ipad

People have been blogging about the ipad and its potential for education ever since the thing was announced.  I got my hands on one last night and here are my first impressions.

I have a laptop and I have an iPhone.  I’ve not had a desktop computer for many years – nor do most students.  For me, the laptop is a workhorse used heavily for email, calendaring, note taking, browsing websites, and reading and creating documents.   The iPhone is primarily for social and leisure purposes, used for texting, phone calls, weather forecasts, maps (with the GPS) and listening to music.  There’s crossover in my usage of the two devices of course – I’ll often check my email or calendar on the iPhone, and I use Twitter and Facebook on both, depending on which machine I’m using at the time.  So is there space in my life for another device which is basically just a giant version of the iPhone (but without being able to use it as a phone)?

Portability
The iPad is a lot more portable than my laptop which already looks like a dinosaur in comparison.  There are probably many occasions when I would consider taking the iPad but would think twice about carting my laptop along.  It is less portable though than the iPhone which is always in my pocket.  As a learner on a university campus or a whole range of other situations I’d be happy to carry around an iPad all day – it weighs less than a textbook and is much thinner.

Typing
The iPad gets the thumbs up on portability, but how usable is it for note taking or writing essays?  I’ve become adept at typing with one finger on the pop-up keyboard of the iPhone.  I also touch type on my laptop.  I’ve found touch typing on the iPad’s pop-up keyboard difficult but I might perhaps get used to it.  With the keyboard dock, however, the thing is transformed into a mini laptop which I could imagine using for writing lengthy reports as well as emails.  Typing is therefore much faster than with an iPhone and the same as with a laptop.  If you use a couple of fingers to type, the keyboard dock, which seems to weigh as much as the iPad itself, may not help you much.

Screen
The quality of the images and videos is superb, though you’d find it difficult to use outdoors on a sunny day (as you would with all three devices).  It’s a better tool for face to face discussions than a laptop because the thing can be placed flat on a table and you could have more than one person touching the screen.  I might also feel more comfortable using this in meetings as flipping the screen of a laptop up puts a barrier between you and everyone else (who may suspect you are checking your email rather than fully participating in the meeting).

The touch screen of course is one of the killer design aspects of the device – as it is for the iPhone.  It’s faster, more intuitive and simply more pleasurable to touch icons and move things with your finger than it is to use a keyboard, mouse or touchpad to navigate around a screen.  The downside is the constant smears left from greasy fingers which need to be wiped off on a regular basis.

Connectability
There are good reasons why an iPad doesn’t have a USB port but it would be so nice to be able to plug it into a laptop or hard drive and simply drag music files, photos and other documents between devices.  Instead you have this ridiculous situation of having to use a third party application such as Dropbox to transfer files onto your iPad which doesn’t even have a file system you can access properly.  Plus of course you can’t actually junk your laptop because the iPad is designed to be synched on a regular basis with another computer.

The iPad connects beautifully to wifi at work but I have become so used to near ubiquitous internet access on my iPhone (via the phone networks) that not having similar network access on the iPad would make it seem crippled in comparison.

Applications
One reason I’m not yet ready to junk my laptop running Windows is the lack of applications I’ve become dependent on.  I take notes with OneNote and can do things like selecting a sentence and turning it instantly into an item in my MS Office todo list.  The standard Notes app on the iPad is totally basic in comparison.  Of course there are thousands of apps for the iPad under development and many already available but the sophistication of standard Mac and PC apps is not yet there.  I’m sure that’s only a question of time.

A colleague last week showed me a fantastic application where you point the iPad at a particular section of the sky and it shows you what the stars and constellations are in that spot.  The educational potential of this device which combines raw computing power, great graphics, adequate screen size, portability, touch screen, internet access and GPS is extraordinary.

The killer educational app I think for this device and our students will be for reading texts.  While I attempted to convince myself that I could read a book on my iPhone, it wasn’t exactly pleasurable and I never finished it.  However I think we might have finally got somewhere with this device and that people will be prepared to read large amounts of text from its screen in a way many have not been prepared to on laptops or desktop machines.  The printer is therefore set to become increasingly unnecessary and this confirms my view that the rows of books on my shelves will soon be as moribund as my LP collection.

