I’ve been at Heriot-Watt University for many years now but haven’t really had much to do with the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning here. A couple of new projects might change that. Continue reading →
A question: does WordPress have anything like the Long Term Stability branches of Ubuntu?
The Cetis website is based on WordPress, we use it as a blogging platform for our blogs, as a content management system for our publications and as a bit of both for our main site. It’s important to us that our installation (that is the WordPress core plus a variety of plugins, widgets and themes) is stable and secure. To ensure security we should keep all the components updated, which not normally a problem, but occasionally an update of WordPress or one of the plugins causes a problem due an incompatibility or bug. So there is a fair amount of testing involved whenever I do an update on the publications site, and for that reason I tend to do updates periodically rather than as soon as a new version of each component is released.
Last month was fairly typical, I updated to the latest version of WordPress and updated several plugins. Many of the updates were adding new functionality which we don’t really need, but there were also security patches that we do need–you can’t have one without the other. One of the plugins had a new dependency that broke the site, David helped me fix that. Two days later I login and half the plugins want updating again, mostly with fixes to bugs in the new functionality that I didn’t really need.
I understand that there will always be updates required to fix bugs and security issues, but the plethora of updates could be mitigated in the same way that it is for Ubuntu. Every couple of years Ubuntu is released as a Long Term Stability version. For the next few years, no new features are added to this, it lags in functionality behind current version, but important bug fixes and security patches for existing features are back-ported from the current version.
So, my question: is there anything like the concept of LTS in the WordPress ecosystem?
I work in the area commonly known as Learning Technology, or Educational Technology. I don’t have much time for trying to pin down what exactly constitutes “technology” in that context, and certainly none for considerations like “printing is technology, does that count”. But today I bought a book which does quite literally(*) illustrate advances in printing applied to learning.
The book is a reprint of the Oliver Byrne’s The first six books of the elements of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners which was first published in 1847. Instead of the conventional referencing of lines, shapes and angle by letters used in geometry text books. So instead of:
Proposition 30: Straight lines parallel to the same straight line are also parallel to one another.
Let each of the straight lines AB and CD be parallel to EF.
I say that AB is also parallel to CD.
Let the straight line GK fall upon them. Since the straight line GK falls on the parallel straight lines AB and EF, therefore the angle AGK equals the angle GHF.
Again, since the straight line GK falls on the parallel straight lines EF and CD, therefore the angle GHF equals the angle GKD.
But the angle AGK was also proved equal to the angle GHF. Therefore the angle AGK also equals the angle GKD, and they are alternate.
Therefore AB is parallel to CD.
Therefore straight lines parallel to the same straight line are also parallel to one another.
This book has:
Colour printing of books was not common in 1847, it only became commercially viable after the invention new printing techniques in the C19th and mass production of cheap synthetic dyes, starting with mauvine in 1856, so this can fairly be called advanced technology for its time. Like many uses of technology to enhance learning, when colour printing of text books did become commonplace, it wasn’t used with the same imagination as shown by the pioneers.
* except, of course, that “literally” means according to the written word and this is a book of pictures. #CetisPedantry
Editable files for the What is Schema.org briefing are now available from the Cetis Publications site. The process of enabling editable copies of this publication has leads me to some reflections on the publishing workflow behind it.
We published What is Schema.org? a Cetis briefing paper for LRMI in June, as with most of Cetis’s publications it is covered by a CC Attribution licence so, according to the terms of that licence
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
However, it was published as a pdf, which a colleague of mine says means “pretty damn final”, so you would have found it hard to take advantage of second of those freedoms.
Why was it published only as a pdf and not as a .odt/.docx file like many of Cetis’s other publications? Well, I decided not to run risk the of head injuries and masonry damage that comes with trying to do page layout in OpenOffice or Word, and prepared the pdf using an open source desktop publishing package called scribus. On the whole I’m happy with that. I could have released the scribus files when we published the document, but, firstly we were in a bit of a hurry and I didn’t have time to check that the text file assets had been synched with any in-page edits that had been made in the last round of proofing (I’ve done that now, so here is an archive of the assets and other files you need). I’m aware that not everyone will find scribus to their taste; the original text was created in Google docs, which many people might find a better starting point for making changes to the text (because it is). The Google doc text had got well out of synch with the text in scribus and the final pdf.
