R.S.S. Feeds

I have now created feed buttons on the Rave 2012 and the Behind Rave 2012 pages. They are located on the right hand side above the links.

I haven't implemented RSS XML files before so please let me know if there are any issues.

Interview with Adam Burt

I had the pleasure of discussing the project with Adam Burt, Ravensbourne's Technical Tutor. His wiki page gives you a good idea of who he is and what he's about, so check it out, and here's the cast link:

Podcast Link

One thing that I don't think was on the podcast was Adams latest project in the form of geo-blogging. His work has been nominated for a New Statesman 2006 New Media Award, and is really interesting stuff. Take a look HERE.

Discussion with Miles Metcalfe

Last week I had several conversations with the Head of IT Research and Development at Ravensbourne; Miles Metcalfe.

In general Miles gave me a very much "down to earth" view of the way things are, especially at Ravensbourne. One of the areas we covered was that of the college's new exterior. He pointed out that the college really has to look at these things as a business, and how the P.V. tiles really wouldn't represent a sound financial investment as the financial payoff wouldn't happen for a long time and the college would probably require another relocation before then. On top of that, Ravensbourne is not known for it's 'vision', epsecially when compared to somewhere like Goldsmiths who's ideals are represented in their appearance.

I also stated in another post that I feel Ravensbourne should be setting an example in it's environmental attitude. Miles also countered this with the college's current stand on environmental issues which is...pretty much nothing! There is a carpark that is constantly over flowing, a tiny and insecure bicycle store and even the Student Union lacks environmental representation within the college.

This links onto an underlying truth that Miles pointed out which I found very interesting, which was that the students are technically the college's customers. The college is obligated to go with how the students feel, and I really don't feel that as a body the students or the Student Union do enough, or anything for that matter, on subjects such as the college's environmental stance.

We then moved onto the subject of Learning Environments and Community and the college's Moodle.

We agreed that as younger staff come through the ranks and embrace the technology with the experience they had of it as a student the quality of the content and the use of such online resources will become a lot better.

We discussed the process that Open University takes with the payment of it's tutors, which are primarily sessional. They are rewarded according to the feedback from their students; Did they post on the forums? Did they reply to their emails? But this then leads onto a tightly knit community and all members of that community are happy and eager to offer their help where they can, which embodies the idea of peer education, which is often found in college's, but cannot been seen to be promoted by the institution (I think in a physical sense) to a certain extent.

One of the issues with the current Moodle at Rave is that a lot of creative people see that the best way of learning is face to face conversations and discussions, learning from each other and this is why more traditional tutors find it hard to think that a website or some online "community" can be classed as learning.

The concept of a 'Ravensbourne Community' is a clouded one. There is more of a broader community built up of common interest groups. I asked Miles if he thought that the generation of technology is blurring the lines between different design genres and broadcasting, and whether this would consequently blend the lines between these interest groups.
Primarily, the answer was yes. My example was Final Cut and iMovie and how this allowed a lot of people to try their hand at broadcasting with out any training. Miles however commented that these people were not becoming broadcasters as such, they were becoming something else, some thing new, in the same way that when Dance music was created, it was different from what had come before it.
The conversation went onto talk about how these interest groups actually got a narrower point of view with access to the internet, as it was so much easier to find people just like you, that you were never forced to speak to people of other interests, and in a way this has made a lot of people far more narrow minded. I have plenty of experience of this in design forums.

We then went on to talk about the college's digital representation of the students, and where the line should be drawn between social and educational spaces and opinions.
Miles said that the difficult situation the college is in is that the internet as a new technology is feared by the public, and is consequently more heavily mediated and regulated. This means that if a student voices what they see to be fair and objective opinions, that in other contexts are damaging to other people, the college can be held responsible. So here there must be a line between academic and college based activities which can be hosted by the college and personal space and points of view that can be given to Blogger for example.

Miles had previously asked me "Why do you need elearning when it's all on the internet?". We went on to talk about how a college as an idea is a place where people agree to come together to learn, and people that are there to be taught have an agreement to sacrifice some of their independence to be taught by their tutors. This idea by itself and how this can be reflected in a digital space is an interesting one. Combined with the networks and connections you make at college or university, I feel as though there is nothing that says that you can't 'go to college' online.

Miles said that one of the biggest problems he's facing with the college's elearning is the fact that a lot of lecturers use the space as a repository. This makes it a lot harder for the person looking for their piece of information as there is so much to filter through. Over time this will settle down as the unused information can be filtered away and users can be educated on how the resource should really be used.

Personal Learning Environments is a big interest of Miles'. This includes users 'advertising' their interests, their knowledge, and what they want to learn about (and this was touched on in my interview with David Porter). We spoke about being able to rate information. Like iTunes or eBay, personal ratings and recommendations are very powerful. Being able to do this with in a V.L.E. would not only automatically sift through bad and pointless entries, but highlight the interests of common groupings and individuals.
But this simple contribution can allow each student to build up their online portfolio and digital representation to their future employers and this is especially useful in the creative industries. Not only that but you will be building up your communication skills (through blogs, comments and wiki entries) which are becoming more and more central to the design industry.

