Thursday, 27 September 2007
Links - a bit late! - for week commencing 24th September
From David Bradley, Science writer:
blog and podcasts
http://www.sciencebase.com/
I was looking for an asynchronous whiteboard, because the tool in Blackboard is itnended for use during synchronous sessions.
Online collaborative whiteboard: Skrbl
http://www.skrbl.com/
What we really wanted was a Wiki that could be used as a collaborative mindmap.
I found several reviews of online mindmap tools, and the most useful tool looks like it may be Mindmeister:
http://www.mindmeister.com/
Web 2.0 is truly wonderful. Someone has probably invented the application you're looking for - although it may not work with the others you'd like it to and it may not be free - but it often is free, at least at a basic level! It's a good business model. You only buy into the tools you actually find useful.Labels: collaborative whiteboard, links, mindmap
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:55 AM
Monday, 24 September 2007
Final reflections on the ALT-C conference #2
Marion Miller, Manager, JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire and Humber, University of Leeds, summed up the contributions to the theme: Learning technology for the social network generation.
She made an interesting suggestion that the VLE "has had its day". The focus is moving away from VLEs towards social networks - but we were talking at ALT-C as experimenters - and I doubt that Universities are really ready to junk their VLEs.
Once conclusion from the conference was that staff need to experience these technologies in order to use them effectively for their learners - to take small steps.
Another challenge is that of learners not being ready for Web 2.0 - not willing to reflect publicly in a blog, not comfortable with editing one another's texts, not even comfortable with technology at all in the case of the growing numbers of mature and work-based students.
Our own wiki-tivities workshop went really well. I made copious notes on other sessions about wikis, to see if their experiences supported our model, and indeed they did. Some examples:
Phil Cheeseman from Roehampton talked about the need to
* provide structure and scaffolding, and
* design activities that provide explicit opportunities for collaboration
Richard Walker and Wayne Britcliffe from York spoke about 6 projects - a major and helpful study. These included the points that:
* students made class presentations about their work on the wiki
* there was a need to acknowledge and summarise online contributions
* it was essential to make explicit the learning outcomes
Some of their case studies are available on the York VLESupport website
Attendees at our workshop had generally favourable opinions. More on the wiki-tivities model elsewhere (see, e.g, our presentation on the ALT-C website) and the abstract of the workshop
Some of the conclusions of our participant groups during the workshop:
* wikis can be used for icebreaker activities
* staff need to experience exemplary use of wikis in order to apply them for learning
* there needs to be a "gentle" introduction to having someone edit your text (perhaps a pairs exercise)
* when designing a wiki-tivity it is easy to "start big" and may help to redesign in a "smaller" way - perhaps a series of wiki-tivities in the same wiki rather than just one
* moderating/facilitation is just as important as in other online collaborative spaces
Comments:"I like something definite that students can work with."
"Although I hadn't come this afternoon intending to go back with anything, I have lots of ideas for the staff development course I run."
"The best session I've been to so far."
Oh, and Peter Norvig of Google in his keynote told us Google have partnered with Creative Commons to index all opencourseware which might be useful.Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, Google, wiki-tivities, wikis
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:11 AM
Final reflections on the ALT-C conference #1
I was looking through my notes from the ALT conference and realising that I hadn't quite finished reflecting on the sessions. It seems unfair that the later sessions should miss out on reporting.
I tried to attend some sessions that were relevant to my areas of expertise and some that were new to me. A session on reusable learning objects made me realise that there are some things I know next to nothing about yet. Understanding RLOs requires quite a high degree of technical knowledge in XML etc. I have just enough knowledge to appreciate what the developers were doing, and the principles behind it, and how they can be used - but I don't think I'll be creating RLOs any time soon without further training! One of the sessions covered use of the XML editor (plus) software Xerte, free from Nottingham University.
Generative learning objects were the next new thing - they can be reused to adapt to other uses. One example was a "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" game template which could be used with questions sets from different subject areas.