So, I have made sure that the Google doc has the same text as the published pdf, and have set the sharing on it so that anyone can see it and can make a copy to edit themselves (here it is). I did consider other possibilities, such as version control repositories e.g. github, but in this case I don’t think I want version control. People will make their own edits to suit their own purposes, I hope. In other words, forking is good, I don’t envisage pulling updates back into the Cetis version too often. I have also made a promise to myself not to start on the page layout for the next briefing (What is LRMI? in case you’re wondering) before the text is fixed, so that the Google doc and Scribus files for that don’t get out of synch.
I’m still not entirely happy with the editability of the images. They were created using Lucidchart. You can get the output as png files through either the google doc or the scribus archive, they’re better than nothing but I suspect that svg versions might be more useful.
Is this worth it? Personally I think so, otherwise I might as well use Creative Commons licences with the No Derivative restriction, which I choose not to. In this case, I know there is interest in creating a version that covers schema.org in RDFa as well as microdata. That would be an update worth publishing through Cetis.
A play-list for Roman History from the In Our Time archives. [Updated 8 Feb 2019]
I’ve become a bit of an addict of In Our Time since I was alerted to the archives available as podcasts by a tweet from someone, I can’t remember who. In Our Time is a Radio 4 programme where Melvyn Bragg discusses some topic with three academics. Whoever it was who sent that tweet said something along the lines of it possibly being the basis of a University syllabus, which gave me the idea of putting together a playlist for one of the topics I’m interested in: Roman History.
Taken from various sections of the In Our Time archive, the descriptions are edited excerpts of those found on the BBC In Our Time site. The links are more or less chronological in order of Roman history; on left are links to discussions that relate directly to the story of the Roman Empire, on the right are discussions which relate to neighbours of the Empire and ideas that influenced the story.
All except one of the programme* are available for download from the BBC site, I’ve cobbled together this rss file will set up a podcasts play list. (*I can’t find The Roman Empire’s Decline and Fall for download.)
Praecursores
Thermopylae
For the historian Herodotus, the Battle of Thermopylae (480BC) was the defining clash between East and West, and allowed Western values to rise above Eastern.
The Battle of Salamis
To the Greeks, the Battle of Salamis (480BC ) and other Greek victories that lead to the withdrawal of the Persian occupation enabled a flourishing of a culture that went on to influence the development of civilisation in Rome and, later, Europe and beyond.
The Phoenicians People from the Levant who established a trading network across the Mediterranean linking many settlements, including Carthage.
The Etruscan Civilisation Emerging ca.800 BC the Etruscans thrived for the next eight hundred years, extracting and trading copper and developing a sophisticated culture. Eventually the Etruscan civilisation was absorbed into that of Rome.
Persepolis
The great ‘City of the Persians’ founded by Darius I as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire that stretched from the Indus Valley to Egypt and the coast of the Black Sea.
Alexander the Great
One of the most celebrated military commanders in history. Born into the Macedonian royal family in 356 BC, he gained control of Greece and went on to conquer the Persian Empire, defeating its powerful king, Darius III.
Romulus and Remus
According to tradition, the twins were abandoned by their parents as babies, but were saved by a she-wolf who found and nursed them. Romulus killed his brother after a vicious quarrel, and went on to found a city, which was named after him.
Res publica, 500-50BC
The Roman Republic
The rise and eventual downfall of the Roman Republic which survived for 500 years.
Hannibal The Carthaginian general who led an entire army, complete with elephants, across the Alps in order to attack the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War which unfolded between 218 and 202 BC.
Carthage’s Destruction Carthage and its destruction by the Romans in the 2nd Century BC, was a pivotal moment in world history that left Rome as the supreme power in the Mediterranean.
