See also: Archives
The following contains some early results from the evaluation of Webfuse course sites as mentioned in the last post. The aim is to get a rough initial feel for how the course sites created for Webfuse in the late 90s and early 00s stack up using the framework produced by Malikowski et al (2007). As opposed to other PhD work, this is a case of "showing the working"....more...
For the last couple of weeks I've been working on chapter 4 of my thesis. I've worked my way through explaining the context (general context and (use of e-learning), the design guidelines and the implementation (parts 1, 2 and 3). I've now reached the evaluation section, where I'm meant to describe what happened with the use of Webfuse and make some judgement calls about how it went....more...
One of my continuing "rants" that long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with is the lack of fit between enterprise systems and what people want to do with them. I've blogged about this with enterprise systems, learned to live and thrive in spite of that gap and drawn some lessons from it for enterprise systems....more...
The last post finalised some bits of knowledge I needed, now it is time to put it into action and complete the eStudyGuide block to a barely useful level....more...
The last post in this series described the start of a little project to learn more about PHP/Moodle programming in order to get BAM into Moodle. Essentially everything is done, there are two main tasks left:...more...
The following is the last of, what is now, a three part series of blog posts outlining the design and implementation of the Webfuse system. These are part of chapter four of my thesis. The previous two parts are here and here....more...
This post continues the description of the design and implementation of Webfuse started with this post....more...
This continues the collection of content that goes into Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis. Chapter 4 is meant to tell the story of the first iteration of Webfuse from 1996 through 1999. The last section I posted describes the design guidelines that informed the implementation of Webfuse. This post and at least one following post seeks to describe the details of the design and implementation of Webfuse....more...
The last post provided an overview of what is required to put BAM into Moodle and generated a list of things I have to learn in order to implement it....more...
The previous post in this series started me along the lines of actually coding something in Moodle. It was only a pretend thing but indicated that blocks are fairly simple to implement. That previous post also pondered about the need to do some planning. Which brings me to the two main tasks for today...more...
The previous couple of posts (one and two) described the context in which the Webfuse e-learning system was designed. This focused primarily on the context at CQU up to 1996 or so. These posts form the definition of the problem which Webfuse was meant to address....more...
The following is the next completed (to a rough first draft stage) section of chapter 4 of my thesis. It follows on from a post from yesterday that started defining the problem being faced. This section completes the definition of this problem by giving a broad summary of the use of "e-learning" at CQU up until 1996....more...
Last week's update reported on a bit of a brick wall that had been struck. Thankfully, the strategies outlined in that update and feedback from the esteemed supervisor has well and truly destroyed said brick wall and progress is steaming ahead with a renewed sense of vigour and perhaps just the vaguest glimmers of light at the end of a long, long tunnel....more...
In the last PhD update I outlined a change to tack. I've moved from working on chapter 2 (the lit review) to working on chapter 4. Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters, each describing one iteration of the 2 action research cycles that make up the core contribution of the thesis. Chapter 4 focuses on the period from 1996 through to 1999 and is titled "Build it and they will come"....more...
I continue to have a high level of skepticism around the concept of universities investing in ePortfolios. I feel that it is another example of how people within universities tend to over-emphasize their importance in the scheme of things, extend the university role into areas it where it should never have been and subsequently waste resources and more importantly the time and energy of academic staff that would be better spent focusing on other aspects of improving learning and teaching. In particular, I see ePortfolios being another approach that is being over-run by the technologists alliance....more...
Increasingly, the IT requirements of organisations are being met through the application of "enterprise systems". Large systems created by commercial vendors (though increasingly there are also open source variants, which while offering small improvements still suffer some of the same problems) that are meant to provide an integrated solution to a large scale system with an appraoch that combines "best practice" processes and techniques with information technology that will "scale" to meet the requirements of the organisation. Examples including ERP systems like Peoplesoft for finance, human resources and, at universities, student enrolment. In terms of e-learning at Universities the current dominant approach is also to employ "enterprise systems". With e-learning the "enterprise system" is known as the learning management system (lms), course management system (cms), virtual learning environment (vle) or some other 3 letter acronym. Examples include: Blackboard, Moodle and Sakai....more...
Up to Unit 7 of the introduction to Moodle programming course, this one is titled "Replicating a moodle block". So the programming begins....more...
In the previous step I got to know a bit more about the Moodle code base, libraries and idioms. Even got to modify a bit of code - nothing much more complex than hello world. Time to continue that journey....more...
As part of my new position/ I'm meant to identify opportunities, trends etc around learning and teaching and inform the local institutional community of them. The following is the first of those reports. I've attempted to keep the explanation as short as possible as I'm uncertain the type of folk I'm writing this for are likely to read long essays....more...
Okay, so Moodle is installed, configured and working. The next step, I believe, will be playing a bit with Moodle development and trying to get my head around how it works, what the abstractions are and anything else I need to know in order to actually start the design and development of "Moodle BAM"....more...
It's Tuesday, so must be time to take the next step in getting BAM into Moodle. Last time I got up to having Moodle checked out from CVS and PHP/Apache and MySQL all working nicely together....more...
It's been a fortnight since the last PhD update due to last weekend's personal, celebratory trip to Adelaide. The time away was useful and has resulted in an insight that's going to change focus for a bit....more...
After a bit of an absence, time to get back to the thesis. The following continues the recent work on the People component of the Ps Framework. So far, I've done students and teaching/academic staff. This post looks at leaders and managers (badly). I'm working on a section or two on technical and instructional design staff....more...
Currently reading Winefield et al (2003) as part of writing my thesis, thought I'd share some of the points and reflections here....more...
I'm currently working on the "Leaders and managers" part of the People component of the Ps Framework for my thesis. As part of the reading for that section I came across the following quote. It turns out I won't use it directly in the thesis and I need to save it for future work/reference. I'm also taking the opportunity to track down and record a bit more information about it....more...
Having received approval to port BAM into Moodle, the first step is to get a Moodle development environment installed on my laptop. I'm meant to be getting a new one this week, however, local IT hasn't been forthcoming in when this is going to be available. Can't wait, I only have two days a week to work on this, and today is the last one this week....more...
Received formal institutional approval yesterday to commence the process of porting BAM into Moodle. This has two implications that spring to mind:...more...
Over the last few days I've finished reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely a professor at Duke University in behavioural economics. What follows is a bit of a summary. In short, I enjoyed it and it's reinforced an interest in questioning some of the assumptions that seem to underpin the current practice of L&T at Universities....more...
BAM (blog aggregation management) is a tool used by a number of CQU courses. It's mainly used to help staff observe and mark individual student reflective journals. The journals are hosted on freely available blogs that the students set up and then register with BAM. Normally, we advise students to use Wordpress.com for their blog, but there's now a small problem. Any suggestions?...more...
Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) is a little project of mine that's been going since 2006. It's an example of, what I think, is a more appropriate product model for e-learning systems - essentially small pieces loosely joined/best of breed/PLE. Currently BAM is based on the infrastructure provided by Webfuse, another project of mine (which embodies and enables the better product model)....more...
The following is the next part of the People section for chapter 2 of my thesis. The People section was started a week ago with this post. This one takes up the task of saying something about academic staff, subsequent and soon to be completed sections will look at management, academic staff developers and technology staff....more...
As mentioned a fortnight ago I've had much of the last two weeks doing non-PhD stuff including a road trip to Longreach. So this update is somewhat light on....more...
The following is an attempt to reflect upon an EDUCAUSE Review article by Bryan Alexander entitled "Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality". I'm doing this because I believe the topic, at least at first glance, has connections with the new role/ I'm meant to fulfill at my current institution....more...