LearningSpace

I know that Sassoon wrote 'A Soldiers' Declaration' to his commanding officer, but I also know that he hoped it would be channelled through to being read in the House of Commons.  One must assume that he had some kind of relationship with his CO and had he expected the communication to stop with that person, he would most likely have used personal words like "you", or "we".

I can't help imagining that he would have discussed his intention to write this protest, or at least his feelings about the change in direction from war of liberation to war of conquest with the CO, he must have had some kind of personal relationship with him, whether it was good or bad is unknown to me.  The fact that the CO turned a blind eye to it is not necessarily an indication of a bad relationship, it may be that he felt he was protecting Sasson from himself.  The medical record shows that the MO held a certain sympathy towards him, he took pains to point out that Sassoon was not a pacificist (not a popular position to hold at the time), only concerned about the way the war was being conducted. Presumably the CO would have held some views about this as well.

Sasson opens with "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance" .. to me a statement is something issued when the author wants to make a point, not debate it.  He is leaving the debate to the potential reader(s). Asking them to think about what he is saying. His own mind is made up. 

Wilful defiance:
Is he quoting something that has been said to him about his attitude? Or was the use of these words a sort of youthful grandstanding.  Or a means of drawing attention to his statement? Wilful and defiance are very strong, dramatic words, they are also the sort of thing that might have appeared on a public schoolboy's report.

Suffering, sacrifice and agony are used in relation to the soldiers, I have to question why civilians are not considered here, and wonder whether this was deliberate?  Sensibilities were different in those days so maybe not.  Today we get figures on numbers of civilian casualties alongside military, were civilian casualties reported during 1914-1918?  Suffering, sacrifice and agony are very strong, emotional words, as well as being dramatic.

Deliberately, insincerity, evil, unjust, error, complacence, callous are all directed at the "military authority" in his opening which is a nice side step from directly blaming the Members of the House of Commons, those people he wanted to influence. I noted his ambition was for this staement to reach the Commons and not the Lords....

The 1914-18 war was the first to be the focus of mass-media attention. Should a statement like this be debated in the Commons, it is very likely that it would rapidly be reproduced in the press, thus reaching a far wider audience.

In just 5 short paragraphs he was:

1. Dramatic, drawing attention

2 & 3. Expositional, stating his case

4. Accusing and conciliatory (not protesting the war, but how it is being managed - an ideal banner for a politician  in the Opposition to fly). 

5. Asking and accusing

So, did he suit his words to his audience?  I think so. 

He was aiming at House of Commons, which I would suppose to be comprised of representatives of the "Tommies" and middle-ranking officers rather than the higher-ranking officers who would be most likely from the class that either had connections with Members of the House of Lords, or at least aspirations to be connected with them)

There is ammunition there for an ambitious politician trying to make a name for himself to take up the case and gain a great deal of public support from the growing number of families who had been decimated. The language is formal, the case is made quickly and a solution is offered. Any no-brain political hack could make use of this.

The statement is also in the form of a press release, the opening statement is a sub-editor's dream, it is short, it tells a story and it draws the reader in.  The use of dramatic and emotional words throughout the text are in keeping with the editorial style of the times, and confirms to an ideal two inches of double column, which is just about the right size to reproduce along with some editorial comment.

Base Details

If I were fierce and bald and fat and round
Living with scarlet majors at the base
Speeding young heroes down the line to death
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotels
Reading the roll of honour
Poor young chap, I'd say
I used to know his father well

And when the war is over and youth stone dead
I'd toddle safely home and die, in bed

 

That's what I remember of the first work by Sassoon I came across when I was in first year of secondary school. It's stuck with me for 40 years. I  typed this in without checking the original text. No punctuation until the end because for me the words "in bed" were the punchlne.  I'm going to look up the poem again to see how wellI remembered it.

The point of this exercise is to illustrate to anybody who reads this and to myself the way Sassoon's use of short statements had the power to embed themselves in the mind of the reader.

OU Annotate was released to all OU students and staff on Wednesday.  Well, technically it had been open to all of them from the previous week, but we made a song and dance about it on Wednesday.

So far, I've not had any reports of the server falling over, so that's a good start!

I've been keeping an eye on things, and did some number crunching and thought I'd share...

