an eight week period and is to be repeated again later this year. They discussed what impact they see the IMS Specification Learning Design having on future events, and they felt Learning Design (LD) is a key development for the sustainable future of events such as these. About LT Scotland Their remit covers all matters relating to the curriculum in the pre-school, primary and secondary education sectors in Scotland. LT Scotland is required to advise the Scottish Executive on any aspect of the learning experiences of children and young people up to the age of 18, and on any issue that may have an effect on those learning experiences. The remit also highlights the importance of the effective use of information and communications technology (ICT) in education and learning. This aspect of the remit is not restricted to young people. Rather, LT Scotland is charged with providing advice, guidance, products and services relating to the use of ICT in any area of education and lifelong learning. - Interested in interoperability across other sectors & rest of UK. FE & primary/secondary shared curriculum in Scotland too. - Interested in LD spec because it might support the work they do. - Susan Linklater (ex-LTScotland, now with British Council) was present & also knows a lot about cases used in the presentation - IMS uses use cases; show some of LTScotland use cases. Versailles (in LD spec already); Virtual Oil Spill; All About Rubbish; Ticket to Space (all online events for schools; schools throughout UK and worldwide took part. - All ran inside a VLE called Pioneer (see slide for details); implement IMS CP 1.1.2 in 2003. May implement IMS LD or wait for v.2.0. Want to show that what we do with elearning can also be done with other systems. - Fiona’s presentation: what we did and what teachers thought of them. o The Versailles Experience (done a while back, no case study/feedback available) § See slide. § Was difficult for secondary schools to timetable it in. o All About Rubbish (primary schools) § See slides. § Screen shots: Home Waste Audit § Case study slides (1 school used all 3 online events) o Virtual Oil Spill § See slides. § More of an interactive role play. Classes divided into a variety of roles. o Ticket to Space § See slides. § Popular event; running again this year. § More structured event than the others, not much scope for teachers to do their own thing. - Gerry’s presentation: Online events & IMS LD o See slides. o Want to do next: take one event and run it in different ways. Usually run it in such a way that schools have to be bound to LTScotland’s schedule, bound to their pedagogy. Using the same set of resources, but allow teachers to use different resources too if wanted. o So want a tool to run these things, maybe also end up with a library of them, so look to IMS specs for this. Questions: BO: Time to setup? FL: Resources took longest time. Time going out to support schools took the most time. But the actual time to put the content on wasn’t much time. GG: Developing the content took a long time. But some teachers felt the ones with less content more activities were better. Could also pick up content from others and build activities around it. Mark Stiles: Experts? Was that difficult; how did you do it? FL: Approached experts first, got them to log on; fitted in well with videoconferencing. Would have been nice to have them reply sooner. GG: Found with Ticket to Space, over 300 schools participated; how to moderate the discussion forums? Sometimes 20 people per schools; too much for one moderator. Could have “trigger points”; get another moderator when a certain number log in; run multiple instances simultaneously instead of all at once. Forums become learning object themselves that future teachers could use. GG: Could build up FAQs out of them. Susan? Susan: Was difficult to get experts. Ticket to Space almost ended up having an FAQ. But kids would’ve liked personal response from experts. GG: So: we want a tool! Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) demo James Dalziel, Adjunct Professor and Director, Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE), & Executive Director, WebMCQ Pty Ltd james@webmcq.com NB: No slides publicly available; summary slides were distributed to meeting participants. James has led the development of the “Learning Activity Management System” by WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an IMS Learning Design “inspired” approach to the sequencing of learning activities. James demonstrated the LAMS system from the perspectives of students, teacher monitors, and authoring, including discussion of recent ideas in the Learning Design community and the implications for future development. James also discussed early feedback from LAMS user groups within Australia and the UK, and the implications of these findings for the future of e-learning. In the afternoon, James provided an update on the COLIS project, and the recent launch of the Macquarie E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) – a university research centre devoted to research, development, and implementation of e-learning architectures and infrastructure using open standards. Tool and how the LTScotland scenarios mentioned fit in. Looking for solutions for reversing the trend of technology driving what happens in education. - See slides. - LAMS is LD-inspired, not a reference implementation. - LD uses play/act model to describe learning activities. - James uses 3 parts (can describe any kind of learning under this framework/LD framework): o Who is involved? o What content is needed? o How is the activity conducted? (tool) o Starting to think about 4^th part: When (- runtime behaviour etc.) - LD will have big impact in next few years because it enables description of learning in a simple way. - Simple example of LD: “What is Greatness?” (see slides) o