I also asked Miles about another idea that came up with David Porter which was that of giving every student a laptop, and doing away with most of the college's internal, non-task specific computer hardware which had happened at a design college in Canada. Miles replied that it is simply a matter of money, and as the U.S. and Canada have much more financial input from their students, they can do this much more easily. This will change in times with the planned fees change here in the U.K. and it is becoming more of a necessity to own a laptop. But it would be easier to tell new students that they need a laptop, and if they can't afford one, we will supply you with one. But then we went on to state that it wouldn't be the price of the hardware that would be an issue, but the price of the licenses for the appropriate software makes it an almost impossible idea.

In conclusion the one thing that this interview made me realise more so is that the college is operating as a business. As students, we are the customers and we should exercise that right more.
Also it made me think that education to both the lecturers and the students is essential. I know that a few of the online resources are new and are still really being tested, but awareness, promotion and education will be very important. The whole domain also needs to be branded to form a unity, which I mentioned to Miles would make a nice project!
On a broader scale, the idea of this personalised experience is very interesting. We can see sites like delicious and digg rating sites and stories, but rating information and knowledge, and maybe even rating people (in a professional sense) is a very strong abstract.
The discussion itself was also an eye opener. It's access to people like Miles that make college the experience it is, and as these people slowly become more and more 'digitally available' it will make the digital college idea much clearer and seem far more achievable.

I just want to add that it also came up in the interview, and in an email I received the other day, that I am promoting the idea of an entirely online Ravensbourne. I would like to make it clear that this is not the case, as I right now I think the technology should be used as an enhancement, not a replacement.

Interview with David Porter

On Saturday afternoon I had a conversation with David Porter of BC Campus which happened over Skype, and despite both our efforts I didn't manage to record it. Subsequently what was planned to be a podcast here has turned into a typed report.

So I will start with a bit about BC Campus which was mentioned in a previous post. The program is a virtual higher education campus. It is a partnership of 26 public higher education institutions within British Columbia in Canada, which allow their students to become part of a much larger educational community. Its students are mainly undergraduates and BCcampus has been running officially for about 3 years now.

The idea has been running for much longer, but it was 3 years ago when the British Columbia government picked up on the idea, and David told me that a lot of government funding has since become available and has really given the project the chance to make it what it is.

I asked David how he could see BC Campus evolving over the next few years and he said that their vision of supplementing traditional educational schemes with more social softwares was a general goal, using items like blogs, casts and wikis, to build on these social virtual environments.

In my previous research the word social hadn't really arisen, but during my interview with David it came up a lot. He had just returned from a conference on the idea of wikis and he painted a picture of educational environments that were less run by the instructors, and what seemed to me as more of a socialist community whee everyone could contribute, comment, post and debate on an equal level.

This idea of peers leads me onto my next question, which was based on futuristic technological aspects, and which did David feel would be making a big impact. His first answer was peer to peer services, talking about the influence of services such as iTunes. In retrospect, the idea of "Peer To Peer" sums up this socialist concept, where each persons perspective is equally welcomed and the instructors role becomes more of a guiding influence. David also went on to talk about managing identities. In the creative industries, as students and practitioners, we have portfolio's of work, and he proposed the idea of an "intellectual portfolio". People can advertise their knowledge, their lack of knowledge, the things they want to learn about and the things they feel they could contribute. This again paints a nice image of perpetual learning, an erasing of the boundries between education and the work place.

While we were on the subject of portfolios, I asked how he felt about the decline in "value" of degrees, and what the state of things on the other side of the ocean are. He agreed that students that come along with credentials from Harvard or the other Ivy League colleges have an instant impact and it's the rest of the population that would benefit from these "intellectual portfolios" in the same way that creative industry graduates do.

The coversation went on to talk about V.L.E's in a more specific way and one of the key themes was that of feedback technologies, where student weren't simply being given the content over the web, but also the chance to comment, ask questions in real time or in the future during revision. It's the lack of this feedback, that is currently hindering a lot of V.L.E's.

David made the observation that this could strictly be due to the traditional approach of a lot of the instructors, and as the generations move on and students become the teachers, this will become less of an issue as they will be working on experience a pre-established vision.

I mentioned that due to the lack of virtual communities at Ravensbourne, a lot of the students have turned to their own structures, and I used the MID 2 Blog as an example. David simply stated that it's a common occurance right now, and if the instructors don't pace themselves they will lose a lot of valuable contact with the group.

I asked David how he felt about virtual environments in relation to students social skills. A lot of the critics state that this new approach doesn't supply the students with vital interpersonal skills. David said that when the environments are structured in the synchronous style that this is a big issue, but as new technologies allow for asynchronous structures and easy feedback, these skills can be easily supplemented. Not only that but they can be built in a more creative fashion. Students can comment, debate and voice their opinions during live conferences or at any time of day, the broadness of their contributions become much wider.

In all these situations, the effectiveness of the system relies on the creativity of the architect and the instructor.

We did touch on the concept of augmented reality but we both agreed that most of the projects that have so far been publicised have been conceptual and the stuff of research labs.