Judas Maccabeus Born in the second century BC, Judas led his followers, the Maccabees, in a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, which was attempting to impose the Greek culture and religion on the Jews
Spartacus Slave revolts in the 1st century BC, especially the Roman gladiator and rebel leader Spartacus.
Cleopatra The last pharaoh to rule Egypt, Cleopatra was a woman of intelligence and charisma, later celebrated as a great beauty. She was lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) supported and attempted to reinvigorate the Roman Republic in its final years.
Julius Caesar Assassinated as he entered the Roman senate on the Ides of March, 44 BC, Caesar was an inspirational general who conquered much of Europe. He was a ruthless and canny politician who became dictator of Rome, and wrote The Gallic Wars, one of the most admired and studied works of Latin literature.
Imperium
The Augustan Age
A golden age of literature with Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphosis among its treasures. But they were forged amidst creeping tyranny and the demands of literary propaganda.
Horace
Horace (65-8BC) flourished under the Emperor Augustus was one of the greatest poets of his age and is one of the most quoted of any age.
Strabo’s Geographica Written by a Greek scholar living in Rome, published 7 BCE, the Geographica is an ambitious attempt to describe the entire world known to the Romans and Greeks at that time.
Greek and Roman Love Poetry
Greek and Roman love poetry, from the Greek poet Sappho and her erotic descriptions of romance on Lesbos, to the love-hate poems of the Roman writer Catullus.
Roman Satire Much of Roman culture was a development of their rich inheritance from the Greeks. But satire was a form the Romans could claim to have invented.
Metamorphosis
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet Ovid and explore the theme of metamorphosis from the transformation of Narcissus to the bug of Kafka’s story, and beyond.
The Aeneid Virgil’s Aeneid was the great epic poem that formed a founding narrative of Rome, written in Augustus’ reign at the start of the Imperial era and has been called an apologia for Roman domination; it has also been called the greatest work of literature ever written.
Vitruvius and De Architectura
Written almost exactly two thousand years ago, Vitruvius’ work is a ten-volume treatise on engineering and architecture, the only surviving work on the subject from the ancient world.
Seneca the Younger One of the first great writers to live his entire life in the world of the new Roman empire, after the fall of the Republic.
St Paul Paul’s impact on Christianity is vast. Crucially, Paul is responsible for changing Christianity from a Jewish reform movement into a separate and universal religion.
Josephus Born Joseph son of Matthias, in Jerusalem, in 37AD, he fought the Romans in Galilee in the First Jewish-Roman War. He was captured by Vespasian’s troops and became a Roman citizen, later describing the siege and fall of Jerusalem.
Pliny’s Natural History
Some time in the first century AD, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder published his Naturalis Historia, or Natural History, an enormous reference work which attempted to bring together knowledge on every subject under the sun.
Pliny the Younger
A prominent lawyer in Rome in the first century AD, Pliny later became governor of the province of Bithynia, on the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Throughout his career he was a prolific letter-writer, sharing his thoughts with great contemporaries including the historian Tacitus, and asking the advice of the Emperor Trajan.
Agrippina the Younger
One of the most notorious and influential of the Roman empresses in the 1st century AD, Agrippina was the sister of the Emperor Caligula, a wife of the Emperor Claudius and mother of the Emperor Nero. Through careful political manoeuvres, she acquired a dominant position for herself in Rome.
Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome Roman historian Tacitus chronicled some of Rome’s most notorious emperors, including Nero and Caligula, and whose portrayal of Roman decadence influences the way we see Rome today.
Roman Slavery
The role of slavery in the Roman world, from its early conquests to the fall of the Western Empire.
The Celts
The Greek historians who studied and recorded the Celts’ way of life deemed them to be one of the four great Barbarian peoples of the world. Perched on the North Western fringe were the British who shared many of the religious, artistic and social customs of their European neighbours.
Roman Britain
One backwater of the Empire noted for its wretched climate, gloomy atmosphere and uncouth inhabitants.
