CLT@LSE

CLT Launch a new look website

Jane Secker — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The CLT have been busy over the past few months redesigning our website. We hope you like the new look site and find it easier to navigate and full of useful information. If you have any feedback about the site then please send comments to clt-support@lse.ac.uk with the subject line: New website feedback.

Packtracker User Group Annual Meeting

meic — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Packtracker User Group Day (PUG) Tuesday 8^th. May 2007 Attendee from LSE was Mei Pang The 2007 PUG away day meeting was held on the 8^th. May at the University of Westminster, chaired by Mr George Pitcher from Ingenta. The attendees were a mixture of veteran and new Packtracker (PT) users but the discussion topics and demonstrations were well paced, relevant and adapting by all. The topics for discussion were: The renewal process. Mr Pitcher demonstrated a new feature in which we could request P/T to generate (create a webpage) and email a course renewal list (items requested last year) to an academic with the option to tick to indicate that they would like to renew the items and to add new readings using the dedicated space at the bottom of the page. The lecturer then press ‘submit’ and the list will be emailed back to dedicated Epacks mailbox / staff to process. This will only work as long as we have all the appropriate email addresses in place and update the settings page in P/T. Mei Pang from LSE indicated that this is ideal for her institution and Mr Pitcher indicated that this could be switched on by early next week (21/05/2007) to meet LSE needs. George also highlighted that there is now a facility to record usage statistics in P/T. This is a manual system and one has to input data every month. Reporting Mr Pitcher highlighted the ease of P/T in creating CLA auditing reports. It was aimed at new users as LSE is already using this facility. Ordering Documents from BL For over 2 years, Heron has automated email requests for BL documents. This could be added to P/T as a new facility. To switch on, enter your BL account details on the settings page. Requests will be sent (ARTEMAIL) from the 'Document and File Handling' section of the Transaction page. At present this will not actually send an email, just let you see what would be sent. It is planned to switch the full functionality on after the User day on 8 May 2007. Epacks may find this useful to order Copyright Fee Paid copies as currently relying on TSS section in the library to order copies. The arguments for this are better control and speed. Against, duplication of another section’s work and incur cost for CLT (unless we have permission to use the offprints account with BL with view that we are all going to be E-Readings). Budgeting George mentioned that Packtracker is capable of recording and tracking invoices. LSE is already using this function. Navigation Panel One of the attendees wanted the navigation panel to be reorganized. Currently the navigation panel contains a list of Packtracker functions / activities with no logical ordering. New functions as developed just got placed at the end of the list. George agreed to look into grouping some activities to reduce the list. One suggestion is to group lecturers, course designers and librarians together as ‘contacts’. Agreed by the attendees. File handling George informed the attendees that Packtracker could be switched on to monitor the activity of a file from the date mounted to the date of expiry (take it offline and remove the file to an archive folder). To do this he will need access to the host institution’s secure server. On the Epacks administration side, the expiry date must be inserted in all records so that files could be weeded and deposited in archives. Lecturer Direct Entry George is exploring the possibility that we could get the lecturer / course designers to do more by creating reading records which could be inputted into Packtracker directly by them or imported by dedicated epacks staff. Possibility one – lecturers / course designers could create a pack in packtracker. Once created, epacks staff will take over control on the administrative side. Possibility two – from Packtracker, lecturers and course designers are pointed to a webpage form. Once completed, press submit and the form will be emailed to the dedicated epacks mailbox. Staff import the information to Packtracker. Possibility three – from Packtracker, email the epacks staff a list of readings. Internal Process The relevant development here is that a LSE logo could be branded at the bottom right hand corner of the CC cover sheet on E-readings. Penguin Publisher has recently withdrawn blanket permission. George informed the attendees that he could switch Packtracker to alert staff with this information when Penguin has been selected as the publisher and any future publishers who may withdraw from the blanket licence. MCP/PUGmeeting/080507

Diverse 2007 Conference

Sarah — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Recurring themes: Videoconferencing - first keynote by Prof Lennart Olsson talking about media and videoconferencing as an environmental and economic solution. Ironic as most of us had flown to Norway for a conference which was also virtually available online. Most agreed that the virtual experience can't replace the experience of meeting people face to face and spontaneous informal discussion but the presentation raised some interesting points. Second keynote was Dr. Robyn Smith, a videoconference via the University of New England, Australia and showcased how good videoconferencing could be. Pedagogy - understanding how technology can help teaching and learning and adapting video and multimedia to suit learning needs. More questions raised than answers but food for imagination. Copyright and IPR - everyone is struggling and frustated by this aspect of media. There needs to be a clear framework for online educational use. William Garrison wrote an interesting paper about the limitations of current media available for teaching and research purposes. Stuff/possible solutions to go away and research, promote:

METAL (Mathematics for Economics - enhancing teaching & learning)
JANET collaborate
Interactive Media Research Group
Clive Holtham: https://talk.city.ac.uk/p79108334

To be continued....

"Accounting is a form of storytelling..."

Sonja Grussendorf — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The BBC has published the recommendations resulting from their strategy review which cast (yet again) a spotlight on the licence fee. Is it right that people should be paying for something they're not using? A group of teenagers (i.e. future licence fee payers) interviewed by John Humphrys for the Today Programme on Saturday seemed adamant that BBC programmes were not made for them. Among the controversy about licence fees, cutting websites and services, closing down radio stations (Radio 6 Music, Asian Network) we might remember the contribution to education the BBC has made and is continuing to make, in line with its mission statement to "inform, educate and entertain". There's the Janala Project for example, which offers people in Bangladesh the chance to learn English via their mobile for free, a dedicated site for learning, providing resources for history and science, as well as the BBC online archive. And finally, the BBC remembers accountants. One doesn't often hear the bold statement that "the history of accounting and book-keeping is largely the history of civilisation", but a new series on Radio4 is charting precisely this history in 10 15-minute slots over the next two weeks. "Accounting is a form of story telling - giving an account - and stories require an audience, listeners; auditors."

does lecture capture make passive students?

Sonja Grussendorf — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Lecture capture: encouraging passivity or supporting revision? At the LSE we’ve had one system or another for a few years now. We blogged about how opinions about the efficacy of lecture capture was polarised among students and staff in August 2009: http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/clt/?p=327 and in the Association for Learning TEchnology Newsletter in greater detail here: http://newsweaver.co.uk/alt/e_article001408097.cfm?x=bdDG9MJ,bb84WB1t,w But just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s not controversial (and just because we support it doesn’t mean we expect academics to use it: the system is strictly opt-in, not opt-out). And as an academic, just because yesterday you thought it was a great way of giving additional support to your students, doesn't mean that today you're not wondering if you might be taking away something substantial from them; namely the ability to listen carefully to your perfomance, take notes and learn actively by being with others. As student you might be grateful for any additional support or you might fear that lecture capture is a first step towards removing face to face lecturing. What matters here is not only the actual evidence for benefits and disadvantages but also the perceived benefits & disadvantages. Lecture capture, typically allows:

Recording of video and audio of teaching event
Publishing of presentation
Asynchronous viewing
Remote viewing

What are the oft-cited benefits?

Aiding reviewing and revision
Clarifying ‘muddy points’
Particularly beneficial for students for whom the lecture is not in their native tongue
Removal of traditional barriers to learning“Echo360 envisions an opportunity for every student to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience. Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's student living in a 24/7 world.”

So what are the fears of staff, and are these fears substantiated?

Popularly held belief that students will stop attending face to face lectures
A first step towards replacing lectures with podcasts and/ or video recordings altogether http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=410469
Reliance on rercordings discourages note taking and encourages passive learning
The notion that educational technology should encourage such immersive, intrusive tak on students is sickening

What research backs either side up? Surveys don’t always give you the full picture of course, this is a given. A project in ... also, lecture capture is fairly new. So in the end, it comes down to HOW it is used, employed at an intistution The debate isn’t over – and that’s why we are hoping to host a house debate about this on teaching day (18^th May 2010) http://www.educause.edu/Resources/LectureCaptureSystemsAreTheyWo/163626 The presence of lecture capture systems in the educational marketplace is becoming more pronounced. The various companies and institutions promoting them promise that they will transform academia across course delivery formats. This presentation will present evidence from research studies at two distinct institutions regarding the impact of using various lecture capture systems. Data will be presented on variables and outcomes related to the decision making needs of students, faculty, and administrators. We will also discuss how educational institutions can set up research programs to evaluate the effectiveness of their lecture capture systems. http://www.lecturecapture.com/index.php?/topic/255-the-use-of-lecture-capture-in-light-of-teaching-approach-and-content-type-an-institution-wide-study/ While instruction with video has occurred for decades, the routine practice of lecture capture in the context of traditional classroom instruction is a relatively new development. Available research generally provides support for the use of lecture capture. Many students cite a number of benefits, including the ability to review key points, obtain additional clarity, make up for unavoidable conflicts, and review for tests

Some thoughts on lecture capture the LSE

Steve Ryan — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Jane recently posted on the very successful LSE teaching day. She mentioned how the keynote, Nicola Lacy referred to some of the downsides of lecture capture and Jane also described the very entertaining debate we had in the afternoon on lecture capture. Now the merits of a lecture capture has become a bit of a hot topic recently, indeed about half the CLT seemed to be a undertaking research into the topic or talking at conferences about it. I guess I was the person most responsible for bringing lecture capture to the school so I thought I will give a bit a brief background on will how we came to using it, extent of usage and what I think are some of the main issues in its use. Some background CLT started investigating lecture capture some five or six years ago. We used to take a camera to a classroom, obtain a PowerPoint from the lecturer and stitch the whole thing together using a variety of tools but mainly Microsoft producer (of we did play with others such as box mind). The end result was really good, students and the staff involved were very pleased. However the whole business took up a lot of time and effort and would not scale. However it did suggest to us that this was an area well worth investigating. We continued to try out options including networkable personal video recorders (anyone remember the kissbox?) and we looked at various commercial offerings before splashing out about four years ago equipping a lecture theatre with a system known as Apresso. This worked really well and producing output very similar to our initial attempts with producer but without all the labour and timelag. We continued to evaluate the system (around this time we picked up a UCISA

Test

Vinayak — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:59:16 +0000

Test entry. This will stop the not found error.

The plan

Matt Lingard — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:21:10 +0000

is to use this blog for CLT internal communication, initially sharing links and info on the VLE evaluation and other topics. We can use categories to organise posts (Posts can be in multiple categories) Matt

Sakai 2.0.1 features

Kris Roger — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:55:28 +0000

Well, this is kind of an experimental post, but also a link to the Sakai features page Also, here's the list of institutions actively investigating Sakai and some possibly useful stuff on migrating content to Sakai. They seem quite cagey about support for this. Plus you can create an account at the Sakai demo site. Kris.

Report on Alti-lab

Steve Ryan — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 12:09:28 +0000

This article describes the use of various learning design tools and interoperability testing using WebCT.Moodle and Sakai. They are shown linking to various repositories, external tools etc. Well worth reading

Revised Pedadogical Framework

Matt Lingard — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 16:28:42 +0000

This might be useful for VLE evaluation as an addition to the checklists of functionality. Btitain & Liber 2004 (Revised) Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of Virtual Learning Environments See P26-7 which prvides a list of questions to ask divided into: Student level, Module level, programme level See: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/VLE%20Full%20Report%2006.doc

Learning Design

Steve Ryan — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:33:49 +0000

For those with an interest in Learning Design: Discussion of JIME special issue "Advances in Learning Design" There will be an online chat this Wednesday afternoon (15h GMT) featuring authors of the JIME special issue on Learning Design .Articles in the JIME special issue relate to the chapters in the book and report on ways in which Learning Design has been applied and the tools and techniques that have been developed to support this approach to design for learning How to participate The discussion will be on Wednesday September the 28th at 16:00 CET (15:00 GMT), and it is open to everyone who is interested in the topic. The sessions typically run for 60-75 mins and participants will be able to pose questions about the articles and have the authors respond. The posing of questions and responses all happens via the UNFOLD chat interface, with replies being typed in 'live', under the moderation of one of the UNFOLD project team. The resulting transcript is then made available via the UNFOLD website. A link and instructions for logging

Sakai and moodle comparison

Steve Ryan — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:45:26 +0000

This link shows the Edutools sakai/Moodle comparison.

CE6 at Nottingham

Matt Lingard — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:38:18 +0000

I've emailed the IS-Learning-Team at Nottingham to enquire about their experience / a visit. Not much on their site about CE6 at present - an announcement on the Dept of education pages and the CE6 server

CE6 Modules

Matt Lingard — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:45:01 +0000

At the last but one VLE meeting we touched on the CE6 Vista Modules. They are:

Community Manager for supporting diverse operating groups on campus
Learning Object Manager for distributing and reusing academic content
PowerLinks Kit for software development
PowerSight Kit for reporting

Links to each on the WebCT Vista Modules page

CE6 at Nottingham (2)

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:10:16 +0000

I've received the following information from Andy Beggan at Nottingham: My name is Andy Beggan and I head up the Learning Team here at Nottingham. We have now moved over to CE6 (first courses were run on the 1st September, with a University wide switch over on the 13th). Staff and students are actively using CE6 now and so far feedback has been positive. There are a few 'teething problems' which we are waiting to be fixed in a service pack release in November, but generally CE6 is a greatly improved version and far easier to use. I would be happy to talk to you about upgrading to CE6. In summary... In Feb 2005 we joined the Early Adopter Programme which gave us access to the Alpha version. We also had contact to other group members, but more importantly to the technical development team at WebCT who were able to advise us on our upgrade. This included a technical infrastructure review. In the end we didn't follow the advised architecture as we already had in place a powerful server cluster for our Portal and an Oracle database. This was a worry (as WebCT would not confirm--understandably--that this would work), but our technical team here were confident that it would be sufficient for our needs. Because we didn't purchase any new hardware (as recommended) ensuring the architecture was okay was tested during the beta release--which overall may have lengthened the process as we discovered we needed to upgrade Oracle. However, the additional hardware costs are not insignificant (especially it you have to buy new Oracle licences). Once installed we were able to start demonstrating the new system at internal e-learning seminars and via a small but keen e-learning community at Nottingham. This began in May/June (with a view to a September 2005 release). At this point we started announcing the release of CE6 and the planned upgrade over the summer. The plan was to migrate all content for staff. We didn't want to ask staff to migrate their own content as we are keen to encourage the widespread adoption of e-learning across the University and thought this may be off putting to most. We also contacted all instructors individually to advise them of the upgrade and ask them which CE4 courses were still needed, delete old content and who should have access to the new courses in CE6 (designer/instructor). This ultimately reduced the number of courses requiring migration by a third and highlighted new courses that needed creating. We spent a few weeks testing different migration strategies and in the end decided to 'packet' content into groups based on schools (course level) using the system integration API. Our existing WebCT4 server did not have enough memory to do all courses in one go, so we needed to set up a work plan within the central support team to ensure that whilst one packet was being uploaded and another was being checked. This worked well and migrating all content actually only took 3-4 days (approx 400 courses), with most time spent on providing staff access. We have our own home grown staff and student record system which meant that we needed to ensure that identifiers were consistent with that rather than WebCT. Mostly the courses migrated well. There were a few teething problems (broken links, etc. and bugs in the current release), but mostly staff have been pleased. CE6 looks very different, which can be daunting at first, so we organised a series of half-day orientation events (32 in total) to introduce staff to CE6 and allow them to look at their courses during the session (with central support staff close at hand). We also have two courses (WebCT for staff and WebCT for students) which provides access to online orientation tools--provided by WebCT. These are quite good and provide e-learning support to our staff and students. We have now gone live. I believe we may be the first institution to do so--atleast we haven't heard of anyone else. I hope this is helpful, please let me know if you have any other queries. What other VLEs are you looking at by the way? Regards Andy

VLE comparison criteria

Steve Bond — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 11:26:00 +0000

This is the list of criteria for choosing a VLE. These need to be categorised into mandatory, highly desirable and desirable criteria. Adding and modifying content Uploading HTML Bulk upload Direct access to uploaded files Selective release of content Ability to modify uploaded files IMS content packaging compliance Tagging of content Stylesheets Recent changes indicated Interface Look and feel Branding can be removed Screen can be reorganised by administrator Screen can be reorganised by instructor Different presentational options Interface can be modified by student Use of frames Flexibility with different terms/sub-terms within a course Assignments Ease of upload Can update once uploaded Means of communicating grade to student Grades can be viewed all at once Bulk export of assignments Bulk import/export of grades Link to SITS/LSE4U2 to update grades Discussion groups and collaboration Interface Editable – admin/instructor/author can edit, delete messages Threading, on/off/customisable Moderator and administrator control Facilities – private, anonymous, banning, small groups SMS integration Email gateway to discussions Collaborative working – shared filespace for students, staff Email notification Unread message indication Personal tools Personal notes, exportable Blogs Portfolios – course-specific or across all students’ courses Personal profiles Tracking Of discussion participation Of content access, by document, by student, by class group Of logins, IP addresses Range of documents for which accesses are tracked Assessment Interoperable - works with Respondus, QTI Configurable scoring systems for quizzes Decent reporting, statistics Ability to export results as CSV Import/export to QTI Equation editor Grade-book editable and exportable Random ordering Question bank Range of question types Embed media into questions Offline working Synchronisation Internal integration Links between different pages and functions of the VLE Wiki-like autolinking Ability to present multiple functions in one go Learning sequences Calendar system Is there one Is it any use Administration Granularity of permissions Pervasiveness of permissions – are all VLE features protectable? Ease of use of admin interface Power of admin interface – bulk operations Staff effort required Bulk upload of users Bulk creation of courses Self-registration system Interoperability with other information systems How easy to upload student records from registry Upload class groups from SITS Integration with LSE4U2 Authentication – LDAP, Active Directory Systems Reliability – downtime, how much of this is a feature of the VLE? Security Maintenance person-time Backup procedure – per course, per system Server requirements – how many boxes? Technical base – LAMP, Windows Customisability Open source / open system Upgrading How often, how essential Is upgrade process straightforward Are consequences of upgrade clearly communicated Authentication Security of login – SSL? Single sign-on possible? Support Is it any good Is it free Is it readily available Does a community of users exist Search Across uploaded content – which file formats? Across discussions Across one course, or all courses student has access to Includes student-uploaded documents? Installation How difficult / time-consuming? Vendor assistance required? Documentation Does it exist Is it any good Is it freely accessible Help files – context sensitive, any good? User documentation Help files Books Cost One-off cost Server licences Hidden costs Migration & Upheaval Effect on students Effect on course designers Effect on lecturers Effect on us Transfer of existing content – what needs to be transferred? How easy is it to transfer ocntent from WebCT4? Usability & accessibility Intuitive for teachers Intuitive for students? Built-in features to enforce/verify accessibility? Legal standards – claims of compliance, which features do claims cover? Scalability How many users has it been successfully used with? Standards compliance Multilingual support Character sets Language packs Groupwork Other Internal email – and can it be disabled? Media plugins? Wiki feature? Class lists Address books

BlackBoard takeover

Steve Ryan — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:38:38 +0000

Stephen Downes has harversted a lot of blog reaction to the takeover on one page. Very useful Steve

Edubuntu released

Steve Ryan — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:57:46 +0000

This sounds interesting Edubuntu is a flavour of the [WWW] Ubuntu operating system, which is optimised for classroom use. It has been developed in collaboration with teachers and technologists around the world. The aim of Edubuntu is that an educator with limited technical knowledge and skill should be able to set up a computer lab, or establish an on-line learning environment, in an hour or less, and then administer that environment without having to become a fully-fledged Linux geek. This is our first step towards that goal.

Hosted Moodle Service

Steve Ryan — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:11:07 +0000

Northumbria Learning has recently launched a flexible and cost effective eLearning package, making eLearning affordable and accessible to all! eLearning is a delivery mechanism designed to meet the changing and growing demands of learners, today and tomorrow. Key factors making eLearning an attractive delivery solution include the ease of access to content, the ability for users to study at their own pace and being able to access content and information anytime and anywhere. Click here for more benefits of eLearning. We are offering you a very competitive package so that you can adopt eLearning. For only £600 per year, we can provide you with a single block of Moodle service*, fully hosted on secure servers, access to FAQ's and 24hour system support and access to online resources. At an additional cost we can also provide extra support and a design service so that you can have your site tailored with your logo and branding. For more information on our eLearning services and experience click here.

ULCC VLE Service

Steve Ryan — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:04:06 +0000

Another hosted service- I wonder if any universities use it? ULCC (University of London Computer Centre) can run a Moodle service on behalf of your institution. Our services range from hosting on-line courses on a shared platform through to a complete package of advice, training, design, and deployment. There are many advantages to choosing ULCC over an in-house solution. ULCC has wide experience in hosting and evaluating VLE systems and offers security, connectivity and a formal service level agreement.