• The number of annotations has increased 2-fold since release
• The number of users has increased 8-fold since release (lots of lurkers then)
• Around 40% of the annotations added have been deleted (lots of "hello world" I guess)
• Almost all the annotations are private; there's small but significant use of public and share-by-group
• 90% of the annotations are highlights rather than bookmarks, and only 1 used the accessible creation form rather than the toolbar (still at least 1 did, or I'd wonder why I built it!)
• 70% of annotations have comments attached
• 25% of annotations changed the highlight colour
• 20% of annotations are on non-OU content
• There is small takeup of the rating and tagging features, but again, they have been used so I think it was worth building them!

So, there's been some use of every key feature that we built - except for the Alert tool, and I'm pretty glad about that not getting used!

A very satisfying first few days

My thoughts or feelings about Extract 1 and 2 are, they both are merely opinions. In my opinion, today's students are more attentive about their study even It is a little bit tough to do for them because so many influences surrounding them. Everyday the tecnology keeps growing faster because of their knowing something and use their intellegence to run it. It depends how the person to absorb influences.

I am a kind of believing that Fb is frying our brain because so many opinions are gathering together in the same times

I think the technology has helped me to read and write in a new ways from earlier generation

I would like to say something to writers that their opinions are absolutely right. It is us to decide for being good or bad

 

 

 

Following on from my investigations into the learning registry, Phil Barker sparked a thought in my mind about what place annotations have as paradata, and particularly whether there is useful usage information in the OUAnnotate database that could be shared.

The first stumbling block is ... what web addresses should I report on, or in other words what exactly is a learning object. Anything can be annotated, so does its use in connection with a learning and teaching tool make the item a learning object? News sites, wikipedia, blog posts, youtube, ...  Would users of the registry expect to see data on such pages, and would they want to do anything with it?

Secondly, just because the data is gathered by a system run by the OU, does that give us the right to report on annotations on pages not run by us? Sites like Jorum will offer clickthrough paradata to openlearn into the uk experimental node and that's sort of the same.  But we know about each other, and we already have an agreement for Jorum to list OpenLearn content, but no-one has agreed that we can annotate their content and most sites will be unaware of the registry.

Thirdly, we expect most use of OU Annotate will be on our own learning & teaching systems and module websites.  These are only visible to students enrolled on those modules.  So we'd be reporting usage data on pages that no-one else can see.  Isn't that rather pointless?

Maybe it would make sense to report on annotations about OpenLearn and other public OU sites, but going further than that makes me nervous.

So, having decided to share something, how much could we share? Fred Bloggs marked this text with a yellow highlight, the tag 'rubbish' and the comment 'patently incorrect' or John Doe said that this paragraph clearly explained to him the concept of z would be useful data about a resource, as would Anna Todd bookmarked page t.  But if they don't tag or comment, and only highlight, is that any use to anyone but them?

And revealing their names might be a breach of our users' privacy since we've not told them we'll share with a world-wide audience.

At the opposite end of the spectrum x people annotated y is probably meaningless.

We could anonymise perhaps "user 312 said...", or "user 50 tagged with", "user 567 bookmarked".  And maybe don't submit the highlight only annotations?

 

 

Yesterday I spent the day in Manchester hearing about the UK's experimental node of the Learning Registry and talking to people who either want to publish data into it or write services based on the data in it.

A range of different options were available to me to get LearningSpace data in.  The simplest way seems to be to run a python script which will wrap my existing OAI service (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/local/oai/oai2.php?verb=Identify) in the JSON notation required to submit to the registry.  The biggest drawback here is that the OU doesn't have a centrally serviced python system (it would have to be a box under my desk) so that's not really the sort of thing I can advocate as a sustainable solution!

Or I could write a PHP version of the python wrapper.  But if I'm going to write PHP, it seemed to me to be better (more reliable, quicker) to get the data directly an put it in the JSON notation rather than get it through a third script.  This also allows me to extend our submission with paradata.

Yes, I now know (thanks to yesterday and very nice people commenting on my previous post) what paradata is!  Its usage data about units.  At first I thought "why would I want to do that" and we had some discussions about statistics all being lies anyway.  After all, what does a page view really tell you about some-one's experience with OpenLearn.  And page views counted by Moodle are different to those counted by Google Analytics too, so which would you list?  The ratings and reviews are much more informative as are the downloads.  So hopefully that's what we'll do, including page views from Moodle, just because we can and people like big numbers.