The Druids Active in Ireland, Britain and Gaul, the Druids were first written about by Roman authors including Julius Caesar and Pliny. They were suspected of leading resistance to the Romans, a fact which eventually led to their eradication from ancient Britain.
Boudica In 60AD, Boudica led an army of tribesmen and sacked Camulodunum, modern day Colchester, before marching on London. She came close to driving the Roman Imperial power out of Britain before she was finally defeated.
Hadrian’s Wall Built in about 122 AD by the Emperor Hadrian, its construction must have entailed huge cost and labour. However, the Romans abandoned it within twenty years, deciding to build the Antonine Wall further north instead.
The Cult of Mithras A mystery religion that existed in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD.
Ptolemy and Ancient Astronomy In the 2nd Century AD Ptolemy proposed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and explained all the observed motions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars with a system of uniform circular motions which he referred to as ‘epicycles’.
Provinces of the Roman Empire, AD 210. By Mandrak – Own work, Public Domain, Link
Decline and Fall, Byzantium
The Roman Empire’s Decline and Fall
How far is the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome? How critical were the bawdy incursions of the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths and the Vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire?
Queen Zenobia
Born in around 240 AD, Zenobia was Empress of the Palmyrene Empire in the Middle East. A highly educated, intelligent and militarily accomplished leader, she led a rebellion against the Roman Empire and conquered Egypt before being finally defeated by the Emperor Aurelian.
The Sassanid Empire
Founded around 226 AD, in Persia, the Sassanian Empire lasted over 400 years as a grand imperial rival to Rome. This super-power traded goods from Constantinople to Beijing, handed regular defeats to the Roman army and only fell to the Islamic conquests of the 7th century.
Constantine the Great
Born in modern day Serbia and proclaimed Emperor by his army in York in 306AD, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to profess Christianity.
The Trinity
The idea that God is a single entity, but one known in three distinct forms – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – has been a central belief for most Christians since the earliest years of the religion. The doctrine was often controversial in the early years of the Church, until clarified by the Council of Nicaea in the late 4th century.
The Nicene Creed
The Nicene Creed which established the Divinity of Christ, written to counter the 4th Century Arian heresy.
Augustine’s Confessions
St Augustine’s account of his life, sometimes called the first autobiography, written around AD397 after he had been appointed as Bishop of Hippo.
The Pelagian Controversy In the late 4th century a British monk, Pelagius, travelled to Rome where he preached a Christian doctrine which many regarded as heretical: that mankind was not inherently depraved.
The Picts
The Picts is now a label given to the people who lived in Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde line from about 300 AD to 900 AD, from the time of the Romans to the time of the Vikings.
Byzantium
In 453 with the Barbarians at the gate, through the gate and sacking the city of Rome “the wide arch of the ranged empire” finally began to fall…Or did it? In AD 395 the Emperor Theodosius had divided the vast Roman Empire between his two sons.How did the East survive when the West fell, were they really Romans and why do we know so little about one of the most successful and long lived Empires ever to straddle the globe?
Justinian’s Legal Code
The ideas brought together under Justinian I, Byzantine emperor in the 6th century AD, which were rediscovered in Western Europe in the Middle Ages and became very influential in the development of laws in many European nations and elsewhere.
The Arab Conquests
In 632 the prophet Muhammad died and left behind the nascent religion of Islam among a few tribes in the Arabian Desert. Within 100 years Arab armies controlled territory from Northern Spain to Southern Iran and Islamic ideas had begun to profoundly refashion the societies they touched.
The Abbasid Caliphs
From the mid eighth to the tenth century the Abbasid Caliphs headed a Muslim empire that extended from Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Persia to Uzbekistan and the frontiers of India.
Muslim Spain
In 711 a small army of North African Berbers invaded Spain and established an Iberian Islamic culture that would last for over 700 years
The Battle of Tours
In 732 a large Arab army invaded Gaul from northern Spain, and travelled as far north as Poitiers. There they were defeated by Charles Martel, whose Frankish and Burgundian forces repelled the invaders.
