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Cover sheet for proposals (All sections must be completed)
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E-learning Tools for Learners and Teachers
Distributed E-learning Programme
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Name
of lead institution/organisation University
of Oxford
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Name
of proposed project Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs
for Learning Environments (RAMBLE)
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Project
partners -
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Full
contact details for primary contact
Name: Dr Paul Trafford
Position: VLE
Administrator
Email: paul.trafford@oucs.ox.ac.uk
Address: Learning
Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road,
Oxford OX2 6NN.
Tel: 01865 283429
Fax: 01865 273275
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Programme
area(s) of proposal
E-learning content and tools
Managed Learning Environments
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Length of project and total cost to the JISC over its life 7 months, £30,274
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Cost of proposal to the JISC £30,274
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Proposed
project start date
2 August 2004
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Outline project description
RAMBLE will investigate the
use of Web logs (blogs) as a reflective authoring activity in an educational
context. The project’s work is divided into two strands:
1 The off-line authoring of Web log entries on a PDA and
subsequent upload to a Web log server.
2 The creation of a blogging component that will allow Web
log content to be integrated into Bodington, an open source VLE.
The first strand will investigate mobile blogging for students who do not have immediate access to
an Internet connection. We will investigate various PDA-based blogging
clients, and use them in three case studies of learners at different stages
in their learning. The second strand
will develop a tool that will enable blog content to be presented in the
wider educational context of a VLE. The tool will be able to query any blog
server that is standards-based.
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Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments
(RAMBLE)
1. Introduction
Project
Title: Remote Authoring of
Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments
(RAMBLE)
Project
Duration: 7 months
Proposed
start date: 2 August 2004
Proposed
completion date: 4 March 2005
Abstract
RAMBLE will investigate the use
of Web logs (blogs) as a reflective authoring activity in an educational
context. The project will be particularly relevant to Higher or Further
Education, and these will be the targets for the dissemination of the project's
conclusions.
The project’s work is divided into two strands:
1. The
off-line authoring of Web log entries on a PDA and subsequent upload to a Web
log server.
2. The
creation of a blogging component that will allow Web log content to be
integrated into Bodington, an open source VLE.
The first strand will investigate mobile blogging for students who do not have immediate access to an
Internet connection. We will investigate various PDA-based blogging clients,
and use them in three case studies of learners at different stages in their
learning – in the fields of Medicine,
Chemistry and ICT (this project).
The second strand will develop a tool that will
enable blog content to be presented in the wider educational context of a VLE.
The tool will be able to query any blog server that is standards-based.
Note that the project does not propose to deliver VLE
content to the PDA. The use of VLEs directly with mobile devices involves
considerable complexity and is outside the scope of this project.
Background
A large part of the educational process is that of
reflection and internal distillation; this needs to take place independently of
the classroom, whether on or off campus. The aim of this proposal is to enhance
support for the learner working in their Personal
Learning Environment (PLE), their own evolving, individual learning space.
In order to facilitate continuity in the learning process, the project focuses
on support for experiential reflections offline, and when subsequently online,
their incorporation in the setting of a Virtual
Learning Environment (VLE).
The means for such activity will be Weblogs (or just blogs).
Blogs are a highly popular means for publication on the Web, allowing
both reflection and engagement through linking and comments. In the few years they have been around, they
have been widely adopted and it may be argued that they may even bridge the
‘digital divide’ because they make it very easy to publish information
online. They are also of demonstrable
educational merit at different stages in the education system – such as
stimulating social connections in primary school,
helping to develop ideas and invite feedback at secondary school,
and giving students full control and ownership over their online content in HE.
In this way blogs may be seen as complementary to the more
institution-oriented delivery of
courses, whether they be face-to-face or online through VLEs etc. The personal
experiences of the learner in this case will relate to both online and
face-to-face teaching and may express connections that only make sense in the
wider context.
A lot of student reflection and deliberation takes place off
site, such as the consideration of lectures and the provision of feedback. Furthermore, there are existing patterns of
activity that are underused but are likely to be very amenable – such as the
habit of SMS text messaging, which can be any place, any time. Hence, in order to best realise working off
site, the blogging needs to be mobile, i.e. we need moblogs. A moblog is defined as: “A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of
content posted to the Internet from a mobile device, such as a cellular phone
or PDA. This flexibility is particularly
advantageous to people studying in more than one institution and for different
types of qualification, vocational or academic.