One of the important messages was to separate design from content so that new content could be easily be put in. I certainly found that the case at NCSL last year when I was editing the XML files in the introduction to learning course to update the content: I didn't have to alter too much of the Flash.
Finally, I learned about umbrella learning objects (ULOs)
Key features of RLOs:
* can be placed in a different course or VLE
* can be edited by the tutor to update it (not just by a techie)
* can be repurposed, e.g., in a different subject area
My favourite session was an early morning session on Mobile technologies for Learning and Assessment. Gareth Firth from the ALPS CETL and Rob Arntsen from MyKnowledgeMap told us about the use of PDAs for learning and assessment (both summative and formative) in IPE by students during hospital placements.
We got to play with the PDAs, download a video, take a picture and upload it to a website. An internet-ready PDA went immediately on my birthday list - unfortunately the cost of using the mobile internet probably means I won't use it much! The PDAs in the study were run on an unlimited data contract and text and voice were disabled. Ultimately, text and voice should be billable to the students themselves while data is still paid for by the institution. I AM going to get one though.
Interesting to think of students accessing their assessments everywhere from hospital (are they actually allowed to use mobile devices in all hospitals?) to home to Tesco! (The pharmacists in the study were working on placement in supermarket pharmacies.)
Reasons for using mobile technology include:
* record assessment IN the workplace
* don't need to re-key anything later, e.g., reflections
* integrates with VLEs, e-portfolios, etc.
I learned more from this than from Dylan Wiliams keynote, also about assessment, because his was about assessment in the classroom. Still very important, but perhaps not as exciting as in Tesco!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, inter-professional education, IPE, m-learning, mobile learning, PDAs, reusable learning objects, RLO
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:34 AM
Friday, 21 September 2007
Libraries and Librarians in the Blogosphere
Here are some of the most representative library blogs I've found. Some librarian blogs are among the best blogs I've read. Must be something about librarians and information... From the UK, USA and Australia.
Peter Scott’s Library Blog http://xrefer.blogspot.com/ Links
Cambridge University Medical Library http://cambridgemedicallibrary.blogspot.com/ Facts
Spineless (Heriot Watt) http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/ Facts and Opinions
ILS Blog, University of Worcester http://www2.worc.ac.uk/wordpress/ Opinions
Library Suggestion Blog (Virginia Commonwealth) http://blog.vcu.edu/libsuggest/
Theoretical Librarian http://theoretical-librarian.blogspot.com/ Occasional
Eclectic Librarian opinions http://www.eclecticlibrarian.net/blog/archives/000851.html
Hey Jude (Winner of Best Library Blog in the EduBlog awards 2006) http://heyjude.wordpress.com/
The L Files http://bulibrary.blogspot.com/ Facts and Opinions
Plus some examples of types of blog
•Academic blog – the Adelie blog
•Group blog – Leeds University e-learning
•Personal blog – Stephen Downes
•Business blog – iQubed blog
•Conference blog – Women Business & BloggingLabels: academic blogs, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, librarian, librarian blogs, librarians, libraries, library, library blogs
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:40 AM
Wednesday, 19 September 2007
Learning from Greece...
A librarian colleague told me today about her success in using a new presentation technique.
The Introduction to the library and how to use it probably isn't one of the most exciting things that happen to new students in Fresher's Week ... so no doubt librarians in Universities up and down the country are trying to make their sessions more interesting and engaging.
The Kefalonian Technique worked well for my colleague. It was adapted by a librarian from a presentation by holiday reps in Greece. It sounds like it's adaptable to a wide variety of presentations where facts have to be got across.
Firstly, lively music is played as the attendees come into the room (to wake them up), and something more soothing is played at the end as they leave.
Instead of just going through a series of slides, printed questions are handed out as the attendees enter, and the presenter then asks for the questions which may come in any order. To make sure that certain questions ARE asked in the right order, colours are used, for example, the presenter first asks for a yellow question.
The audience don't know there's only one yellow question: "Who are you?" which obviously has to be first.
