"The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is a $100,000 competitive program of awards intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences that make use of the unique attributes of a virtual learning environment. As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. (See Press Release )

Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of in-world services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

.....

For the 2008-9 award year, funded ideas will be limited to those that can be implemented in the virtual worlds of Second Life or Project Wonderland . In future years, the program may be expanded to other virtual world platforms.

....

Proposals will be accepted at any time until all funds are disbursed for the 2008-9 award year, but proposals received by June 16, 2008 will have the greatest chance of being funded, as that is the date upon which the review of proposals will begin"

OK, so we are only starting with a pilot there, but that will make it the second university department where the PLE is being piloted. 

The first is our own School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, where for the task in hand, first year students rated the PLE as 'better than Moodle' and 'something I would be happy to use again in my university career' (only two quotes from our first evaluation session).

The third use will start soon in Unviersity of Manchester's School of Education, on a distributed learning course.

We are producing an interim 1.5 version this Sunday in time for the York meeting. We are also on track to have a very 'media-friendly' version 2.0 suitable for use by art, design, and graphics students available mid-Feb.

Below, a screenshot from the developing version 1.5. To see the whole thing, you may have to right mouse, select 'view this image', and then perhaps click on the resulting image (Firefox) or the enlarge symbol (IE). Also a couple of images from one of our media spaces.

Massive thanks are due to the Emerge benefits realisation programme for funding the PLE initiative!

So what do you get now?

• User profiles, friends, and communities of users - the standard social software stuff, with various different kinds of joining policies for the communities.
  
• The ability to construct directed-graph like learning plans.
• The ability to transform learning plans into interlinked documents, images and links to external web-based resources that together reflect an individual's or a community's growing knowledge.
  
• The ability to change learning plans on the fly during learning.
  
• Learning plans and documents can be simultaneously edited by more than one user over the web in a Google Docs and Spreadsheet like fashion. (Actually we use our own graph editing software, and Zoho, a Google competitor, to edit the documents.)
• There is an easy-to-use interface to del.icio.us, and a light touch mechanism to incorporate existing web resources and systems.
• There is no notion of privacy or visibility in the current system's user interface, so any registered user of the system gets full vision of what anyone else is doing.

What extras will appear in the full version? I have a long list, but basically

• Visibility controls.
• A whole bunch of productivity features, some automated, and some manual. For example, automatic notification of other users with common interests (if they have set themselves as visible), automatic notification of visible items which may be of interest.
• Integrated communications facilities.
• More light touch use of existing Web 2.0 facilities.
• Support for a very large number of registered users (yes we are still aiming at supporting on million registered users per installation).
  

The material itself is drawn from an upcoming report on Web 2.0 and Higher Education by Tom Franklin and myself. The report, for the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education builds, with JISC's kind permission, on our earlier Web 2.0 report for JISC. The new report will be published on OBHE's site early next week. Ostensibly the new report is only available by subscription, but there is a ten day trial access scheme that will enable non-subscribers to reach the report. Alternately your institution may already be a subscriber.

From here on is a quote from the draft report. Numbers from 118 onwards refer to footnotes in the report; these are reproduced at the end of this post.

We have examined how Web 2.0 can be used to support learning and teaching within the current higher education system, here we briefly look at a more radical view that Web 2.0 technologies will enable a radical transformation in the nature of higher education itself. In "The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa" 118 Derek Keats and Philip Schmidt of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa, explore how developments in social networking and technology, and developments in legal and economic understanding may lead to change in educational institutions. Characterising three stages of education they describe:

• Education 1.0 as being in a didactic style,
• Education 2.0 as Education 1.0 enhanced by use of Web 2.0 technologies.
• Education 3.0 as "characterized by rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational opportunities within which the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge artefacts that are shared, and where social networking and social benefits outside the immediate scope of activity play a strong role. The distinction between artefacts, people and process becomes blurred, as do distinctions of space and time. Institutional arrangements, including policies and strategies, change to meet the challenges of opportunities presented. Education 3.0 as used here embraces many of the concepts referred to by Downes (2005)119 in his concept of e-learning 2.0, but complements them with an emphasis on learning and teaching processes with a focus on institutional changes that accompany the breakdown of boundaries (between teachers and students, higher education institutions, and disciplines)."