On the subject of big numbers, Pat and I discussed whether you should do an "everything up to now" first submission and then regular (monthly say) updates, which I could do using the date part of the activity stream.  The first one would be the first released date of the unit to today, and then you'd do 1-31 January type submissions.  Nice idea, but because of the volume of activity on LearningSpace I don't have easy access to log data back beyond about a year.  So I think we'll just start with the most recent full calendar month (or release date to end month for any units released recently).

One rather scary thing is that there is no delete in the Learning Registry, so if I publish a test entry it will be there for all to see.  That means the only time I can really test a full run of all LearningSpace materials will be on our live site as I don't want any development or test platform URLs getting "out there".  This doesn't fit with our normal development practice of only letting fully tested code onto the live system.  Fingers crossed then!

So where next?  Well I've written up all my notes and handed them over to our LearningSpace maintenance team. Hopefully they'll complete the prototype and launch it over the next month or two.   Its back to the day job of launching OU Annotate and working out how to get LearningSpace off Moodle 1.9 for me.

Look out for another post on the subject of OU Annotate and the Learning Registry soon when I've had a chance to mull over another interesting conversation with Phil Barker from yesterday.

Write one paragraph describing a place where you have worked. Describe how the people used their tools, machines or other equipment.

 

You didn't realize how much the place stank until you were at home, then you would notice an odd smell on your clothes or in your hair and you wouldn't recognize it. Then the next day the same thing would occur and you could only conclude that it had been the school somehow.

Whether everyone smelled the smell I can't say. But I did. Not every day but on particularly bad days i could not stand the smell and would practically have to drownd myself to ride the air around me of the smell.

Write a scene in which two characters are quarrelling about the setting. One wants to stay and the other wants to leave.

"Come one Jackson there is nothing here." She complained. Jackson who must have been her boyfriend shoved her off and turned down another ilse of books. He touched the back of several as though they were sacred.

She coughed and stomped after him glareing around at everyone. "Really Jackson there is nothing here but old books that ought to be burned."

The bookstore became quiet. It was small so the lack of sound made it feel much smaller. The four or five devouted custumers turned to look at her and she glared hautily back.

Jackson rubbed dust from off a shelf. "I suppose Mel was right." He said softly.

"Mel?" The girl asked. "What's he got to do with this trashy place?"

"Mel told me, you and I wouldn't work."

The girl stared at him in silence. It seemed that those words had stopped her brain. Jackson vanished down another isle of books leaving a trail of dust behind him.

 

Today I have begun the Intermediate free course on Decribing Motion Along a Line S207_2. So glad I found it.  So far tonight I have done a few hours and have 'gotten' everything covered so far.  So off to a good start to my journey into physics.

I have taken plenty of notes so far and will continue to do so  Now its 4am and off to bed.

Completed first course, an initiation into the UK-RED! Also SHARP 2011. An introduction to reading in the past, Perhaps could haver been done in an hour, but RED too fascinating.

A while back some-one suggested that LearningSpace content ought to be listed in the Learning Registry.  This happens a lot!  In most cases, we just tell the repository owners where our OAI-PMH feeds and all courses RSS feeds are and leave them to it.

It appears that the Learning Registry will be a bit different, because it prefers a JSON input and that's not a service we currently offer from OpenLearn.

The Learning Registry community are very nice though, and the developer google group is quite active.  I've been given a python script which converts OAI to JSON for submission.  Shame I don't know any python and its not on the OU's supported technologies list.  I've also been given some PHP samples which will get me part of the way there (specifically signing the envelope).

This is sort of a back-burner project for me, and my email is full of "ought to read this.." links to possible tools I could integrate or borrow from (thanks mostly to @kavubob).

So in order to kick start it and focus a bit more (for at least a day), I'm going to the CETIS Learning Registry UK contributors and JLeRN event in Manchester on the 23rd Jan which is a CETIS event to get developers to talk together about working with the UK node of the registry.  I'm looking forward to seeing a few familiar faces, wrestling with metadata issues once again and maybe when I get back I'll understand a bit more about the jargon I just spouted!