Sounds like a good idea to me! Thanks Heather!Labels: librarian, library, library skills, managing sessions, presenter skills, presenting
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:10 PM
Monday, 17 September 2007
Links for week commencing 17th September
Creative Learning Activities with Moodle
Interesting set of slides from Paula de Waal at Padua University about being creative in using the tools available in Moodle. Ideas also applicable for other VLEs - we can all try to be more creative about the tools we've got.
A bit trivial - but an intriguing blog story:
An American "mommy blogger" gained notoriety from this listing on eBay http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=130144061675
You then need to read her blog (which is very funny infact) to see what the notoriety did to her blog hits. http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/
More blogs:
Bioethics Bites - a a collection of resources to assist in the teaching of bioethics. This project was established and is maintained by Chris Willmott at the University of Leicester, UK. There are presently three members of the BioethicsBytes team - Chris, Bonnie Green and David Willis. http://bioethicsbytes.wordpress.com/
And Microbiology Bytes http://microbiologybytes.wordpress.com/ "the latest news about microbiology, in a form that everyone can understand." This site is created by Alan Cann, also at the University of Leicester. He also has a blog entirely about frogs
And also (from Alan Cann's education blog) draft guidelines for using external web 2.0 services from the University of Edinburgh.Labels: blogging, blogs, links
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:45 AM
Friday, 14 September 2007
The wiki way
Here's an interesting article on "the wiki way" from the Guardian.
"Don Tapscott, the author of an eye-opening new book called Wikinomics, says that we have barely begun to imagine how the internet will change the way we live and work. He tells Oliver Burkeman how everything from gold mining to motorcycle manufacturing is being transformed - and why huge companies as we know them may simply cease to exist."
Hmm. I suppose if you're selling a book you have to make big claims. But having seen how many wiki projects fail, I am more cynical...Labels: collaborative working, learning futures, media, Web 2.0, wiki, wikis
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:27 AM
Thursday, 13 September 2007
Spaces still available on Season of Inspiration online writing course
Season of Inspiration online writing course
There are still some spaces left on our latest online writing course
Season of Inspiration
9-week online writing course. Starts 8th October 2007 for 9 weeks.
Join us in making the most of seasonal colours and scents, metaphors of the season, place and time to provide inspiration for writing that'll see you through the rest of the year. We offer support, exercises and creative bolstering. You'll experiment with and collaborate in haiku walks, visual writing, meaningful journalling and capturing the sights and sounds of the season. Dip in and rediscover your creativity. Previous students will find all-new materials, and new students are very welcome.
info@newmediawriting.com
http://www.newmediawriting.com
The techie details - we'll be using Moodle :)Labels: online courses, online learning, season of inspiration, writing, writing courses
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:33 AM
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
How they do mobile learning in Japan...
This is a 2D barcode of the URL of the ELKS community.
Apparently these barcodes are all the range in Japan where people use their web-enabled mobile phones to read them and then surf to the URL. They are used, e.g., on a poster for a radio station to encourage people to listen, on the doors of public libraries to direct users to a page that shows opening hours, or on tutor's offices to direct students to a page that shows opening hours.
As 100% of students have web-enabled mobile phones and data transfer is cheap, they can be used for all sorts of learning applications from voting on which of the videos shown in the lesson they preferred, to assessment quizzes, to sending a question randomly to one of the students in the class (of course - you could just point at one!).
Thanks to Keiso Katsura for introducing me to these tools in a seminar at Leicester University yesterday.Labels: e-learning, elearning, Japan, Keiso Katsura, learning technologies, mobile learning
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:58 PM
Monday, 10 September 2007
Links for week commencing September 10th
Online Tutoring
e-book by Carol Higginson, from 2000
http://otis.scotcit.ac.uk/onlinebook/
Common Ground
"The intersection of art, philanthropy, and the environment."
http://www.commonground2008.com/
EduTools
Old VLE comparison
http://www.edutools.info/item_list.jsp?pj=8
New peer review version
http://www.edutools.info/static.jsp?pj=4&page=HOME
"e-learning - making it work"
A major national one-day conference for the Learning and Skills sector jointly organised by QIA (the Quality Improvement Agency) and ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) on
11 October 2007 at NCSL in Nottingham.
http://www.alt.ac.uk/fepc2005.htmlLabels: links
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:00 AM
Thursday, 6 September 2007
Lessons for ELKS from ALT-C...