Discussion in whole class; review of content; small group discussion of specific questions reporting back to big group; prepare final report for marking. o Showed live demo of course in LAMS. Discussion forum. Web pages with section at top with instructions for what to do. Simple way to give context that teacher wants to give. Chat tool; gives specific questions and posts results to whole class; motivates students stay “on task” as they often have difficulty with this when using chat. Report upload section. Monitoring environment- synchronous activities running together- helps teachers monitor this. New monitoring stuff since last time: Active sequences and Archived sequences available; Live- tells you how many learners are online; green dots on learning design screen show where learners are; click on them and get names; click on name and see what student is actually doing. Alternative view- students’ activities all in rows. This goes beyond LD spec, which doesn’t talk about monitoring much. o Showed authoring environment. Authoring screen; tools (like typical VLE tools but with strong collaborative bent). Repository of activity sequences; private; departments and institutional levels. Opened up one activity; showed Greatness sequence from previous demo. Can modify it in two ways; can go in and change content or can change sequence. Showed example of changing the question for small group chat discussions. Could also change whole thing from “What is Greatness?” to “What is Jazz?” and change the content throughout. Changing the sequence: put content at the beginning then have discussion after. o We thought LD spec is wonderful but at present teachers need to edit XML doc: so we wanted to create a user-friendly tool to give an idea. o Then showed examples from LTScotland presentation. Ticket to Space example: Noticeboard intro; Small groups; Solar system resource; Offline activity intro; Pictures and discussion sharing. So can take this and roll it out whenever I want. Also could change it to suit my students/teaching style/whatever. Could then give it back to central repository at LTScotland to share it and experience with it good or bad. Versailles Experience example: (difficult because large and complex use case; first attempt to capture in LAMS; James did it this morning). Noticeboard intro to Versailles; split into country groupings; given country objectives; show country resources/search; country discussion; cross-school groups (all the different ‘Poland’s’); task: decide priorities for negotiations; discussion environment to talk about that; introduction to negotiating; recorder area for negotiations; then six parallel chatrooms for private negotiations, then post back to asynchronous negotiations; schools go back and reflect on what they learned, resources, etc. At present cannot quite do all of country grouping needs. o Current state of IMS LD: § Feeding back to Valkenburg Group § LAMS v1.0 beta is now final and ready for use o LAMS trials § Trial groups K-12 schools & Universities § Feedback positive: teachers & students like it. Ease of authoring- make pedagogy questions central. Learning a lot about difference between synchronous and asynchronous activities; synchronous activities are very engaging for students; students more willing to answer questions online than f2f; boys school in tough area in London secondary school, boys much more willing to answer online than in class- 85% not wanting to offline; 85% willing to online. Classroom facilitation experiences (coordinate vs. mentor); gone all the way to the heart of classroom teaching experience- why do it in classrooms if we are all there? While we did it online teacher went round and mentored as debate happened online- teacher was very moved by ability to go and give advice and mentor while the system does stuff they would normally have to do at front of class. This could be a major impact of the LD approach! We do not know how frequent that would be. o Wizard demo § Some like to start from blank page in design tool, some don’t. So provide alternative way “Activity Sequence Wizard”; steps teachers through process. Starts from asking what teacher’s goal is “Are you trying to deconstruct a concept” then drills down through possible approaches. Suggests tools, gives examples, template sequences. Questions: JC: Can see the strength, but it looks more like teaching design than learning design. In HE there’s more than one route through and learner chooses. How to do it? JD: Show examples; have only shown linear examples but we have done work with this, using Optional Activities. Students can choose which one and in what order they can do it. There is no need to set order. You may want some kind of structure but not linear, can do that. Transition can be between two sets of optional activities. This is not the same as very sophisticated learning scenarios; this is more about collaborative learning activities. And ability to transition. RE: Very impressed. Instantiation of LD as a concept. Coding LD files? JD: Quick answer; when we tried to implement LD spec with Greatness, couldn’t get all the things in use case to work with LD so had to add things. Been having discussion with LD spec authors about how to harmonise and add new features into the future. New spec, not many implementations; need to pool experiences to go forward. Authoring environment spits out an XML document to run in runtime engine. Need to align XML with LD spec. Different at nuance level rather than conceptual. ??: Looking at that; learning styles- can direct along lines of learning styles? JD: Two ways; one to have branching within system. Didn’t implement in first version- because it meant you could break the system. Will be in later system. Two: Could put notice board in directing them to do different activities based on learning style. Not automatic. So