http://svy.mk/devcsi12

The broad topics of this survey include: benchmarking developers across the sector; examining stakeholders’ views of software development; discovering examples of local innovation; and gathering suggestions about the on going future development of a developer community in UK education. The survey is very important for informing future work of the DevCSI project and should provide useful information as to the value and importance of developers to innovation in the education sector. It should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. So if you are developer in education, you work with developers, or your work is effected by the work of developers please fill in this important survey.

Each respondent will be able to enter a prize draw to win a £200 Amazon voucher or one of four £50 vouchers. If you would like to enter for your chance to win, please follow instructions at the end of the survey.

Thanks for your participation and good luck in the prize draw!

See the results of last survey.

Please feel free to pass this blog posting on, or repost. Thank you.

Browse through our complete collection of recordings of these lightning talks to get a taste of the range of projects represented at Dev8ed….

What is FOSS? Who Are OSS Watch? Why should I care?

Rowan Wilson

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Grand Research and Development Challenges (STELLAR)

Fridolin Wild

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XCRI-CAP Demonstrators

Rob Englebright

Click here to view the embedded video.

Top IPR Tips and Risk Management

Naomi Korn

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Learning Designer

Diana Laurillard

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get There Fast

Qamar Zaman and Roger Greenhalgh

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reusable Java and C# LTI Tool Classes

Niall Barr

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Different Kind of Hosting

Alex Iacconi

Click here to view the embedded video.

DEVELOP and Beyond

Guy Pursey

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From Atom, to OData to Assessment APIs

Steve Lay

Click here to view the embedded video.

Localisation: Developing for International Users

Malte Ressin

Click here to view the embedded video.

James Outterside, Dan Plummer, Suzanne Hardy, Graham Isaacs and Raul Balesco introduced the PublishOER Project (a UKOER3 project).  The PublishOER team are working with publishers to find new business models enabling risk free incorporation of published materials into OER (including development work for centralising a business process for dealing with permissions requests to publishers, publishing to multiple publication formats from single source, dealing with multiple licences, etc)

Their contributions to Dev8ed included a short lightning talk giving an overview of the project and a longer workshop session.  Both sessions were recorded so you can get a broad overview and more detail about the project and the discussions it elicited at Dev8ed.

Lightning Talk

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Workshop Session

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This video is also available on Vimeo.

Simon Booth and Stephen Vickers delivered several hands on workshops and short talks introducing Dev8ed participants to the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification.

LTI provides a standard mechanism for securely launching an external application from a VLE course, giving this application read and write access to the VLE grade book, and the ability to retrieve a list of users enrolled. The same code works with all VLEs: Moodle, Blackboard Learn, WebCT, Sakai, Desire2Learn.

In this video, Vickers introduces the LTI and explains its relevance for developers, developers, VLE administrators, teachers and learners.  This was followed by a hands on workshop taking participants through the specification step by step.

Watch this session in full

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Other Resources

Stephen Vickers gave us a short video interview summarising their activities at Dev8ed and explaining why the LTI specification is important…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Sheila McNeill and Peter Chatterton co-presented a short talk exploring how programme teams can blend face-to-face engagement and technology tools, focusing on the need to address human factors in using technology tools to support curriculum review and development.

This short talk followed on from their longer workshop session: Exploring and sharing tools for learning design through a number of design challenges, in which they outlined a number of design challenges centering around how learning activities can be designed more effectively.

In the longer workshop session, they asked participants to explore the processs, tools, content and activities they currently use and examined how to create integrated workflows based on exisiting processs, tools, content and activities. Their core aim was to explore potential opportunities to build on the outputs of the work of the JISC Currciulum Design Programme and the outputs available in JISC Design Studio, building on the ideas raised at previous CETIS Design Bash events.

In this shorter talk, they provided a summary of the discussions that resulted from the longer workshop and some of the challenges surrounding learning design.

Watch this session in full

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Other resources

Sheila MacNeill gave a short video interview discussing the origins and aims of the workshop in more detail, and described some of the positive outcomes from the session…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Edukapp is the UK-wide widget and app store, collecting learning technology produced for and in Higher Education. In this Dev8ed session, Lucas Anastasiou and Fridolin Wild explained how to interface your local environment with the widget store and run-time engine so that you can feature widgets and gadgets in your local virtual learning environment (or similar).

Edukapp was described by many as one of the coolest finds from Dev8ed.

Watch this session in full

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Other Resources

You can find out more about Edukapp at the project home page.