The Carolingian Renaissance In 800 AD on Christmas Day in Rome, Pope Leo III proclaimed Charlemagne Emperor, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors. A Frankish King who held more territory in Western Europe than any man since the Roman Emperor, Charlemagne’s lands extended from the Atlantic to Vienna and from Northern Germany to Rome.
Third Crusade When Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, seized Jerusalem back in 1187 Pope Gregory VIII issued a Papal Bull for restoring the Holy City to Christian Rule.
Constantinople Siege and Fall When Sultan Mehmet the Second rode into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire.
Post Hoc
Is Shakespeare History? The Romans
What was the motivation for Shakespeare’s reimagining of Roman history in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, and how do the affect how we view Roman history today.
Rome and European Civilization
Melvyn Bragg assesses the role Rome has played in European civilization. Rome has meant Republicanism, as well as Imperialism; it has stood for Pax Romana and also for the machinery of war, it is an eternally pagan city that still beats as the Catholic Heart of the Christian Church.
As part of the Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education that I am taking I need to outline my conception of teaching and learning and describe how and why you do (or will) teach”
On the left is a model learner I found in Leuven. If you think of it as showing knowledge flowing into someone’s head as they read a book, then it is not my conception of learning. I believe:
knowledge is not something that exists externally and can somehow be transferred into a students head, it is something that is built and rebuilt in the brain.
learning is not something that can be done passively simply by absorbing what is in a book, it requires an active effort
education is a social activity, not a solo activity
(For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t preclude reading as an active effort or as part of a social activity.)
Part of my role as a teacher is to provide and be part of the social setting, activities and resources through which students may develop their knowledge and understanding of the outside world.
I am involved in education because I believe in the capability of people learn, to change and to improve, throughout their life. Their time at University is part of that, but I think it is important to consider what students will need the day after they leave University and in 10 years time. Once they leave University many of them will find themselves without a teacher for the first time in their life. Part of my role as a teacher is to prepare them to be without a teacher. The area that I teach (computer science/information systems) is rapidly changing. When I suggested to a colleague that he should tell his new students what it is that they will learn in the next four years that will be useful in ten years time he replied “Tough question – ‘we are/should be teaching students to solve problems we don’t know using technologies we don’t know'”. That suggests to me that problem solving and the ability to learn new things are more important that content knowledge. Now that is a thought that is quite terrifying, the content knowledge is way easier to teach, but I can at least encourage students to think about what they know, what they need to know and how they are learning.
I also believe that teaching is difficult and the resources and approaches used are difficult to create. It is important to evaluate what works and what doesn’t, to change and to improve what doesn’t work, and to share what does.
[The image is my own available on Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution only licence http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbarker/4663480615/ Leuven being the brewing capital of Belgium and therefore of the world, and alternative interpretation is that it represents the role of beer in learning.]
I while back I read Harry Collins’ and Robert Evans’ book Rethinking Expertise. The website blurb says:
What does it mean to be an expert? In Rethinking Expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans offer a radical new perspective on the role of expertise in the practice of science and the public evaluation of technology.
Collins and Evans present a Periodic Table of Expertises based on the idea of tacit knowledge—knowledge that we have but cannot explain.
The core of that “Periodic Table” is a range of ways of knowing about things that runs from “beer mat knowledge” to “contributory expertise”:
Collins’ and Evans’ spectrum of expertise
Beer mat knowledge is the sort of information that may be learnt from a “did you know” snippet on the back of a beer mat, useful for pub quizzes, but disconnected from any other knowledge; popular understanding is what might be gained through reading popular science books or watching documentaries; primary source knowledge requires understanding original papers in a field; interactional expertise is the ability to talk to other experts, requiring a knowledge how the published literature fits with the excepted paradigms and current developments in a field; and contributory expertise is enough expertise to advance the field one self.