To ensure that these experiences are related appropriately
to the given e-learning structures, we will develop a new tool, which will be a
container for blog entries in a VLE.
The VLE offers a number of advantages: it can restrict access to
selected groups of users, add meta data, and be set in particular contexts,
such as a course or tutorial. In
Bodington, a student may be permitted to build a richer study space around the
blog, including supporting documentation and tools for collaborative working,
e.g. inviting feedback through questionnaires. In this way, the tool will tie
in closely blogging activities and e-learning in VLEs.
Modular Design for Sustainability
The system envisaged by this project has three modular
components:
1. A
PDA or smart phone with a moblogging
client.
2. A
Blog Server which supports Blogger API
to receive feeds from the client and provides feeds that are
standards-compliant or de facto
standards.
3. A
VLE capable of processing and presenting feeds provided by a Blog Server.
There are a number of existing software packages that fulfil
the requirements of components one and two; we intend to use one or more of
these in the project. When we develop the third component we will utilise the
same standards, thus the components will interact using the service-oriented
architectures that are being increasingly adopted in educational technologies.
This allows us to repurpose the blog content for multiple targets - such as
VLE, PDP, email boxes etc. with minimal effort.
Figure 1: Component-based Blog publishing and presentation in VLE
Standards
The following Web services standards (or de facto standards) will
be adopted:
Mobile Device client: Blogger API 1.0 based on XML-RPC
Blog server: Blogger API 1.0 for loading blogs; XML storage; Atom and RSS
feeds
VLE: RSS, Atom for reading feeds, XSLT for transformation into XHTML.
This project supports the Learning Domain Services of the
JISC E-Learning Framework,
especially reflective learning for personal development. This is achieved via a PDA blog authoring
client (user agent) and a new tool in a VLE, which utilises its authentication
and authorisation facilities together with other services including alerts
(newsfeeds) and format conversion.
2. Project description
This project plans the following work packages according to the timetable
below.
WP1 . Review
and Research of PDAs and blogging
WP2 .
Write mobile blogging guide for staff and students
WP3 .
Development of simple VLE resource to incorporate and
render feeds
WP4 . Use
Cases in mobile blogging and learning environments - technical support
WP5 . Use
Cases in mobile blogging and learning environments - evaluation and
dissemination
WP6 . Package
code to release as Open Source project
WP7 . Final
Dissemination and documentation
2.3 Risk Analysis
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Risk
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Probability
(1-5)
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Severity
(1-5)
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Score
(P x S)
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Action to
Prevent/Manage Risk
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Staff shortages
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3
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4
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12
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OUCS is funding a new VLE
developer post
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Hardware
Failure of PDA (power, display etc)
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2
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5
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10
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Budget for two extra
devices
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Moblogger
software does not function correctly
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2
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4
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8
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Proper Testing; use multiple clients
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VLE Blog
resource not functioning
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2
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4
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8
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Proper Testing; provide
guidelines on alternative means to link to blog within VLE
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VLE not
available for case studies
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2
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4
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8
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Downtime should be
publicised well in advance
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Unauthorised
exposure of confidential data
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1
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4
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4
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VLE has reliable access controls, so need to ensure
that they are applied
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2.4 IPR and Copyright
According to the University’s policy on Intellectual
Property,
the University claims ownership of all intellectual property on works
consisting of software, databases etc
that are devised, made, or created:
(a) by
persons employed by the University in the course of their employment;
(b) by student
members in the course of or incidentally to their studies;
However, "the University will not assert any claim to
the ownership of copyright in …
artistic works, books, articles, plays, lyrics, scores, or lectures, apart from
those specifically commissioned by the University.” More specifically, there are three areas for consideration
regarding IPR and copyright for blogs:
1. Blogs created and stored on the mobile
device will rest with the user as the blogs are personally authored
articles.
2. Blogs uploaded to a blog server – these
depend upon the conditions of use. For
popular sites such as blogger.com, there are no constraints on intellectual
property. For services hosted at an institution, the
University retains the right to own the copyright
on that instance of publication, but not the intellectual property.