Caucus - open source web based elearning system

Kris Roger — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:04:56 +0000

Er, they don't seem to like the term VLE. Anyway, yet another open source offering. Like Moodle this focuses on conversation and communication rather than content. I've posted this in case we decide to widen the scope of our VLE evaluation in light of the recent merger news - and I just happened to stumble upon it. Kris.

WEbCT -your questions answered (or not)

Steve Ryan — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 08:35:40 +0000

Greetings, As we at WebCT have been talking with many customers over the last couple days, a number of important questions have been asked over and over again. We wanted to follow up with you to ensure you receive answers to those top-of-mind questions: What will happen to my product? Will I have to switch to Blackboard’s products? Blackboard announced that it plans to develop, innovate, upgrade, improve, and support both Blackboard’s and WebCT’s products, including WebCT Vista and WebCT Campus Edition, and the Blackboard Academic Suite and Blackboard Commerce Suite. The combined company will continue to invest in each company’s products consistent with product development directions respectively communicated to each client base. Right now, WebCT is still hard at work on new product releases, including a new release of WebCT Campus Edition and WebCT Vista in 2006. What’s your product roadmap? When will the next-generation platform be available? Blackboard has announced that, following the merger, it will develop common, standards-based APIs, based on Blackboard Building Blocks and WebCT PowerLinks, which will allow the existing product lines to interoperate with one another. Following the merger, under Chris Vento’s leadership, we will eventually develop a new next-generation, standards-based, product set that incorporates the best features, usability characteristics, and technical architecture from the two product lines. Note: Chris Vento is WebCT’s current Chief Technology Officer and will be taking on the role of Sr. VP of Technology and Product Development in the combined organization. The development of this next-generation suite is expected to be an effort that will take multiple years and most likely happen as the existing products evolve over time and therefore should not impact your current upgrade and deployments plans. Neither Blackboard nor WebCT can provide more information about future development timelines right now because we are still operating as completely independent companies. After the merger is complete, we will provide more specific information as it becomes available. How will WebCT's practices and standards for quality account management, quality service and quality support be integrated into the combined company? WebCT employees will represent roughly 50% of the combined company in the Academic Suite business. Blackboard is keenly aware of WebCT's reputation for quality and direct communications in our account management, professional services, and support interactions and will seek to adopt WebCT's best practices across the entire combined company. We also would like to encourage you to attend the town hall-style information session that Blackboard and WebCT are holding jointly at the EDUCAUSE 2005 Annual Conference, in Orlando, Florida. The forum will establish an open dialogue between members of the academic community and Blackboard and WebCT CEOs about the planned merger. The meeting will take place on Wednesday, October 19th at 11:40 a.m. at the Orange County Convention Center, Exhibit Hall A-2. The session will be repeated on Thursday, October 20th at 2:20 p.m. in room W204A. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact your current WebCT account manager. We look forward to our continued partnership, hearing your thoughts, and answering any questions you might have. Sincerely, Carol Vallone Chairman, President & CEO WebCT Michael Chasen President & CEO Blackboard

Another set of views on the merger

Steve Ryan — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 08:44:41 +0000

This article talks about the importance of Open source (halfway down) and point out that Blackboards application to join the Sakai partner programme was rejected as BB did not support Sakai services sufficiently.

I think I can see where this is heading...

Steve Ryan — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:16:08 +0000

October 18, 2005, Orlando, FL, EDUCAUSE 2005 - Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) and Microsoft announced today at the EDUCAUSE 2005 annual conference, a joint development project intended to help academic institutions achieve a higher degree of integration and interoperability between their respective portal and collaboration products. The project will result in tighter integration between The Microsoft Office System and The Blackboard Academic Suite™ via standards-based integration of The Blackboard Community System™ and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server.

The Wiki

Vinayak — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:29:54 +0000

I know I'm not offically a part of the CLT team, but I figured I had something interesting to share! The Economics Wiki, one of the pilot projects for this year's EC102 course has begun well. There seems to be a reasonable amount of self-motivation among students - in the voluntary registration process, we have had 50% of the registered student population sign up within the first six days of the form going live, far higher than had been expected. The weekly discussion that I am running on parts of the coursework has also been going well - I have had five or six people writing on the Wiki and slowly a genuine "discussion" seems to be emerging. Click here to see the page. If you guys are interested, sign up for a Wiki account, and help edit / watch the pages to see how things unravel this year.

The registration form is at http://econwiki2.lse.ac.uk/Wikireg2005/form1.html

The LSE Teaching and Learning Conference 2006

Kris Roger — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:18:06 +0000

This is my initial contribution to the LSE T&L conference 2006 discussion blog. One thing we didn't discuss is what we are actually going to call this event now that we have more or less decided that it should be an event primarily targetted at teaching and and learning support staff rather than at teaching staff/academics. Any ideas? Also, this is just a starting post to get the ball rolling... Just post any thoughts, ideas and links to interesting people in the 'T&L Conference' category. Kris.

Videoconferencing value for language teachers

Kris Roger — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:22:13 +0000

I was doing a quick Google for use of video conferencing and stumbled across this page. Looks like it was written by someone with some hands-on experience. The only downside is that it looks like this is quite old. But this sort of person might be of interest to both CLT and the Language Centre for example. I'll look into it more and post back with edits and progress - just a first foray. Kris.

off topic -Stanford on Itunes

Vinayak — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:06:14 +0000

Stanford Provides Access to University Content With Podcasts This week, Stanford University will publicly debut a project called Stanford on iTunes, providing Stanford-related audio content via the iTunes Music Store, Apple's popular music jukebox and online music store. Stanford on iTunes will give alumni and the general public free access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content. Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni - as well as the general public - with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available.

SOAP implementation for Moodle

Chris Fryer — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:49:37 +0000

Some Italian developers have come up with an API for moodle, using SOAP. They presented a paper (PDF) at OSS2005 describing the rationale; essentially getting Moodle to talk to other student-information management systems at Genoa. This would be an alternative to hacking Moodle's database to replace some tables with views of CMIS. The plug-in is still in development (of course), but can be downloaded from the Moodle Development section in Using Moodle

Multi-user Blog tools

Steve Ryan — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:15:52 +0000

This appears to be a useful review of various blogging tools. Wordpress comes out prety well

Podcasting possibilities

Kris Roger — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:00:26 +0000

Testing a 'podcast' link. Let's see, here's my podcast Okay, it's not a podcast, just a test file, and it's Chinese. You'll need to use ipodder to test download to an ipod etc. If you'd like to test it for me then just subscribe iPodder to the CLT podcast. Unfortunately iTunes only allows you to subscribe to podcasts that are already in their directory. Kris.

Private Test

Matt Lingard — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:21:01 +0000

with a link to my test blog Test to file

online learning examples

Steve Ryan — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 08:21:04 +0000

Nice. A project consisting of more than 70 "interviews, flash movies and resources from teachers doing good stuff in online teaching and learning at the Uni... you can look through them by faculty, discipline, graduate attribute, study level, approaches to learning and a fair few more approaches. Each case (for example) has interviews broken down into chunks, transcripts of those interviews, related cases, flash walkthroughs of the environments and sometimes a fair bit more. (from OLD Daily) Maybe we should do something like it?

WebCT 6 single-box

Chris Fryer — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 12:14:57 +0000

More a bookmark than a blog entry, but you can set up WebCT CE 6 as a single-box solution, according to the hardware requirements. Good while we're evaluating, given the restrictions in the machine room.

Purpose / Use of CLT Blog(s)

Matt Lingard — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:14:32 +0000

In the team meeting today Steve R suggested opening this blog to the wider world. This seems a good a place as any to discuss this... Ahead of having our own blog server it would be good to think about how we are going to use it / them- what's the purpose? I'm not against opening the Blog up but do we need a closed Blog too? Maybe not. What would be really nice would be one blog with the ability to restrict posts or categories to certain users. So when posting a message it is either 'public' or 'CLT'. I don't think WordPress allows this but i may have missed it. I've seen it in other blog-type tools such as ELGG If we're opening this blog up do we need two? Is a 'Learning technology News' or a 'CLT News' category within this Blog a possible replacement for the defunct newsletter blog? From our CLT homepage we could just link to the relavant category, for example VLE Evaluation Category

another option?

Steve Ryan — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 09:33:21 +0000

-----Original Message----- From: Virtual Learning Environments [mailto:VLE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK]On Behalf Of Peter Trethewey Sent: 31 October 2005 09:33 To: VLE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: The best way to secure internal funding for a VLE is... I hear a rumour that China is going to offer cheap space on its own VLE to every country in the world. I think they're calling it NOODLE.

Nottingham Visit

Matt Lingard — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:43:03 +0000

I have arranged a visit to Nottingham University for next week (Tues 8th) to meet with Andy Beggan and the e-learning team there. As I mentioned in an earlier post Nottingham were a pilot for CE6 in the UK and have moved lots of courses from CE4. Interestingly they also currently support Blackboard though the plan had been to move to WebCT. Maybe not?

Pingbacks

Matt Lingard — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:20:09 +0000

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are two features of blogs. I'm still not sure about Trackbacks but i think I have Pingbacks sussed! When you post an article to our blog any other blog articles you mention in your article are 'pinged' (contacted) as part of the publish process. If the blog you mentioned allows pingbacks then your mention of their article will appear as a comment on their site!! Confused? Here's an example. On a test blog: mattblog I have posted an article with a link to an article on our CLT blog. When I posted that message the CLT blog was notified via a ping and because the CLT blog allows pingbacks a comment was automatically added... if you take a look at the Multi user Blog Tools article on the CLT blog you will see 2 comments, including one that comes from my test mattblog! In fact now there are 3 comments - one manual comment, one from mattblog and one from this article - an internal pingback!

The value of blogging

Kris Roger — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:27:19 +0000

A nice line and a link to the corresponding cartoon. âI had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barkingâ? by Alex Gregory, The New Yorker, September 12, 2005

Trackbacks

Matt Lingard — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 12:46:38 +0000

are more manual pingbacks (see earlier message) When you write a blog message about an article in another blog you need to include a Trackback URL which you get from the other blog. The results is the same as a pingback - your blog message becomes a comment on the other blog. So are they useful? For connecting blog posts / articles / messages (which is correct???) I guess so but will users get them. Mind you as pingbacks are automatic they don't really need to. I've included a trackback URL in this message for the Pingback post! If you look at the Pingback post you'll see this message is a comment.

Writely

Matt Lingard — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 08:24:14 +0000

This is a test page produced online with writely by Matt:

Steve R showed me this. The great thing is that you can send it straight to your blog. Have a look at http://www.writely.com

What to Tell Your Campus About the Merger

Matt Lingard — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 13:30:53 +0000

What to Tell Your Campus About the Blackboard-WebCT Merger on campus-technology.com

Just to see if we can work with child categories

Vinayak — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:29:33 +0000

Here's a test under Vinayak, which comes under "The Wiki".

Open University going Moodle

Matt Lingard — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:53:32 +0000

Open University going Moodle The Open University’s Learning and Teaching Office has started a new programme worth nearly £5 million to build a comprehensive online student learning environment for the 21st century... I guess £5million shows OS isn't 'free'!

Uniblogs - free blogs for university and college students

Matt Lingard — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:34:06 +0000

Uniblogs is a spin off from edublogs which now has a roadmap for the next 12 months

Moodle Quizzes

Matt Lingard — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:11:43 +0000

I had a go at importing an existing quiz to our moodle installation today. Although there is an 'import WebCT' questions option it failed but I can't work out why - the questions appear to be in the required format. In the version we are running there isn't an import IMS QTI option, which is what we would need to go via Respondus. I had a look on Moodle.org to see if / when IMS QTI import is available and got frustrated! I couldn't find a definite answer .... Knowing where to look was a problem.... too many options and not enough options Part of it is about trust though - if i use Dr C (the WebCT Discussion list) there are people I recognise whose answers have shown to be reliable. Whereas I have no certainty about the posts on 'Using Moodle' (yet)

Blogging notes from edublog workshop

Kris Roger — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:36:32 +0000

I don't know whether I'll keep this up, but I've decided to blog from the workshop and save making notes later. I doubt any of this'll make sense, but I'll maybe add detail (and links) later. I'll publish in parts, as otherwise I'll have one very long entry. So here goes... Multitasking - chat, blogging and listening at the same time. Intro Social s/w tools - IRC, IM, discussions fora > social bookmarks (de.icio.us), social networks (friendster) > wikis, weblogs. Who is blogging? communities, companies - but famous cases of people blogging about work getting the sack! universities (warwickBlogs), individuals - e.g. Stephen Downes www.frappr.com/edubloggers - network of educational bloggers. Um - and there's a substantial chat session going on while the presenters speak. this is slightly bizarre. Lots of description about what makes up a typical blog tool e.g. entries, categories, comments etc. Trackbacks - way of saying 'i'm using one of your posts in my blog'. Why so popular? Easy, democratic, allow [re]creation of self, playing with identity Web 1.0 = Traditional static publishing via FTP etc. New system - east, fast, scaleable > with RSS - syndicated, peer to peer, social > Web2.0 Update your blog, it's not just words (KR ?) RAMBLE mo-blogging video-blogging photo-blogging audio-blogging (podcasts) Weblogs vs wiki wiki - group blog - personal egs of wikis - usual suspects err - wikipedia Information overload? how to manage gigantic flow of info (paraphrasing Robin Good quote)? Answer: Use RSS aggregators - some have embedded into web page - e.g. Stephen Downes Bloglines - internet based tool but personalised Web 2.0 - "an architecture of participation" Tim O'Reilly 2003 Just a slogan? web as platform (as opposed to web as medium) web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 what do they mean? read/write web consumer vs producer online identity community > network point of presence semantic web www.foaf-project.org folksonomy micro-content e-learning framework (JISC) so much jargon!!!!! e.g. flickr social tools and blogs - all good? cons - just replacing old tech with new? And time for some coffee!!

Blogging notes from edublog workshop - part 2

Kris Roger — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:44:16 +0000

Josie Fraser - history of blogs... The slides are here Intro. to blogging in education. Comparison of blog tools available. History 1997 weblog in OED (really?) 1999 Blog coined Technorati -eg of business that has grown around blogs 20 billion blogs by Oct 2005, 80k per day Formats and tools Ease of use public and ungated - this is a debate within education, should they be open to all Short posts, developmental, subjective, informal 'enmeshed in distributed conversations' Web 2.0 - user centred platform That Downes man again (as in Stephen) - e-learning 2.0, recent article from 'foremost edublogger in the world' (!) All types of users in education, at every level. Finding a voice - a 'blogging voice'. What do I want to say and how? Schools - Musselburgh Grammar School using blogs for exchange purposes. Researcher and edtech blogs - community of practice, Downes, Derek Morrison, James Farmer edublog milestones - Gateshead Library since 2001. edublogs.org from James Farmer 1000th blog in 2 months, for educators. Now provides blogs for students. edublogger directory student blogs - to fulfil assessments this is quite rushed!!! Future VLE - Scott Wilson 'the most popular diagram in e-learning world' Comparison of blog tools multi user and individual blog tools - wordpress recommended for multiusers 20six, aclblogs.net, aclearn weblogs toolkit, blogger, elgg, typepad, yahoo, xanga Comparison chart (MS Word file) The next part of the workshop was to go off and try another example of some blog software. I thought I'd go and try elgg as it has the added educational dimension that the others do not. It also has a social aspect through the use of FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) social networking and linking people by the use of tags. See my first elgg post!! Now it's time for lunch!

Blogging notes from edublog workshop - part 3

Kris Roger — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 13:31:48 +0000

Part 3 - after lunch Learning Theory and online networking tools ways of thinking and knowing, ways of doing (practice), social networking tools theories of learning behaviourism (Gagne), cognitivism (Piaget), social constructivism (Vygotsky), sittuative learning (Wenger), + Connectionist - forming networks, pattern recognition context and related task types for each theory (e.g. cognitivism > problem based learning) socio-cultural model - learning is a conversational activity, social environment acts as scaffold for tutor and learner to engage in dialogue. collaborative activity forms vital component. what changes are we responding to?

tech - ubiquitous computing student profile and expectations new pedagogies external forces, global marketplace community - rise of network society information age mindset

computers are not technology doing more important than knowing trial and error preferable to logic multitasking typing not handwriting staying connected zero tolerance for delays lines between consumer and producer are blurred edu uses of weblogs

reflective practice knowledge management assignments group work e-portfolios sharing resources role play and simulation Distance learning MA in war studies core materials via LMS dialogue via e-mail, discussion forums, skype, weblogs access subject to temporal, distance and tech constraints is a need to discover and create role in learning community these relationships need to be made explicit through online dialogue (as they are normallly implicit face to face) using WebCT vista fitness for purpose discussion fora - structured and semi-structured for knowledge building and dialogue (disputational, cumulative, exploratory) weblogs - personal publishing for reflection, taking ownership of learning experience wikis - knowledge sharing and building Conversational tools content free templates that scaffold "the inner conversation", "outer conversation with tutor", "outer conversation with resources in the personal domain". In practice all students have a blog, tutor blogs they use a newsfeed aggregator to collect blogs using RSS (bloglines) What happened? student evaluation revealed strategic pragmatic economic management and perception of their own education evaluation - time and assessment were key connectivism from community to network - student and tutor blogs link to external 'expert blogs' - forming a 'knowledge network' Knowledge can rest with the network... Does our theory of knowledge drive our choice of tools?

Edublog workshop - part 4

Kris Roger — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:15:22 +0000

feeds and aggregators to desktop, browser, webpage make your own! Bloglines demo... ooh, i'm going to set up a bloglines account. a bit about podcasts, iStanford etc plus some interesting stuff i've shamelessly copied from Kate Boardman as the net connection here failed when I pressed 'Save and continue editing'. So much for live blogging... "rss mixers. do I like the sound of this? kickrss... . feed2js, feedbook (great idea by dave cormier -ideological prototype on giving students aggregator of feeds rather than a course book), SuprGlu (mixing different blogs)" By the way Apple have insisted that ipodder Lemon, the main competition for download podcasts to your iPod, change their name as Apple think we'll all get confused. So iPodder Lemon is now Juice Receiver (?ughh) Can you tell it's nearly 3.30pm? The rest of the session was spent, how can I say, playing with the various blog related tools. Cheers, Kris.

BlackBoard & WebCT are one Blog

Matt Lingard — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:01:12 +0000

BlackBoard & WebCT are one

Anyone for Moolgg?

Matt Lingard — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:39:44 +0000

EdTechPost: ELGG vs. Moodle - defusing a false dichotomy Excerpts from above link: I've had a few people come up to me at conferences recently and ask me to compare ELGG and Moodle, and choose between them as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. Indeed, even within the Moodle community itself there seems to be a bit of dismissiveness about what ELGG does, and the notion that with just a couple of twists of code Moddle can easily replicate its functionality. ... what is exciting for me is that Terry and Athabasca are putting together a large, production environment in which Moodle and ELGG will seemingly co-exist quite nicely, thank you very much, and take care of different problems.

Assessment, maths and Moodle

Steve Ryan — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:03:36 +0000

I came across this while looking at the jisc frameworks page, (that will be a separate post). Mantis is a server at York hosting maths/assessment type projects in Moodle "The Mantis server hosts the web sites of several open-source projects related to e-learning. The sites are realized as courses within the Virtual Learning Environment Moodle. This makes sense because all these projects develop tools that can be used from within Moodle so these tools can be demonstrated on this site. All project sites are open to guests but you are also invited to create an account for yourself and contribute to the discussions in the forums."

elf projects

Steve Ryan — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:55:01 +0000

The E-learning framework website list all the JISC ELF projects. I think it is worth looking at the list. At first I went wow but after a bit of clicking my response is more muted as it is in early days in many cases. The list includes a grouplogging tool (flash demo only) that in time may be good. Several eportfolios, a resource list management system(aaargh) and something called Smirkboard, which must be better thatn its title

VLE Survey in FE

Steve Ryan — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 16:11:31 +0000

The results of a survey of vle use in FE were posted today. The survey was quick and dirty but the results are interesting. 72 responses from 3 lists Learnwise 6 Blackboard 17 WebCT 6 Moodle 32 FD le 2 Teknical 2 Bodington 1 Plone 1 Fronter 1 Serco Virtual Campus 1 Bluespheres Create 1 2 colleges building their own The anecdotal information that I keep hearing is that Moodle will soon be in every FE college ( I make it 44% and rising)

Merger Update

Matt Lingard — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 15:53:03 +0000

Talk by Blackboard’s Carl O’Keefe at Durham conference, December 2005 Headline was that the merger hasn’t happened yet! And is likely to be delayed to June 2006 for legal reasons. Carl showed the intended roadmap for product development broken down into stages but with no dates or time frame yet. Stages as follows: 1) Develop Common API for WebCT & Blackboard. This will utilise the existing WebCT PowerLinks & Blackboard Building Blocks 2) Blackboard Portal and Content systems to be made available for WebCT 3) An evaluation system – Caliper – already under development for Bb to be made available for both Bb and WebCT. 4) New Product Throughout these 4 stages Bb maintain that both existing individual products (i.e.WebCT & Blackboard) will be fully supported and developed...