Blooms Taxonomy, revised
It always struck me that there was a congruence between this spectrum and Blooms taxonomy. At least at the extremes, mastery at “Beer mat” level requires no more than remembering, contributory expertise is about creating. In between the match isn’t one-to-one, but there is some overlap.
Reading about pedagogies this week while preparing for teaching, it struck me that there is another mapping that could be made. The first three of Collins’ and Evans’ classes could all be learnt in isolation, that is by reading books or watching films; the other two require, by definition, interaction with other people. So this seems to map to the three perspectives of pedagogy presented by Terry Mayes and Sara De Freitas[1]: the associationist perspective: learning as an accumulation of skills the cognitive perspective: learning as a process of building mental models making sense of concepts the situative perspective: learning in the context of social interactions.
Odd, that it is the situative perspective that I struggle most with understanding, yet the social aspects of interactional can contributory expertises were ones that made immediate sense to me as someone who has worked as a physicist on a subject (polymer science) that showed the differences between physicists and chemists, and who went on to learn the different between physicists and engineers by working with engineers.
1. Terry Mayes and Sarah de Freitas Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models (pdf). Stage 2 of the JISC e-Learning Models Desk Study. Also see Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharppe (eds.) Rethinking Pedagogy in a Digital Age (1st ed), chapter 2 Learning and e-learning: the role of theory.
I’ve just been inducted onto Heriot-Watt’s Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice. One of the exercises asked us in pairs to think about “What makes a good learners”Prompt for discussion We were to think about this, discuss with a partners and then feedback. The intention was to identify the attributes of a good learner (reflective, open to new ideas etc. etc.) but one pair reported back ideas that seemed to me to be more about what factors are conducive to producing a good learner, literally how do you make a good learner. And I wonder whether that isn’t in fact a more interesting question–not that I think that you can make a good learner in the same way that you can make a milk shake.
Anyway, the first activities we have is to produce a teaching philosophy statement, and I think that making good learners is not a bad thing to base a teaching philosophy around.
The first course I will be teaching is called Design for Online Learning, the aim is
To provide knowledge & understanding of the principles of online course design and development.
It’s a course that has been offered for several years now and I don’t think the title or aim have been updated recently.
Let’s take the title one term at a time
Design
Clearly this is pedagogic design rather than visual design (though there is a section on story boarding, and I might work in something on wireframes). One of the resources referenced, the Jisc publication Effective Practice with e-Learning says:
Bringing about effective learning, however, is a complex and creative process which involves identifying objectives, recognising the needs of the learners, selecting the most suitable approach, and then striking an appropriate balance between e-learning and other modes of delivery when working within a technology-rich context (one in which practitioners can choose between e-learning and traditional options). In this guide, this process has been termed ‘designing for learning’.
page 11, my emphasis
Online
I’m not sure that this is entirely helpful in the context of a course offered in Information Systems. To be clear, it’s not that we offer courses that cover other modes of delivery such as mobile learning or blended learning. I think the term “online learning” dates from time when “online” was considered to be something new and distinctive. “Online learning” was just one name in the long chain of what we call what we do, staring with something like computer based learning and computer aided instruction/learning through learning technology, e-learning, blended learning, to technology enhanced learning. I’m not even sure what counts as online anymore: does everything become online when all devices have network capabilities? Is an app for formative testing that is downloaded to a phone or an interactive ebook out of scope if it doesn’t use that networking capability. I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think they are out of scope is because it is clearly the learning that is important, and that does not need to happen online.
Learning
Various topics relevant to education, those which are more relevant to the course are larger and bolder
Yes, it will be important to cover something about how learning happens and what can encourage it, which means covering something about education more widely. The focus will be on teaching learning and assessment, (rather than other activities in education such as policy, administration and accreditation) but these are underpinned by research into pedagogy. psychology and philosophy.
So what is it about?
Well, I hope that the course will allow students to make a start on being a learning technologist, as defined by ALT
Learning technology is the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching, and assessment.
Learning technologists are people who are actively involved in managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of learning technology.
The 