These concepts are widespread. In Europe there is a groundswell of interest in whether Web 2.0 will act as either a transformative or an enabling force in changing universities by blurring the boundaries between individual universities, by blurring the boundaries between higher education and open education, by giving rise to the need for other qualification awarding bodies at HE levels, and by changing learning and teaching practice. For example, there may well be a future role for third-party accreditation organisations awarding qualifications to individuals for learning based around open content educational materials and individual contributions centred around that material.120 At least in the UK, there is also a strong opinion that there is too much capital invested in universities and too much societal dependence on the degree awarding function of universities, and that the large amounts of useful research performed in universities for Education 3.0 to significantly affect how universities function in relation to each other and to society in general. In this view, adjustment to Web 2.0 and the increased co-operation between students that it enables may simply consist of working out how the concept of individual assessment and award of degrees on (mostly) individual work can be reconciled with increased student co-operation and group work.

However in the less developed countries there may be strong reason to change HEI models, coupled with less societal inertia. In this context and in relation to Education 3.0 Keats and Schmidt discuss challenges to HE in Africa. These include skill shortages that lead to lack of critical mass in different subjects in individual institutions. The authors point to web connectivity and Education 3.0 as being able to address this challenge. However the authors also point to lack of funding that affects computing facilities and available bandwidth. We note that there are, in South Africa at least, efforts to reduce the high cost of bandwidth. Keats and Schmidt discuss free open source software as part of the solution to high costs. While Keats and Schmidt note that UWC is not at a stage to address Education 3.0, there are various UWC initiatives that could lead to the establishment of UWC as a Education 3.0 institution. These include:

• The development of open source software for educational purposes via the UWC established African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project 121 and the Free Software Innovation Unit (FSIU) 122. AVOIR received ZAR3.7M of funding from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in 2004 123. AVOIR has a variety of other African universities participating in the project 124 as well as participants iAfghanistan, India and Philippines.
• The Free Content and Free and Open Courseware Project 125 currently being established inside UWC.
• The Rip-Mix-Learn Research Group that considers both educational experience and assessment in higher education courses which make extensive use of open educational resources, and in which students create significant parts of the course content themselves. The interdisciplinary group focuses on five UWC courses which use a range of technologies and tools, including podcasting, on-line discussion forums, and peer assessment.
• Collaboration in the NetTel@Africa programme, where "The overall goal of the NetTel@Africa is to make the provision of ICT more efficient and ubiquitous to the citizens of targeted countries. Achievement of the goal will require improved policy and regulatory reform and increased private sector investment in ICT (telecommunications sector)." 126
• Action under an HP Digital Publishing Grant127 to promote the use of digital materials for learning, including the use of wikis for the development of wiki books by students. The HP grant includes membership of the Chameleon Federation 128 which is dedicated to using digital publishing to improve education. The federation is composed of HP and 24 participating universities in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Russia, the UK, and the USA.

118 Keats, D., and Schmidt, P. (5 March 2007 ) "The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa", Vol 12 No 3, First Monday. URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/keats/index.html Last accessed 1 August 2007. We would like to thank Derek Keats for referring us to this article, and Philip Schmidt for commenting on our interpretation of the article and associated research.

119 Also referred to elsewhere in this report: Downes, S. (17 October 2005) "E-learning 2.0", eLearn Magazine, ACM. URL: http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&articl Last accessed 1 August 2007

120 One author (van Harmelen) had a conversation in May 2007 with Patrick McAndrew, Director of Research and Evaluation for the Open University’s Open Content Initiative, with both agreeing on the possibility of a third party organisation awarding certificates based on a learner reading open content and posting contributions on a blog centred around that material.

121 African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources. URL: http://avoir.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007.

122 The Free Software Innovation Unit, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
URL: http://fsiu.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007.

123 International Development Research Centre. URL: http://www.idrc.ca Last accessed 1 August 2007.

124 “Other universities participating in the project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and The University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique). In addition, a number of other universities are collaborating with the AVOIR project through other means of support, including the University of Ghana Legon (Ghana), the University of Port Elizabeth and Peninsula Technikon (South Africa)." Tectonic (25 October 2004) "UWC gets R3,7million for free software development", URL: http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=372&tags=ind Last accessed 1 August 2007.