3. Blog data loaded into a VLE – as above,
if the content did not originate in the VLE, then there is no IPR applied by
the University, but the University retains a copyright over the instance as stored
in and presented in the VLE
For the development of the software, notably for the
Bodington VLE, as in previous JISC-funded projects:
- Software
will be owned by the University of Oxford. It will be released under LGPL license as mandated under
paragraph 30 of the 03/ 04 call
- An
IP registry will ensure any code submitted to projects is available under
the same license
- Version
management will operate under CVS
Bodington itself is released under an Apache-style license.
2.5 Privacy
The University has a duty of care with respect to data
protection. This project will involve
the handling of personal logs, but the use cases will be designed within
certain parameters that will not involve sensitive data, e.g. about
patients. Participants will be made
well aware of these parameters.
Even so, a set of case studies will involve potentially
sensitive feedback about courses, so access restrictions will be implemented on
the blog server, e.g. access to some blogs will require authentication.
2.6 Sustainability
The development of the Blog resource will be contributed to
the Bodington Project, an open source project with a growing consortium of VLE
developers, including the Universities of Leeds, Oxford, Manchester, Highlands
and Islands. Accordingly the software
will be maintained under CVS in the Oxford branch of the Bodington source tree
held on Sourceforge.
Documentation and dissemination activities will enable
others to investigate further mobile blogging and the hosting of blog servers
at educational institutions. In
particular, this work can inform JISC's programme in 'E-learning and
Innovations - the Use of Innovative Technologies and Models to Support
E-learning', particularly Work Package 1: Mobile Computing and Wireless
Networks.
It will also seek to tie in with the proposed Skills
Profiling Web Services extension to WS4RL
(Web Services for Reflective Learning) that will integrate PDP web services
with logbooks in Bodington. Thus blogs loaded into Bodington may be subject to
standards-based reflection on skills.
4. Key personnel
Paul Trafford as VLE
Administrator manages the day-to-day running of WebLearn, Oxford University’s
centrally hosted Virtual Learning Environment.
During the past four years, he has been involved in research, testing,
procurement, development and administration of VLEs, especially those based on
open source technologies. He has been
using handheld computers in conjunction with the Internet since 1999, including
the administration of WebLearn.
Peter Robinson works as a
co-ordinator of a team of learning technologists at Oxford University’s central
computing services. He is an
experienced multimedia developer and has nine years experience working on a
variety of projects with academics at the University. Peter is a member of the OUCS Portals project and the JISC-funded
CREE project, Portals: Investigations into User Requirements &
Sustainability.
Adam Marshall until recently worked at Liverpool managing LUSID (Liverpool University
Student Interactive Database) but now works at Oxford University as the senior
developer for Bodington VLE and is managing and doing development work for the
WS4RL project. He is an experienced Java programmer, has a good understanding
of both PDP and IMS LIP and has been an active participant in CETIS LIPSIG.
Colin Tatham is a Senior Java Developer with
excellent Bodington experience, Colin has been involved in various Java
development projects, and is currently working on adding additional
functionality to the Bodington VLE in use at Oxford University. Previous projects include
the JISC funded JAFER (Java Access for Electronic Resources) project, which
produced a toolkit of Z39.50 components built using Java and XML, and the
PORTOLE project, which involved incorporating the JAFER components into
Bodington, in order to provide reading list tools.
Karl Harrison is
IT Coordinator and Training Officer at Oxford's Department of Chemistry. Currently his research group works on the
construction of multimedia virtual chemistry environments and learning objects.
Vivien Sieber is the Senior Learning and Teaching Officer for the Medical Sciences
Division with the aim of promoting effective use of technology in teaching and
learning. She was manager of the Teaching and Learning Technology Centre
(London Metropolitan University, LMU) with university-wide responsibility for
learning technologies. She ran the masters module Applying Learning
Technologies and contributed to the postgraduate certificate in teaching and
learning. She has organized and run a number of successful workshops alone and
in collaboration with TechDIS, LTSN and UMAP for the MSD and LMU.
5. Contact
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Name
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Dr Paul Trafford
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Position:
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VLE Administrator
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Institution
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University of Oxford
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E-mail Address:
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paul.trafford@oucs.ox.ac.uk
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Postal
Address
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Computing
Services
13
Banbury Road
Oxford
OX2 6NN
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Telephone
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01865
283429
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Fax
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01865
273275
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Appendix: Workpackages
WP1. Review and Research of PDAs
In this package, a number of blogging clients will be will
evaluated for each mobile device; and a blog server will be made available for
project use on a test machine
Deliverables:
1. Documentation
on testing, selection and installation of blogging clients on a range of mobile
devices
2. Documentation
on setting up a blog server for institutional use
3. Disseminatation
to LTSN centres for Medicine and Physical Sciences, LTSN Genric centre and
TechDis.