In conclusion, the key thing I drew from the discussion is that the boundries of the V.L.E. world are implemented by the creativity architects and the instructors. As time passes and younger instructors have a chance to play a key role, these boundries will stretch.

The concept of this "socialist" environment also got me thinking a lot, and although in the content David spoke of it it seemed to be aimed much more at post graduate students, I think the (relatively) simple implementation of wikis and the increasing willingness of young students to contribute to the digital world makes a very interesting picture of virtual education and our perceptions of the lines between student and teacher.

VLE Research

I have just been looking into some more VLE info and have found a couple of things I could post. Firstly was the MIT OpenCourseWare program, which I have heard about before but I've never had a chance to look through it. The site is massive and there is a lot of information up there. It got me thinking more about the public learning which I want to write a full post on but can't seem to find an angle right now.

I also revisted this site from the Swinburne Multimedia Design Dept which I really like. The tutorials are easy to follow, the site is clearly laid out and it's a comfortable, laid back learning experience (I think it might have something to do with the accent).

Whilst I was looking at online communities, I found a PDF from an organisation by the name of BC Campus which is an entirely online learning environment based in Vancouver. They have an "online campus" offering all the things a normal college does, just in a virtual state. It's a balance between this and traditional methods that needs investigation for the new space.

Bradford Uni Do Podcasts

A lecturer at Bradford University has done what I was talking about in my post on the main page and is delivering the body of his lectures over podcast and topping it up with personal time with the students. His class can txt or email him questions or queries and then he answers them on his blog, which I think is an excellent approach as students can find out what other people found difficult, or how some people may have looked at an idea differently.

The story was covered on the BBC site here.

Rave Forums

I have been looking over the Ravensbourne forums and there are some long running debates and opinions on the move itself. Although you need college credentials to post (I think) it makes for some interesting reading.

Lord Foster's Academies

Lord Norman Foster has started to turn his head towards the world of education, and the deputy chariman of Foser and Partners has been quoted in this article by The Times as saying; “Schools are a crucial part of life . . . The environment is very important and requires love and attention. The design of a school is perhaps the most important of any building,”

I also thought this was an interesting quote: “It’s surely not necessary to have such fancy, multi-million-pound buildings to improve pupils’ GCSE results. It’s high quality teaching, not architecture, that drives up standards. Pupils and teachers deserve clean, modern facilities but the bill for some of these seems extravagant.” from Sarah Teather the Lib Dem education spokeswoman.

I do in a way agree, although I think that if the building is designed in the same spirit as the Swiss Re building of the City Hall then the investment would be well worth it.

Discussion with Fiona Duggan

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to have a discussion with Fiona Duggan of D.E.G.W. who is a consultant to the college on the move to Greenwich. Below are the key points of what was said and I have also cut together the first Rave2012 podcast which you can listen to or download here:

- Fiona began by clearing up the fact that the fact that the architects for the new site are infact Foreign Office Architects, an international couple that do a lot of international projects.

- Fiona then highlighted an organisation named The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

- Podcasting Lectures - The U.S. (MIT, Stanford etc.) have been casting their lectures publicly for a couple of years. They did it on the basis that the information itself is worth very little, what is important with a college education is the affiliation with the institution and the networks you build up from an institute like MIT or Stanford. These institutes are starting to see a shift in the importance of the value of intellectual property and more and more you will see the information from lecturers becoming available to the public.
People still want the college environment for the relationships and the networks, and fundamentally you are buying you're acreditted degree.

- Fiona agreed that more and more qualifications alone are meaning less and less as they are so easy to come by, and the work itself, especially in creative industries, is increasingly meaning more and more.

- The architects on the project (Foreign Office Acrchitects) are not primarily a sustainable design orientated company. They see it more as a piece of what can be done. Although Fiona described them as a responsible design company in terms of the environment.

- Peter Hammond was bought up who is a sustainabile design consultant bought into the project by F.O.A.

- Fiona said that one important theme that I should definately cover is that of new technologies, and the design of new environments that support these new styles of learning.

- We then spoke about the use of public, multi purpose space within educational environments, and how these would play a big role in the new "time shared" studio scenario and how increasingly more students are using their own computers to complete their projects.

The Google Grid

I just listened to a podcast by Kevin Rose about his thoughts on the G Drive (Google's new online storage concept).

It got me thinking about the new Ravensbourne learning environment which was spoken about in my interview with Fiona Duggan of D.E.G.W. on Monday, which will be available to listen too hear soon.

The idea that students wouldn't have to be onsite to access their work would be a great enhancement to the Virtual Learning Environment (V.L.E.). Work aspects could be publicised or stored privately, podcasts from lecturers or personal ones could be stored for access at anytime and it would supply a public access space for group work and projects and everything would be shareable at the click of a button.

I really feel that Google are providing a lot of services that could be of use to this future infrastructure, such as Google Calendar and GMail, if not to be used themself, at least as a good template for the way things could go.

Behind Rave 2012

This section of the project documents my progress as I make my way through the research, the interviews and the idea generation. So as where the Rave 2012 site shows all the finished produce, this is where I will record a diary of how the final story is created.