they can choose if they don’t agree. LB: Lurkers? How to deal? JD: System steps them through process. System records whole experience; teacher can see that someone did nothing and take it from there. LB: Accessibility? JD: Flash; done a lot of work on accessibility. Web pages. Haven’t done a lot of accessibility testing yet. Authoring environment for teachers will be most challenging because it is so visual. Work with experts in future. ??: FE testing to start soon? Where? JD: Client here in UK will roll out in both HE and FE. School environments like linear. HE like its sets of activities, less structured. Don’t know about FE yet. Learning Creativity Profile Generator (LCPG) Prof Glenn Hardaker, University of Huddersfield g.hardaker@hud.ac.uk Glenn presented his latest work at Huddersfield, a tool aimed at capturing a wide amount of information about learners and their preferences. See Slides. The underlying design principles are based on empowering educational culture through directly supporting equity of pedagogy in our educational institutions. ICT design process in building the LCPG is intended to proactively facilitate inclusive educational environments and where appropriate challenge our formal thinking as learners but also as educators. The LCPG operates both as a stand-alone piece of software and in conjunction with our Open Learning Environment Tool (OLET) in supporting life long learning. The aim of the software is to generate a rich profile for learners that will be used with our LMS software and/or by a mentor such as a tutor or trainer. The specific aims of the LCPG are directed at gaining depth of understanding of the individual on various levels concerning the learning and creativity interface. The LCPG is modular based focused on the following:  The individuals general interests, attitudes and desires – by which the mentor may gain a better knowledge of the learners perspective.  The pre-attitudes of the learner to formal learning – insight into barriers to education  The individuals learning preferences and the implications for teaching - visual, audio, kinaesthetic, tactile learners.  The individuals cognitive learning style, highlighting the preferred teaching style – considered in context of physically, emotional and mentally centred.  The individuals subject specific creativity– explores creativity skills, motivation and relevant expertise. The data collected may be used by the OLET to develop a learning path that will specifically accommodate the individuals’ requirements in terms of learning preferences, creative abilities and expertise levels. For a mentor the LCPG provides a comprehensive knowledge construct in directly a student-teacher relationship. Certain parts of the system are specifically designed for interpretation by such a person and will allow greater collaboration with the individual. The general outcome for the learner is a report that provides key indicators and guidance in supporting their educational choices and directions. This report is built dynamically from the results of the learning and creativity diagnostics and matched to our extensive knowledge base. For example, a learner who indicates that they respond best to visual stimulus when learning may find a statement in their report that states something similar to the following: “When learning you may find that you get the best results from watching a video, studying charts and images, and reading through written descriptions….” To conclude, a brief outline is provided of our knowledge construction approach toward learning and creativity diagnostics and the underlying design principles in proactively supporting inclusive educational environments. DfES e-learning strategy – Discussion Participants split into groups to discuss the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) ‘Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy’ published on 9 July 2003. The strategy is available for consultation until 30 January 2004. The main website for the e-learning strategy is: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy You can download a copy of the strategy and the consultation response form at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/elearningstrategy/strategy.stm Other participants attended a second demonstration by James Dalziel provided an update on the COLIS project, and the recent launch of the Macquarie E- learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) – a university research centre devoted to research, development, and implementation of e-learning architectures and infrastructure using open standards. This was followed by a general discussion of both presentations by James. James is also subscribed to the Pedagogy Forum Jiscmail list (details below) and agreed to continue the discussions about his work on the list. General discussion and Forum issues All participants reconvened for a general discussion. Feedback from the afternoon discussions re the DfES e-learning strategy highlighted the need for further opportunities to debate the issues which arose, such as the ‘downsides’ to e-learning and also the need for cohesion with other strategies within the UK. It was agreed that the discussions should continue and that the jiscmail list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cetis-pedagogy) should initially be used for this. The next Pedagogy Forum meeting will be held on Monday 20 October 2003 at Birkbeck College, Central London. Professor Diana Laurillard (Head, e-Learning Strategy Unit, DfES) will be present and the whole day will be devoted to group discussions and responses to the strategy. Further details and registration will be available soon. With thanks to Sarah Currier for taking notes during the day. If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Lisa Corley, the Pedagogy Forum Co-ordinator (Telephone: 01204 903851).