VLE Survey 2005

Matt Lingard — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:12:29 +0000

The latest HE VLE survey (2005) is now available. This follows on from 2001 and 2003 surveys. Full document is available as a PDF

Summary of Conclusions 1. Uptake of VLEs has continued to increase, with HE colleges now on a par with pre- and post-92 institutions. 2. The number of VLEs in use at a given institution is beginning to decrease, but with pre-92 universities still displaying the greatest diversity. 3. Blackboard and WebCT continue to dominate. Other proprietary software is declining but there is an increase in in-house and open source approaches. 4. Post-92 universities demonstrate the biggest increases in use by both students and staff. 5. Access to course material continues to account for the greatest VLE usage, but particularly in post-92 universities, there is increasing usage that is not merely supplementary (i.e. optional for students). Usage is conspicuous across a very wide range of subjects. 6. Central IT continues to dominate technical support. Elsewhere, dedicated VLE units appear to be absorbing the support previously provided more diversely. 7. The integration of VLEs with MLEs has increased both in range of activities and in depth. In particular, there is a substantial increase in the creation of student account files for transfer to a VLE. But there is limited progress in integration with portal development and e-portfolios. 8. Strategy and decision making are becoming ever more consolidated centrally and are being substantially informed by external agencies. But there is also an increase in local consultation. E-learning and VLEs are increasingly being cited in strategy documents. 9. Learning and teaching activities are consolidated as the primary drivers for considering using a VLE. Specialised support such as that required for distance learners and students with special needs are identified as significant factors but have as yet had little impact on the character of resource provision. 10. Availability of funding is now the primary stimulant to VLE development, and a small percentage of this is still as project funding, though assured institutional funding now dominates. 11. Perceptions regarding the use of career enhancement as a means of encouraging VLE usage are very low, but there is an increase in expectation that VLEs will be used by staff. 12. Standards are neither seen as supportive nor as barriers, indeed, they have negligible influence. 13. Most institutions are not yet using innovative technologies such as wireless and mobile phones, though post-92 universities are most active in this area. 14. The requirement to implement Personal Development Planning is beginning to have a small but noticeable impact on VLE usage. The development of e-portfolio capabilities is an emerging concern for HEIs.

Jenkins et al (2005) VLE Surveys UCISA

Moodle pilot feedback

Kris Roger — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:06:28 +0000

The Information Systems department have started using Moodle on one postgraduate course and already have some feedback for us. The following are paraphrased from the original e-mails:

One of the most tedious things about Moodle (as it is with WebCT) is the stage of uploading files before you can do anything. In place editing or at least drag and drop upload is strongly desired (using something like WebDav).
By default there is a 2Mb upload limit on all files. CLT have altered the PHP configuration to allow 8Mb, but this seems to be the upper limit imposed by Moodle. This is okay for individual files, but a serious limitation if uploading a Zip file containing multiple files. This however needs testing.
When you modify an item there is an accept changes button but no abandon changes button.
You can copy but not paste using keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla/Firefox and you can copy an paste in IE. Interestingly in Netscape 8 when you use dispay as firefox it behaves like firefox, but when you choose display like IE you can neither copy nor paste!!
When you modify an item in any way or add a resource or ... when you return to the front page you are returned to the top of the page, not where you were, so you have to scroll back down again each time. Really tedious if you are working down week by week.
The System knows week numbers, they appear when you edit a resource for a week, but does not display them. To show them i had to enter them manually.
On a more positive note - the system Design students could try to write enhancements for Moodle next year if we stick with it. So we can look at that then and see if there is anything on a wish list they could get stuck into.

That's all so far and thanks to Mike Cushman for these. Kris.

Moodle upload limits

Kris Roger — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:53:52 +0000

An update already on the feedback from I.S. This from Chris: For the file upload limit, it seems I missed "post_max_size" in php.ini. If I set this to 10MB, this will raise Moodle's value as soon as we restart the web publishing service. There are actually 4 levels in which a maximum upload size can be set - system level (php.ini) - moodle level (admin->Config ->Site variables->maxbytes) - course level (Course settings->Max Upload Size) - activity level This allows for finer control over certain areas. Chris

Elgg Update (version 0.4)

Matt Lingard — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 12:51:31 +0000

ELGG have upgraded to version 0.4 today. There is a new (mediawiki) Elgg Information portal and a new company: Curverider offering hosting, training etc This what's new according their Press Release

With version 0.4, podcasting is as easy as pushing a button. An advanced templating engine uses CSS standards to allow the user full control over the look and feel of their digital assets. Users can link to content on the Web as easily as writing a note, and search for related information - as well as people working on the same topics they are - simply by clicking a link. Information can be drawn into a user's profile using the power of RSS. Shared calendars can list classes, promote events or let users keep track of their appointments. Files, reflections, podcasts, blog posts and profile information can all be shared with as many or as few people as the owner desires.

Matt

Moodle: MoodleDocs - our new documentation system

Matt Lingard — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:37:55 +0000

This was mentioned in a recent meeting - Chris maybe? - Moodle Annoucement: MoodleDocs - our new documentation system Moodle Docs Needs a bit of work yet!!

A brief overview of Sakai

Steve Ryan — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 09:44:30 +0000

In 1995, two major commercial learning management system providers, Blackboard and WebCT, merged, prompting many colleges and universities to investigate lower-cost open source alternatives. In the Places to Go column in the last issue, we looked at an alternative to commercial learning management systems called Moodle (Downes 2005/2006). In this issue, we continue our exploration with a look at Sakai. Started in 2004, the Sakai project is a "community source software development effort to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education" (Sakai n.d., ¶ 1). Its flagship product is the Sakai content management system, which is now being used in numerous institutions. For example, dozens of American universities have adopted the software; meanwhile, the organization itself recently gained its one hundredth partner and was recognized by 75% of the respondents in a recent Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness survey (Abel 2005). These trends represent significant growth for open source software in a market that has otherwise been stable for the last few years. The Sakai project Web site does not lend itself to easy navigation and exploration. A large center column filled with recent news items released by the foundation itself dominates the space; while these can be read, they do not lead to further information. Thus, the bulk of navigation occurs in the left-hand column; new visitors should begin with the About link to get a brief overview of the project. Upon clicking this link, readers should notice the additional menu of links that appear beneath the About link (it is very easy to miss this), allowing navigation to the People, Community, and Adoption pages of the site. The Community page introduces readers to the different facets of the project, styled as "the Sakai universe" in a small diagram. Major components include the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP), an arrangement that allows academic institutions to become part of the project itself (institutional fees range from $US 5,000 to $US 10,000) as well as the Sakai Commercial Affiliates (SCA) program, which consists of "commercial firms that offer for-fee support and expertise for the Sakai Project's community source software" (Sakai 2005, ¶ 1). The commercial partnerships demonstrate the sort of presence Sakai is gaining, with names including Sun, IBM and Peason Education among them. As the Community page also indicates, Sakai is related to a number of other educational projects including the Open Knowledge Initiative project (OKI), which "defines open architectural specifications that support the development of educational software" (SourceForge.net n.d., ¶ 1); uPortal, a widely used academic portal system; and the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI), a collaborative project devoted to the development of non-proprietary portfolio software. More partnerships, collaborations, and affiliations could be listed here; for example, Sakai was recently integrated with Learning Activity Management Systems (LAMS), an open source learning design toolkit. Sakai thus occupies the center of an emerging constellation of related online learning products and initiatives—a far more widespread challenge to commercial software than the emergence of a single tool would be. Returning now to the menu on the left side of the home page, after the news link (which merely repeats the items already found on the front page), readers will find some gateways into the Sakai community: the Events and Discussion pages, respectively. Entering the Discussion page, the user will find three major forums—one each for SEPP and SCA and one for the general public—the latter of which is further divided into an area for developers and an area for users. Guest access is available for both areas of the public forum. For new visitors, it is recommended that they first enter "guest" as a userID and password when prompted; once they have done so, readers can then visit the User's forum to get their first taste of Sakai itself. When readers log in to the User's forum via the "guest" userID and password, they can select from the topics in the menu bar at the top of the page (again, easy to miss) to access the Playground or Sakai discussion groups. Once the link is selected, a previously invisible menu will appear in the left column; the Playground has more selections but, not surprisingly, less interesting content. Here, readers can see the other features of the Sakai user interface; while these features vary according to the discussion group selected, they include Schedule (an easy-to-use calendar), Announcements (general information on recent developments), Resources (release information, program documentation, planning materials, or other items), Drop Box (for uploads), Chat, Wiki, and Email Archive. To return back to the home page of the site, readers will need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Sakai Foundation Home link. Once readers have accustomed themselves to the interface, they may then explore the site's contents in greater depth by creating their own personal account. After clicking again on the Discussion link on the home page, readers can establish their own account via the How to Join DGs link in the menu on the left side of the home page. When first logging into the User's forum with their new username and password, readers will initially see a generic portal page with sections designating the current Message of the Day, Recent Announcements, and Recent Discussions. In order to join specific discussion groups, readers can click on the Membership link in the menu on the left, and then click on the Joinable Sites link under the Membership tag. A varied list of designated groups then appears, accompanied by descriptions of their respective roles within the Sakai project; group topics range from broader public issues concerning governance, policies, and promotion (Advocacy & Strategy) to much more specialized issues such as content management (Content), the integration of Sakai software with other systems (DG: Integration), and multimedia development (DG: Web Video and Audio Tools). After clicking the "join" option for selected groups, readers can then view their customized portal page via the Home link in the left column. Group topics appear listed at the top of the page for convenient access to their respective streams of information. To leave their customized portal page and return back to the home page of the site, readers will again need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Sakai Foundation Home link. After extensive navigation through the site (and several conversations with our editors about how this is to be done), it can only be concluded that navigation in Sakai is hostile to the user. Common navigation features, such as a link back to the home page in the upper left, are missing. Popup windows appear almost at random; sometimes the menu on the left will open a new page, sometimes it will launch a popup. The readers bounce back and forth between sites with no real guidance or heading to indicate where they are. There are breadcrumbs, but they are partial and misleading. This is an aspect of Sakai that will have to be reconsidered from the ground up if the system is to be taken seriously as an alternative to commercial learning management systems. From the home page, information about the Sakai software may be found on the Software and Resources page; this link, like others in the column, also expands into its own menu when selected. Worth noting in the extra menu is the Features List, which may be used for a point-by-point comparison to other systems, and the Software License featuring the Educational Community License, a type of open source license for educational use. Numerous Presentations describing the software are also available. After clicking the Software and Resources link, readers wanting to download and try the software for themselves can also do so via the QuickStart guide that appears linked on the far right—although the material may be opaque for readers not experienced with Web technologies. Written in the Java programming language, Sakai requires a Tomcat web server, and there is a download version with the server included (a good idea, since version conflicts are a common issue); Sakai also requires a database system (either the free MySQL database engine or a commercial Oracle system can be used). For fast and easy testing, the site offers a convenient demo version for its readers as well as binary and source versions for experienced Web developers. The Sakai project is a large initiative, and the Web site reflects that. It is also very much membership-driven, and the Web site reflects that as well; for example, causal visitors will be frequently greeted by login screens restricting resources and discussions to members only. This reflects a different approach, and perhaps a different philosophy, than that of Moodle, discussed here last issue. Moodle is a small, nimble application that developers can install in a snap and change on the fly. Sakai, on the other hand, represents a larger committment to install and run and exacts a clearer delineation between those who develop the software and those who use it. That said, Sakai enjoys the advantages of the enterprise approach; it has arguably greater scaling and stability than Moodle and thus provides a well-resourced foundation to offer ongoing development and support. References Abel, R. 2005. Preliminary analysis of the open source in higher education survey conducted from April 15, 2005 to May 1, 2005 by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.. Downes, S. 2005/2006. Places to go: Moodle. Innovate 2 (2). (accessed January 30, 2006). Sakai. n.d. About Sakai.(accessed January 30, 2006). Sakai. 2005. Commercial affiliates. (accessed January 30, 2006). Sourceforge.net. n.d. Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI). (accessed January 30, 2006). Copyright and Citation Information for this Article This article may be reproduced and distributed for educational purposes if the following attribution is included in the document: Note: This article was originally published in Innovate as: Downes, S. 2006. Places to Go: Sakai. Innovate 2 (3). (accessed February 1, 2006). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Open source PowerLinks for WebCT

Kris Roger — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 13:01:33 +0000

Looks like WebCT will support wiki and RSS integration, but only if you have the "WebCT Vista PowerLinks Kit for software development". I'm assuming you only need this PowerLink kit if you need to customise a PowerLink (which you wouldn't do with Wimba, but might with something open source). From the latest WebCT newsletter: "Open Source PowerLinks from the WebCT Vista Developers Network Are you looking for ways to integrate and extend WebCT? Recently, several open source PowerLinks created by the WebCT Vista Developers Network were made available through the WebCT PowerLinks Showcase:

With the Gutenberg Book Search PowerLink, instructors and designers can create custom searches on the Gutenberg collection that students can run with a single mouse-click from their WebCT courses.
The Mobile WebCT PowerLink lets students and instructors read their WebCT mail from their mobile phones.
With the OSPI Integration PowerLink, institutions can enable single sign-on from WebCT to the OSPI e-portfolio, providing users with easy one-click access to their e-portfolio content.
The PhpWiki Integration PowerLink provides students in a WebCT with course seamless access to PhpWiki via a proxy tool from the WebCT Course Menu.
The RSS Feed Integration PowerLink provides the capability to fetch RSS feeds from any Web site supporting RSS service from within a WebCT course.

WebCT Vista Developers Network PowerLinks are available as-is and are not supported by WebCT. You do not need to license the WebCT Vista PowerLinks Kit or belong to the WebCT Vista Developers Network to use these open source PowerLinks. However, you do need the WebCT Vista PowerLinks Kit for software development to be able to easily and securely customize these PowerLinks. To learn more or to download these PowerLinks today, visit the WebCT Vista Developers Network PowerLinks page." Kris.

Webct6 and Moodle

Steve Ryan — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 11:28:22 +0000

There is now a comparision at Edutools between webct6 and moodle 1.5. Maybe it has been there a while but I have only just seen it. The decsion tools looks interesting. You identify a series of criteria, weight them, score the 2 products on a scale and it will give you a "decision". You need to be pretty familiar with the products to do it properly but as it will allow you at add your own criteria, we may be able to adapt itas part of our evaluation.

But could you read your notes on an ipod?

Steve Ryan — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:39:12 +0000

From Derek Morrisions Auricle The iTunes player automatically will associate album covers to tracks (which are PDF files) but some people have been extending the software further to organise all sorts of files such as their lecture notes and attaching them to audio files of the their lectures. They can then copy them to their iPods and carry them all around - audio lecture and notes together. What a great idea!

Moodle v Sakai

Steve Ryan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:21:09 +0000

A very interesting discussion with some statistics on this blog that support Moodle.

LMS Comparison Wiki

Chris Fryer — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:05:36 +0000

I stumbled across this today: http://ctlet.brocku.ca/webct/LMS_Options_and_Comparisons Not sure if it tells you anything you didn't already know. Yet another Wiki, too.

CourseGenie 2 and Moodle

Kris Roger — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:19:12 +0000

Interesting that Horizon Wimba are now touting CourseGenie as a tool for Moodle. The text below is from their latest mailout, while no mention of it on their web site.

This new version most notably features the ability for instructors to create Flashcards, insert code such as HTML and Java, and export their course content to new Blackboard, WebCT, and SCORM formats (ideal for Moodle users). Course Genie allows faculty to quickly and easily convert their Microsoft Word documents into content for their Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, and other online courses.

Wild speculation, but I wonder if this might mean possible future support for Moodle from HorizonWimba's other products. More likely that SCORM is just a happy coincidence for them I guess. Kris.

NetVibes

Matt Lingard — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:44:59 +0000

NetVibes Just came across this on Auricle... It's an RSS portal page. I know you can do this elsewhere - Yahoo for example but this is a pretty neat interface. Works well with podcasts - player appears at the top of the page

altspring - JotSpot

Matt Lingard — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:37:00 +0000

The ALT Spring Conference is using a JotSpot wiki for it's conference site. Most pages appear to require a login to edit (Perhaps speakers are being given access to add their profiles / abstracts, I'm not sure) but some pages are open to guests to edit. Such as this one: Delegate Blogs - altspring - JotSpot Perhaps we could think about incorporating a wiki into our website... not sure for what yet!

The Lecture is dead?

Matt Lingard — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:48:04 +0000

Radical... The College of Law are replacing all face-to-face lectures with online / DVD versions for their "LPC programme". Time spent in small seminar groups will be increased to compenaste for the loss of 'contact' hours. Full story: http://www.thelawyer.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=118836&d=122&h=24&f=46 Will be interseting to see how this develops. An 'insider' tells me that students applying for next year weren't aware that the majority of their lectures would be DVDs!!

Elgg and WebCT Integration

Matt Lingard — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:52:52 +0000

Just seen this on ELGG... Aperto eLearning Solutions is pleased to announce a partnership with Curverider to provide seamless integration between WebCT's Vista and Campus Edition 6 product lines, and the Open Source Learning Landscape product Elgg Elgg and WebCT Integration | Aperto Elearning Solutions

e-benchmarking! » Guide

Matt Lingard — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:03:30 +0000

On the e-benching blog mentioned by Steve in today's team meeting is an interestinge-bEnchmarking! » guide from Derek Morrison on using blogs. It's aimed at those involved in the benchmarking blogs but an interesting read - a good summary of the poros and cons of blogs

WebCT 6 and e-portfolios

Kris Roger — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:05:19 +0000

Looks like WebCT are adding another tool to WebCT 6. Things seem to be moving quite quickly! This from the latest WebCT newsletter.

Get ready for the WebCT Portfolio! Moving to WebCT Campus Edition 6 will also pave the way for you to start using the WebCT Portfolio. Targeted for release in the first half of 2006, the WebCT Portfolio is a personal portfolio solution that will make portfolio initiatives easy for institutions to manage and for students and instructors to learn.

Doesn't say whether this is an optional extra or whether it is going to be included in the basic CE licence. Kris.

What’s the big deal with blogs, podcasting and RSS?

Matt Lingard — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 10:29:40 +0000

New Blackboard Blog... which includes: Blackboard What’s the big deal with blogs, podcasting and RSS? Doesn't say much actually but writely.com pops up again... I keep seeing it... Perhaps more interesting is this in the first posting to the blog

The time is ripe to seriously consider how open source and packaged software can co-exist and benefit each other.

HigheredBlogCon

Matt Lingard — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:32:38 +0000

HigheredBlogCon

Welcome to HigherEd BlogCon 2006, an all-online event highlighting innovative uses of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, and other digital tools in academia.

Moving from here to the conference wiki it appears that one of the proposed pesentations comes from Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a Visiting Research Fellow and Lecturer at the LSE! Anybody know her?

Blackboard Unveils "Blackboard Beyond" Initiative

Steve Ryan — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:33:50 +0000

Interesting that there is absolutely no mention of Webct or its products in this vision of the future, and this is a post merger announcement. Link here

Elgg Test

Matt Lingard — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:43:29 +0000

Test post to see if this appears in my Elgg blog http://elgg.net/mattl/weblog/ In theory, you can maintain your own blog outside of Elgg but then use RSS to feed it into Elgg

M-Learning for London: a regional workshop with hands-on experience

Matt Lingard — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 16:01:02 +0000

Another M-Learning event!