Oh and if any-one can tell me the difference between metadata and paradata?

03/04/12

dear journal entry i just joined this new website and they are very godd and helpful i think i am going to stay here for a while.i want to write for movies when i  finish college

Feedback

In your notebook, as an ongoing exercise, try Monique Roffey's method of building character outlines to flesh out your characters and see how much you can discover about them.

Use headings:

• Physical/biological: age, height, size, state of health, assets, flaws, sexuality, gait, voice.

• Pyschological: intelligence, temperament, happiness/unhappiness, attitudes, self-knowledge, unconscious aspects.

• Interpersonal/cultural: family, friends, colleagues, birthplace, education, hobbies, beliefs, values, lifestyle.

• Personal history: major events in the life, including the best and the most traumatic.

 

 

I'm not going to do this activity because it feels wrong to me. Everyone is always saying create this pedigree of them. Know everything about them.But it's not all that acurate.

I mean creating a character is like meeting a new person. And in real life you'd never walk up to someone you'd never met and ask them for their most traumatic moments in their life.

It's rude. You have to get to know the person first. Then you ask them questions. You first observe that person in their element you become closer to them and learn more.

And you ought to do that with you characters too. Just stick them in a story. Write about them getting up in the morning. Observe them just like you do real  people when you first meet them.

After that you start asking question but I feel you should never do this first. It goes against human nature and if you writing about humans how can you get it right if you're going against human nature? 

In the forum for the unit 'Motion under gravity S103_3' Anne-Marie Hillock posted the note “If the gravitational force Fg experienced by an object is proportional to its mass m then why Saturn with a mass of 95.159 (based on earth mass 1) has only a gravitational force of 9.0 m/s/s while on Earth it is 9.8m/s/s. What I am no taking into consideration?” The brief discussion that follows comes to no firm conclusion.

This set me thinking.

The discussion for activity 1 states “The magnitude of the gravitational force increases when the masses of the objects increase, and it decreases as their separation increases.”

The following paragraph reads “The gravitational force that you experience depends on the mass of the Earth, and on the separation between you and the mass of the Earth. For a large (approximately) spherical object like the Earth, it is the separation between you and the centre of the Earth that is relevant, and this separation is essentially the same for all objects close to the Earth's surface.”

I discovered that the mean radius of the Earth is 6.3710 x 10⁶ m and that of Saturn is 5.8232 x 10⁷ m¹. So Saturn's radius is roughly 10 times that of the Earth. From the quote from the text of the unit this is equivalent to saying that the separation to use when calculating F_g for Saturn is 10 times greater than the seperation that applies for an object on Earth.

This does not explain Anne-Marie's observation.

However, the discussion from activity 1 does not include an important fact from Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. This says that the force of gravitational attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the separation of the bodies². This means that the impact of Saturn's larger radius is to reduce the gravitational force arising from its mass by a factor of approximately 100 at its surface.

95/100 is a close approximation to 1. This means that the effect of Saturn's greater mass on its gravitational force very nearly counterbalances the effect of the greater separation due to its size. As a result the value of F_g acting on some mass close to the surface of Saturn will be very similar to the value of F_g acting on the same mass close to the surface of Earth.

From the unit, F_g = ma where m is mass and a is the acceleration due to gravity. Therefore, for F_g to have similar values close to the surface of both planets it must be that the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of both planets is also very similar.

That's the observation that started me on this investigation in the first place!

Thanks Anne-Marie, I really enjoyed this piece of work.

 

I've spent a very brief amount of time today investigating the licence choice screen in moodle 2, and seeing what it affects.

I'd had high hopes for this screen when I saw it first pop into the codebase, but I'm feeling a little let down right now.  I can't help wondering if I missed the point somewhere?

In my dev site, I set the sitewide default to CC-BY-NC-SA to match OpenLearn.  I'm still using the standard theme, but no CC icon appeared on the page anywhere.  So, if I create a course, I should be able to say which licence it has right?  Wrong.  Ditto any activity within a course.

At which point I started searching the codebase for use of the config variables to see if I could work out whether the screen controlled *anything*.

It seems to do "stuff" with the community hubs "publish this course" and course finder block.  I will probably post more about those another day.