I’ve downloaded some classic books for free and I think these are probably as easy to read as on paper and certainly a lot easier to get hold of.  I also downloaded the Financial Times app which makes the paper very readable and incorporates video clips.  The broadsheet and tabloid newspaper on paper is surely not long for this world.

Add hyperlinking,  annotation facilities which allow you to store and share your comments on the texts, interactive quizzes, the environmental benefits etc and it becomes ever harder to justify printing and sending out reams of paper to our students.  There are of course a few downsides not to lose sight of such as the necessity for a network connection and dependence on an electricity supply to keep the battery topped up.

Conclusion
I feel I could “love” the iPad in the way that I do my iPhone but have never before felt about any other electronic device.  It’s a thing of beauty.  It is also appallingly proprietary and locked down and will force me to go to the iTunes store continuously, making me part from time to time with relatively small amounts of cash.  The device is designed to work as an adjunct to my computer so I can’t yet get rid of that and I’m certainly not dumping my iPhone because it’s even more portable (and has a phone).  Steve Jobs is a genius because in less than 24 hours he seems to have created a need in me for a third electronic device, which I didn’t need before.  Millions of learners are going to find they enjoy the experience of learning on the iPad more than they do from their laptops or smartphones.  I hope others are going to give Apple some serious competition here but that doesn’t look likely in the short term.

Devolve Me

The OU is working on a number of iPhone applications as well as optimising some of its websites for mobile delivery.  One example of an iPhone app is Devolve Me where you can see how you might have looked back in the mists of time.  Strangely, I end up looking pretty much as I do already.  Devolve Me is just a bit of fun but it does demonstrate the difference in the graphical and interactive potential of an educational app compared to a website.

I’ve been wondering for a while whether we are better off going down the route of ensuring our websites are optimised for mobile delivery or developing bespoke applications for the iPhone, Android platform etc. My thoughts have been further stimulated by recent conversations with Mike Innes and Shailey Minocha at the Open University.

ReadWriteWeb refers to a recent report by Taptu on the state of what it calls the Mobile Touch Web. Taptu believes there are already more than double the number of websites which are optimised for mobile delivery with icon-based navigation than there are iPhone apps. Taptu also predicts that the number of such sites is set to grow much more quickly than the number of iPhone apps.  That’s pretty obvious really as it’ll become the norm for websites to be optimised for mobile as well as larger screen delivery.

So should we use up valuable development resource in building educational apps for our students as the University of Saskatchewan has done or should we go down the web browser route like Oxford University? Here are some thoughts on both routes:

Advantages of educational apps

• Clever and pleasing forms of navigation are possible
• The entire screen can be used
• Content can be stored for offline access more easily
• Functionality such as GPS can be tapped into more easily
• The app is self-contained and perhaps more visible once you’ve got it – it may be more likely to take precedence on your phone’s “desktop”
• There may be marketing benefits for the institution or a stronger feeling of ownership by the user – it feels like you’ve got a product

Advantages of educational mobile-optimised sites

• Should be cheaper to develop – if done properly should work on all platforms rather than having to be recreated for each one
• No need to waste time downloading apps – which would also be a barrier to access for some users
• HTML5 makes various things possible which previously could only be done in an app eg offline storage, animations
• Content and the site itself may be more easily indexed by search engines and therefore found by users

Highly interactive games-type applications may continue to require bespoke mobile apps but for most educational software I can’t help thinking the mobile-optimised website route will be the one to head down as browsers allow increasingly sophisticated forms of interaction.

We’ve assembled many requirements for future developments and experimented with various ways of grouping and presenting these requirements.  A draft roadmap is at last beginning to take shape.  While there is much behind the scenes, less exciting work to be done on enhancing areas such as search functionality, five innovative headline projects stand out.  I thought it would be useful to present our latest thinking on these areas below and see if people agree that these are key areas to concentrate on.

Innovation Projects

Mobile VLE

Vision: Within three years the majority of students will have a smartphone and not long afterwards almost all of our students will have one.  This will present tremendous opportunities for learners to study from the small device they will carry with them everywhere.   While most students will use larger devices such as laptops and smartphones to study we should make it possible to carry out all aspects of OU study via a mobile device.  Websites redesigned for small screens will be adequate for most purposes.  Mobile apps however will be developed for specific learning purposes and a generic OU study app should be investigated to enable enhanced navigation, use of the entire screen and offline access.