I'm the convenor of the ELKS community of practice - that's E-Learning and Knowledge Sharing- and it's a community of expertise in e-learning in HE, which is run for the UN's GAID (Global Alliance for ICT in Development) initiative by BDRA out of the University of Leicester. It has several other institutional founders around the world (4 continents in fact!), and with an Australian Omnium web interface. So there were several people and sessions at ALT which were of interest to me wearing this hat, particularly as one of the strands was e-learning and internationalism.
In a session yesterday afternoon Alannah Fitzgerald spoke about social computing and the sustainable support of learning communities. The community she spoke about met the needs of a very specific niche group - volunteers and workers in micro-credit and micro-lending organisations based on Professor Mohammed Yunus' Grameen Bank model. I guess an international version of the credit unions we have in the UK.
They've created a network of resources etc. aggregating information about successful projects for others to learn, including real and fictional case studies, guiding questions and reflective practice. Really helping to empower individuals and their communities and I'd love to have her talk about to the ELKS community.
I hadn't heard of the software she mentioned to aggregate metatags from the social network - SUPRGLU, must check it out. A feed aggregator for blogs relevant to ELKS would be a great idea for our community.
Karen Robinson discussed her study about how cultural and linguistic backgrounds of students affected their use of e-learning and whether technology could support them better. Her story of the student pasting other people's contributions and his own into a translator before he could post on the forum alerted me to that possible issue in ELKS discussions being entirely in English (though I am thinking of adding Spanish to the mix in some way).
Also, the use of discussion boards requires a higher level of English than listening to lectures and writing essays: and there can be cultural differences in how a forum (for example) actually looks (colour of the background!), let alone the culture of behaving in the online space.
Tore Hoel also had a message for me - "Syndication and aggregation work better that overarching frameworks or platforms." In other words, people don't necessarily want an all-singing all-dancing community that is a new, separate and time-consuming place they have to go and visit - even unique content isn't necessarily appropriate - it may be better to provide an aggregate of information that is appropriate to our project in the ways that members already like to interact.
This morning I heard Marc Dupuis talking about a European virtual campus - lots to learn here about working together, and if within Europe is difficult - going global is even harder! "European collaboration is difficult," he stated - and I have to admit from my experience of EU projects I concur. Copyright and intellectual property are of particular importance across institutions and nations - must get that issue clear for ELKS. Linguistic differences cannot be underestimated. I wonder if lessons from a European project like this can be extrapolated to global collaborative projects?
Chris Douce of the Open University talked about the plethora of standards across Europe for e-learning - so what will the situation be like when you add in the rest of the world? How difficult might it be for us to provide universal simple learning such as online tutoring skills courses or learning objects?
Paul Bacsich reminded us that teaching may be in English but "secret learning" may well be in the students' native language(s) - Arabic in the case of the Arab Open University. He also gave us compelling reasons not to have more than 9 chapters in a report - sage advice!
As next year's ALT theme is about the digital divide, I think it's probably a cue to offer a short paper about ELKS, if we're still going at that point!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, communities of practice, conference, e-learning, ELKS, global, internationalism, UN, UN-GAID
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:06 PM
ALT-C: bloggers on blogging
Blogging as-you-go isn't as easy as I thought. I was too tired last night to blog about yesterday so now I have two days' worth to try to encapsulate!
I've decided I don't like live blogging - I'm too chicken to blog directly into Blogger, and have been trying it by making notes (pen and paper) directly intended for my blog and then typing them up. I find I don't have time to reflect on what the speaker is saying, I just end up copying bits of Powerpoints or random quotes. As soon as you start to reflect and synthesise something, they've moved on and you've missed the last thing they said. And I make so many typing errors and break my concentration by correcting them... Yet if you blog afterwards, you've lost that immediacy and already forgotten things... I guess half an hour in a session followed by half an hour to think and blog is probably the best way, but that's not the way conferences are organised. And I'll always want to reflect, edit and edit again before my blog goes out to the world.