M-Learning for London: a regional workshop with hands-on experience

Includes PDAs (London met) and Podcasting which is co-presented by Andy ramsden who's a LT at Bristol Uni who "broadcasts" a blackboard support fortnightly Podcast. RSS for Andy's podcasts

PAS78

Steve Bond — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:25:07 +0000

PAS78 is a new web-accessibility specification from the BSI. Not a standard as yet, but may become so over time. Seems to cost £30 though, even if you download it. Details here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/10/bsi_disability_guidelines/ Available from: http://www.bsi-global.com/ICT/PAS78/index.xalter

National Events

Matt Lingard — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:11:55 +0000

A long list of national events from this JISC RSC mailing list. Sorry there are too many to make links live manually, you'll have to copy and paste... 20th-24th March 2006 - Digital Preservation Training Programme Birmingham Conference Park http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/dptp/bookingform.htm 21st March 2006- IPR in E-Learning Middlesex University http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/bdu/IPRworkshop.html 22nd March 2006 - Edexcel Licence Centres Conference 2006 Aston Business Centre, Birmingham Email: licenceconference@edexcel.org.uk 23rd March 2006 - Project Management Workshop University of Newcastle http://www.netskills.ac.uk/workshops/event/ncl-mar06-projman-r1/ 23 March 2006 - Web 2.0 Hip or Hype? Said Business School, Oxford www.alpsp.org/events/2006/TUW/default.htm I was quite interested in this one (above) but perhaps too publisher focussed. Lots more... 27th-31st March 2006 - Designs on eLearning Online Conference Online International Conference organised by the University of the Arts focusing on the use of technology in learning and teaching in art, design and communication. http://www.designsonelearning.net/index.php?section=1&item=2 27th- 31st March 2006 – Innovating Learning 2006: Transforming Learning Experiences An online conference www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_conference06_booking.html 29th March 2006 - e-Assessment: Tools & Techniques (Netskills course) Institute of Education, London http://www.rsc-london.ac.uk/cms/775/ 29th March 2006 - Free Course: Introduction to MIMAS Bibliographic Services University College London http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/science.shtml 30th March 2006 - Mobile Learning: Education on Demand (Netskills course) Institute of Education, London £145 http://www.rsc-london.ac.uk/cms/776/ 31st March 2006 - JISC/UUK/SCOP One-day Conference on Compliance Issues in Higher Education Woburn House Conference Centre, London www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/events 6th April 2006 - Blended Learning: Integration and Innovation Cornwall http://www.cuc.ac.uk/blendedlearning/ 10th-12th April 2006 - Open Source and Sustainability Oxford http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/2006-04-10-12/ 10th-12th April 2006 - Networked Learning (a research-based conference on networked learning in higher education and lifelong learning) University of Lancaster http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/ 12th April 2006 - Legal Aspects of Online Learning Environments University of Warwick http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/events/OLE_06/Programme.htm 3rd May 2006 - SOLSTICE 2006 Conference: Enhancing student learning through the intelligent deployment of technologies Edge Hill, Ormskirk http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/SOLSTICE/Conference2006submission.htm 3rd May 2006 - Autolib National Conference Buckingham £30 http://www.rsc-london.ac.uk/cms/835/ 15th June 2006 - Blended Learning - A dialogue in Innovation and Practice The University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Herts http://perseus.herts.ac.uk/uhinfo/index.cfm?05673EF2-0FDD-FA74-4431-A663 19th-21st June 2006 - 2nd INTERNATIONAL PLAGIARISM CONFERENCE 2006 Gateshead, Newcastle http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk/conference2006/index.html 21st June 2006 – e-learning @ Greenwich: Conference University of Greenwich http://www.gre.ac.uk/e-conference 21st – 22nd June 2006 - An Expedition to European Digital Cultural Heritage Collecting, Connecting - and Conserving? Residenz zu Salzburg http://dhc2006.salzburgresearch.at/content/view/1/2/lang,en/ 26th-30th June 2006 - ED-MEDIA 2006: World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications Orlando, Florida, USA http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/call.htm 3rd–5th July 2005 - The Higher Education Academy Annual Conference East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/List_Annual%20Conference%20event.htm Call for contributions – the deadline for the receipt of contributions is Monday 30 January. Proposals should be submitted via the website: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/conference.htm. 5th-7th July 2006 – DIVERSE 2006: Video & Video Conferencing in Education Glasgow Caledonian University http://elisu.gcal.ac.uk/diverse2006 6th – 7th July 2006 – Joint JISC/CNI Meeting Moat House Hotel, York http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/jisc-cni-2006/ 5th-7th September 2006 – ALT-C 2006 Edinburgh, Scotland http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2006/ 29th November – 1st December 2006 - ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2006 Berlin, Germany http://www.online-educa.com/?a=1

This week is Social Sciences Week! Use it to find out more about podcasting!

Jane Secker — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:21:06 +0000

This week is Social Sciences Week! Have you seen the Social Sciences Voices web site yet? Social Science Voices http://www.sosig.ac.uk/voices/ . a special project of SOSIG Each day it is publishing a page on the web site on a topic to do with making use of audio. These include * Getting started with podcasts * Marketing and news uses of audio * Teaching and learning uses of audio * Research uses of audio * Putting it all together Accompanying each day's written post is a short audio download on that topic, showing how the podcast concept could work.

Programme for HigheredBlogCon

Matt Lingard — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:14:44 +0000

The Programme for HigheredBlogCon is now available. Worth a look. Matt

Case Study: Podcasts as a Learning Tool in Economics

Matt Lingard — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:35:48 +0000

Following on from Jane's recent post, I've been following a few links... Some interesting findings: Case Study: Podcasts as a Learning Tool in Economics (Economics Network) Similar comments about the need for short audio clips were made by Andy Ramsden in today's sosig podcast on teaching Matt

Open University announces £5.65 million project to make learning material free on the internet

Steve Ryan — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 14:27:30 +0000

The Open University today announced a GBP £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) project to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. Supported by a grant of US $4.45 million from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation the University will launch the website in October 2006.

Higher Education podcasting

Matt Lingard — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:23:58 +0000

It's a podcasting day for me today... Now listening to a podcast on Moodle at OU higlighted on Auricle where Derek Morrison asks

Why aren't you doing something like this? Why aren't you out talking to and capturing the views and experiences of the innovators in your own organisations and then sharing them with the rest of us? Where's the funding that will make this possible going to come from? Is this best left as a distributed activity involving just anyone who's interested, or is there also scope for a major pump-priming initiative involving the major educational funding bodies/agencies?

Matt

Resetting Moodle courses

Kris Roger — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:14:11 +0000

While trying to find out how to reset a Moodle assignment I found that you can't even reset the course as a whole! And it looks like I'll have to recommend that a teacher deletes an assignment and creates it again. See this Moodle forums entry: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=36874#170711 Kris.

Reports from Moodle Pilot

Matt Lingard — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:51:12 +0000

EdTechPost: Reports from Collaborative Moodle Pilot in BC This seems to be quite detailed, for example this is one document forming only part of one of the 10 study objectives: Process & Time to Migrate a WebCT Course to Moodle v1.6 On the downside it's lots of Word docs which doesn't make for such a great web experince... Matt

Aplia

Vinayak — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:39:08 +0000

I don't know if you guys have seen this before, but an Economics professor from Stanford has started a VLE specifically designed for Economics students and Economics courses. The system, known as Aplia tries to integrate textbooks with VLEs, and backs it up with the celebrity status that Paul Romer has in the profession. Romer's most famous contribution to Economics has been a model that suggests that people who innovate and create ideas must be rewarded by patents and monopoly protection to compensate them and urge them to continue innovating. My own area of interest lies in trying to suggest that this isn't absolutely necessary, using Open Source innovation as a proof of concept. I wonder if we should use Moodle, tweak it up a bit, and create an Open Source equivalent to Aplia and see which one does better :)

Lifelong E-learning

Matt Lingard — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:14:26 +0000

One day conference at SOAS in june: Lifelong Learning for all: E-learning from Concept to Practice.

Email ends the age of deference

Matt Lingard — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:35:05 +0000

"WebCT is now almost nationwide" ... apparantly... see the second comment on this blog article: Email ends the age of deference from Guardian Unlimited: Mortar Board

WebCT Community Forum, Coventry

Matt Lingard — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:42:42 +0000

The WebCT Community Forum on 25th April 2006 promises to be a lively and stimulating event, with presentations exploring aspects of moving from WebCT CE4 to Vista 4, associated staff development issues, a preview of WebCT’s Personal Development Portfolio, the use of audio files in assessment, and feedback on the recently held 5th Annual WebCT European User Conference, Edinburgh. http://www.corporate.coventry.ac.uk/forum2006

Personal Portfolios

Matt Lingard — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:14:11 +0000

One common theme from today's APD away day was 'personal portfolios'.... Herve mentioned them in his presentation and is keen to introduce something like the new WebCT portfolio next academic year for students to be able to present themselves and their work; the need for a tool for PDPs (personal development planning) came up in the PhD discussion group I was in (I know Steve has previously shown them the edinburgh system (name?); and in the Blue Skies "e-tutor" session personal profiles & personal planning were central to the ideas generated. These are perhaps not all quite the same but there is definitely some commonality and a possible future area of work.

Ping Pong

Steve Ryan — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:53:06 +0000

Has anyone come across this VLE. I was just sent the following email. Dear New UCISA Friends, It was a pleasure to meet many of you the other week in Blackpool. We learned a great deal from our conversations and came away with a few major themes ringing loud: 1. You are spending way too much money on hardware in order to run your existing WebCT or Blackboard solutions. 2. You are concerned that the Blackboard/WebCT merger threatens the competitive spirit of the VLE market. 3. You are open to a solution like Ping Pong that affords you the same VLE functionality at a fraction of the total cost of ownership that you pay today. Case in point regarding the over-expenditure that you are forced to make with Blackboard or WebCT: we heard one amazing example in which over £200,000 of hardware was necessary to run a solution that would have only required an £8,000 hardware investment in conjunction with using Ping Pong! Importantly, there is a way to save money while delivering an even better VLE service to your stakeholders. There is a viable alternative to WebCT and Blackboard. Ping Pong will perform a road show throughout the UK in April and we would be happy to pay a visit to your university to tell you why this Scandinavian product can change the way you approach your VLE initiative. Please let us know if you are interested in booking time with us. With kind regards, Richard, Michel, Agneta, and Jeff PING PONG® is Scandinavia's leading Virtual Learning Environment (VLE/LMS/LCMS) developed and designed in Sweden. PING PONG offers a comprehensive range of functions for training, communication, collaboration, evaluation, testing, statistics, administration, and skills and competence management. The user-friendly interface allows both system administrators and individual instructors to choose relevant functions as they see fit for distance as well as campus-based activities.

Screencasts

Matt Lingard — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:04:02 +0000

Podcasts vs Screencasts In the first presentation of the HigherEdBlogCon today, Mark Ott highlighted some of the inherent problems of lecture podcasts and explained how he trys to overcome them by 'screencasting'. The main problem with audio podcasts is that audio is not scannable - so while it's useful for a student listening to the whole 50min lecture it's no good for a student who is revising or reviewing material as it's difficult to find a particular point in the lecture. He uses screencasts - camtasia recordings of PowerPoint with audio - to overcome this. He also makes them shorter - lecture segments of 5-15mins covering 1 or 2 topics and he records them at 'full speed' i.e. no pauses that you would find in a real live lecture. This is of course extra work but perhaps the output is more useful. At least from a reviwing / revising perspective.

WebCT Vista 4 / CE6

Matt Lingard — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:54:08 +0000

Report from Coventry WebCT Forum (Part 1) Overall Coventry are very happy with the new product - lots of benefits, like easier file management - but my overall feeling was not so positive by the end of the day. I'll addreess this in a later post. For now some bits and pieces re WebCT picked up at Coventry:

Despite overall positivity, Coventry regret buying Vista and wish they had CE6. The extras that Vista offers are not worth the money they feel
Next WebCT Service Pack will include blogging and journalling tool (developed as part of the Porfolio tool)
Migration - Coventry have quite a headache this year with new Vista and lots of new staff, new faculty structure, new module codes etc. They are using the Section feature for Cohorts / Years which is not what i thought they were for. Isn't that the purpose of terms? I'll explain this further in the next VLE meet, I have some detailed notes. I spotted a potential problem for them with this that they had not noticed...
They are getting individual designers heavily involved in the upgrade - briefing and half day workshop to upgrade courses
Powerlinks included in a template do not work in courses generated from that template.
Using the migration tool so-called "redundant pages" are NOT migrated. A redundant page is, for example, an HTML page that has been linked to from a Single Page for example. Effects those who have uploaded their own sets of pages rather than using content modules to organise them. The course has to be exported / imported manually rather than 'migrated' to include these redundant pages.
Introducing a new very simple template. It includes the word 'Homepage' on the Course Content Home (i.e. the homapage). Apparantly WebCT are considering replacing 'Course Content Home' with 'Homepage' after feedback from edinburgh

WebCT Portfolio

Matt Lingard — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:18:17 +0000

Report from Coventry Forum (Part 2) A live version of the forthcoming (possibly July) WebCT Portfolio was demoed at the Forum. This is an extra that has to be bought but WeBft are not revealing prices yet. Many participants were interested in its potential for use as an electronic PDP tool.

Students get an extra tab "WebCT Portfolio" alongside the MyWebCT tab. The portfolio allows students to organise their own material how they wish. They are given a set of Designer tools to do this. The tools include ones we are familiar with (textblocks, content modules - renamed as Binders) and new ones - a blogging tool for example.
Students can control access to individual elements via selective release. This includes the ability to give access to non-WebCt users (e.g. an employer) by creating upto 3 accounts!! This wasn't demoed so not sure how this works.
There's an Learning Objectives tool (not the right word perhaps) that allows students to create learning objectives then tie work to them as an alternative structure
Back in WebCT - the best feature - students can select work (e.g. discussion posts, assignments with tutor feedback) and "Save to Portfolio". Files are created in their file store and they can then organise them how they wish
Everyone agreed that students would need training in use of this tool.

My overall view is that it is too complicated. For a designer who knows WebCt it is fine, but for students??? I think you can provide templates which might help. It's definiely worth a more detailed look but my initial feelings are not positive.

Simplicity

Matt Lingard — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 14:22:19 +0000

Report from Coventry Forum (Part 3) My overriding feeling after spending a day focussed on WebCT CE6 and the new Portfolio was why does everything have to be so complex? I really do think we need some simpler interfaces for lecturers and designers to use and CE6 fails to deliver. It may just be a question of time and a need for familiarity but CE6 is overly or badly designed in places... It may be easier than 4x in some ways and perhaps even overall but it is still way more complicated than it needs to be.

Warwick blogs and e-tools

Steve Bond — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:09:18 +0000

This is the Warwick stuff I was talking about: This is the Warwick blogs page, where you can see the thousands of student blogs that exist. This is an individual departmental section (Theatre studies) where the blogs seem to be quite focussed on academic subjects. This publicity is how they got so many blogs going. Warwick produced an in-house 'BlogBuilder' tool to do this. It is one of a range of web tools that they have produced and integrated with single sign-on. Steve

WebCT 6 Testing Checklist

Chris Fryer — Thu, 04 May 2006 09:37:08 +0000

The University of Houston and University of Houston-Victoria came up with a testing schedule/script to ensure their installation of Vista worked with various browsers, operating systems and java versions. I doubt we'll have the time/inclination to test every possible environment, but it could be a good checklist for testing the student & staff builds, at a minimum.

WebCT My Modules (Coventry)

Matt Lingard — Fri, 05 May 2006 11:24:14 +0000

This screencast is by Andy Syson at Coventry. It's for Designers and is to explain their rollover procedure:

Understanding your initial My Modules List

E-learning from Concept to Practice

Matt Lingard — Wed, 17 May 2006 15:43:50 +0000

Is anyone going to this - I don't think I've seen it on our list? Could be intersting:Lifelong Learning for all: E-learning from Concept to Practice. I'm interested Matt

EdTechPost: 'Blog Uses in Education' Drag and Drop Exercise

Matt Lingard — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:47:27 +0000

A drag-and-drop version of the matrix of blog uses. Possibly useful for a workshop (with PCs): EdTechPost: 'Blog Uses in Education' Drag and Drop Exercise

Edupress

Steve Ryan — Tue, 23 May 2006 11:14:38 +0000

Has anyone come across this? Edupress is a wordpress variant specifically for educators "EduPress is Wordpress for educators. That means it's first and foremost a blog but an extremely flexible one which can be made into a fully featured multimedia extravaganza of a website! Like Wordpress, EduPress is free and open-source, meaning it can be shared and modified however you wish. Check out the features below and see how you can use EduPress effectively in your teaching: Automatic hyperlinking Integrated audio player Easy podcasting capabilities Easy-to-use admin interface Option to make whole or parts of blog password-protected Comment spam protection Compatibility with mobile devices Contact form Email encoder to prevent spamming Header images related to education 'Asides' category to show mini-posts on sidebar (e.g. for homework) Printable posts " It looks very nice. I wonder if the anti spam email encoding will work for some of our projects. You can find it here. Edupress

Turnitin Integration

Matt Lingard — Tue, 23 May 2006 15:57:37 +0000

Northumbria Learning are working with iParadigms (US developer of Turnitin) to integrate Turnitin with Moodle as has already been done for WebCt & Bb. How does this work for CE6? Is it a PowerLink we have to get / buy?

Accessibility guidelines

Steve Ryan — Wed, 24 May 2006 08:55:18 +0000

Very intersting post by Joe Clarke, highly critical of the new web accessibility guidelines. Here is a taste "In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas." and "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group is the worst committee, group, company, or organization I’ve ever worked with. Several of my friends and I were variously ignored; threatened with ejection from the group or actually ejected; and actively harassed. The process is stacked in favour of multinationals with expense accounts who can afford to talk on the phone for two hours a week and jet to world capitals for meetings. The WCAG development process is inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t speak English. More importantly, it’s inaccessible to some people with disabilities, notably anyone with a reading disability..."

WebCT Portfolio (2)

Matt Lingard — Fri, 26 May 2006 15:42:59 +0000

Further to my earlier comments on the WebCT Portfolio tool in this blog yesterday I joined an online Seminar by WebCT run thru Horizon Live Classroom. [Seminar Archive] I found it a little dull, partly because I'd seen the tool before at Coventry but also because I find Powerpoint / Audio presentations difficult to stay with for an hour... so i should have gone to real life presentation with Kris ;-) The main question I wanted to ask was about the possibility of a pilot / trial licence as the rather hefty 5-figure sum we have been quoted by WebCT for the Portfolio is a non-starter. I asked my question but it was rephrased as: is it possible to 'review and test' WebCT Portfolio? The answer to that is yes - work with your account manager and it will be possible to evaluate the environment. It came across as a ways of us being able to test the system rather than a way of us piloting over an academic year / term. We need to check but I doubt we can do that without buying. I have to say there was some very positive response from other 70+ participants and only two or three visible 'raised eyebrows' when I mentioned the significant 5-figure cost!

What's new in WebCT CE6

Matt Lingard — Wed, 31 May 2006 13:30:30 +0000

Brief descriptions and screenshots: http://webct.uni.edu/information/whatsnewCE6.htm from The University of Northern Iowa

Moodle & Elgg

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:20:41 +0000

A new Moodle plugin that promises

a means to transfer submissions to online assignments from moodle to an eportfolio system, namely elgg

Once elgg improves its user interface this will be worth investigating. Something to keep an eye on definitely See also WebCT & elgg in this blog

Classroom audio and video capture - Apreso and podcasts

Kris Roger — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:34:25 +0000

LSE Centre for Learning Technology have been investigating various options for recording lecture audio and video over the past couple of years (with support from the Audio Visual and Technical Services units). This has ranged from simple audio recording with a voice recorder to full automated recording of all lecture audio and visuals displayed through a data projector. One option we have looked at is the use of a digital video recorder (DVR) to capture audio from the lecture theatre PA system along with video output from the visualiser. During the 2005-2006 session we have been using a Kiss DP558 DVR, which is has a web schedule function and FTP server for download of the resulting video files. This has proved to be a bit 'flakey' and the post-production required to present and stream the lecture has been fairly tedious. But it has however been very useful as a proof of concept experiment. So we were happy to find a solution in January 2006 called Anystream Apreso, which is essentially a software solution that captures 3 different inputs simultaneously (VGA projector, composite video and audio) and packages them into a web based presentation. The new system should eventually allow us to schedule the recording of lectures in LSE's main lecture theatres without any intervention or production effort required between us setting a schedule for the term and the lectures appearing online - either on the wider web or through the current LSE VLE (WebCT). The system also allows lecture audio to automatically be published as 'podcasts' for playing on portable audio players such as the Apple iPod. We also already have a platform that can publish any lecture series recorded with a standard voice recorder as a podcast. We are now working with the LSE Audio Visual unit to acquire the Apreso licences, the hardware (capture PCs and content management servers) and work on finding a solution to some fairly substantial technical barriers in one of the main LSE lecture theatres. Further progress will be reported here of course! Kris.

Blogs and VLEs - do they really fit together?

