Web-based writing support: making it useable for distance teachers

This paper considers the issues that distance teachers in higher education who are not writing specialists face in supporting their students’ academic writing development. We discuss the usefulness of open web-based writing support resources, and propose the need for a system that serves as an interface with these resources. Such a system should help teachers to make quick selections of materials that can be offered to students to address specific problems in the students’ assignments. We consider principles for the design of such a system, based on the experience of building and testing a small prototype for tutors on an Open University Masters in Education course

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

Learning from the learners' experience: e-Learning@greenwich post-conference reflections

This publication comprises papers from presenters who, having made a conference presentation, were invited to author an academic paper about their work

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

Designing Museums for Participation, Collaboration and Social Interaction

This thesis documents the design and development of novel interactive experiences that explored concepts aimed to enhance the visitor experience to Cork Butter Museum, Cork, Ireland. The context to the work is that in recent years, museums and cultural institutions are increasingly motivated to apply creative strategies to engage visitors who come for recreational, social and sometimes educative purposes. Novel museum exhibits designed to cater for such needs often involves the integration of new media technologies in response to rising expectations visitors have with regards to being actively engaged during their visit. This often requires a higher level of participation than reading text or looking at artefacts from a controlled distance. Researchers have explored transforming the visitor experience through a wide range of projects in the fields of embodied interaction and experience design, which might be regarded as emerging subfields of research practice in HCI. Recent approaches to the design of public exhibition spaces have often made use of widely available input/output sensing technologies which support alternative strategies for the creation of novel interfaces and delivery of dynamic content. In light of such developments, the aim of this work was to explore the design of engaging experiences that would facilitate participation, collaboration and social interaction in a museum through the creation of technologically augmented artefacts. From the outset, a principle of the research was to ensure that any interventions were sensitive to and respected the natural aesthetic of the museum environment. Aims and objectives that were suitable for the research were first identified through design research, out of which a set of design principles that were specific to the museum emerged.Authentic artefacts which were suitable for the creation of novel experiences were identified and transformed over the course of an iterative design and development cycle. They were then brought into the museum for a case study, and their effects were analysed and discussed. The process, methods, and findings that were uncovered over the course of the research will be described in the thesis

Revolutionary and evolutionary technology design processes in location-based interactions

Development and deployment of location based systems is a key consideration in the design of new mobile technologies. Critical to the design process is to understand and manage the expectations of stakeholders (including funders, research partners and end users) for these systems. In particular, the way in which expectations impact upon technology development choices between small-scale, 'high tech' innovations or larger scalable solutions. This paper describes the differences in a revolutionary design process (for 'high tech' prototypes or catwalk technologies) versus an evolutionary design process (for scalable or prêt-à-porter systems), as exemplified in two location-based mobile interaction case studies. One case study exemplifies a revolutionary design process and resultant system, and the other an evolutionary design process and system. The use of these case studies is a clear natural progression from the paper that first described the concept of 'catwalk technologies' (Adams et al, 2013), which itself drew upon research that used mobile devices for outdoor 'in the wild' locations. This paper presents a set list of fifteen heuristic guidelines based upon an analysis of these case studies. These heuristics present characteristics and key differences between the two types of design process. This paper provides a key reference point for researchers, developers and the academic community as a whole, when defining a project rationale for designing and developing technical systems. In addition, we refer to the role of the researcher/research team in terms of guiding and managing stakeholder and research team expectations and how this relates to the planning and deployment of catwalk or prêt-à-porter technologies. Lastly, we state how this research has vital implications for planning and enacting interventions and sequences of interactions with stakeholders and, crucially, in the planning of future research projects