Periodic Fable

Tuesday, 28 November 2006

The future of learning....

Blog entry: 28th November 2016

It’s going to be a busy day today.

The big event of the day of course for me is my PhD viva which will be taking place in the University’s main campus within Second Life. My interviewers and supervisors will be logging in from Hunter Valley, Sydney; Vancouver, Canada; and Rimini, Italy. The one thing technology can't change is the rotation of the earth. It's been difficult finding a time to have it - poor Sharon will still have to get up at 6 am to join in!

It’s been hard work completing a PhD on reflective practice with technology when it has been such a fast-changing arena. When I started, reflection was about notebooks, text-based discussion boards and blogs; now audio, video and animation are routine and reflection on learning is as likely to happen in LifeSpace or YouVid as in an application on a University server. Thank goodness for the new Open Source SynchLife software that enables everyone to keep track of, tag, categorise and make available any or all of their personal content wherever it is on the Net. The MyPortfolio add-on is a godsend to academics.

Who’d have thought when the BDRA opened the Second Life campus for the University ten years ago that we would now have ten times as many students in Second Life as we do for “traditional” online distance learning – and twenty times as many as on the RL campus itself. Leicester really did well to be first in this field. Courses can be paid for in Linden dollars – a currency used by nearly as many people as the euro these days!

Tomorrow’s my book launch – now that’s REALLY strange. It may be based on over two thousand contributing authors’ comments via a website, include animation and video from 83 amateurs on the web, and be a multidimensional multimedia narrative with linked icasts and free bodyset for accessing the associated virtual reality immersive environment, but it’s still called a “book”.

Still, it's great that technology now allows me to work full-time from my favourite island in the world. That view across to the castle lifts my spirits every single time I look at it, though when I walk over there along the shore the wind tends to play havoc with my virtual keyboard as I'm trying to facilitate my students' e-tivities.

posted by Helen Whitehead 12:11 PM

(0) comments

Theories /Practices of Blogging

An interesting post for blog fans on the Writing-and-the-Digital-Life blog alerting us to the Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture themed issue: Vol. 6, No. 4 (2006), Theories/Practices of Blogging

posted by Helen Whitehead 11:25 AM

(0) comments

The difference between a blog and a wiki

Derek Morrison posted a great description of the difference between the HEA Benchmarking/Pathfinder projects' blog and wiki on the HEA Pathfinder blog

Although specific to the project, his compare and contrast had a lot of relevance to the general difference between blogs and wikis - so here is his explanation, edited to be more generic:

So why a wiki as well as [a] weblog? The simple answer is that they can complement each other.

First let’s consider the weblog.
A weblog posting is usually presented in reverse chronological order and clearly identifies a single author (or information owner) as the originator of the posting. Readers are usually able to comment on the posting with their comments appearing in chronological sequence beneath the primary posting, i.e. blog readers can respond to but not edit the posting. The single originator + commentary model is perhaps at its most appropriate in a ‘thought leader’ or project management context, i.e. an initiative is facilitated if the source of information, perspectives or stimuli for debate are seen to be coming from a known, perhaps authoritative, and hopefully respected, source.

Now let’s consider the wiki.

The wiki provides an opportunity for collaborative authoring, editing and development of a web information source. The editing rights mean that account holders can modify or enhance any of anyone else’s information with the updated page taking precedence. Although the idea of someone editing or even deleting part of someone else’s intellectual outpourings may make authors with no previous wiki experience nervous, the wiki also provides a version history facility so that it becomes possible to ‘roll back’ to a previous version of the page and so compare the current version with previous work. So the wiki becomes a collaborative development opportunity with versioning built in. In a fully open wiki, malicious defacement or alteration of wiki web pages (as well as spam) can be a problem although an active wiki community soon repairs any such damage. An ‘invitation only’ wiki allows only registered users to author or edit.

So what uses could we put a Wiki to? A couple come to mind. Because a wiki facilitates the collaborative development of thoughts, ideas, concepts, and information then a Wiki could perhaps make a contribution here.
It's not necessary to try and develop the whole of an online resource, but instead only focus on developing/initiating a small part of it.

posted by Helen Whitehead 10:56 AM

(0) comments

Monday, 27 November 2006

Software in Education - Open Source or not?

John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons entitled Software in Education, number 179.

"That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market."

One interesting site about the pro-open source option for schools is the Open Schools Alliance www.openschoolsalliance.org

posted by Helen Whitehead 11:49 AM

(0) comments

Wednesday, 8 November 2006

Dublin

We spent a lovely long weekend in Dublin 4-6 November 2006.

Recommendations if you ever visit there:

Hotel: Trinity Capital - situated very centrally indeed, near Trinity College (but above a fire station)

Pubs:
The Duke, Duke Street
Bailey's, Duke Street
Davy Byrne's, Duke Street
The Halfpenny Inn, Temple Bar
O'Neill's, opposite Tourist Information Office, Suffolk Street

Tours:
Literary Pub Crawl
Musical Pub Crawl
Over the Top Tours: Celtic Experience

Eating & Shopping
Avoca store, Suffolk Street - cafe top floor, food hall in the basement. Scrummy!

And not forgetting the Book of Kells

posted by Helen Whitehead 10:51 AM

(0) comments

Gibbs' Reflective Cycle

Learning is most effective when time is taken to think through the process and impact of experiences and to attempt to make sense of thoughts, feelings and reactions. Such reflection can enable the learner to identify patterns, resolve uncertainties and make decisions for tackling new situations in the future.

A number of models have been devised to illustrate cycles of reflection and one of these was the Reflective Cycle developed by Gibbs. It's used a lot in training healthcare professionals to become reflective practitioners.

Gibbs G (1988) Learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. Cheltenham: The Geography Discipline Network. Available to download
http://www2.glos.ac.uk/gdn/gibbs/ (Accessed 08/11/06)

First identify and describe a task, event or experience for reflection, and then rather than simply describing the facts, attempt to answer the following:

Feelings: What were your reactions and feelings?

Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience? – identify positive and negative aspects

Analysis: What sense can you make of the situation and your attitudes to it?
Include here ideas from outside this experience to help you understand what was going on.

Conclusions: What can you conclude from this and other experiences, and the analyses you have undertaken?

Personal Action plans: What will you do differently in this type of situation next time? What action are you going to take on the basis of learning from this experience?

Useful links on reflective practice and Gibbs Reflective Cycle:

Useful resource from Northampton University

Terry King @ University of Portsmouth

A Word document with a useful framework, from Brighton University

posted by Helen Whitehead 10:29 AM

(0) comments