Kris Roger — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:14:24 +0000

I stumbled across an interesting debate on whether it's best to encourage the use of established blog sites such as blogger.com rather than try and create course-centric blogs within the institution (and the VLE). This question was one that was already going on in my head, as to how blogs can work as part of a course - after the novelty wears off, is there enough of a community to maintain such an isolated course only 'blogosphere'? Also, does it really have time to mature sufficiently in the concentrated time-span of a term length course? Any thoughts? Kris.

E-course packs: deadline 31st July

Jane Secker — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:01:19 +0000

Following the introduction of a new scanning licence for UK publications, the electronic course pack service is now open to all WebCT users. This allows you to request small amounts of core readings which are scanned and made available to your students through their WebCT course. If you wish to take advantage of this service the deadline for submissions for the Michaelmas Term is 31st July 2006. Please note: * You must have a WebCT course * No more than 20 core readings can be included in a pack each term * Extracts should be no more than 5% of work / one chapter from a book / one article from a journal issue * Readings should usually be from UK publishers - we cannot guarantee being able to obtain copyright clearance for non-UK readings * Only readings NOT available in electronic format will be scanned - so please check the electronic journal collections at LSE If you wish to take advantage of the e-course pack service please contact epacks@lse.ac.uk If you are interested in course pack services more generally please visit the new Course Pack One Stop Shop website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/tss/OSS/OSS.htm

Blog Matrix

Matt Lingard — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:42:21 +0000

Using Blogs in Education

Matt Lingard — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:44:58 +0000

Inspired by Scott Leslie's original matrix of some uses of blogs in education I have produced a new version. As you will see it also owes much to this Dutch version which Scott Leslie highlighted recently on his blog when writing about a further excellent drag-and-drop version which it also draws on! So why yet another version? Well, I wanted wanted a simple version in English (!) that would work well as a Powerpoint slide for our forthcoming internal workshop on weblogs and wikis. I think this will but all comments welcome! It was created with PowerPoint and converted to an image for this blog posting (Click the thumbnail for a large version). MANY thanks to the original authors! Matt

Online Collaboration Using Weblogs and Wikis

Kris Roger — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:37:17 +0000

Here's the presentation from our lunchtime workshop (19 June 2006). Session outline: Recent technologies, such as weblogs and wikis offer new possibilities for online collaboration and communication. A weblog is a webpage containing entries on a topic provided by an individual or group of writers. Weblog readers are then able to comment on these entries. A Wiki is a website of editable web pages, enabling users to collectively write documents and link them together. Weblogs and Wikis are quick and easy to use and don’t require technical knowledge. This session will explore the potential of these tools in teaching and learning. It will look at examples of weblogs and wikis in use and provide opportunities for hands-on activities and discussion.

DIVERSE conference - video in education

Kris Roger — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 15:23:33 +0000

This week I (Kris Roger) am at the DIVERSE conference being held at Glasgow Caledonian University. I'll try and summarise some of the sessions that I attend and maybe add some of my own thoughts along the way. Apparently some of the conference is to be webcast, but I've yet to find where! There are also Diverse Flickr and YouTube groups - hopefully there will be something to see at some stage! I'll tag any follow up posts as Conference related if you're interested. Kris.

DIVERSE Conference - Day 1

Kris Roger — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:26:40 +0000

Well after chatting to some Finnish colleagues I've already found one other person writing a blog from this conference, so I guess, unsurprisingly, I'm not the only one. The first session of the day was the usual introduction to the conference accompanied by some sponsor presentations. The first of which was by Video 3 technologies limited who are another provider of web based presentations - similar to Horizon Live. The product looked fairly easy to use but they failed the print a URL in the conference program, so I'll come back and edit this if I find one! The other sponsor presentation was by Marratech who provide multipoint video conferencing software. For the parallel sessions I generally found myself at the teaching practice and theory related talks - the main theme was 'how can the use of video relate to these?'. The best of these showed how video production by students can help them develop an understanding of different learning theories. e.g. students to make a short film illustrating a particular theory. Others looked at different models of lecture presentation and which students felt enhanced their learning the most. Finally, one presenter hoped to harvest video lectures from different institutions so that they can be re-used. Of course a number of intellectual property and copyright hurdles were raised during this session. The final session I attended today was a panel discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of reusing lectures. This raised a number of interesting points, such as the balance between production values and the quality of the learning content. Whether students are interested in lectures from other universities. Also covered were issues such as why teaching staff may sometimes be reluctant to produce video content, e.g. some may be averse to having a public record of their lectures (warts and all) for all to see, and what incentives would encourage them to invest their time in producing video lectures, e.g. promotion related recognition for their teaching efforts. So, apologies as this is the equivalent of a rapid scribbling of notes, maybe I'll come back and edit or add to them tomorrow after some reflection. And of course I've only captured a random sample of the sessions today. I may get around to posting some (irrelevant) photos too. Now I'm off to watch the second world cup semi final - allez les bleues!! Kris.

DIVERSE Conference - Day 2

Kris Roger — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 16:05:53 +0000

Today started with a keynote from a number of Queen's Award winning community media projects based in Bristol, including the Knowle West Media Centre. They showed some of their films and discussed how some of these ground-up projects can interlink with more established forms of education, funding and business. It was a great keynote as it certainly differed from the standard e-learning conference paper from an 'established' and/or 'famous' academic. The first parallel paper of the day focused on the use of virtual reality and avatars and how a lack of an established identity, structure or relationship between participants can help aid imagination. This was interesting and also an important requirement for a creative writing course, but I've yet to re-imagine how many LSE courses could use this environment. The second paper looked at using filmmaking to enable student learning, in a similar way to one of the papers from yesterday. The approach was to enhance learning by getting the students to engage with the subject matter through a creative process. The last paper before lunch looked at a number of implentations of the use of streamed lectures at Lancaster over the last 6 or so years. The first used a talking head 'manually' combined with PowerPoint slides (from 2000) through to the most recent incarnation which uses Microsoft Producer. The next step will be to use Camtasia Studio for wider browser compatibility. There wasn't much focus on value to students and learning though, apart from a simple usage survey where 34% of the target audience (non-native English speakers) said they re-watched the lectures. After lunch one of the papers featured 'presenter by video conference'. Firstly, the technology (Macromedia Breeze) only had one hiccough, although it did seem to insist on doing weird screen wipes when it thought nothing was happening! The topic, unsurprisingly, was about using video conference software to enable two disparate student cohorts (one at LCC, London, the other at Winona State) to communicate and collaborate. They seemed to have had some success from an organisational point of view - students had weekly meetings and communication was between small groups (LCC) to one student at Winona. The most interesting question was 'did it enhance student learning?', the answer was of course 'yes', but I didn't really get how - probably because there wasn't enough time to answer the question thoroughly. Finally, the last sessions I attended today were from the VideoAktiv project. Clive Young's was especially interesting as he gave us a run-down of the top 10 uses for video in education. Maybe I'll list them at a later date or maybe I'll link to Clive's presentation when I find it online! I'm off to the conference dinner now so see you tomorrow. Oh, and I managed to upload some images to Flickr, but with a lot of faffing around with over-secured wifi access and eventually a borrowed USB cable (thanks to Ross Little!). See you tomorrow - if anyone is reading that is... Kris.

DIVERSE Conference - Day 3

Kris Roger — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:42:09 +0000

The keynote today was from Scott Higgins, a film historian from Wesleyan University, New England. He gave a fascinating talk on the importance of colour as part of a film narrative, using illustrations from the history of film - including an example from the beginnings of cinema (The Sealed Room, 1909), the age of technicolor from the 1930s to the 1950s and a brief mention of contempory techniques for post-production alteration of colour composition. After coffee we were told about plans for a media portal, which the producers hope will enable a market place in reusable video and film - anything from commercially produced material from organisations such as the BBC to film produced by individual teachers. Unfortunately the supplied laptop failed the presenters and they were unable to show us a demo! The third session of the day was from Gerald Cannon of Dublin City University who talked about their very impressive integrated system for recording everything and everyone within their Nursing Studies school. The system comprises of 36 cameras linked to various capture stations which also link to a central video server. Recording is controlled using touchscreens by the staff and students and so doesn't require intervention from a technician. Video is encoded as MPEG 2 and 4 and is fully retrievable as each user has a personal account on the video server. The system is used for reflection on nursing practice, peer to peer assessment and also delivery of pre-prepared material. The system did sound fairly expensive though so a pressing need would probably have to exist before such an investment could be made. The conference ended with closing remarks from Chris O'Hagan, who's message was essentially that we must use our imaginations and try to raise the 'lowest common denimonator'. And finally the handover to Lillehammer, Norway for DIVERSE 2007! This final instalment is a bit rushed as I'm off to catch a plane back to London, so I might come back and add to this later. Cheers, Kris.

eLit 2006 conference report

Jane Secker — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:23:01 +0000

eLit 2006 Conference

Jane Secker — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:23:47 +0000

Sarah and I attended the eLit conference at Loughborough University on 28th-30th June. Overall it was an interesting conference, although delegate numbers were noticeably down on previous years. It did however mean the conference was small and friendly and great for networking. And there were some new faces from many of the new universities. Once again librarians dominated, and there were very few IT, academic or e-learning staff attending. There was quite a buzz about new social networking technologies, but also a feeling that collaboration and engaging academics and other learning support staff was crucial. Sadly Allan Martin the founder of eLit couldn’t attend this year’s conference and his enthusiasm and usual opening keynote addressed was missed. An overriding problem throughout the conference somewhat ironically was technical problems, with a projector bulb blowing in the first keynote, through to lost presentations and problems with laptops. We had excellent keynotes, notably from Hilda Kruger and Mark Stiles. Our full report is available as a word document: eLit 2006 conference report

Web-based Operating sytem

Steve Ryan — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:55:43 +0000

This could be worth keeping an eye on (from Slashdot)

Juergen writes "You OS comes from the MIT Labs and contains an email client, Chat Function, RSS Reader, and Text Editor. YouOS is a web operating system that lets you run diverse applications within a web browser. Small applications like sticky notes or clocks. Large applications like word processing, mp3 players, and instant messaging. Even better, it's very easy to tweak an existing application or write your own. "

It is currently at an alpha version, so a way to go before it could be used seriously Follow this Link

OpenAcademic Going Live

Matt Lingard — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 13:09:32 +0000

http://openacademic.org/news/?p=10 A new collaboration in the pipeline: this "project is dedicated to integrating Elgg, Drupal, Moodle, and Mediawiki. All code developed under this project will be released back to the respective communities under an open source license, and it will be freely available to download and distribute."

MoodleMoot Keynote Commentary

Matt Lingard — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 13:30:15 +0000

http://elgg.net/mberry/weblog/126044.html Commentary on Martin Dougiamas' keynote at last month's Moodle conference with links to audio too. Haven't had chance to read read it myself yet.

The Web's New News Thing

Matt Lingard — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:02:58 +0000

Looking to spot the next MySpace? Consider Digg.com, a "social news" site caught up just now in a scrappy battle with AOL. "Social news," you ask? [A test using the Digg 'Blog it' link. Read more about digg - ML] read more of this story

CLT Staff Survey 2006: results now available

Jane Secker — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:34:17 +0000

The 2006 CLT Staff Survey has once again provided us with some valuable feedback and suggests that the services, training and support offered by the team is of a high quality and appropriately focused. A few points have emerged of interest including:

Praise for the CLT team, who provide valuable technical, pedagogic and copyright advice
The importance and value of the e-course pack service, however a possible need to increase the number of readings per week and include non-UK readings for some courses
The value of the training and support we offer – however a need to ensure that this is well publicised and at a time staff can attend
The preference for face to face training either as one to one or in small groups, with a more limited and supplementary role for online support
While most staff feel WebCT has been of benefit to their course, few seem to have made changes to the way they teach in light of using technology
A growing interest in using multimedia in teaching but a hesitancy on some lecturers’ behalf to have their lectures recorded in case students don’t attend lectures
A few recurring problems with links to e-resources (either journals or e-course packs) being broken or not working off campus.

A total of 50 responses were received. Twenty lecturers completed the survey and six departmental administrators with the remainder identifying themselves as postgraduate WebCT course designers. CLT are currently supporting people with a range of experience, with 11 people having used WebCT for more than 3 years, 13 using it for 1-2 years and 19 being new users. More detailed results are available in the Staff_Survey_Summary.doc

CourseGenie 2.1 & Moodle

Matt Lingard — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 14:18:45 +0000

Horizon Wimba Releases Course Genie 2.1 See http://www.horizonwimba.com/about/press_detail.php?id=105 for press release. Better integration with Moodle from Course genie. Quizzes can now be created in CG and scored by Moodle (ie recordred in GradeBook). Will now also export CG quizzes as a CE 6 quiz. Must upgrade and take a look at some point...

Staff Survey Summary.doc

Jane Secker — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:56:43 +0000

Staff_Survey_Summary.doc

Jane Secker — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:59:27 +0000

What is DOPA?

Matt Lingard — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:54:35 +0000

DOPA has been cropping up in my RSS feeds for a while now and I've not really taken much notice. Ben Werdmuller at Elgg has just provided this useful link to the story explaining all... In brief: with tha aim of protecting children online the US is introducing legislation (DOPA) banning schools and public libraries from giving students access to social networking sites such as MySpace... As the article points out, forcing kids to use social networking sites on the sly isn't really the answer.

Report on the 2006 WebCT Reviews

Steve Bond — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:30:36 +0000

The Reviews took place on 6 and 13 June 2006 and were attended by 45 people in total, mostly academic and administrative staff. The Reviews serve two purposes: to allow WebCT users to meet and exchange ideas, and to allow CLT staff to report on the use of WebCT over the past year, and look forward to next year. Participants convened in groups and discussed issues arising from their use of WebCT over the past year. Detailed feedback from these groups is available in the full report, but the key points arising were as follows:

What worked well: support for e-packs, self-registration system, use of discussions to share work and to link up with overseas students
What worked less well: the failure of WebCT in first week of Michaelmas term, technical limitations of the discussions tool
Ways to encourage student use of WebCT: use of compulsory assignments, introduction to WebCT in a computer classroom, giving students ‘ownership’ of the discussion forums, discussing in class what is happening online.
Other topics: the feeling that teaching staff need to become more involved in using WebCT; suggestion that demonstrations by existing users would help generate interest; concerns about time limitations and how students could be used to do more of the work; suggestion that student seminar presentations could be filmed.

After the review, all participants were asked to complete an evaluation survey about the review. The results of the survey, completed by 88% of attendees, were extremely positive, with all participants rating the reviews as either ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’. Furthermore, all participants agreed that they had learned something from the review and that it was pitched at the right level. Respondents identified the key benefits of the review as being the chance to exchange ideas with other WebCT users and getting updates on new developments in learning technology. Suggestions for improvements to the reviews included: allowing more time for demonstrations of new tools, getting a greater number of academics to attend, and demonstrations of good practice by other WebCT users. These results are greatly encouraging and indicate that the reviews are worthwhile exercise. We will consider implementing the suggestions for improvement in next year’s reviews. Please see the full report for further details.

WebCT Reviews: Full report

Steve Bond — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:35:45 +0000

stu.dicio.us

Matt Lingard — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:02:17 +0000

From EdTechPost Some more 'social software'.. seems to to be aimed at students making notes in lectures etc which are then shared with rest of the class... EdTech post reckons it's aimed at PDAs / phones which would make sense. It is very easy to use. See my example at http://stu.dicio.us/madrattling/ More on the stu.dicio.us blog

EdBloggerNews

Matt Lingard — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 08:48:12 +0000

Following on from the earlier posting on Digg there is now a "News for education 2.0" (!) site working on the same basis. Take a look at EdBloggerNews. I spotted it on weblogg-ed in a posting about the "Links posted for you" feature of del.icio.us - del.icio.us goodness which I wasn't aware of. Will I use it? Probably not as I'm not a del.icio.us user but perhaps useful for a collaborative group using del.icio.us for research or a group project... may be.

e-learning 2.0

Matt Lingard — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 08:53:34 +0000

The 2.0s are out in force... Thanks to EdBloggerNews I'm now reading e-learning 2.0 - how Web technologies are shaping education.

Designs on E-learning Symposium

Matt Lingard — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:04:11 +0000

I'm 'attending' this Designs on E-learning symposium online as I can't go in person for the whole day. The content is focussed on "innovations in technology and elearning in relation to art, design and communication subject areas" with, it seems, a focus on 'Web 2.0', blogging, podcasting etc. However it was the format I wanted flag up. Comments made in the online discussion will be viewable by participants in face-to-face discussion:

"Participants attending online will be able to access face-to-face discussions and contribute through synchronous conferencing and face-to-face participants will be able to transfer to online discussions whenever they wish. Communication technologies will be used extensively throughout the symposium in order to provide multiple channels for discussion and multiple means of recording and representation. Both audio and video Podcasts will be made of the Symposium and will be available on the Designs on eLearning website following the event."

There are currently about 50 online and 50 attending participants booked. I'll post a report here too. Matt

Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation: ALISS Summer Conference

Jane Secker — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 13:50:41 +0000

The ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) summer conference was held at the LSE on Wednesday 23rd August. I was chairing the event and Matt from CLT was one of the presenters. The theme of the conference was 'Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation: technology or training" and there were 6 presentations including Matt Lingard and Peter Godwin, talking about social software that many of the 'Google Generation' now use, such as blogs and wikis. Margaret Flett from UCL and Frank Parry from Loughborough were looking at MetaLib and the role of federated searching, particularly in comparison to Google Scholar. Sarah Pavey, a school librarians gave an insight into information literacy education in schools and finally Angela Joyce from Intute, gave us an overview of the new Intute: Social Sciences website and the services available. I really enjoyed the conference and initial feedback suggests that the delegates found it a thought provoking and useful day. ALISS would like to follow this up with a hands-on session, perhaps early in 2007. Heather has now made the slides available on the ALISS website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/other_sites/aliss/23august2006.html

Results

Steve Bond — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:17:12 +0000

WebCT 2006 student survey results.

WebCT student survey 2006

Steve Bond — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:17:34 +0000

The results of the 2005/2006 WebCT student survey are now available. The complete report is here, and a summary follows. A total of 1356 responses were received. Overall, the results reflect well on the state of WebCT courses at LSE. The student satisfaction level is high, and students say that they feel encouraged to use WebCT, that they think it is well-integrated with the course teaching, that it is a valuable supplement to traditional modes of teaching, and that they would like to see it used on more of their courses. The WebCT features deemed most useful by students are those that we would consider fairly basic: lecture contents, reading lists, e-packs, and external links. The assignments tool is also well appreciated. However, discussions, which are used by 80% of respondents, are seen as more non-useful than they are useful. The most requested WebCT feature is “example essays”, and there is also some desire to see the use of TV/Radio programmes, audio/video lectures, quizzes, student presentations and past exam papers. Only a small proportion of students take advantage of WebCT training. When asked what they think training should include, there are very few concrete suggestions. It is possible that there is a publicity problem with regard to training, but it might well be the case that most students simply do not require training. Finally, the results also reveal some problems with the survey itself, and certain questions may need to be redesigned for next time.

ALT-C 2006: the next generation

Jane Secker — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 16:33:38 +0000

It's almost the end of the first full day of ALT-C (Association for Learning Technology Conference) at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The weather might be a bit dreary but the content certainly isn't! I've been to lots of really interesting talks, there's been several mentions of information literacy and there are more librarians here than ever before - so I'm happy! We started the day with a keynote from Diana Oblinger from Educause, who talked about today's learners and the Net Generation's learning preferrances. She talked about the concept of 'neuroplasticity' which is where your brain changes the way it works due to external stimuli. She talked about the redesign of learning spaces, the importance of social networks and she even mentioned information literacy. A great start to the conference. I've attended a couple of session on repositories, including one by staff at the University of Cambridge Knowlegde Resource Network. This afternoon Lou McGill led a great session about repurposing and sharing learning materials and the role of library staff in facilitating this. Just this moment I've been to a session by Ian Wallace on phyiscal and virtual spaces for learning and the concept of Library 2.0 - using social software to redesign our libraries. He also described the development of a new physical learning space at Glasgow Caledonian, called the Saltire Centre. And Steve Bond would have enjoyed the session I went to by Julian Tenney from the University of Nottingham on Flash, XML and reusability. He's designed an open source tool for creating learning objects in XML and its available at: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/Editor/ This evening it's the Ghosts and Ghouls tour, so I'll be no doubt scared silly! I'll report more tomorrow on whether I got any sleep following this!