Lots of other ALT attendees are blogging about blogging about their blogging (and so on and so forth!) including David Bryson, James Clay and Steve Wheeler.Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, blogging
posted by Helen Whitehead 4:43 PM
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Tensions between personal space and social space in mobile learning
The session on mobile learning by Dr Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Dr John Cook, Professor Tom Boyle, Mr John Traxler was very interesting. Agnes and her colleagues were good presenters.
I did, however, find my personal devil's advocate surfacing. So much of mobile learning seems to be about the devices, and it seems to me that as technology moves on, and converges, we will all have devices that unite TV, phone and computer technology and we will laugh at the days when we tried to deliver learning via SMS.
I've tried to decide on a meaning for mobile learning - or m-learning before - at much length, with others at a conference. In this presentation it seemed to be mostly about the location interacting with the person - and the person interacting with other people's responses to that same location - great for studying the architecture of a building, or an ecosystem on a field trip, but not much use for "studying chemistry on the bus".
I liked the idea of social space as hyper-local - but I'm still not sure about the local emphasis. Am I not m-learning if my wearable computer is connecting me to a seminar on psychology from Australia while I am walking down the road? Not connected with the location but very much mobile learning.
Like Tim Rudd earlier, John Traxler reminded us to think about the future in new ways - not just to design a faster horse (from the quotation from John Ford).
A very interesting and practical symposium.Labels: ALT-C2007, alt-C20071216, altc2007, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:57 PM
ALT-C presentations on Tuesday
I was certainly nodding at Tim Rudd's exhortation to us to think about learning spaces for the future without being "held back" by starting from where we are now. We must not be bound by cultures and habits from existing methods of teaching and assessment - let's be innovative!
That people are hidebound was demonstrated in the last session I went to. Gill Kirkup of the OU had surveyed students on whether they wanted to use blogs, for learning or otherwise. Not surprisingly they said no - well they probably had no clear idea of how blogs might be used to support their learning. Not until they have experienced an innovative and effective course design involving relevant use of blogs will they appreciate their usefulness. In the mobile learning symposium, John Traxler discussed how difficult it was to ask people what they want - because they give the answer they think you want, they are affected by culture and assumptions and taking things for granted...
John Traxler also reminded us to think differently about the future, talking about the serendipity that gave us Teflon, post-its and SMS.
I was interested to see from Marion Miller that the JISC RSC Summer Conference in Yorkshire and Humberside had a very successful social network set up on Ning. It was interesting that competitions were held with prizes for content - a good push to get people started with contributing - if you can afford it!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, beyond control, learning technologies, social networking
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:44 PM
ALT-C Day #1
I certainly picked a mixture of different topics at ALT-C today. There are so many sessions it is really difficult to choose, and as I'm changing jobs at the end of this current project I don't really know what subjects will be most appropriate! So I picked some topics that I didn't know anything about and some that I did.
Michelle Selinger's keynote confirmed a lot of my opinions - such as the fact that the age-dominated approach to learning is not appropriate for the digital generation. Her descriptions of the chasms between formal and informal learning, between school and HE and between HE in the developed and developing world really rang a bell. She went on to say that it's not a "Knowledge Society" that is needed but a "knowledgeable society" to bridge those chasms.
It was a real shame to see that Creativity was so low on the list of traits that employers want in their new employees - only 22% mentioned it in job specs in the study Michelle cited.
I wasn't so sure about her insistence on podcasts replacing lectures. I think lectures are a format that has worked well and will continue to do so. Podcasts are an addition not a replacement. Personally I tend to prefer lectures - so long as I can actually get to them. Still, Michelle did, in reply to a question, amend her comment to "don't put lectures above everything else, consider the other technological possibilities" which is fair enough!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, beyond control, keynote, learning technologies, michelle selinger
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:32 PM
