Notes from the digital frontier

SOFTWARE will free teachers to revolutionise their craft after hundreds of years.

NOVELIST Patrick O'Brian and the creators of musical notation deliver e-learning expert James Dalziel images of language that help the Macquarie University academic explain one of his own preoccupations. The 19th-century sailing ship terminology O'Brian loaded into his 20-book Master and Commander series, and the way in which music was recorded on the page from about the baroque period onward, are examples of brilliant communication.

Dalziel hopes this kind of virtuosity will one day be normal in classrooms, that enough will be known about how people learn so there will be a nomenclature for lesson plans that can be "played" like music, instructions so clear students and teachers will easily scramble up and down the rigging of high-quality learning.

"We don't need to represent everything but enough so that other people can replicate and interpret," he says. If the work he leads at his Macquarie E-Learning Centre of Excellence in Sydney continues to prosper, this will occur, along with other goals.

Such as the Learning Activity Management System he developed with the assistance of his team. This elegant, nimble software delivers a rare thing, an online classroom that coexists with the physical one, where even students who wouldn't usually put up their hands to contribute aloud are happy to type their comments and feed them into a chat room.

Accustomed as we are to technical genius, it may come as a surprise to discover that e-learning has struggled to provide such sophisticated tools. Indeed, it is simple to load course material on to a website for distance students: this passive use of the technology is the traditional view of how e-learning can best be used.

But to build software that allows students to zip between a constantly updated class forum and other sequenced activities including, say, using a search engine and back again, and to enable the teacher to monitor all of it on their own screen as it happens, demands expertise of a whole other order of magnitude.

Not only has it been hard to create the software enabling teachers to construct lesson plans with relative ease but Dalziel's team has also devised the technology for teachers to share their work on a website where it is available to others in an online community.

"A range of projects have tried to do something similar; most have found it extremely difficult to build. A lot of projects never got out of the research and development phase or were too complex and never had wide adoption," Dalziel says.

In the process of proving that service, the issue of language arises. LAMS and other systems similar to it, Dalziel says, are "our early attempts at a representational framework for the teaching and learning process".

"When you get two teachers together and one tries to explain to the other what they did today, they find it almost impossible. We talk in such an unstructured and fluid way. What happened, in what order, how long did it take, who did what at each step?"

"We do not really have a language to write down what happens in education: it's a fundamental problem. Astonishingly we have been doing education for hundreds of years and we don't know how to write it down."

Thus he was struck when looking at an original Bach score that it was the rules of notation that made it possible for him, a modern man, to read it. "Suddenly, hundreds of years later, looking at a Bach manuscript, I knew exactly the intent of the composer because we had got to a point where notation was read enough and there were enough rules. We don't yet have a descriptive language for the process of education.

"LAMS was the first piece of software to grow out of a way of thinking that attempted to describe it in a rigorous and technical way.

Listening to Dalziel requires a sharpened capacity to deal with acronyms -- he is apologetic about using them but unable to stop -- and it crosses the mind that it's another form of communication that makes sense in his coded world, where there are so many things on the go, a shorthand of sorts is inevitable.

To LAMS and MELCOE add these former and present projects of his: the 2002 $1.1million COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services consortium) and the $4.2 million MAMS (Meta Access Management System). The first, now complete, showed Australian universities how to integrate their e-learning and library systems; the second aims to provide the technology for them to unify systems such as e-learning, library and finance under one name and password. Both were funded by the commonwealth and all help provide the foundation for the most important acronym, the DER, for digital education revolution.

Dalziel describes himself as a "digital native". His father helped him buy his first computer second-hand, for $300, when he was eight. That's not so long ago, given he will be 37 this year.

When he contemplated a career, he chose psychology over music (he is a pianist and drummer) because "it is a good grounding for lots of things, it makes you think carefully and critically". Starting on the academic ladder in the mid-1990s, when the internet was taking off, he devised some e-learning for the introductory psychology course he was organising at the University of Sydney.

He saw its broader potential for education and, with a partner, started a company, WebMCQ. He also part owns, with Macquarie University, a spin-off company, LAMS International, which provides support for the free LAMS software.

"WebMCQ started off offering educational technology for universities, but we ended up doing most work in the corporate market, helping companies design online training for staff," he says of the earlier venture.

"A lot of people used to assume e-learning was about distance education, and it has been used for that, but it's also been very widely used on campuses as an adjunct to face to face classes. But the vast majority of people used it for e-administration instead of e-learning, to store lecture slides, course documents, for course announcements, not for learning with the technology."

His frustration with that and his conviction that software could enhance how learning was done was the starting point for LAMS, whose brief was to build a sequence of activities structured for the participation of students.

"The other driver was that even with a great set of activities in the current platform, there was no way of sharing them with other teachers," he says.

Thus MELCOE, set up in 2003 with Dalziel as its director, to "put together" the next generation of e-learning.

LAMS has been translated into 25 languages and there are about 3200 users in 90 countries. He has no idea how many people are using the software but estimates thousands of educators.

Dalziel envisages an educational repertoire, created by sharing content and methodology, that will help revolutionise teaching.

"Some e-learning was about replacing the teacher and I have always felt passionately that's the wrong way to go. What we want to do is give teachers a broader and much more critical role in designing activities they are going to do with students with technology.

"The other thing we want is for teachers to share experiences and develop good practices rather than rely on textbook publishers."

Part of that is making it as easy as possible for teachers to use. "I'm always driving my software team around the bend, saying: 'No teacher would want to do that!"'

Dalziel sees unlimited potential for LAMS-learning: "I'm so excited by the impact of what I'm doing I want to see it to fruition."

For him, it's a digital heaven, a classroom where learning is maximised and teachers can share methods as well as content with minimal effort, using a shared language. But more is needed, he says.

"LAMS together with other systems for teaching and research need to be part of one secure network for their use to be maximised," Dalziel says. "The MAMS project already provides a test-bed for this."

Hence the Australian Access Federation project, led by the University of Queensland and Macquarie University, which will formalise agreements required for universities to access data within and between each other, starting next year.

The use of one name and password via the MAMS software, or its equivalent, will dispense with the multiple layers of security that obstruct teaching and research.

"So far in Australia the federation is mainly focused on the research sector," Dalziel says. "The idea is for teachers and researchers to use only one name and one password to log on and they can get access to their online courses or workspaces through one secure network."

There is one other dream: to push back the barriers to education even further. Thus it is not surprising he is part of the worldwide push towards a system of open education, in which resources, technology and teaching practices in education are all freely available.

But he acknowledges there is a long way to go before publishers and institutions will come on board for that idea. For the next five to 10 years the task is to keep improving LAMS, to see it to achieve its full potential, to see it spread. Meanwhile, the technology to deliver it to everyone, everywhere, in an affordable form will develop, probably via hand-held devices that can be online all the time.

"People have dreamed of the day when every student would have a computer device always on the network. Our software will be even more useful then," Dalziel says.