ALT-C Day Two

Jane Secker — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:51:32 +0000

Hello again from Edinburgh. Just a quick update on last night's ghostly tour which Steve thinks was not at all scary and for me was rather like an episode from Most Haunted. Let's just say I was a lot happier when I got in the pub and had a drink in my hand rather than in a very dark and spooky vault! If you like to see a photo of me go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25498841@N00/236942137/ Anyway, onto the conference. This morning I attended a session on repositories and whether they'd had their day and were a failed technology. A group from the West Midlands Share project. We had quite a lively debate. The speakers were mainly talking about learning object repositories and we also had some contributions from the audience who were familiar with institutional repositories for research content. We talked about about the issues managing both teaching and research content in repositories and whether this is desirable and possible - interesting and highly relevant to MIDESS! The keynote was Tim O'Shea from University of Edinburgh who is another great proponent of libraries and sees the digital assets and digital curation as being central to the success of research-led universities and really important for e-learning. Once again I find myself nodding lots and feeling that LSE has been leading the way integrating learning technology and libraries. Steve has promised to post something further later today, and I'll be in touch either later today or tomorrow. It's the conference dinner tonight at the Dynamic Earth centre which I'm looking forward to!

ALT-C Wiki

Matt Lingard — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:22:32 +0000

Following jane's postings I was wondering if ALT were organising any online coverage or if others were blogging. The ALT-C wiki doesn't really seem to have taken off.... but there is a link to a handful of photos on Flickr A couple of ALT-C bloggers can be found on Technorati and some more (including this blog) on a Google alt-c blog search

Alt-C Day 2

Steve Ryan — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:29:48 +0000

Well Jane has shamed me into finally posting. My good intentions to post everyday have so far not come to much. The conference is seems to me to be going pretty well with more than the usual number of interesting sessions and fewer "what we did with our VLE" type presentations. Diana Oblinger's overview of students' use and expectations of technologies and its potential impact on education was pitched at just the right level for a keynote. It appeared to be an effortless overview but actually contained much of real substance. Around the conference a hot issue for many is the BlackBoard patents. No new news or developments but it is clear where many delegates sympathies lie. Jane has already mentioned the "ghost and ghouls" tour. For me the highlight was when a certain person had to be taken out before the end as it was all getting a bit too scary! hmm clearly I am not very good on picking up the psychic aura. Let's hope only the right kind of spirts are present at the conference dinner tonight.

ALT-C Day 2, part 2

Jane Secker — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 16:26:42 +0000

Just to out-blog Steve here's my second posting of the day. This afternoon I went along and chatted to several poster presenters. Had a really interesting chat with people from Bristol about using podcasting. They have a blog which they'd really like people to post entries on about what they are doing with podcasting. I was telling them a bit about video lectures, podcasts and visualiser stuff we are doing at LSE, so Sarah and Kris do post something on: www.podcasting.blog-city.com I also chatted some more to Iain at Glasgow Caledonian who works in the Saltire Centre and he might have a solution to our Fedora upload problem. I've passed on Marie's e-mail so he'll get in touch and he's going to be at the Open Scholarship Conference in October. I also chatted to the Intrallect people who showed me the latest version of their repository software. Just this moment I went to a session on e-portfolios from Shane Sutherland at Wolverhampton who have developed PebblePad. A neat tool which is really a personal learning environment as it contains blogs and many other tools which can be shared. Right, that's it from me as I need to get my glad rags on for the dinner tonight! Farewell folks!

About

Matt Lingard — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:29:47 +0000

CLT Blog is the team blog of the Centre for Learning Technology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and is authored collaboratively by the members of the team. The blog is open to comments and we look forward to hearing from you - you will need to include an email address but this will not be published.

ALT-C Day Three

Jane Secker — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:59:37 +0000

I've not long arrived home from the conference and I have to say it has left me full of enthusiasm with lots of ideas and things to follow up on. Dare I say, a bit different from previous ALT conferences I've attended. There really was a feeling that we are getting beyond VLEs and starting to think about how the next generation actually learn. This morning I went along to a social software set of short papers. Liz Bennett from Huddesfield talking about using sychronous discussions so students could get to know each other socially. And a group from the University of Leicester, led by Roger Device, talking about wikis and how they are being used for a variety of purposes - they were interestingly described as informal repositories - it seems to be the word of the moment! He talked about developing 'wiki-bility' amongst students, who'd actually really quite disliked being set an assignment that involved them having to do some original research and add an entry to wikipedia. If it was still there un-edited in 2 weeks they were deemed to have been successful. Roger concluded that Web 2.0 could well be a deep cultural change for universities and for IT services departments. The chair's of each theme then led a round up session and I went along to Phil Candy's session on the Next Generation Learners theme. He entitled his talk 'Laudable, but misgudied' which was how he described people of his generation who attempted to engage with technology so that students thought they were cool! He summarised the key themes of the conference as he saw them, what had not surprised and what had intrigued him. He then asked us to discuss with the person sitting next to us what had surprised us, what we learnt and we fed back to the group. He concluded by decribing a model of e-learning based on research he did at the Department of Education and Science in Australia on Self Directed learning in the Digital Age. I really liked Phil's round up to the conference and thinks he talks a lot of sense. The final keynote was Stephen Heppell, and I only caught half of this session as I had to leave for the airport. He was an e-learning pioneer and talked about some early attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to use technology in education. He argued that we are in a new millenium and that 10 years ago we built big things that did things for people. Now we should be building things to help people help each other. He argued that universities are monolithic hierarchical organisations and they are going to have to change. It's a challenging time and don't expect the government to lead the way with policy. Steve can pick up where I left off, but I'm disappointed I missed the end of his talk as what I saw was entertaining and thought provoking.

Two keynotes and two visions?

Steve Ryan — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 16:06:17 +0000

I talked about Diana Oblinger’s keynotes in an earlier post. But the other two keynotes, from Tim O'Shea and Stephen Heppell provided a fascinating contrast in all sorts of ways. Both in very different styles and from very different perspectives were addressing the key question of what will education be like in future. For Tim there were real challenges ahead. The future was tough and the universities best placed to survive and thrive were the traditional academic powerhouses like Edinburgh. They have the strength, capability and resources to be best placed to develop exciting and innovative e-learning. Stephen argued that traditional universities run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant. The future was open, participatory and collaborative. Traditional structures and traditional institutions would break down and disappear. He compared universities today to British Rail of the 1950s. arguing that BR carried on in its own way, assuming it knew when and where we wanted to go and was oblivious to the fact that we were all buying cars that allow us to chose our time and destination New technologies give the possibility for the incredible creative and innovative potential of all citizens to be expressed. He outlined new forms of collaboration, assessment and accreditation through which this potential would be realised For me what was particularly striking was the incredible speed Stephen believed this would happen. His timescale was only a few short years while Tim tended to emphasise tradition and continuity. In Tim's vision the traditional residential university (if it was the quality of Edinburgh) would not only survive but flourish for the foreseeable future. I suspect that many listeners, like me will probably see themselves somewhere between the two positions outlined. Optimistically perhaps wanting to reach out towards Stephen’s vision but recognising that while our current modes of education are indeed changing they are based on much of value. ALT had plenty of papers on collaborative work and worktools, repositories, open access developments etc to suggest that we are already doing significant work within existing structures. It is then, not so much a stark alternative but a recognition that we need to continue to work to use the possibilities offered by ICT to open up and enrich learning environments for all and that universities still have much to contribute to this endeavour.

Library Mashups

Matt Lingard — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:23:13 +0000

A mashup, according to wikipedia is:

"website or Web 2.0 application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service"

I just read about the Talis Library Mashups Competition on EdTechPost. The winner of the mashup competition was Go Go Google gadget (!) which takes data from a library catalogue and feeds into a Google personalised home, for example your currently checked out items and the 'hottest items' in the catalogue. This follows on nicely from some of the presentations and discussion at the recent ALISS conference.

Academic Blogs

Matt Lingard — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 15:17:44 +0000

A number of academic blogs were mentioned in a recent THES article*. I'm recording them here as they may be of use in planning the new blogging etc workshop:

http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/ (International Politics Associate Prof.)
http://globblog.blogspot.com/ (Anonymous Economist - not posted recently but links to several Economics Blogs)
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ (Economics Associate Prof.)
http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/ (University Diaries of an American English Professor)
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ (Berkeley Economics Professor)

Must start looking for some UK ones. This law firm blog was also sent to me recently: http://impact.freethcartwright.com/ (IP & IT law) *There's no link to the THES article "Curse.com or blessing.net? Or be silent and take up stamp collecting" as although I eventually managed to find it online (via Lexis-Nexis & athens login) I couldn't figure out how to do a link... please feel free to add one! The article if you didn't see it was about the potential pitfalls of academic blogging with regard to career progression...

Google is not the Net

Jane Secker — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:16:31 +0000

Sarah Rosenblum passed on an interesting article from the Library Journal reporting on the American Library Association's 2006 conference and the challenge that Google was presenting libraries. There was a lot of talk about social software but also talk of gorilla's as well. I liked this quote: “Google is so pervasive in so many realms that used to be specifically what libraries did,” Janes explains. “It is a collection, it is a way of searching, a navigation mechanism. It is doing all these things that look like what people used to go to libraries and librarians for.” Google, he says, “is the 800-pound gorilla.” To read the full text see: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6370224.html

New Sound Archive from British Library

Jane Secker — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:32:52 +0000

Today I went to the launch of the British Library Sound Archival Recording Service which is an initiative funded by JISC to make selected extracts of the BL Sound Archive available for teaching and research to the HE and FE community. Further information about the service is available at: http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/archsoundrec.htmlThe collection is free, however we do need to take out a licence. Although at the moment the collection is not core to LSE, it is well worth would promoting to staff as soon as we have the licence. We should include details of the service in all the digital media sessions we do for academic staff. Once we get our subscription sorted I will send a follow up message about how you access it.

Survey of UK university/college staff and students

Jane Secker — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 13:59:35 +0000

JISC is conducting a review of the role of a national Internet search and training service for UK universities and colleges. Please help us to ensure that views from the Higher and Further Education community are taken into account by filling in this short online survey: http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/intute/survey/ PRIZE DRAW: A £50 Amazon Voucher will be awarded each week whilst the survey runs. DEADLINE is 25th October 2006

Digital Directions - Law Blog

Matt Lingard — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:11:22 +0000

From my friend at the Law College ;-) Digital directions Blog

This e-learning based blog will give law academics the opportunity to discuss the use of technology in their or others' work

Might be useful for the upcoming social software sessions.

Reading Blogs Guide

Matt Lingard — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:21:45 +0000

Meant to mention this when i wrote it.... The new IPE blog includes a Reading Blogs Guide I did for them. Comments welcome and feel free to use it on other blogs. Maybe i should add it to this one?

OpenLearn

Matt Lingard — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 12:53:16 +0000

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ Launched earlier this week and using Moodle but perhaps not to the untrained eye!

The OpenLearn website will make educational resources freely available on the internet, with state of the art learning support and collaboration tools to connect learners and educators.

Interesting both in terms of content - though i haven't really looked yet - and to see how Moodle is being developed at the OU. Changes i have spotted so far:

The look - this is something we must explore...
The 'Happy' face has gone - the defalut is now no image. Much better I think.
The blog tool has been renamed learning journal which makes sense as it's a more accurate description as the Moodle Blog doesn't include a comments function
Lots more I'm sure

No mention of Moodle at all... Time to explore some content... PS Just spotted a link to this: OpenLearn content via RSS on the Wales Wide Web

Open_scholarship_2006_report.doc

Jane Secker — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:00:26 +0000

Open Scholarship Conference: report

Jane Secker — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:01:02 +0000

Marie and I, along with several colleagues from the Library, recently attended the Open Scholarship Conference at the University of Glasgow from 18th-20th October. The event attracted an audience from the UK, Europe and beyond and focused on the topic of open access repositories and how their are transforming scholarly communication. Further information is available from the conference website at: http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/openscholarship/ Marie and I have written a detailed report on the event if you are interested in finding out more and this is attached. Open_scholarship_2006_report.doc

Social Software Workshop

Matt Lingard — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:18:13 +0000

A new workshop has been added to the E-literacy for E-Learning programme: Social Software: blog it, tag it, share it! Friday, 10th November, 12:00 - 13:30

This session is a mixture of demonstration and hands-on activities covering blogs, RSS, news readers and social bookmarking. It looks at reading blogs as a way of keeping up-to-date in your field, focusing on how to find academic and other relevant blogs. One feature of blogs is that they produce RSS feeds, also known as news feeds. RSS feeds can be collected and read in a news reader allowing you to read the content of multiple blogs and other news sites (such as the BBC) in one place. The session will show you how to set up an online news reader for collating your personalised news, saving you from having to visit each site individually. Finally, the session looks at social bookmarking, the practice of storing your Internet Favourites or Bookmarks online, allowing you to access them from anywhere and share them with others.

Full Details & Booking

Wikis in Education

Matt Lingard — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:08:29 +0000

Last week I attended 'Exploiting the potential of wikis' hosted by Brian Keely, UKOLN and Steven Warburton, Kings College. It was an excellent day with a large number (70+?) of delegates from varied backgrounds within HE (IT Sevices, Learning Technology, Library and Teaching staff). Summaries of the discussion sessions can be found on the obligatory workshop wiki. As is often the case the day threw up more question than answers but here are my reflections: 1. More examples needed There seem to be limited examples around of wikis being used with students. The predominant model in use seems to be the "wikipedia model". Students create a glossary, encyclopedia etc either alone or in groups. For example:

Molecules at Imperial
Taxipaedia at the LSE
Romantic Audience Project at Bowdoin College

Other ideas for using wikis include collaborative report writing, online conferences and debating assigned readings but as I say few concrete examples at this stage. A lot of delegates were as interested in wiki use for more for administrative / project management / user support uses (in the same way we've been using mediawiki for recording VLE evaluation). Phil Wilson spoke about how they are rolling out wikis for all departments at Bath but use in teaching appears to be a secondary aim. After detailed evaluation Phil strongly recommends Confluence for enterprise use of this kind. 2. Are wikis really easy-to-use? This was a question I asked after hearing that they were in a couple of the talks! It was agreed that technically it can vary depending on the particular wiki software. Some have good WYSIWIG editors others rely heavily on some kind of wikitext (markup). Will students need help with MediaWiki? I was partly getting at this but was more interested in what you might call the social or cultural aspect of using wikis and collaboration. How do you collaboratively author in wikis and are we comfortable doing so? For example for me it still feels strange to edit some one else's work and I tend not to, particularly on an 'external' wiki. I think staff and students will need guidance. 3. Building Understanding It also (re)occurred to me on Friday that introducing wikis for non-teaching uses is a great way to build understanding, confidence, and competence in these tools. Once staff are more familiar with the possibilities and limitations they will be more likely to incorporate them in their teaching (if appropriate). This is the same approach that we are taking with other social software by running the Social Software courses we have planned this term.

TV Remotes

Matt Lingard — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:35:58 +0000

The Future CMS (VLE)

Matt Lingard — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:38:57 +0000

Interesting presentation on the future of VLEs from Scott Leslie. Takes a while to download (13MB) but worth persevering with for later stuff on so-called 'e-learning 2.0'. Also of interest, following recent conversations within CLT is Scott's use of photos and screenshots through-out... not a PowerPoint bullet in sight! And I also like and agree with this comparison of VLEs & TV remotes which comes from an EDUCAUSE presentation by Ali Jafari and Patricia A. McGee which i found via Scott's blog EdTechPost while listening to his talk.

Online Classroom: video resources from Halo Vine

Jane Secker — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:22:28 +0000

I've just had an e-mail from Halo Vine (we had permission to digitise some of their videos in the past). They've just launched a new service called Online Classroom. Further details available at: http://www.onlineclassroom.tv/ You seem to be able to get lots of extra resources for £25. Including:

Classroom Activities: video clips with downloadable questions and answers
Up-to-Date: interviews with experts on some of the latest developments in your subject
Other Classrooms: clips showing experienced teachers in action sharing their lesson ideas
Eye on the News: a look at current news items by leading experts giving them a psychological / sociological twist
Exam Bytes: senior examiners give advice on revision and how to get good grades
What's New?: the latest information from exam boards, professional organisations and universities
The Forum: a chance to exchange views, worries and ideas with other teachers

Do you think anyone would find this useful?

Social software: Using RSS newsreaders and social bookmarking

Kris Roger — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:01:35 +0000

CLT recently ran a workshop for the LSE Library e-literacy for e-learning programme called "Social software: Blog it, Tag it, Share it". The session started with an introduction to blogs and then how to search for and find useful blogs. We then looked at various online tools available for keeping track of multiple blogs. The second half looked at social bookmarking with del.icio.us and various academic collaborative linking and referencing sites such as citeulike. Rather than say more about it here I'll point you to a recording or 'screencast' of the session created with Camtasia. You'll need at least Flash Player 9 for full functionality. You can also find all of the links referred to at del.icio.us as well as the traditional presentation PDF, plus handouts for the personalising Google exercise and for the Google Reader exercise. We're running the session again on November 24th if you fancy experiencing the live event! Kris.

Google for Educators

Matt Lingard — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 17:21:47 +0000

Google for educators is a new Google page indexing google tools that are...you know...useful for you know who. However I was surprised to see that Google Scholar isn't included! But it did remind me that I must have a closer look at Google Docs as an alternative to a wiki for collaborative work. Has anyone explored this already? I know Kris was about to the other day...

PageFlakes

Matt Lingard — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:20:26 +0000

Pageflakes is another personalised portal-type page. Read more on Webblogg-ed about it. The Darfur Resources Page that's highlighted is a good example for our workshops. Update: One thing I like about PageFlakes compared to say Netvibes (which I use as a reader) is that you can make pages public and share editing rights (via email addresses).

MP Supports Open Source

Matt Lingard — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:54:21 +0000

According to EdTechUK an MP has tabled an early day motion supporting use of Open Source in Education because, I think, of concern that the current processes disadvantage potential use of Open Source...

"John Pugh MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons entitled Software in Education, number 179. Please write to, or email, your MP within the next week with a request that he or she add their name to this motion:

"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."

You can find your MP here!

Gliffy

Matt Lingard — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 14:36:00 +0000

Anyone tried this? I haven't yet but will be having a closer look soon. Gliffy is a browser-based tool for creating and sharing diagrams. It also allows for collaboration. In theory you can:

Create many types of diagrams such as Flowcharts, UI wireframes, Floor plans, Network diagrams, UML diagrams, or any other simple drawing or diagram

According to edtechpost it's incredibly easy to use... Update: have tried it now and yes very easy and def worth a look. This floorplan took two mins. You can export to various formats including PNG

Personalisation of Learning

Steve Bond — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:52:41 +0000

Notes from workshop

Personalisation of Learning

Steve Bond — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:22:10 +0000

On 8 Dec 2006 I attended a workshop on "Personalisation of Learning" in Manchester, organised by the HEA's Supporting Sustainable e-Learning Forum (SSeLF). The day consisted of presentations by Oleg Liber (Bolton) and Mike Halm (Penn State), seeking to define what "personalisation" means and how it might be implemented in e-learning. The workshop was much better than I had expected. Both presentations were thought-provoking, and the quality of discussion amongst the participants was high. The structure was good, with the two knowledgeable presenters using their presentations to stimulate discussion amongst the audience. Oleg Liber’s talk investigated what we mean by “personalisation”, and sought to define what a “personal learning environment” might be. He immediately rearranged the space so that the audience were sitting in groups rather than rows, and his two-hour session was punctuated with a number of discussion periods from which we fed back the outcomes. After exploring questions such as “what is personalisation?”, “what is the difference between personal and personalised?” and “what is a PLE, and what is it not?”, he moved on to demonstrate his own vision of a PLE, a prototype system called Plex. Mike Halm's presentation started with an overview of the state of university teaching, using quotes from various books, especially Declining by Degrees, which looks interesting. However, there were also some rather dubious quotes, for example an assertion that “85% of learning takes place in informal contexts” which I suspect belongs in the “97% of statistics are made up” category. Later in the talk, Mike attempted to bring learning styles into the picture, which prompted a discussion about the validity of such things that went on for some time and was quite interesting, even if it did use up most of Mike’s remaining time. Finally, he demonstrated his own model of a PLE – a system called LionShare. More detailed notes are available here: Personalisation of Learning - full notes

Blackboards Social Bookmarking Service

Matt Lingard — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:36:41 +0000

EdTech's Scott Leslie seems to have been the first to spot Blackboard's new social booking system. Bookmarks are viewable by all at www.scholar.com but only Blackboard customers can add bookmarks... once you've added the necessary PowerLink / Building Block

Idaho State Moodle Pilot

Matt Lingard — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:39:45 +0000

See http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000856.html Includes link to report... WebCt 4 users expanding Moodle pilot from 20 to 50 lecturers.