Hardware
considerations
In order to provide broad coverage of the commonly adopted
platforms and also different levels of specifications, it is proposed to adopt
two platforms for testing by a sample of students:
1. Palm
Tungsten/Zire OS 5.x (a cheap PDA based on recent version of PalmOS).
2. Pocket
PC (a more expensive device running MS Windows Mobile).
Note that the use of Smartphones may be considered at a
later date, though at present they are viewed as expensive solutions.
Choice of blogging
clients and publication method
Publication of a blog is carried out in three steps:
1.
Authoring of blog content.
2.
Transmission of content to blog server.
3.
Publication of blog.
Step 2 can be carried out using various means, principally
through web services, but also via ftp and email to blog gateways (as supported
for instance by blogger.com).
The author will be free in this project to use whatever
method suits to generate a blog suitable for their use case, though support
will be provided mainly for a setup where authoring and upload are carried out
in the same application. It is expected
that client will respect Blogger API 1.0 as it is one of the most common [de facto] standard APIs, which uses
XML-RPC
. Others include the MetaWeblog API,
Moveable Type API, and LiveJournal.
More recently, Atom
has been introduced as a replacement, unifying the syndication and API
format. As this project emphasises
guidance on just using blogging, for uploading content into blogs we will
choose existing clients that support Blogger API, including Pocket Blog
for Pocket PC, and there is
Vagablog. for
PalmOS.
Blog server setup
In order to support publication of the blogs in the case
studies, use will be made both of existing services that are already available
to the public such as blogger.com,
suitable for any open diary of activities, and a locally configured
service, over which there is more control, offering scope for custom
authentication and authorisation, and hence more privacy for blogs that are
closed.
Accordingly, we plan to install at Oxford Pebble,
a lightweight, open source, blog server that is written as a Java Web
application and supports the Blogger 1.0 API, and standards-based delivery of
feeds, particularly RSS2.0 and the emerging Atom.
WP2. Write Mobile
Blogging guides for staff and students
Deliverables
1. Documentation
for teaching staff on the creation of templates for blogs
2. Documentation
for staff and students on carrying out offline blog creation and
publication.
Documentation will
be provided on the creation and uploading of blogs on the PDAs to a blog
server, to be available online as Web pages and included on the mobile device
itself. Blog entries have a simple
structure and may be created in any text editor. Course staff will supply the templates, which will provide titles
and a few topics to focus the reflection.
A selection of simple templates will be provided. In particular, to support personal
reflection, a selection of templates will be provided in IMS Learner
Information Package (LIP) format. In addition, staff may design the templates
themselves. The user can copy and
paste these templates into the blog authoring window and simply fill in content
under each topic.
A questionnaire will be prepared for staff and student
bloggers to complete at the end of the respective case studies. It will treat among other things the
effectiveness of use within the given context, the blogging process itself, and
the choice of platform.
WP3. Development of
simple VLE resource to incorporate and render feeds
Deliverables:
1. A
new tool in Bodington to read and process RSS and Atom feeds
2. A
new Blog resource in Bodington to present the Atom feed
3. An
investigation of the feasibility of implementing blog authoring tools in the
new blog resource.
4. Bodington
User guide for Blog resource
5. Full
documentation of development work undertaken.
The target of the blogs in this project is Bodington,
an open source VLE that has a growing developer community. A new Bodington container resource called Blog will be created (generic containers
resources include Floors, Suites of Rooms and a bulletin board facility called
the Group Communication Room) whose content will be supplied by a new
feed component that can be used more generally. This will also help promote the use of RSS especially among
departments, who can include feeds into their course areas.
Development will inform the Bodington project, specifically
for the work being undertaken more specifically to support PDPs. More generally, it will inform the evolution
to the next generation the Bodington III PLE Edition.
A breakdown of the main tasks:
1. New
Bodington components that can read RSS and Atom feeds respectively
2. New
Bodington resource called Blog that reads and processes a feed and
renders it for display inside the VLE according to various options, including:
·
A single static Web page that presents the blog in
summary form together with an optional link to the blog. This page will be generated dynamically from
the feed.