And whenever I upload or use a file, I can set and see what its license is.  But it is never displayed on the course home page or used to restrict or open access to the file.

This licence choice could be very powerful for Open Educational Resources.  I'd like to see the licence icon displayed prominently for each course/page/activity/asset, and that if the license is open the access permissions for the item could be different and less restrictive, and that items with open licenses would be discoverable through RSS or OAI services, open to search engines, include additional RDF metadata.

I'm hoping some-one will tell me that I've missed the point (or a setting) somewhere, but I think it needs a fair amount of development yet for it to reach that point.

For the last year I've been working hard on our Moodle 2 VLE for students and on our new web annotation system.

Those projects have now come to an end and although my colleagues will be continuing to maintain and improve those systems, I will be turning my attention back to OpenLearn.

My first task is to take a look at how to move LearningSpace away from its Moodle 1.9 platform before it is no longer supported.

There's a lot to think about over the next few months as we plan out how to do it.

We want to take advantage of the opportunity to try to make things better.  So we're looking at which features of LearningSpace are most popular, what works well and what doesn't.

If you have any opinions that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you.

Pretty nice here.

We always expected it, and I know tutors are worried about OU Annotate adding a new place that they feel they need to keep an eye on for student comment, but I'm surprised at how quickly we're seeing OU Annotate used to give feedback about page content.

Let me say now that we do not expect tutors to moderate activity on OU Annotate.  That's why there's an "alert" feature, so students can report things to us.  We also do not expect tutors to engage in dialog with students about annotations, though I can understand why a dedicated tutor might feel that it is a good idea to do so.  For now, OU Annotate is a "personal tool" not indended to be required as a part of study.  In the same way, we don't expect tutors to look at their students personal blog posts.

Last week I blogged that OU Annotate had gone live to a select group of students.  Just a few hours later, someone had annotated my post!  If you have access to OU Annotate, you can go and look.  If not, the annotation was on the phrase "February is the bigger unveiling to all students, with some extra features that we've nearly finished." and the comment made was "I'd like to hear more about what these extra features are..I hope it will be on the blog."

This isn't the only example of early use of the new system to provide feedback.  There's some on the student user guide for the VLE too.  As an author, its an odd feeling to see someone "write" on your work.  Very direct.  On balance, I think its a good thing, but definitely unnerving.

And it definitely provokes a response!  So here, for Will and any-one else who's interested is the list of features coming in February.

In the toolbar:

• slip of the mouse created an annotation you don't want?  One click immediate delete option
• tried to load on a site with frames and nothing happened?  explanation message added
• move the end points of existing highlights - including merging annotations together
• copy some-one else's highlight to annotate the same words
• give an annotation a rating to show you like it, see a count of "likes" for each annotation
• automatic and user methods for fixing broken annotations (where the page has changed)

In the manager:

• view your own and other people's profile, not just followers
• a tag cloud
• give an annotation a rating to show you like it, see a count of "likes" for each annotation, sort by most liked, most liked block
• rss and atom feeds of recently shared and most liked annotations
• export to Google docs or RTF options
• select subset of displayed annotations for export, paged download for large exports
• advanced search - filter by highlight colour, author, url, date etc
• alter the number of items displayed in each block
• accessibility & usability improvements

 

OU Annotate went live on Monday. http://students.open.ac.uk/annotate/

There I've said it.  Publicly.

I've been sitting here quietly watching the database for a few days to see what happened but now I'm just about feeling brave enough to mention it to you.

When I say "went live", we are in pilot mode which means that students of a few courses, plus all OU staff including tutors.  February is the bigger unveiling to all students, with some extra features that we've nearly finished.  I'm not sure when we'll go live for OpenLearners; probably not until next summer.

So far use and feedback has been minimal.  There are around 50 user accounts, just under the hundred annotations and one tag(!) in the system.

Pretty much all the annotations are experimental rather than course activity, though I expect to see that change soon.

Over 75% of annotations so far are private.  The public ones are all totally public - no group/course sharing yet.  Hope its working!!

A similar percentage of annotations have been made with the toolbar - which I think is low, we expected use of the "create annotation" form to be almost vanishingly small.  One to watch that!

I'll be watching the database for a while yet, as we try to work out what people are doing with their new toy.  Hope you like it.