125 The Free Content and Free and Open Courseware Project , University of the Western Cape, South Africa. URL: http://freecourseware.uwc.ac.za Last accessed 1 August 2007. We are told that this site is currently being redesigned and all existing content will be reposted during August 2007.

126 NetTel Africa. URL: http://www.nettelafrica.org Last accessed 1 August 2007.

127 Witkin L., and Vanides J., "Digital Publishing boosts higher education", Hewlett Packard. URL: http://h41111.www4.hp.com/globalcitizenship/uk/en/bulletin/10/int Last accessed 1 Aug 2007.

128 Chameleon Federation. URL: http://www.dp-chameleon.org Last accessed 1 August 2007.

I’d be interested to hear your views, particularly if you use both of these media in any way.

The comment field awaits... thanks!

I've reproduced Leigh's post to TALO here for your potential delectation because I found some parts interesting, so from Leigh Blackall on the TALO mailing list, I present:

TALO :: It’s not plagiarism, it’s an easy essay   

The game is a MMORG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) attracting considerable interest in France despite the fact that it is only in beta. From the web site "BEOCIA is a free massive multiplayer game. In an original universe , pursue the same goal as all others players : the knowledge of your past . To reach this aim, build communities, launch wars, fondate [sic, read found or establish] huge cities, trade, chain combos in desperate fights, invade countries, solve jigsaws during quests in rich colour... The destiny of the world of Beocia is in your hands !"

If you want to see it, speak, please, to Eric Raffin. And with this I must grab my laptop and dash to a train to Manc, city of dreams.

Elsewhere, well documented, so I’ll not link to them, there has been some concern about personalisation, especially where it interconnects with selfish individualism, and indeed a link to ‘personal’ use of multiple online communication channels as a spoiler for some n the online event.

So back to the chat issue in the on-line event, myself sometimes as chat and drawing active (I shy away from the use of guilty) as anyone else. Was that all bad, or all good, or somewhere in-between? I felt a bit for our main speaker, because his slides got drawn on a LOT, and I felt that was not all good. But hey, I also felt that the community * was finding its feet with a new medium and new communications channels. At a different later time, I was a momentarily embarrassed facilitator who had to suddenly find his feet on finding an extemporaneous chat conversation was un-replicable at question time. But that was cool, what is a facilitator for but to react in real-time to potentially difficult situations?

[ [ Passingly, not really part of this post: And there was a real point to that moment of discovery of un-replicability, the observation of transient phenomena that had meaning for the chat users in the context of the stream of the presentation, and that clearly added to the chat users' learning experience. Now, as not all presentation particpants wanted to be exposed to the chat perhaps the user interface to the chat system might have had a turn-off chat visibility, to enable a more personalised experience, but that is another story with its own ramifications. ] ]

Now, what I did notice was that by the end of the online sessions the over-the-top drawing had disappeared, and there was a generally more focussed purpose. Someone (ahem) kept on posting evocative images to counterpoint the final session, other people kept on drawing hearts. I feel we live in a multi-channel world, and what we ended with were good things in a multi-channel world. We need to get used to all this stuff; multiple choices are not a trivialisation unless the choice is a reduction of the richness of human experience to consumerism.  Personalisation of education is not the same as the individualism that plagues UK society (individualism as discussed by Chris Hall in a previous and very interesting post).

Regarding multiplicity of channels and sources of information, and degree of personalisation, what I want to say is:

You haven’t seen anything yet!

Some questions that I seem to be coming back to again are: We are educators (or even meta-educators), we have some influence; we are designing things for the future. How can we help make a better world? How can we capture design choices in our products that  encourage students to care for each other, to see the value of community, to help each other, to take community learning experiences into the world as a way of  being?

------------

Thanks to George for starting me off on this post (mini-rant?) with a post over at the VLE.

and

* Did I really make a Freudian slip and refer to us as a community?  That's what I typed without thinking. Interesting, I wouldn't have called us a community a few weeks ago.