Learning Futures

Matt Lingard — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:09:51 +0000

The Learning Futures Conference was organised by Leicester University's Beyond Distance Research Alliance headed by Gilly Salmon. I attended the first day which included 5 keynotes and 3 discussion sessions (in reality further presentations). Overall I was a little disappointed and didn't get the New Year inspiration I was hoping for. In a nutshell... plan for the future... look for robustness - solutions that will work in a variety of scenarios... academics haven't embraced e-learning yet and it's time for tansformation, risk and making a difference. It was great to see a student presentation as one of the keynotes though. It was given by Martin Cullen and Chloe Foster from Leicester Students Union and was based on interviews they had carried out with current students. On the whole the students identified e-learning as the VLE and the content made available through it. Ease of access to these resources such as lecture notes was seen as key. The use of the VLE as a single central location for departmental information / communication was also mentioned. For the future, the students interviewed were interested in more of the same but across all courses / depts, recordings of lectures, improved navigation, notification of updates and one call for less one-way (teacher to student) use of the VLE and more "interaction". Generally more content but with greater ease-of-access. The presenters stressed that students very much thought that e-learning / the VLE should be supplemental NOT a substitute and some students were concerned that introduction of activities such as online discussion was about cost-cutting. For me an interesting contrast on the day was the one between the majority of presentations which focussed on the need to keep up with students through Web2.0, social software, wikis etc etc and students' presentation where more of the same content, consistent across all courses was the main thrust! Having said that... the other interesting contrast was that the students showed 3 videos that they had made themselves while most other presentations relied heavily on bullet points.

Languages Collaboration

Matt Lingard — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:47:07 +0000

Last week the Language Centre's Herve Didiot-Cook (Language Co-ordinator, French) hosted visitors from Columbia & Brown Universities. The main purpose of the visit was to look at ways of sharing online teaching material across institutions. Staff from CLT were heavily involved in the meetings and the presentations which included:

Use of Drupal for organsing / storing teaching material (Columbia University)
The i-Tunes U pilot (Brown University)
Use of LAMS for creating sequences of online activities (LSE)
Overview of the UK's JORUM repository (LSE)
Overview of Fedora software and the MIDESS Project (LSE)

Staff from all the institutions are keen to work together and pilot projects will follow soon to take this forward. More later...

Easier access to full text articles via Google Scholar

Jane Secker — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:11:57 +0000

LSE staff and students can now save time by getting direct access to the full text articles subscribed to by the Library when they search Google Scholar. Over Christmas a system was set in place which enables Google to recognise most of our subscriptions and give you a link through to a page where you access them using using your LSE passwords,. To try out this new service. Simply go to Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com and run your search! Note if you are off campus you must log on using the LSE remote desk top http://www.lse.ac.uk/itservices/remote/termsvc/termsvc.htm so that Google recognises you as an LSE member.

Integrating Drupal, Moodle and Elgg

Kris Roger — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:14:58 +0000

Stumbled across this interesting, but old, article that focuses on an example integration of Drupal, Moodle and Elgg, relating to Matt's earlier post about collaboration with Columbia and Brown. Some interesting ideas here - enabling connections between VLE, portfolio and content management systems, including public facing web sites. I would expect some political implications regarding who runs (owns) what though! If you have time it's worth reading the discussion/comments too. Kris.

On the Horizon?

Matt Lingard — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:52:09 +0000

What are the emerging technologies likely to impact on learning & teaching in the next 5 years? According to the 2007 Horizon Report (PDF) we might expect the wide adoption in education of:

User-created Content
Social Networking

in the next year or less... and

Mobile Phone
Virtual Worlds

in two to three years... and

New scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming

in four to five years. The report is worth a look, each section contains links to existing examples and further reading plus the del.icio.us bookmarks used by the writers. It's quite US-focussed so perhaps add a few years on? It's a collaboartion between EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium and earlier predictions are available. I spotted it on SocialTech written by Josie Fraser who seems to be the only UK-based member of the 27-strong Horizon Advisory Board (the authors).

Launch of the Journal of Information Literacy

Jane Secker — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:02:14 +0000

The Journal of Information Literacy was launched today and is edited by Sheila Webber from the University of Sheffield. Jane Secker from the LSE is the Deputy Editor. Volume 1, Issue 1 is now available from the Information Literacy website: http://www.informationliteracy.org.uk/JIL.aspx JIL is an international, peer-reviewed, academic journal that aims to investigate Information Literacy (IL) within a wide range of settings. Papers on any topic related to the practical, technological or philosophical issues raised by the attempt to increase information literacy throughout society are encouraged. JIL is published in electronic format only and is an open-access title. The aim of JIL is to investigate and to make generalised observations on how Information Literacy impacts on organisations, systems and the individual. While recognising the firm foothold already established by IL in the Higher Education sector, the editorial board, seeks to consolidate and extend this to a wider educational audience. Furthermore the board welcomes ever-wider interpretations of IL that extend its theoretical interpretation and practical use beyond the educational arena and across national frontiers.

Tagging - a passing fad?

Matt Lingard — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:44:46 +0000

Interesting post on the significance of Web 2.0 over on the Media @ LSE Group blog where David Brake expresses his doubts that tagging will ever become mainstream.

An Essay Evolves

Matt Lingard — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:49:13 +0000

Lynn Reynolds, a student and 'Writing Mentor' at London Metropolitan University is attempting to write an essay online over the next 3 weeks at http://evolvingessay.pbwiki.com/ Lynn writes:

The prospect of tackling an academic assignment is often daunting and anxiety-provoking, even for students who already know a lot about the topic in question. Being given model essays and model answers can actually make the problem worse; it often seems as though the writers managed to produce perfectly coherent, fully-formed arguments from thin air. “That never happens to me,” we think, and already we have that sinking sensation of failure. Model essays just make us feel inadequate. We don’t know where to start. And what’s more, even if we do get going, how do we know if we’re on the right track with the content of our assignment? This experiment aims to shine a light into all of these dark corners.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops... Lynn is also blogging her experience

Yahoo Pipes

Matt Lingard — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 13:08:49 +0000

Has anyone come across Pipes yet? According to their overview:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor

What does that actually mean... well the first pipe I came across and have now cloned allows you to search all links found on a particular page so if you find a list of useful sites you can use this search tool to restrict your search to them. My cloned copy of Tony Hirst's original linkedsearch pipe is set to search everything linked to from the CLT blog but you can change the URL to whatever you want. I've no way of knowing how well it works but it seems to pick up everything. At the time of writing the most popular pipe is New York Times thru Flickr which finds photos (on Flickr) based on the current content of the NYT homepage. Each pipe has an RSS feed too. If you want to browse existing pipes, clone and tweak them or create your own from scratch head over to Yahoo Pipes

Hello from BbWorld Europe 2007 (TM)

Kris Roger — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:49:11 +0000

Or the Blackboard (WebCT?) 2007 European conference to those that speak English. I was planning to blog more extensively from the conference this year, but my plans have been scuppered by a distinct lack of internet access at this learning technology conference. There's no wifi in the conference venue and the 'cyber cafe' (haven't heard that term in a while) consists of about 15 stand-up email terminals for a 400 delegate conference. It's lunchtime on day 1 - the guy from the World Bank (Bruno Lanvin) provided a broad and interesting perspective on how technology is currently the key globalisation driver and how education and technology can work to reduce global inequalities. Typical keynote fayre. The opening Blackboard keynote was okay - a number of vague statements on future directions and how they won't make the same mistakes re. stability and quality in future as Blackboard have invested lots of resources for testing and quality assurance. I became more depressed when Mr Chasen added 2.0 to the end of a number of key terms. Apparently we're to have Blackboard 2.0 (I thought they were already on 7?), along with Web 2.0, e-learning 2.0 and even... 'education 2.0' (I wonder if Bb have trademarked that yet). I think he means they're planning to employ a bit of Ajax technology here and there. To end on a brighter note - some Manchester University colleagues covered copying course content between different flavours of WebCT and Blackboard for simultaneous delivery of the same course at 4 different institutions. Their conclusion was that JISC Reload really didn't help, while the WebCT IMS export tool was the key to migration. They had quite a few problems with migrating just one fairly basic content based course, so it served as a good reminder that we at LSE will need to be extremely thorough with our migration plans this year. Finally, I need to go and see a brief glimpse of some Cote D'Azur sunshine after being stuck inside all day! Kris.

BbWorld (TM) Europe 2007 Part Deux

Chris Fryer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:26:45 +0000

Today I'm at the BbWorld Europe conference in Nice, discussing all things Blackboard. The weather's lovely, thanks very much, but as we're installed in a windowless concrete monolith, opportunities for working on my tan are limited. Bruno Lanvin of the World Bank delivered an interesting keynote presentation this morning, discussing the impact of knowledge and technology transfer in driving globalization. I won't paraphrase him too much, as his presentation will be posted to the Blackboard website later on, and his slides will work pretty well without the voice over, but I was struck by some of his statistics. This year, humanity will generate some colossal number of exabytes of new "information", equivalent to the sum total of information generated in the last 5000 years. He didn't comment on how much of this stuff will be useful; I have a gloomy suspicion that 90% will be viagra spam, and much of the remainder will be pointless barking into cyberspace in the form of blogging. But let's assume that plenty of "applicable knowledge" is generated. Students now entering the third year of a degree programme will find the stuff they learned in their first year is out of date. As educators, therefore, we should be concentrating on developing learning skills rather than content, since we are preparing students for jobs that haven't been created, to use technologies that haven't been invented, and solve problems we don't even know exist. Next, I attended a panel session with early adopters of WebCT/Blackboard Vista. Only some of them had upgraded to Vista 4, some relatively painlessly, others... less so. One of the presenters made an interesting point about scalability: yes, you can add a few application nodes and extra database servers and run the whole shebang behind a load-balancer to serve hundreds of concurrent users, but some of the software tools themselves don't scale particularly well. The assignments tool, for example, rapidly becomes unwieldy once you get past 50 students on a course. To be fair, I'm sure there are examples in all VLEs. Each presenter made passing reference to "stability" being a source of complaints from the users. A fellow delegate saved me the job of pressing them on this point. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given they were invited to speak by the vendor, the presenters did a good job of blaming external factors, such as the unexpected consequences of operating system updates, pop-up blockers buried in some anti-spyware tool, Java version changes and so forth. I almost followed up by asking whether it's such a good idea to impose strict preconditions on the user environment in the first place, but perhaps that's a question for the developers themselves. Chris

BbWorld Europe 2007 Part Trois

Chris Fryer — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:22:57 +0000

In yesterday afternoon's session, I attended the "Blackboard listening session", with senior members of the board arrayed before us like contestants on University Challenge. There was very little discussion of the Blackboard Academic Suite: almost everyone wanted to talk about the Vista/CE6 product line. Bb have committed to extending the open API layers for all their products. This is primarily to enable better integration with external systems, but also, one hopes, to expose information stashed safely away in the database, presently protected from the impious meddlings of systems administrators. One delegate noted that there were diagnostic and performance tuning tools available to the sysadmins at Blackboard hosting services that aren't currently available to the poor souls who have chosen to support the system in-house. Sadly many of these products are proprietary tools not belonging to Blackboard, so they can't be released. They have promised, however, to release some "best practice" guides and improve the "reference architecture" so we can find out what the thing is up to. Inevitably our attention turned to the thorny issue of stability. One delegate said they were now having trouble "defending the product" to the user community. We were told that Blackboard had learned from a bad version upgrade from 5.5 to 6 for their Academic Suite, and were now much better at running an "enterprise development shop" than were their colleagues at WebCT. The core development and maintenance teams had been separated so the product could continue to evolve while bugfixing went on elsewhere. The beta release programme is now being extended to Application Pack 2 for CE6 and Vista, and time on developing this release is almost 100% focussed on stability & scalability issues. AP2 is being presented as an end to all our woes, but the release date may yet be too close to the start of the academic year.

BbWorld Europe 2007 - Blackboard mention the 'M' word

Kris Roger — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:01:36 +0000

This'll be a quick post as my tired old legs need a rest. Just a note on the Blackboard 'next generation' talk (presented by the head of product development) that I attended yesterday afternoon. This was generally disappointing as it was a rehash of the opening keynote with a little more detail, but it still managed to be suitably vague. Bb confirmed that they're extending support for WebCT 4 CE for those that want to wait for Blackboard 2.0/NG or whatever they choose to call it (hey, they even refer to it verbally as WebCT rather than Blackboard Learning System CE 4 blah blah blah). It strikes me then that there is little incentive to migrate to CE6 in the near future if there are going to be further changes down the line and waiting is now 'officially' an option. They also outlined how they see the future Blackboard Academic Suite architecture as a framework for linking a whole number of Blackboard and non-Blackboard systems together - including... Moodle as some sort of 'niche' VLE within the Blackboard universe. See 'Other 3rd party CMS or LMS' in the diagram below.

From Blackboard Conference 2007

Just attended an interesting session on how Sheffield Hallam University provide Blackboard support for their staff - essentially they outsource their first line support for basic technical queries, thus allowing SHU staff to concentrate on pedagogical and more in depth questions. Before that I listened to a discussion about the application of blog, wiki, podcasting and other 'emerging technologies' for teaching and learning. There were a few people trying similar things to LSE, one person even plans to use Elgg to support their PhD community - didn't get a chance to chat unfortunately. But generally I got the impression that wikis and blogs haven't become 'mass market' anywhere else yet (at least nobody from Warwick piped up). It looks like this is going to be my final post from the conference as they're packing up the cyber-cafe around me - guess I'd better go and catch the end of the final session - Blackboard's approach to open-source; should be fun.

Lifelong Computer Skills

Matt Lingard — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:49:02 +0000

An interesting article on life-long computer skills from Jakob Nielsen that's been picked up by a couple of blogs today - Future Lab Flux & Seb Schmoller.

Teaching Blog Example

Matt Lingard — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 10:35:43 +0000

A good example of a blog being used for teaching by an individual lecturer is Jonathan Briggs at Kingston University. The blog is used for lecture notes, podcasts and as well as direct communication with the students, the lecturer often replies to students comments.

Social Libraries

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:59:55 +0000

I just came across this course which is packed full of social software resources. It's called Five Weeks to Social Library and is running now but all the content, blog postings from participants etc are freely available. Could be stuff of interest to the CDE project but also resources for the E-Literacy and the blog/wiki staff dev courses

Ditch that Mouse & Keyboard

Matt Lingard — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:26:44 +0000

This is probably old technology now - recorded Feb 2006, SO last year - but I want one! Watch the 'Minority Reports' Touch screen on YouTube. I came across this clip on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that I haven't seen before (and am finding a little confusing) but it beat del.icio.us in Dion Hinchcliffe's 2006 Best of Web 2.0 which itself provides a useful list of web 2.0 sites.

Digital Media for Teaching workshop

Kris Roger — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:03:16 +0000

CLT recently ran a workshop for the LSE Teaching and Learning Centre workshops programme called “Digital Media for Teaching”. You can find all of the links referred to at del.icio.us as well as PDF and Flash versions of the PowerPoint presentation on our course resources page. This workshop runs again on May 2nd. We also regularly run an "Images, Multimedia and copyright" designer workshop so look out for this on our workshops page - and we'll advertise on our mailing list. You'll find the handouts and links for this on our course resources page if you can't wait. We also jointly run a 'presentation skills' (PDF link) workshop with the LSE staff development unit.

Embedding YouTube in the Blog

Matt Lingard — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 12:18:04 +0000

The other day I made a post with a link to a YouTube video. I tried to embed it using the code that YouTube supplies but this resulted in the blog looking like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it... and no video. Today Charlie Beckett was asking how to do this for his POLIS blog so I've been looking into it. If you look at my earlier post you'll see that it is now working but it's a bit fiddly. I followed instructions posted by Matthias Zeller Memento which involves turning off the visual rich editor while you make the post. I've found that you only need to worry about your personal settings so a revision of the instructions would be:

Login to WordPress admin
Go to Users
Uncheck 'Use the visual rich editor when writing'
Go to Write >> Write Post
Type your post
Paste the ‘embed’ code for your YouTube video in the write box (copied from YouTube)
Publish

And then repeat 2&3 to turn the visual editor back on!

Eduspaces

Matt Lingard — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:26:06 +0000

The external hosted version of elgg has been relaunched as eduspaces. And I think elgg is defintely worth revisiting... I'll certainly be having a more detailed look soon. Just need a project / interested academic... Since I last looked at it, with a group of PhDs about a year ago, and decided it wasn't quite there, the following things have changed:

Look and feel
Much improved navigation - links to your own profile, blog, files, resources (RSS feeds) are always visible
Your profile is more configurable
Community blogs can be viewed as a Forum as well as a blog
Messaging system introduced
Browse users / communities as well as search & tag cloud
WYSIWYG editor for blog posts and messages

All in all, much improved... Update: In today's seminar Terry Anderson reminded me of one of key features of elgg which we identified when looking at it previously and that's the permissions side of things. When posting to an elgg blog, adding a file or completing your profile you have complete control over who can see it - your content can be public, only seen by logged in users, completely private or restricted to an elgg community or a group of elgg contacts that you specify.

Some thoughts on Virtual research environments

Steve Ryan — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:05:15 +0000

I have been thinking about virtual research environments. In this context I'm not so much interested in all singing all dancing high-end research environments but rather the provision of a set of tools that will assist academics in the kind of research collaboration I believe many of them are engaged in. We have recently been asked to set up a WebCT course so that a group of academics worldwide can edit a book. We set up a wiki link to a web site for a European wide research project. Anthropology want some kind of virtual research environment to work with colleagues in China and elsewhere. We've also had several requests for blogs and wiki is linked to groups a PhD students or research groups. I also suspect that a number of academics are exploring the research potential of the Google suite of tools. I suspect that for many collaborative research involves working together on books, journal articles papers and the like and what they need are some fairly simple and easy to use tools that can support this process particularly when collaborators are disbursed both geographically and temporally. I think a requirement of this environment is that it can easily be made available to anyone the academic wishes to collaborate with regardless of their institution affiliation or location. So what might be required? When I looked at some of the JISC virtual research environment outputs , they seem heavy duty portal type approaches that would have considerable overheads in development, adaptation and maintenance. I don't think we should be going in that direction rather I would suggest that we start with an environment that is a simple and as flexible as possible and gives academics the choice of which tools to use or not. I also suspect that most of the "bits and pieces" are lying around and that it shouldn't be too difficult to assemble some kind of prototype environment that could be piloted. So here are some suggestions for starters, academics should go to select what they need.

We need an archive where drafts can be stored with a good clear versioning system.
We need the ability to edit collaboratively, Word or Google docs?
we need the ability to capture and share references. This could be via social bookmarking software e.g. delicious or some of the academic variants e.g., Connotea or H2O or maybe some of the Windows live academic features.
I think a discussion board would be good as would an instant messaging client that works across all the main providers.
also the provision of a blog and more likely a wiki.

All of these bits and pieces could be put into a container such as Moodle. This kind of environment could also be used to enrich teaching e.g. making selected elements available to students.

Terry Anderson on PLEs

Matt Lingard — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:52:18 +0000

I attended a CDE event today delivered by Terry Anderson of athabasca univeristy, canada's equivalent of the OU. The session had been advertised as blogs and social software but the focus was Personal Learning Environments (based on social software). He described a PLE as a "web interface into the owners' digital environment" and spoke about the institutional VLE being replaced by an institutional PLE (such as elgg) as a transitory step to individuals choosing their own PLEs. This year he has`been teaching a class using Moodle for content, elgg, branded as me2you for blogging and making connections, elluminate for real time stuff and furl for bookmarking and sharing web resources. Couple of quick things - Athabasca are using moodle, he mentioned some recent data on web2.0 use from the jisc spire project which might be worth a look and a strongly recommended read was Seely Brown new learning environmnts (2006).

UCL Teaching & Learning Network

Matt Lingard — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:04:23 +0000

I attended a UCL Teaching and Learning Network session on podcasts yesterday. Before I get on to podcasts I'd like to mention the impressive attendence - about 30-40 with around half teaching staff. We need to give some thought to this - do we try and do something similar here or join in with UCL - the offer is there. The format, for those not familiar, is a monthly event in a fixed time slot and location with an online presence to support it (open guest login). The sessions themselves are two hours with presentations and group discussion. Recent topics covered include tools for collaborative teaching & learning, Moodle, & student information literacy. A bit on podcasts The session focussed on 'pure' podacsts, i.e. audio + RSS with a general "what is / how to" presentation followed by a look at examples of education-related podcasts. The following discussion was wide ranging and covered issues of quality, copyright & IP, as well as the usefulness (or not) of audio-only lecture recordings when navigating them is so difficult. For now, with the exception of a few individual enthusiasts, it seems more likely that UCL will be following the route of Warwick and Imperial to concentrate on a few top quality podcasts of public lectures and the like:

Was Pepys an early blogger?