Principles

1. Our mobile presence should not attempt to replicate that designed for larger screens.  It will have fewer options and be more icon-based.
2. The existing separation between StudentHome, course website and subject website will have to be rationalised for mobile learners.

Google Apps

Vision: Google Apps will become the primary space for students to create and store content and to interact with others informally and under their own control, while the VLE will remain the main space for more formal module and subject-based activities.  The functionality of Google Apps will be added to in the next three years and new apps will be made available, some with interesting educational possibilities.

The use of cloud-based services for students is a significant departure for the University, with the burden of hosting the hardware and software borne externally.  However there are possibilities for integration between Google Apps and internal systems.  For example it may become useful to replicate tutor group structures within Google Apps so that tutor-mediated learning activities can take place there.  Formal course-based activity may therefore begin to migrate to Google Apps where the functionality offers something additional to that provided by the VLE.

Principles

1. Google Apps is primarily for individually-controlled activity and informal collaboration, while the VLE is primarily for institutionally-led learning activities.

ePortfolio

Vision: The University will provide eportfolio facilities to all students and staff.  These will be for a range of purposes including:

• the storage and organisation of learning content, references and materials produced by the user
• the presentation of work to professional bodies and employers
• personal development planning
• the capture of data in structured format for formal learning activities
• the preparation of a portfolio of work for assessment purposes

Google Apps provides much of the above.  Work to be carried out will ascertain whether its functionality is sufficient to meet all eportfolio purposes and whether any omissions can be built or procured to integrate with Google Apps.

Principles

1. The eportfolio is owned by the student
2. It must be fully exportable for use as a lifelong learning record

User-generated content

Vision: Web 2.0 systems allow users to place their own content such as blog postings, images or videos on the web and to share them with ease.  Such facilities are available in Moodle and Google Apps.  Social software also increasingly encourages commenting on the content of others and the rating of that content.  Other users can then view the comments and see aggregated rating scores to help them navigate to the most popular content.  Users whose contributions are rated highly by others can be given reputations which can motivate them to make further high quality contributions.  Providing such facilities for our students will increase their connections with each other and help them to feel more engaged in learning communities.

Principles

1. Our learning systems should incorporate commenting and rating functionality throughout.

Personalisation

Vision: Users will increasingly expect to be able to personalise online systems so they can view content in ways which suit them best.  They will also wish to present themselves to others in the way that they choose.  A personal workload planning system will enable students to plan their study activities.

Principles

1. Students should be able to use the hardware platform and browser of their choice
2. OU learning systems should enable users to set individual preferences for colours, fonts etc
3. They should conform to accessibility standards and work with screen readers
4. The incorporation of different elements of functionality and their positioning on the screen should be largely under the control of the user
5. Users should be able to define an online profile with full control over how they present themselves to other OU students and the World

• email (gmail)
• contacts
• instant messaging and presence
• calendar
• document creation, storage and sharing
• websites

Google Apps for Education

All of our 200,000 or so students will be able to use the applications, which will also be made available to staff later. Email accounts will be provided under the my.open.ac.uk domain. We’ll also be looking at whether to bring on stream other applications as they are integrated into the Google Apps for Education suite.

Meanwhile email provision for our 8,000 Associate Lecturers will be brought into line with other staff and they will be given an account with Microsoft Exchange, accessible online or via email applications such as Outlook or Thunderbird.

Growing numbers of institutions are now adopting cloud-based systems such as Google Apps for Education, particularly in the US. The arguments for hosting your own student email are becoming increasingly weak when it can be done externally for free, or at least much more cheaply. Google will provide a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than we could achieve ourselves. In addition there are other services included such as instant messaging that we don’t currently provide to students but could help them to connect more with each other.

These systems will increasingly start to compete with some of the features of learning management systems / virtual learning environments such as Moodle and Blackboard. They provide a higher level of individual control for students and potentially remove some of the administrative burden from the university. Google’s recent integration of their Groups application in the the Google Apps for Education suite is going to present us with some interesting questions such as:

• What would be the additional maintenance issues for us in turning on that functionality so that any student can set up a forum e.g. dealing with inappropriate comments, flame wars etc?
• Should Groups be a space for informal collaboration with formal teaching taking place in Moodle forums?