·
An instantiation of the Group Communication Room that
shows the topics and discussion topics and comments as responses.
·
An investigation of ways that users can author blog
content from within the Blog resource.
3. The
Blog resource will provide interfaces defined via a set of new templates,
consisting of forms in which are enter some standard VLE meta data: name, title,
description, introduction plus the url of a feed
Once the resource is created the content will be dynamically
updated. As with many other resources,
the new Blog resource may be used in generic containing resources and allow
fine control through use of access rights to particular groups.
Development will be carried out on a test server, with a
view to making the service available to restricted groups of users on a
production server.
WP4: Use Cases in
mobile blogging and learning environments technical support
Deliverables:
1. Findings
from case studies will be disseminated through electronic mailing lists,
published individually online and collectively as part of the final report.
2. Findings
will be presented at conferences in mobile computing/e-learning.
Logs can vary in structure and formality from being casual
jottings to quite structured responses that are subject to assessment and
validation. Teaching staff can guide
the level of formality by providing simple templates that can provide structure
in the form of a topic title and headings.
Three use cases will be provided.
1. Project
Diaries a Project Blog and a Developer’s blog.
2. Chemistry
First Year Undergraduate feedback to lectures.
3. Medical
Sciences Undergraduate Log book experiences of clinical students.
Each department will manage the case studies, providing
training for staff in on setting up and supporting the moblogging on PDAs.
In addition to the case studies, users will be encouraged to
continue their public blogs afterwards to see how it may continue to support
their reflection and sharing.
Case Study 1: Project
Diaries
A general blog will be provided, open to the public, in
which general experiences are recorded in the management of the project,
recording experiences about the project and also pointing to related work.
The developer will also make available a blog which will
describe the activities of software specification, development and testing,
particularly highlighting issues encountered.
The blog will both inform other developers working in this area and be
used as source material for the final project documentation.
Case Study 2:
Chemistry Year 1 - feedback
Chemistry undergraduates are required to provide feedback
for each lecture they attend, which is collated at the end. A lot of the feedback is actually written
outside the class. This case study will
investigate whether or not blogs may effectively encourage feedback by
supporting the authoring of feedback offline.
Case Study 3: Medical
Sciences Log book for clinical student year
Fourth Year students at Oxford University's Medical School
are required to fill in an Integrated Clinical Logbook, often at sites that are
a long way from campus and where access to PCs is limited, so even if the log
is available electronically, in practice it is printed out and filled in by
hand. A core part of this is the
weekly learning log, which is meant to support reflection on experiences
throughout the course with entries for every week of the course. Each entry contains a simple structure,
consisting of Week number, date, firm/ward, a memorable activity and learning
experience.
This case study will look at partially replacing the Weekly
Learning Log with a blog where a template will be provided with the above
headings and students enter their text in the gaps underneath. Student will be
allowed to create in Bodington the corresponding blog, where they can choose
selected groups such as tutors and peers to have access and comment further.
The case study will
inform work on Personal Development Plans (PDPs) used in any VLE and
conversely, the ongoing work in PDPs will inform future developments of
blogging for instance, how blogging applications can be enhanced to support
entry and export of IMS LIP data.
WP5 Evaluation,
dissemination and Support Mechanisms for remote authoring of blogs
1. Findings
from the case studies will be published on the Web
2. Contributions
will be made to JISC lists on mobile computing such as PDA_EDU
3. Findings
will be disseminated to CETL, LTSN (generic), the Oxford University Portals
project.
Evaluation will be made, especially in response to the
feedback questionnaire.
WP6: Package code to
release as Open Source project
Deliverables:
1. New
software and documentation will be contributed to the Bodington Project
Oxford is a
contributor to the Bodington Project, which maintains a CVS repository on
Sourceforge, with a main trunk plus development branches for each contributing
institution. The code from this project
will be added to the Oxford branch with a view to being merged at a suitable
point into the main trunk.
WP7: Final
Dissemination and documentation
Deliverables:
1.
Project Web site will provide outputs from all Work Packages
2.
Papers will be submitted to conferences in the field
3.
A workshop
will be held at Oxford University in March 2005, with invitation for related
projects to present, which will showcase the RAMBLE project, reporting on the
case studies of mobile computing in Medicine and Chemistry
4.
A blog will be maintained to provide an ongoing overview
Project Management will include project administration at
the University, at Computing Services and participating departments.