Presenter Fridolin Wild gave us this short interview describing his activities at Dev8ed and the value of the event for him…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video is also available on Vimeo.

Alex Bilbie from the University of Lincoln provided a fast-paced gallop through 167 slides to give Dev8ed participants an overview of HTML 5 and CSS 3, based on his presentation at Dev8D earlier in the year.

Bilbie provided a number of code examples throughout the talk, together with contextual information about the progression of the new standards and what’s happening in the browser world.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Watch this Session

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other Resources

 
The slides to accompany this presentation are available here.

By popular request, Martin Hawksey from JISC Cetis provided a practical overview of how to hack things together with Google Spreadsheets to create a rapid educational development tool at last week’s Dev8ed event.

Hawksey highlighted how Google Spreadsheets can be used as a rapid development tool to create lightweight applications to support teaching and learning. Examples included zero programming based solutions that rely on existing features like Google Forms, spreadsheet formula and conditional formatting. He also introduced more advanced methods using Google’s cloud based programming service Apps Script, which is integrated into Google Spreadsheets and Sites, to create custom functions and interfaces.
 

Watch this Session

Click here to view the embedded video.

Or if you’re up for the longer session, with more worked examples:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other Resources

The slides to accompany this presentation are available here.

You can find more information about Martin and examples of his work with Google Spreadsheets at his website, including Martin’s blog post about the session.

As Dev8ed draws to a close, the final session provided us with a showcase of highlights for the event.

Several participants shared their experience of the event and the positive outcomes that they benefitted from throughout the event, from useful tips and sessions to wider developments.

Some of the feedback included:

“I enjoyed my lightning talk – its a great way to get your head around your own topic” – Malte Ressin

“My highlights: localisation talk and different sorts of hosting talk” – Amber Thomas

“We had lots of discussions to follow up to help refine and use our Learning Designer tool. This was made it a really useful session for us.” – Diana Laurillard

“There are lots of new things coming out in the VLE world, and it would be good to expand on this at future events with sessions about the different VLEs” – Stephen Vickers

“Seven new issues in my GitHub!” – Rob Engelbright

There were also prizes! Martin Hawksey and Alex Bilbie jointly won the popular vote for the best lightning talk, whilst Errol Thompson won a signed copy of Diana Laurillard’s new book for his work on the Learning Designer challenge.

There was also an audience vote for the XCRI “Prettiest Page” competition, which asked developers to create a web page that shows information from the XCRI-CAP Aggregator API. This was won by Jamie Mahoney.

Further Coverage

We will be publishing videos from many of the workshop sessions and interviews with some of the presenters over the next few days. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or follow @devcsi on Twitter to get updates about further coverage.

Ben Ryan provided a light hearted romp through the history of learning technology. This was not a serious or formal session!

Learning technology started in 1728 when the first correspondence course started in shorthand. The next development was not until 1840 when Isaac Pitman began using the penny post for correspondence courses.

In 1909, E M Foster wrote The Machine Stops, a story which first suggested the concept of video conferencing, which was inspired by the invention of the television. However, things really start to kick off in 1926 when Plessey was invented to teach drilling. This was automatic, included assessment, and provided immediate feedback.

Ryan observed that people started to write about learning technology in the 1950′s, (citing Skinner). This literature led to the emergence of new terms, including pedagogy. After 220 years of people being taught using different technologies and via distance learning, which all worked, but then we had to start making it a science, which complicated things.

In 1984, following the invention of the computer, Charles Goldfarb involved a lot of people to develop SGML and HyTIME, which were interactive, multimedia, distributed, and time based. However, these were too complex. A competent programmer would take six months to write a parser for SGML. This led to the development of HTML and XML, which are much quicker to develop. However, Ryan argued that SGML and HyTIME gave us all the technologies we needed.

At this point Ryan paused to look back and flesh out this period. He referred to SAKI (the Self Adaptive Keyboard Instructor) developed in 1956, and PLATO developed in 1959. Come the 1960, they even had TUTOR, which was a programming language which allowed you to write learning design.

Ryan then moved forward again to 1974, when email, chat rooms, instant messaging, and groupware emerged. He observed that by 1983, 40% of elementary schools and 83% of secondary schools in the US used some form of digital technology in the classroom.

Between 1989 – 2000 there was a lot of interesting learning objects. Cisco did a lot of work on reusable learning objects (RLO) and reusable information objects (RIO). We’ve now done away with these too in order to move on to OER, which brought us up to date.

Ryan concluded that we have been distracted by the Internet, but we haven’t learned anything and we need to look back to all those earlier developments.