Another area for investigation is the use of Google Apps as an eportfolio system. Our initial research has shown that it would work for some of the key aspects of eportfolio provision such as the storage of documents under the control of the user, the exporting of these so they can be taken with them through life, and the creation of templates for the collection of structured data for a variety of purposes. We still need to work out how we can freeze or export eportfolio content where it is being for formal assessment.

Working out the balance of what needs to be hosted internally and what can be better done in the cloud is set to become a huge and ongoing debate for educational and other institutions. Lots of interesting issues and work ahead.

1. University leaderships will have to take responsibility for driving the use of new technologies throughout institutions.
   That can be done in a variety of ways as we’re trying to facilitate at the Open University e.g. awareness raising and professional development, enhancing systems, and developing strategies and procedures which promote and remove blockages to the adoption of elearning.
2. Students should leave university with a competent mastery of online modes of communication and information transfer.
   This means there will be no scope for degree programmes (and therefore probably individual courses/modules as well) which do not incorporate online communication and media. To what extent they will have to do so is the unanswered question. It’s all too easy to pay lip service to the use of online content and communication without fundamentally changing the traditional mode of delivery e.g. by adding a forum or uploading some Powerpoint slides. The next one might help:
3. Information about how technologies are used in each course will be available to students as they choose their options.
   Many course descriptors already include details of teaching methods and the use of technologies. It’ll be interesting to see whether students will be presented with such information in a consistent way across institutions to allow them to make the informed choices envisaged by the report. For a really informed choice students would ideally be presented with details such as:
   • What types of online communication tools are provided and how are they expected to be used?
   • What assessed collaborative activities are involved?
   • What is the balance of synchronous / aysnchronous collaborative activities within the course?
   • What kinds of online content are made available and how are they expected to be used?
   • How much time are you expected to study online and offline?
   • What are the hardware, software and internet connection requirements?
   • What assessments will be carried out online?
   • What kind of eportfolio facilities are provided and how are they expected to be used?

   And then for an even more informed choice:

   • How did students on previous instances of this course evaluate their use of the online elements of the course?

   And wouldn’t it be great to be able to answer the killer question (pretty much impossible to answer of course because of the range of factors involved):

   • Does the use of these technologies enhance the overall learning experience, the results and job prospects of the students taking this course?

   All this could certainly be useful to students when selecting courses to study. Arguably unless we can include much of the above this cataloguing exercise will achieve little. Providing such detailed information consistently across the courses within one institution will be challenging but I believe worthwhile. Even without the benefits to students it would be useful for institutions to develop a comprehensive picture of the extent and types of elearning being carried out. Across the sector? That would be interesting and would require a standardised data format and a way of aggregating information from all institutions. Another wee challenge for us.

Initially I took this in a light hearted manner and even sent a jokey message to it saying it had better watch its step or I’d shave it off. The person behind this identity however then followed around 38 twitter users, all of whom looked like they were in the UK elearning community, and began to send a series of bizarre tweets.

I have just been at the JISC CETIS Conference in Birmingham for a couple of days and was approached by several people with greetings such as “hello your beard”. All of these people had been convinced that it was me behind this new character, a fair assumption when it carried my picture and linked to my blog. All thought it was bizarre behaviour, and one person I spoke to said he had actually wanted to avoid me at the conference because he thought I’d gone mad.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out who is behind the account and I did take some satisfaction from blocking this part of my anatomy from following me, and reporting it for spam. After mentioning the incident to a few people the number of people followed by the account was strangely reduced from thirty-eight to one. In some ways it’s fairly innocuous, and has given some people a laugh, but it’s made me think about a few things. Twitter has become an increasingly useful tool for finding out about innovations, developments and news of the things you’re interested in, and for networking with a wide range of colleagues. It’s enabled people to build their professional identity and blend this with information about what they do in their personal lives. This combination of the professional and personal helps to make the medium more engaging.

It’s also risky. Living aspects of your personal life in the public arena makes a new, more insidious form of identity theft possible. This isn’t grabbing your credit card details and your date of birth. It’s using an image of your face, inventing a name which you could plausibly have come up with yourself and then gathering together a few aspects of your personal life and character which are in the public domain instantly to create a new you. Anyone the character follows is then inclined to believe unquestionably that it is you.

The situation in my case has been fairly harmless but it makes me question just how much of my private life I should expose in this way and just how vulnerable one’s twitter persona is to impersonation. Someone with a grudge against you could potentially wreak havoc with your professional identity and cause real damage to work and personal relationships. For the time being the advantages of the medium outweigh the risks as far as I’m concerned but I’ve noticed a number of valued Twitter contacts leave recently and there are of course various celebrities such as Stephen Fry who are tempted to quit.

VLEs have traditionally been based around the course/module as the unit of organisation. Any other form of structure such as a superstructure (eg a degree which combines a number of modules) or a substructure (eg a tutorial group) can be difficult to set up. At the Open University we have now produced a module for Moodle called Shared Activities which allows a student or any other user of the system to set up their own forums, shared blogs or wikis and invite any other VLE user to join them. Other tools could easily be added to the list in the future.

I cannot stress enough how fundamentally this changes the underlying assumptions of what a VLE is. The institution still sets up course web pages, uploads content, specifies learning activities and assessments and provides formal tutor groups with the right students (and tutor) having access to them.

But now individual students can also form their own study groups or use the system for social networking purposes with others in ways that they decide. There is no need to get permission or involve an administrator in setting up a blog, wiki or forum – just a requirement to click a box saying you agree with the terms and conditions and will be responsible for moderating the forum etc.

It has taken more than a year since this system was built to get it released at the University. There have been concerns about the loss of control by the institution, and also procedural, legal and support issues. However finally the reservations have been overcome and the system is available to all students and staff on the VLE. One reason to offer the system to staff as well is so that they can set up their own shared activities with other staff and become familiar with how the VLE works, thus potentially gaining ideas for how these tools could be used for teaching purposes.

If you’re staff or a student on the VLE at the Open University you should now be able to set up a shared activity. Please note that currently no user support is offered.

If you run Moodle elsewhere you can download the Shared Activity Module for Moodle.

Associate Lecturers at the Open University can use these tools but if they want to do so for teaching purposes there is a separate procedure to follow.

In Japan more people access the Web from phones than from PCs (see Techcrunch article) and there are reports (see eg Wired) that a large proportion of Japanese are content with just a cellphone and don’t even want a PC. I find web browsing, even with the iPhone’s excellent user interface, clunky. You can zoom in on parts of the screen with ease but all that moving about to try to get to grips with the entire contents of a web page is tiresome.

Sites formated for mobile devices like that of the BBC are far more satisfactory, and we are currently doing something similar for course websites at the Open University. This is great for administrative aspects of courses such as checking your exam results or course calendar but much of our learning content is in the form of long texts. I am particularly interested in whether it is feasible to read large amounts of text from the relatively small screen of your iPhone or Blackberry. To this end I started reading a book using the free Stanza application on my iPhone. Here are my initial thoughts:

Advantages of reading texts on smartphones

1. You can have a large book (any number of them actually) always available in your pocket / handbag, converged with a device you need anyway (your phone) so you never need either to remember it or to carry about an additional object.
2. You can use small periods of time, such as waiting for someone, waiting for public transport, sitting in a traffic jam (not sure if that’s illegal) which would otherwise be wasted to make progress with your reading.
3. It is easier to hold the device in your hand than to hold a book and simple to turn the pages with a tiny flick of the thumb. I don’t like to bend the back of a paperback book so am forever holding the thing at an odd angle, bending my eyes round corners. Hardback books are heavy. I have no such problems / weird behaviour with the cellphone.
4. In contrast to reading on a computer, the smartphone is always on so there are no tortuous waits while the thing boots up.

There are of course many advantages to digital texts in general as opposed to paper, such as:

1. They’re instantly downloadable, infinitely replicable and have miniscule distribution costs.
2. There are already many thousands of books available for free.
3. They can incorporate hyperlinks to other relevant resources.
4. With the right software you can click/tap a word for an instant dictionary definition.
5. You can incorporate discussions relating to parts of the text.
6. You can highlight and annotate parts of the text – both persist and can be edited and shared easily. Write on a book and it’s hard to amend and of course irritating for other readers.
7. You can optimise the font size, contrast of colours etc.
8. Diagrams and images can be zoomed in on.
9. You can integrate videos, animations etc with the text.
10. An e-book doesn’t clutter up your house.

But it’s not all roses. You probably like books if you grew up with them like I did and here are some reasons why they’re better:

1. Browsing around a bookshop is an almost vice-like pleasure.
2. The tactile nature of paper and the pleasure at touching these old-fashioned physical objects just won’t go away.
3. The screen size of a smart phone is smaller than a book. I’m not sure if this is necessarily a bad thing, though you’re forced to “turn” pages much more frequently.
4. You can have several books and assorted pieces of paper viewable at once. Not so easy on a mobile device.
5. Paper doesn’t become unusable when its battery runs out. Nor do you have to be a slave to electricity supplies.
6. Books look good on your bookshelves.
7. Open University students like getting books through the post and may feel they’re getting less for their money if there’s nothing physical to show for it.

As people become more comfortable with reading from small mobile devices they will inevitably buy fewer books in the same way they’re buying fewer CDs and more mp3s. The price differential is likely to be huge. Paper books are certainly going to remain available for those who wish to pay for them. For those comfortable with reading from mobile phones it may seem an unnecessary luxury to spend £10 on a paper book when you can have the electronic version instantly in your pocket for £1 or less. Whether I (and the rest of my generation) can ever be completely comfortable reading in this way remains to be seen but I’m certainly going to persist with it. And for relatively small chunks of reading I have no doubt that this is going to be a popular way to learn.

£27.99 / $44.99 Packt Publishing A sample chapter is available.

I was recently sent a copy of this book for review. First published in May 2009, Moodle 1.9 Multimedia is one of a series on the popular learning management system / virtual learning environment published by Packt which includes titles on Moodle administration and course development. In fact, while badged as a book on Moodle, it could almost have been entitled How to do a whole lot of whacky things that Moodle can’t. A relatively small proportion of the book is actually about Moodle at all.

The book is aimed at teachers and trainers who already have some experience in the use of Moodle. Certainly having a basic understanding of the concepts of a VLE would help to get maximum use out of it. It is a hands-on, practical publication which will be most useful in schools and situations where the teacher is very much concerned with creating their own teaching content. However it could also be of interest within further or higher education settings by educators who wish to create more imaginative courses and are interested in seeing what tools might be available to them, even if other development staff are employed to create the resources and integrate them into the VLE.

The book is also claimed to be for students and you could imagine a copy left around the classroom being of interest to some of the geekier kids in the class.
To be able to get maximum use out of all the tools you’ll need a good relationship with your Moodle administrator who will be required to change a few settings to enable the integration of some of the multimedia content.

Within the covers is a veritable treasure trove of free applications for creating and editing multimedia content, some of them downloadable, others usable directly over the Web. There are comprehensive and clear instructions on how to use the programs, and as part of the narrative which holds the book together, short sections on how to integrate them into Moodle for presentation to students.

The book has a broad definition of multimedia and describes applications for capturing, creating, manipulating and storing images, sounds, video, animations, screencasts, cartoon strips, slideshows, floorplanners, mindmaps, interactive timelines and interactive maps. At the end it strays into interactive classroom applications including text chat, shared whiteboards, shared applications and audio and video conferencing, though 13 pages devoted to synchronous conferencing is scratching the surface – and it’s debatable whether chat and shared applications constitute multimedia.

From a learning point of view there are a few ideas on activities which can be provided for students using the various multimedia elements but these are fairly minimal and this is more of a “how to” book than one brimming with educational ideas. However the accompanying Moodle website gives some good indications of how the multimedia content can be integrated into learning activities.

Readers are given tips on how to take good photos and enhance them using the popular open source image editing software The Gimp. They are shown how to make screencasts using Jing and comic strips using Strip Generator. The online application Slide is suggested for creating slideshows and the website Imeem for storing songs and creating playlists. Audacity is recommended for editing sounds and Windows Movie Maker for videos. There is even an application called Mogulus explained for creating an online TV station. When Google Docs and other applications such as Google Maps were introduced I really began to question why this book was called Moodle Multimedia however some of these applications are so good that they do need to be mentioned and Moodle can of course be the front end system for the student which brings all the pieces together.

