Innovative learning in action (ILIA) issue three: Employability, enterprise & entrepreneurship

The theme of the 3rd issue of ILIA is Employability, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, reflecting the University of Salford’s Learning and Teaching Strategy and our Goal “To produce graduates with the skills, creativity, confidence and adaptability to succeed in the labour market and make a meaningful contribution to society”. The creativity, problem solving and change orientation this implies recognizes Salford’s distinctive strengths in this regard, and provides us with a conceptualization of employability which embraces enterprise and entrepreneurship, manifest in the form of selfemployment, but equally relevant to those working within organizations i.e. to intrapreneurship. The contributions to this edition provide us with examples of excellent practice demonstrating how practitioners at Salford have responded to the challenge of providing a quality learning experience for our students. Consideration of the papers and snapshots reveal how colleagues have embedded employability into teaching and learning and assessment strategies, and into frameworks of student support, in differing and innovative ways, across the institution. As this edition of ILIA goes to print work is underway to develop an Employability Policy and Strategy for the University. Designed to provide a coherent and progressive approach to Employability, Enterprise and Careers Education and Guidance, this Strategy will be able to build on the good practice evident both in this edition of ILIA and across the institution. ILIA therefore has once again provided us with a range of perspectives on a key area of curriculum design and development. It also has provided an opportunity to reflect on practice and student learning, to share experience and hopefully to identify future areas for collaboration

Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

Exploring a Diverse Teams Approach to Inclusive Leadership Program Design: An Action Research Study

This study explored how a diverse team influences the action research process and what team dynamics emerged when employing the stages of action research when tasked to develop an academic program aimed at inclusive leadership Tuckman s 1965 stages of group development and an action research design conceptually frame this study The researchers use a mixed methodology utilizing quantitative data from the Intercultural Development Inventory IDI to assess the team s level of intercultural sensitivity along with qualitative observations and interviews to determine if the team s diverse composition contributed to the academic development process The results of the study showed team dynamics a safe work environment and intentionality had the greatest influence on the team s success in academic program development Findings of this study can be used to inform faculty administrators and facilitators on the utility of action research methods when collaboratively developing academic programs and other pertinent initiatives that comprise individuals from diverse background

Exploring a Diverse Teams Approach to Inclusive Leadership Program Design: An Action Research Study

This study explored how a diverse team influences the action research process and what team dynamics emerged when employing the stages of action research when tasked to develop an academic program aimed at inclusive leadership Tuckman s 1965 stages of group development and an action research design conceptually frame this study The researchers use a mixed methodology utilizing quantitative data from the Intercultural Development Inventory IDI to assess the team s level of intercultural sensitivity along with qualitative observations and interviews to determine if the team s diverse composition contributed to the academic development process The results of the study showed team dynamics a safe work environment and intentionality had the greatest influence on the team s success in academic program development Findings of this study can be used to inform faculty administrators and facilitators on the utility of action research methods when collaboratively developing academic programs and other pertinent initiatives that comprise individuals from diverse background

An evaluation of identity in online social networking: distinguishing fact from fiction

Online social networks are understood to replicate the real life connections between people. As the technology matures, more people are joining social networking communities such as MySpace (www.myspace.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). These online communities provide the opportunity for individuals to present themselves and maintain social interactions through their profiles. Such traces in profiles can be used as evidence in deciding the level of trust with which to imbue individuals in making access control decisions. However, online profiles have serious implications over the reality of identity disclosure. There are many reasons why someone may choose not to reveal their true self, which sometimes leads to misidentification or deception. On one hand, the structure of online profiles allows anonymity, which gives users the opportunity to create a persona that may not represent their true identity. On the other hand, we often play multiple identities in different contexts where such behaviour is acceptable. However, realizing the context for each identity representation depends on the individual. As a result, some represented identities will be essentially real, if edited for public view, some will be disguised, and others will be fictitious or humorous. The millions of social network profiles, and billions of connections between them, make it difficult to formalize an automated approach to differentiate fact from fiction in online self-described identities. How can we be sure with whom we are interacting, and whether these individuals or groups are being truthful with the online identities they present to the rest of the community? What tools and techniques can be used to gather, organize, and explore the available data for informing the level of honesty that should be entrusted to an individual? Can we verify the validity of the identity automatically, based on the available information online? We aim to evaluate identity representation online and examine how identity can be verified in a less trusted online community. We propose a personality classifier model to identify a user‟s personality (such as expressive, valid, active, positive, popular, sociable and traceable) using traces of 2.2 million profile features collected from MySpace. We use data mining techniques and social network analysis to extract significant patterns in the data and network structure, and improve the classifier during the cycle of development. We evaluate our classifier model on profiles with known identities such as „real‟ and „fake‟. Our results indicate that by utilizing people‟s online, self-reported information, personality, and their network of friends and interactions, we are able to provide evidence for validating the type of identity in a manner that is both accurate and scalable

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated