The following is an attempt to expand upon a mention in the last post about exploring one set of thoughts about why/how we might extend/reuse/build upon some prior research using TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) and its application to understanding the use (or not) of Online Assignment Submission and Management (OASM) in higher education....more...
The following is a collection of presentation resources (i.e. the slides) for an ASCILITE'2012 of this paper. The paper and presentation are a summary of the outcomes my PhD work. The thesis goes into much more detail....more...
I've spent the last week dealing with a range of institutional systems for the submission and processing of assignments, results etc. I'm likely to spend at least another week or two trudging through the inexplicable holes, dead-ends, and busy work such systems create. Hence the need for a break. While walking through the local "Japanese Gardens" back to the office I stumbled across a possible explanation. Or at least a catchy phrase to represent that explanation and provide an opportunity to revisit and share some recent reading....more...
The following arises from some recent experiences with the idea of "minimum course sites" and this observation from @cogdog in this blog post...more...
Note: An update to this post included at the end....more...
So the last of three sections examining the limitations of industrial e-learning and suggesting an alternative. Time to write the conclusion, read the paper over again and cut it down to size....more...
The last couple of posts have attempted to (in the confines of an #ascilite12 paper) summarise some constraints with the dominant product and process models used in industrial e-learning and suggest an alternative. The following - which probably should have been posted first - describes how and where this alternative comes from....more...
And here's the followup to the well received "LMS Product" post. This is the second section looking at the limitations of how industrial e-learning is implemented, this time focusing on the process used. Not really happy with this one, space limitations are making it difficult to do a good job of description....more...
What follows is the first draft of the "Product" section for an ASCILITE paper (the overview for the paper) I hope to finish by tomorrow......just a bit of wishful thinking. Much of it has appeared in this blog previously, just now trying to wrangle it into a formal publication and all the limitations (e.g. space) that brings with it....more...
The following is an attempt to formulate and structure some ideas for a paper for ascilite'12 in Wellington. The aim is to convert my PhD thesis - especially "The information systems design theory for emergent university e-learning" - into something useful and interesting for the ascilite crowd. The following is an attempt to organise the mish-mash of content I currently have into something sensible....more...
Just after 9:30pm last Wednesday I read an email from the Dean and Director of the ANU College of Business and Economics congratulating me on the fact that my thesis had been accepted without revision by the examiners and the institution. Needless to say that it was good news....more...
Apparently, it is too complex to create a personalised class timetable for students at the institution I'm attending. I have previously described what I (as a student) have to currently do to create my class timetable as well as explaining that I helped implement a personalised class timetable system at the same institution about 10 years ago....more...
Today a mate posted to his blog about a small project he's involved with. The context of this project seems to be a good opportunity to comment on the potential flexibility of open source LMS and the limits of that flexibility within an institutional context. It's also an attempt to link it back to the design theory described in my thesis (if you want more of the theory behind the following, look at the thesis)....more...
I've just finished the Douglas Rushkoff book Program or be Programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. As the title suggests the author provides ten "commands" for living well with digital technologies. This post arises from the titular and last command examined in the book, Program or be programmed....more...
The following is yet another sign that the thesis is finally getting close to submission. The following is the second version of an abstract of the thesis. There have been some changes, feedback always welcome....more...
A few recent posts have been first draft excerpts from my Information Systems Design Theory (ISDT) from emergent university e-learning systems. Being academics and hence somewhat pedantic about these things there are meant to be a number of specific components of an ISDT. One of these is the expository instantiation that is meant to act as both an explanatory device and a platform for testing (Gregor and Jones, 2007) i.e. it's meant to help explain the theory and also examples of testing the theory....more...
The following is a first version of the justificatory knowledge section of my ISDT for emergent university e-learning systems. Still fairly uncertain just how information is meant to go in here and also just how far I should go with the reference to other theories (there are lots) and how much time should be spent looking at the interactions between them....more...
The aim of my thesis is to formulate an information systems design theory for e-learning. Even though I have a publication or two that have described early versions of the ISDT, I've never been really happy with them. However, I'm getting close to the end of this process, at least for the purposes of getting the thesis submitted....more...
For the last week or so I've been attempting to bring together the principles that underpin the design theory for e-learning that will be the main contribution of my thesis. This post summarises one of the principles of form and function that is emerging from the last week or so. I using this blog post to escape the confines of PhD-ese and see if writing about it can generate some further refinement....more...
I'm in the midst of the horrible task of trying to abstract what I think I know about implementing e-learning information systems within universities into the formal "language" required of an information systems design theory and a PhD thesis. This post is a welcome break from that, but is still connected in that it builds on what is perhaps fundamentally different between what most universities are currently doing, and what I think is a more effective approach. In particular, it highlights some more recent developments which are arguably a step towards what I'm thinking....more...
The following is an early draft of the "lessons learned" section of chapter 5 of the thesis, the third last section that needs to be completed (to first draft stage). It still needs some work and completing the last two sections will probably lead to some changes, but it's a start....more...
It seems like I'm in the downhill stretch with the thesis. Almost all the new material has been written, am just waiting on some feedback from my esteemed supervisor before completing the last new section (it follows the same structure as a previous section, hence the importance of feedback). So, while I'm waiting on that feedback, I'm starting the revision of the draft chapters. The following is a re-working of the first main section of chapter 1 and provides the background to the research....more...
Over on the Remote Learner blog, Jason Cole has posted some information about a keynote by Dr Richard Clark at one of the US MoodleMoots. I want to focus on one key quote from that talk and its implications for Australian higher education and current trends to "improve" learning and teaching and adopt open source LMS (like Moodle)....more...
The following is a "formalisation" of a previous post. This is the version that forms the first draft of a section in the thesis....more...
Have spent the last day or so doing some more data munging of access logs trying to determine the level of usage of Wf applications within Webfuse. Wf was the framework for developing dynamic web applications within Webfuse - the topic/outcome of my PhD. The following is an initial summary of that munging with some initial reflection. This will get further polished and re-worked for inclusion in chapter 5 of the thesis....more...
As part of the PhD I have to summarise aspects of Webfuse usage, the following is a quick attempt to summarise usage of the Webfuse course sites from 1997 through 2009. The main aim is to show what I've got so far, think about what needs to be added, generate a to do list, and make an initial stab at explaining some of the movements. The hope is that writing this is essentially a rough draft/scribble of material that will end up in the thesis....more...
Time to get back into the thesis. The following is the next completed section from the evaluation part of chapter 5 of my thesis. A result of much data munging and some writing, still needs a bit more reflection and thought, but getting close....more...
I'm currently trying to formalise the information systems design theory for e-learning that is meant to be the contribution of my thesis. i.e. what is the model, set of principles etc that I think is important....more...
The following presents details of feature adoption by courses using the Webfuse system from 1997 through 2009. It presents the data generated by the work described in the last post....more...
I'm in the throws of finalising the second last bit of data analysis for the thesis. For this I'm trying to examine the level of feature adoption within courses supported by the Webfuse system (the main product for the the thesis). The following describes an attempt to formalise the process for this evaluation....more...
The following is the next part of the evaluation section of chapter 5 of my thesis. It seeks to evaluate how well the Webfuse system fulfilled the guideline of "an integrated online learning environment" for the period 2000-2004. This is only the first section which talks about the provision of course sites. Subsequent sections will talk about feature adoption, staff and student usage of course sites, and staff and student usage of Wf applications....more...
This is the second version of an earlier post. As I wrote more of the chapter I felt the need to revisit and expand the idea (though the following is still at a rough draft stage). The following describes the rationale and implementation behind the implementation of the default course sites approach within Webfuse. This approach was used at CQU from 2001 through 2009. It has similarities with what Mark Smithers calls a minimium online presence policy (MOPP), though (I think) my take on the value of MOPP differs a little from Mark's. Not surprising given the following....more...
This is the second post containing a part of the evaluation section of chapter 5 of my PhD thesis. It looks at how much/well Webfuse acted as a web publishing tool during 2000-2004. There's not much here, as this is not the focus....more...
This is one part of the Evaluation section of Chapter 5 of my PhD thesis. It's actually the fourth section, but it's the first to have reached a rough first draft stage. The basic aim is to show how the Webfuse interventions from 2000 through 2004 (and beyond) increased the flexibility and diversity of the system....more...
In the last post I outlined some early rough usage figures for Webfuse from 2000-2009. The following goes into a bit more detail with the usage of the wf applications....more...
In terms of the thesis, my current focus is on chapter 5. This chapter seeks to describe what we did from 2000 through 2004 and beyond. I'm currently working on the evaluation section, a major component of the evaluation is looking at the usage statistics of Webfuse during this period. It's slow going and there is still a fair bit of analysis to go, but some initial figures are available....more...
Last week I was thinking that academics shouldn't manually create course sites. That arose out of the process of writing up the why/what behind what we did with Webfuse from 1999 through 2004. Today, I've been continuing that and looking at the usage statistics from that period....more...
The following is a first draft of the next section of chapter 5 of my thesis. The aim here is to try and illustrate how the combination of the agile and adopted-focused development process of Webfuse, when combined with the design of Webfuse enabled the rapid development of "workarounds" that enabled the system to adapt to changes in the environment and requirements of the systems users....more...
Stephen Downes makes a valid point about my recent question about whether or not academics should manually create websites. I agree with his underlying point that academics should not be forced to use the institutional approach. Given any option I would not suggest such an approach....more...
(There is a response/attempted clarification to comments on the following by Stephen Downes in another post)...more...
There is now a version 2.0 of this section....more...
Over the last couple of days I've enjoyed a small discussion that has arisen out of some comments Kevin has made on my blog. This post is an attempt to partially engage with the most recent comment. I echo Kevin's conclusion, I'd love to hear anyone else's take on this....more...
Yet another section from Chapter 5 of the thesis describing the various changes made to Webfuse in the period from 2000 onwards. This one (very briefly) describes the Webfuse framework for dynamic web applications....more...
The following is the third in a sequence of sections from chapter 5 of my thesis. These sections are describing the changes made in the development and support of Webfuse from 2000 through 2004 (and a bit beyond). This post very briefly describes the adoption a design patterns influenced, OO design....more...
The following is the second of the sections from my thesis that describe the various changes made to Webfuse and how it was implemented during the years 2000-2004 (and a bit beyond). It's a rough first draft. The first section describes how the Webfuse development process came to be very focused on the potential adopters of Webfuse. This section describes why and how the Webfuse development process became more emergent/agile....more...
The following is a first draft of the next section in Chapter 5 of the thesis. It's the first section which starts describing the various different changes that were made to Webfuse and how it was supported from 2000 and on. IMHO, this particular change is something that continues to be missing from almost all university attempts to support e-learning. If not missing, they simply haven't recognised the need for greater levels of skills. It is particularly sad that my current institution, the institution at which these changes/lesson were first implemented and written about 10+years ago, still hasn't learnt the lesson - or perhaps the lesson just isn't important enough....more...
One of the themes for this blog is that the majority of current approaches to improving learning and teaching within universities simply don't work. At least not in terms of enabling improvement in a majority of the learning and teaching at an institution. Recently I finally completed reading the last bits of the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. Chapter 18 is titled "The Real Third Way". This post explores how that metaphor connects with some of the thinking expressed here....more...
This carries on "bits" from chapter 5 of the thesis. It's a rough draft of a description of the institutional context within CQU from 2000 onwards. It's brief and targeted mainly at the factors which impact on Webfuse development....more...
Back working on the thesis. The following is a rough draft of the introduction and part of the first section from Chapter 5 of the thesis. This chapter is starting to tell the story of Webfuse from 2000 to 2004 and beyond....more...
A couple of days ago I wrote the last few sentences for a fairly serious first draft of chapter 4 of the thesis. This chapter has to be re-read by me, read by my esteemed supervisor and then by a copy editor, so it's not finished yet. But it's a step closer....more...
During the last week I have been in Canberra for various events, including giving a presentation on BIM at University of Canberra. Somewhat surprisingly (as last I knew, he was in New Zealand), Leigh Blackall was in "audience" at the presentation, and as is Leigh's wont, he asked some serious questions. I was troubled by those questions and needed time to reflect on what an answer might be....more...
I should be writing other things, but there's a wave amongst some of the "innovation bloggers" at the moment that I wanted to ride for the purposes of - once again - trying to get those driving university e-learning (and learning and teaching more generally) to realise they have something fundamentally wrong. They are using the wrong type of process....more...
Antonio Vantaggiato gives one response to a post from Donald Clark titled "Moodle: e-learning's frankenstein". Clark's post is getting a bit of traction because it is being seen as a negative critique of Moodle....more...
I think that the quality of most university learning and teaching is somewhat less than it could be. There are some really good examples and really engaged teaching academics. However, they are in the minority. This problem is made worse when the context of a particular university is extremely complex. For example, a number of Australian public universities, in response to reductions in government funding, have developed a collection of partnerships with commercial and overseas organisations to offer their courses in various modes. Some of these universities also have traditional on-campus students as well as distance education student spread throughout the globe....more...
Since about 1996 much of my research and development around e-learning has found "concrete" form in a system call Webfuse. First described in Jones and Buchanan (1996) Webfuse became an essential part of CQU's operations. The unkindest (and basically wrong) description of Webfuse is that it was a proprietary, single institution learning management system....more...
Last year I gave a a couple of presentations titled "Alternatives for the institutional implementation of e-learning". In those presentations I essentially argued that what passes for current practice of e-learning in universities - what I now call "industrial e-learning" - suffers from a significant mismatch which, I believe, contributes to most of its limitations. My argument is that the nature of the product (the LMS) and the process (teleological) adopted in industrial e-learning to be completely unsuited to the nature of the people involved in e-learning, the nature of learning and teaching and the nature of universities and the context in which they operate....more...
I've been back working at the PhD thesis, hopefully down to months before submission. At this stage, I need to work on the 2 chapters that are reflecting on the usage of Webfuse during two periods: 1996 through 1999 and 1999 through 2004 (and a bit later). In doing some, the main tasks I need to achieve are:...more...
Over the last week I've posted a bit around papers and ideas about how you evaluate the use of a learning management system (LMS). This post is intended to summarise findings from an initial evaluation of the use of features in the Webfuse system from 1997 through 2009. Webfuse is the system I designed as part of my PhD and has been used at Central Queensland University since 1997. At least the "LMS" part of Webfuse will cease being used in 2010....more...
In a recent post I messily wrote about the start of the process of evaluating the use of Webfuse for my thesis. This post takes the ideas/process from that post and applies it to the course websites produced by Webfuse from 2006 through 2007. The data in here is in a similar time frame to the work being done by Col and Ken on their indicators project....more...
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...
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 initial design and use of the Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) system was, in part, designed to try out approaches that leverage the protean nature of information technology. A major part of this is a move to something different, and hopefully better, than the current, broken e-learning orthodoxy within universities that is stuck on the idea of course management systems (CMS - aka learning management systems) as the only possible solution....more...
On Friday the 20th of Feb I gave a talk at the ANU on my PhD. A previous post has some background and an overview of the presentation....more...
This is a submission to a conference later in the year. The conference has its own specific requirements for submissions, hence the structure of this post. In some cases I've left in quotes or italics the directions given by the conference as to the content of the submission. It's still a work in progress. Submission is not due for a few days. More than keen to hear suggestions and criticisms....more...
The video from NASA referenced in a post from yesterday illustrates many of the difficulties in attempting to be innovative within any largish type of organisation....more...
In a post yesterday I talked about how most applications of e-learning within universities seems to actively prevent students and staff leveraging the protean nature of information technology. That is the nature of computer software to be flexible, malleable and customisable....more...
A part of my thinking around the Ps Framework I suggest that there are a number of dominant assumptions that underpin the current implementation of e-learning within institutions of higher education. I believe these dominant assumptions limit the quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovativness of e-learning at Universities. In this post I am trying to identify one of the dominant assumptions associated with the "Product" component of the Ps Framework and its implications....more...
As part of working on my thesis I'm working on chapter 2. As the traditional literature review one purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate what I know about the topic and to highlight what I think are the flaws or holes in current research and practice that I believe my research will address. The following builds on some initial ideas from a previous blog post and serves as some practice in formulating my ideas. So it will still be rough. Feel free to suggest improvements, point out problems and disagree....more...
Online assignment submission is one of the more used features of Webfuse and is explained in part in a few publications....more...
As part of my PhD thesis I'll be generating some statistics about the usage of the Webfuse e-learning system that has been in use at CQU since 1996....more...
This is a continuation of my attempt to develop a list of the assumptions underpinning existing practice around learning and teaching at universities which the concepts surrounding the Personal Learning Environments (PLE) term bring into question. The list started with this post and is continuing (all the posts should be linked from the bottom of the original post)....more...
T. S. Elliot's poem The Hollow Men has a section that goes...more...
I suggest that many of the problems organisations face can be traced back to a few observations...more...
Update: On 21 Oct, 2008 I redirected my old website here. There are links to the old site included below. If you click on them, you'll be brought back to this blog....more...
Apparently Accenture have discovered "user-determined computing" and associated issues....more...
Not unlike many institutions, at some stage in their use of e-learning, CQU finds itself in the perceived position of having two learning management systems (LMS):...more...
Working with Bernie Walker-Gibbs, CD&DU has helped produce CQU's first "web2.0 course site" for the course EDED11448, Creative Futuring. It's been talked about previously. This post talks briefly about the purpose and initial experience....more...
In the traditions of open source's "release early, release often" and in an attempt to get me writing, I am going to start releasing parts of my PhD thesis. Almost certainly of limited use to others and likely to demonstrate various flaws, but hopefully the public release might generate some fixes and encourage some progress....more...
It's that time in my thesis work (trawling through references for the lit review) when I have finally come back to the "LMS Governance report" written by Lisa Wise and James Quealy. This went through the blogosphere a while back. You can access the PDF of the report and a MediaWiki based annotated bibliography from this blog post....more...
Goold and Auga (2006) describe an experiment in prototyping of a transformation of a face-to-face course into an online offering....more...
The following comes from 'Lessons for Education: Creating a Learning System' (Hargreaves, 2000). It talks about social capital and the role it might play in innovations in higher education....more...
For, what seems the longest time, CQU has been talking about the need to evaluate and choose yet another LMS. We've sort of done this two times before, and from my perspective, both adoption decisions have been fatally flawed. Some discussion about those processes can be found, to a lesser or greater extent, in a variety of publications by CQU authors including: Danaher, Luck and McConachie (2005), Sturgess and Nouwens (2005), and Jones, Luck, McConachie and Danaher (2005)...more...
For the uninitiated, most of my work and research over the last ten years has been in someway associated with Webfuse. It's the focus of my PhD and many of my publications with the intent of attempting to develop an information systems design theory for e-learning. Jones and Gregor (2006) provide one explanation....more...
The Age newspaper has a story about how students are "plagiarising" by purchasing purpose writen assignments from various websites....more...
George Siemens has a online presentation intended to introduce key concepts for a presentation he is giving at Online Educa....more...
What is online teaching? asks...more...
Webfuse has always been based on the premise of open content, where ever possible....more...
A post from Simon Fraser University talks about use of Google Calendar with some PHP code to manage calendars and bookings....more...
The Web 2.0 Course Site idea has many flaws, hurdles or counter arguments....more...
A nice quote to support the approach taken with BAM and to some extent Webfuse...more...