Fernandes describes how to add multimedia to questions in the Moodle quiz engine and also how to use a couple of other interactive quiz systems with Moodle. There are also a few tips on how to assess multimedia content produced by students themselves.

Many of the Web 2.0 applications suggested by the author allow the storage of the resulting content online and the reader is presented with the choice of whether to upload the content to the Moodle site or simply link to it from Moodle so it is embedded within the course but held elsewhere. The pros and cons of these two approaches could perhaps be better explained however there is a section at the end detailing a few issues around the selection of Web 2.0 software, copyright issues etc.

In summary, this is a useful and practical resource about tools for creating, editing and storing a wide range of multimedia content. It is more about multimedia than about Moodle and the majority of the book would be relevant and of interest to users of other VLEs too. There’s perhaps not a lot that can be said about multimedia within Moodle anyway because it is basically an empty shell, crying out for the imaginative resources you will now be able to create using the applications described in this book.

Steve Wheeler kicked off by suggesting that the term VLE is wrong for a start, that we are talking about content management systems and that they don’t promote learning. Sure, the name is not perfect, but it does describe a particular toolset, designed with learners in mind. VLEs do offer the ability to schedule a range of learning activities and make tools available rather than just manage content.

I have always felt that learning systems are basically “learning neutral” and are at the mercy of the learning content and activities which are made available through them. If Steve sees no valuable learning taking place in VLEs then is that due to the lack of imagination of the teachers using the systems he knows? There are innumerable examples of imaginative, engaging and effective learning experiences taking place in schools and colleges via VLEs (as argued by James Clay later) – and many well-documented examples in higher education.

Steve claims that VLEs promote homogenised content and that this one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate for students. Perhaps his institution has the budget to create individualised content for each student depending on their preferences and learning styles. Mine doesn’t. Or maybe all his students are happy to pull together their own list of appropriate learning resources and activities from around the Internet and to form their own groups to study together jointly. Most of those in my institution would not be and they relish the carefully crafted learning content and activities provided for them, which they can supplement with further individual research as required.

For Steve, VLEs prevent students from discussing with others outside the University. There are undoubtedly scenarios where valuable learning could take place by connecting with individuals with shared learning interests via the Internet from around the World. What normally brings students together though is the common purpose of studying a syllabus and taking the same assessments at the same time. It is certainly irritating to be constrained by the licensing policies of commercial VLEs, where you cannot easily integrate groups of non-registered students into discussions however open source solutions have no such restrictions.

Graham Attwell is anti-VLE because he is anti-formal education and he launched his usual attacks on the mass education system, based on a standardised curriculum. If you come from this standpoint then a VLE does indeed replicate many of the undesirable, closed aspects of the formal education system, locking out those who have not registered on courses and funnelling predetermined content into them. A “personal learning environment” comprised of multiple pieces of freely available social software neatly fits the anarchic educational world view, but in my view we will need VLEs for as long as we have formal education with groups of (increasingly fee-paying) students, facilitated by individual tutors, studying a common curriculum for specified periods incorporating rigorous formal assessment processes.

James Clay took a pragmatic approach, despite being billed as the VLE man. No-one thinks that VLEs are perfect but when used appropriately they can provide a framework and guidance to the student and help staff who lack confidence with multiple social networking sites. Nick Sharratt argued that the VLE is not yet complete but that it is necessary and it is our responsibility to demand enhancements so it does meet our needs. He suggested that users expect reliability, predictability and consistency across courses. Well, we’ve had “the VLE is more reliable/unreliable than free social software tools” debate many times so perhaps it’s pointless to revisit it but I just have to point out that I’m finding the current performance of Facebook is making the system unusable and we would rightly be slated if the VLE was as slow to use….

From the recording, I recognised the dulcet Liverpudlian tones of Chris Jones in the audience. He argued that the VLE sits in an institutional framework and is not just about learning. VLEs are indeed very much about the administrative aspects of formal learning and that’s why they’re not going to go away. Nick asked how you can use a social network for learning without knowing who your fellow students are, for example. Whether VLEs are any good at facilitating effective learning as well depends on the imagination and skills of those creating the content hosted by them and the activities facilitated by them. Meanwhile, denial-of-service attacks permitting, social networking sites and free learning content go from strength to strength for those with the time and inclination to engage with them.