Matt Lingard — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:52:45 +0000

"Was Pepys an early blogger?" ask LSE's Tony Barnett in a recent 'argument' with the New Statesman's Ben Davies!

But, most of all, the professor wanted to talk about blogs. "My son writes a blog - his latest entry talks about doing yoga and reading John Fowles's The Magus. Now who's going to be interested in that?" "Mind you," he answered himself, "my son has a female admirer called ML in Washington - perhaps it's a new form of dating agency . . . or is it like those round robins you get at Christmas. We get one from a man in which he tells us about his hamster . . ." "Perhaps," I interjected, "blogs are a bit like diaries - at one end of the scale you get a daily record of a mundane life: 'Got up, went to the toilet, made tea, read paper', and at the other you have Pepys recording the fire of London?" "Now that's interesting," he responded, "Was Pepys an early blogger? Did he write because he witnessed momentous things or were they momentous because he wrote about them?"

The journalist bought the chance to argue with Prof. Barnett for £90 in a charity auction. See Spat'll be ninety quid in the New Statesman for the full story. The recently revamped NS uses a blog format for most of it's site now with RSS feeds, commenting and links to other social software (post to del.icio.us etc).

WordPress Commenting Plugin

Matt Lingard — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:32:32 +0000

This is an interesting commenting tool in use (and probably an interesting read but I haven't got that far yet!). A blog that allows you comment on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. It's being used here to draft a paper on the future of learning institutions. According to Scott Leslie it's a WP plugin.

Teaching with Technology

Matt Lingard — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:38:33 +0000

Over coffee this morning a couple of us were discussing Mark Prensky's chapter on How to Teach with Technology (PDF), part of Becta's Emerging Technologies for Learning: Volume 2. In his chapter which, it must be noted, is focused on secondary rather than post-secondary education, Prensky suggests that teachers shouldn't be taught how to use the latest technology that should be left to the students. Instead energy should be re-focused:

"teachers must learn what these technologies are and can do, and understand them, but without necessarily becoming proficient in their use... ...Teachers also need to help students apply technologies wisely to real problems, and to reflect and search for the deeper issues that the technologies raise, and to bring up and discuss these issues with the students..."

He goes on to give four examples based around wikipedia, podcasting, Instant Messaging and mobile phone cameras. The chapter is well worth a read if only for some of the great quotes he has from students! And then to consider if it applies to HE too...

Because I can...

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 08:34:53 +0000

Herve and I are on the train to Nottingham... nothing to report yet but posting this because I can! feel like I've moved into the 21st century - I'm liking this new Vaio and wireless malarky!

VLE Languages User Group

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:15:45 +0000

Some brief notes from this event attended by around 30 participants at Nottingham Trent University: Wimba Update - Good news from Jessica D'Souza... Moodle integration will be available for late April. I was also reminded that v5.1 is a free upgrade which includes:

Podcaster - 1 click subscribe to iTunes or other program + RSS feed
Presenter - a tool that links a resource with a mini voice-board. Teachers add a resource with an associated audio message. Then students can respond by posting an audio comment. There can be multiple resources with associated audio in the same Presenter 'board'. Resources must be a URL, i.e. you can't attach files

Version 5.1 allows for 20mins recordings (and longer if files are imported). Coventry Flying Squad - Marina Orsini-Jones introduced Coventry's "Flying angels", students who are employed to help staff use technology including the VLE etc. They provide technical support and free up her time for pedagogical support and have been well received by staff. Marina also briefly showed PebblePad which they use (partly because WebCT Portfolio wasn't ready in time!). Students control what can be seen and what is kept private (like ELGG). She has used it for "WebFolio" projects, where the students put together a website as a project. It's then very easy for the teacher to give comments on each page that the students have produced. Audio in CourseGenie - A very useful presentation from Trevor Pull on the different ways of adding audio to CourseGenie pages which for one reason or another I still hadn't got around to looking at. Trevor showed how easy it is to embed both audio files and Wimba audio into CG pages. I do like CG, particularly for language teachers but we still need to overcome the problems we've had with Word macros on LSE PCs Auralog - Tell Me More - Off-the-shelf exercises, with fancy speech recognition. Thousands of exercises. The teacher can (re)sequence exercises that come with software. Surprisingly the Auralog presenter was not aware of UK accessibility law and the software had problematic colour choices and fixed text sizes!

New LSE Law blogs

Matt Lingard — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:48:30 +0000

There are two new LSE Blogs, highlighted by Media @ LSE

Both are hosted externally by Blogger. I think I should put together a page of LSE blogs... a public PageFlakes maybe... just the thing for a Friday afternoon... Update - a public list of LSE Blogs

CAL 2007 in Dublin

Steve Bond — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:21:13 +0000

Steve Ryan and I attended the CAL 2007 conference in Dublin last week. The conference subtitle was "development, disruption and debate", so there was a stream about introducing ICT into education in developing countries, which I confess I avoided. Also there was much use of the word "disruption" in presentation titles (often with little justification). The main difference between this and other conferences I've attended was that it covered not just HE/FE but learning at all levels, including primary, secondary and pre-school education. This added welcome variety to the presentations. One theme that emerged was the idea of the "Grammar of Schooling". This comes from Tyack and Tobin (1994) and represents the idea that the established forms of education have become so embedded that they prevent any serious transformative innovation from happening. See the summary of the "design for learning" symposium below for more on this. I presented a paper entitled "Reuse, repurposing and learning design - lessons from the DART project" which was the last talk of the conference and quite poorly attended, although it seemed to go down well, and we've had two expressions of interest in using our software as a result. Overall, a pretty good conference (despite the unwelcome reappearance of 'activity theory' in several papers). It only happens every other year; next one is Brighton 2009. Ref: Tyack, D. and Tobin, W. 1994. The "Grammar" of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change? American Educational Research Journal, 31 (3): 453-479. Summaries of selected presentations: Peppi Taalas from the University of Jyväskylä presented a series of cross-sectional studies of the use of ICT by 100-200 language teachers in schools, at multiple time points between 1994 and 2005. This is obviously an interesting period because it coincides with the life span of the web. Results showed that ICT is now used by almost all teachers in the preparation for their teaching. However, while the use of ICT in the teaching itself has increased, it is still not mainstream, and a whole 20% of teachers do not use ICT at all in their teaching. The main type of use of the web is for finding resources which are then used in more traditional ways. Training in the use of ICT is widespread but seems to have little effect on take-up. However, teacher involvement in projects does seem to have a effect. Bas Andeweg from Delft University of Technology presented results of a study that compared the effectiveness of different forms of PowerPoint presentation on retention. The three modes compared were "extensive textual description", "concise textual description" (bullet points) and images (representing the same concepts as the text). Results showed that the audience performed better in post-tests when they had experienced the extensive textual description - which is the opposite of what we preach in our presentation skills class. Other results suggested that the use of extensive text slides can compensate for a poor presentation style - perhaps because they give the audience the chance to ignore the speaker and make their own notes from the text. I had some complaints with the study - in particular the images they used seemed particularly clunky and poorly designed - but still it raises questions. Jill Clough from the OU had a nice project using PDAs with GPS capability to create a nature trail, with spatial 'hotspots' that released information to you when you entered them. Students would use the PDAs to receive this information and then take photos and record data, to be contributed later to a shared blog. Seemed promising, most results focussed on a lack of usability of the software used. There was a symposium on "design for learning" that gave us a chance to see and compare two "pedagogic planners" - the Laurillard one that we know about, and another one called Phoebe. The Laurillard planner which started as a baffling spreadsheet and became a more usable Shockwave app, is now moving to an HTML version. Only screenshots were available, but it did look much simpler again, which should help its wider adoption. The aim is to make its purpose "recognisable to lecturers" so that they can be eased into the terminology of learning design. Isobel Falconer from Glasgow Caledonian presented results from a study of the use of "pedagogical patterns", finding that participants roundly rejected the whole idea. The problem seems to be in the tension between the need for such patterns to be generic, and the need for teachers to see real, contextualised examples of use in order to be inspired by them, to see evidence of effectiveness and to envisage how they might use them. The discussion afterwards was interesting. Isobel said that teachers using ICT were mostly applying a "constructivist layer" over the same old instructivist framework, because the learning outcomes are predetermined to be instructivist. In the students, there is a tension between the drive to successful achievement of these predetermined learning outcomes (i.e. strategic learning for assessment), vs. actual improvement of learning. Liz Masterman from Oxford University said that teachers are constrained by their institutional practices (i.e. assessment and more) and so any pedagogical planner needs to account for that. Tom Boyle from London Met said that the use of assessment to force participation is "using a behaviourist tool to enforce constructivist learning", which is an interesting way of looking at something I had found unproblematic untli now. A lot of this stuff about institutional constraints feeds back into the "Grammar of Schooling" argument above. Selected papers from the conference will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Computers and Education.

LSE video lecture service highly commended in national competition

Kris Roger — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:41:54 +0000

Just a quick note to say that the LSE video lectures service provided by the Centre for Learning Technology and IT Services, managed to make the top three in the UCISA Award for Excellence competition with a highly commended award. As previously mentioned on this blog, the back end to the service is provided by Apreso. We've so far found the system extremely useful and have had plenty of very positive feedback from both students and staff, including some very welcome recognition from the LSE Students Union.

Learning On Screen conference

Jane Secker — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 16:30:15 +0000

Marie and I attended the Learning on Screen: Copyright exceptions post Gowers / Taking Down Television II conference held this year as a one day event at the British Library. It was organised by the BUFVC. The copyright focus meant I attended rather than other colleagues in CLT and it also had useful updates on ERA+ Licence which Marie and I hoped would be useful for the MIDESS Project. The conference was opened by Lynne Brindley from the BL, and the morning focused on looking at the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property carried out last year by the Treasury. Various speakers reported on Gowers and what it meant to them including Toby Bainton from SCONUL, Andrew Yeates from ERA, Laurence Bebbington and Richard McCracken. The overall consensus was that Gowers very much was about striking a balance, but that fair dealing really doesn't go far enough in allowing those in education to use copyrighted works in the way they would like to. There was also a sense that we could see many rights in copyright law being overriden by contract law. The OU in particularly felt that copyright laws tend to focsu too much on different media and the location of a person, rather than what their primary purpose was. So why shoudl distance learning or e-learning be any different to learning in a classroom? However, Gowers has certainly raised the profile of IPR so that can be no bad thing. There was considerable discussion about the proposal to allow broadcasts to be shown off campus under the ERA+ Licence, but a general feeling that the price was rather high, given that material couldn't be shown outside the UK. The afternoon's session's switched from copyright to more general sessions on using broadcast and other video material in teaching. Marianne Open and Markeda Cole from BUFVC showed us the enhancements to TRILT, which will allow subscribing institutions to request off-air broadcasts from BUFVC using the database. And you can order on DVD or CD in Wondwos Media and QuickTime format. Ed Zedlewski from Eduserv talked to us about authentication and the shoft from Athens to Open Athens using Shibboleth technology. He also talked about the growing demand for people to have a lifelong identity not linked to their educational institution and how this could be managed in the future. Andrew Milburn from Planet PC talked about streaming media and how bandwidth problems can be solved with their Planet eStream service. Finally Tony Blake and Ian Mottishead from Cambridge Imaging Systems show us BoB (Box of Broadcasts) a system to manage and record off-air recordings at an institutional level. It was developed for the BUFVC but is also being used by Bournemouth University. It allows members of the institution to record their own TV programmes, to store and edit clips and to play them back for classroom or personal use. The system was particularly impressive and even has access management built into it. Murray Weston from BUFVC concluded the day with some throughts and I took away from the day the idea that we really must collaborate more in this area and look to find a way to share digital video collections. I guess this idea ties in really well with MIDESS in many ways and what we are trying to acheive.

LSE to adopt Moodle as the new institutional VLE

Steve Ryan — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:46:34 +0000

Following a year of evaluation, LSE has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment. We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:

Easier to use (for both staff and students); courses can be developed and updated much more easily than WebCT.
More powerful and flexible with a range of new features including learning journals, blogs and wikis that can be used for teaching
Much greater flexibility over ways in which courses are organised: you can choose to organise your course on a weekly basis (probably the most common option) but also by topic or around a discussion board.
It also has much greater control and flexibility over who can be given permission to access the course.
More flexible discussion tools.

A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community. Moving from one VLE to another is not a simple process for CLT. We plan to migrate from WebCT to Moodle over two years. In most cases, for the 2007/8 academic year Masters and Languages courses wishing to use a VLE would use Moodle and in the following academic year undergraduate courses would similarly be transferred. The CLT would be responsible for migrating the course content currently in WebCT into Moodle so that it can be updated in good time prior to the beginning of the academic year. If you would like to know more about Moodle please contact the Centre for Learning Technology (Email CLT-enquiries@lse.ac.uk). We will be holding a series of briefing events open to all staff in May. These are scheduled for

Wednesday 16th of May 12-1 pm
Thursday 17th of May 1-2 pm
Wednesday 23rd of May 2-3 pm

Please click on this link to book a place (LSE staff only) We have a demonstration course now that staff can try out in the role of a student and very shortly we will have a "sandbox" course you can experiment with as a teacher. The CLT will of course be providing training, assistance and support to all staff who wish to use Moodle. If you have any queries please do contact us.

Collaborative Software and Web 2.0

Steve Ryan — Tue, 01 May 2007 08:28:18 +0000

The University of Edinburgh Information Systems working group has recently produced a report with the above title. Quoting from its conclusion "Collaborative technology such as IM, Wikis and blogs are fast becoming ubiquitous, and it is quite clear that the University, through Information Services and its partners, needs to act to ensure that it makes best use of such tools. The report is well worth reading. It can be found here Following on from the report is the University of Edinburgh's Web 2.0 action plan. It is here

Explaining RSS

Matt Lingard — Thu, 03 May 2007 10:15:24 +0000

This is something I've been thinking about for a while as it seems to be a topic that workshop participants don't always get straight away. A 'blog trail' just took me from Open as to... to We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril to OpenLearn_daily to RSS in Plain English Tony Hirst - we ignore RSS at OUr peril - uses this analogy to explain RSS:

One way of thinking about content delivered by RSS, compared to delivering via a website, is to consider the world of film. Visiting a website to consume content is like going to the cinema. You have to physically visit a multiplex, for example, and locate the screen that is showing the film you want to see. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a satellite TV channel. Your Skybox, or digibox, which you keep at home, of course, aggregates the channels you have subscribed to, each playing films on a particular theme. Each channel is like an RSS feed. You can choose which you subscribe to, and when. You can channel hop at your leisure. In the same way, users consume the RSS feeds they are subscribed to via a single application - either online (using a service such as Bloglines or Google Reader) or via a desktop client. Sky Movies sells convenience, pushes content to me. RSS is another push medium.

I can't decide whether it's over complicating it. Won't most people get it with news website examples? RSS in Plain English from the Common Craft Show is an excellent low budget video that I'm certainly going to try and incorporate into my upcoming careers social software workshop but it might be something we can use in the e-literacy social software workshops too.

Packtracker Users Group Annual Meeting

meic — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:37:25 +0000

The 2007 PUG away day meeting was held on the 8^th. May at the University of Westminster, chaired by Mr George Pitcher from Ingenta. The attendees were a mixture of veteran and new Packtracker users but the discussion topics and demonstrations were well paced, relevant and adapting by all. The topics for discussion were: The renewal process. Mr Pitcher demonstrated a new feature in which we could request P/T to generate (create a webpage) and email a course renewal list (items requested last year) to an academic with the option to tick to indicate that they would like to renew the items and to add new readings using the dedicated space at the bottom of the page. The lecturer then press ‘submit’ and the list will be emailed back to dedicated Epacks mailbox / staff to process. This will only work as long as we have all the appropriate email addresses in place and update the settings page in P/T. Mei Pang from LSE indicated that this is ideal for her institution and Mr Pitcher indicated that this could be switched on by early next week (21/05/2007) to meet LSE needs. George also highlighted that there is now a facility to record usage statistics in P/T. This is a manual system and one has to input data every month. Reporting Mr Pitcher highlighted the ease of P/T in creating CLA auditing reports. It was aimed at new users as LSE is already using this facility. Ordering Documents from BL For over 2 years, Heron has automated email requests for BL documents. This could be added to P/T as a new facility. To switch on, enter your BL account details on the settings page. Requests will be sent (ARTEMAIL) from the 'Document and File Handling' section of the Transaction page. At present this will not actually send an email, just let you see what would be sent. It is planned to switch the full functionality on after the User day on 8 May 2007. Epacks may find this useful to order Copyright Fee Paid copies as currently relying on TSS section in the library to order copies. The arguments for this are better control and speed. Against, duplication of another section’s work and incur cost for CLT (unless we have permission to use the offprints account with BL with view that we are all going to be E-Readings). Budgeting George mentioned that Packtracker is capable of recording and tracking invoices. LSE is already using this function. Navigation Panel One of the attendees wanted the navigation panel to be reorganized. Currently the navigation panel contains a list of Packtracker functions / activities with no logical ordering. New functions as developed just got placed at the end of the list. George agreed to look into grouping some activities to reduce the list. One suggestion is to group lecturers, course designers and librarians together as ‘contacts’. Agreed by the attendees. File handling George informed the attendees that Packtracker could be switched on to monitor the activity of a file from the date mounted to the date of expiry (take it offline and remove the file to an archive folder). To do this he will need access to the host institution’s secure server. On the Epacks administration side, the expiry date must be inserted in all records so that files could be weeded and deposited in archives. Lecturer Direct Entry George is exploring the possibility that we could get the lecturer / course designers to do more by creating reading records which could be inputted into Packtracker directly by them or imported by dedicated epacks staff. Possibility one – lecturers / course designers could create a pack in packtracker. Once created, epacks staff will take over control on the administrative side. Possibility two – from Packtracker, lecturers and course designers are pointed to a webpage form. Once completed, press submit and the form will be emailed to the dedicated epacks mailbox. Staff import the information to Packtracker. Possibility three – from Packtracker, email the epacks staff a list of readings. Internal Process The relevant development here is that a LSE logo could be branded at the bottom right hand corner of the CC cover sheet on E-readings. Penguin has recently withdrawn blanket permission. George informed the attendees that he could switch Packtracker to alert staff with this information when Penguin has been selected as the publisher and any future publishers who may withdraw from the blanket licence.

Universes & Pagecasts

Matt Lingard — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:34:34 +0000

I'm not sure who dreams up these names CrimsonConnect was developed by two students at Harvard as an alternative to the institutional student portal: "my.harvard.edu". The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that they were asked to remove the course material they had been included as it wasn't password protected. It was developed with the relatively new Netvibes Universe. I've had a Netvibes account for a while but I don't yet have the ability to create a public universe (invitation-only it seems!), so for now Netvibes remains like iGoogle & MyYahoo, a private personalised page. Pageflakes, have been offering publicly sharable portal-type pages for a while, which they recently seem to have started calling Pagecasts...ugh. Here are a couple of examples:

elearning conference report

Matt Lingard — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:24:48 +0000

elearning at the cusp, 30th May, Staffordshire University. I thought the standard of presentations at this event was very high, and with various chats over coffee it made for a very enjoyable and useful day. There are no big ideas to report, no single nugget that captured the imagination but a few bits and pieces:

Positive reports on podcasting from Leicester. Unfortunately the site explaining the various pedagogical models isn't so hot. The main Impala project page is OK but for me the pedagogical models page only displays in IE and then doesn't work properly anyway.
Interesting final assessment on the MSc in Elearning at Edinburgh, where students get to negotiate some of their assessment criteria as well as choose the "essay" format. While some students stuck to the traditional, others have submitted hypertext essays and there was one Second Life submission... which looked like a hypertext essay... your world your imagination as they say... Sorry I shouldn't knock it, this talk was the best of the day.
Second Life was paid a lot of lip-service ("we could have had the conference in SL") but the overall feeling I got from other delegates was no thanks.
I had an interesting chat about giving audio feedback to students and this may be something we could explore with one of the Wimba Voice tools.
I had a couple of repository conversations, for example, Staffordshire are implementing Harvest Road Hive which will link with their Blackboard VLE. I'm still not convinced by the need for a repository for sharing teaching material except for a relatively small amount of material - study skills stuff for example but there was a definite interest today.
40% of the speakers wanted to remove the e from elearning... elarning anyone?
And finally, the main theme of the day was Web2.0... and how we need to be ready for google generation, which we certainly do. BUT I also think there are far too many assumptions being made about how techno-savvy they ALL are. While 55% 12-17 yr olds use social networking (Jan 2007 in the US) presumably the other 45% don't. And that's before we start on how information literate they are...

LYX

Steve Ryan — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:07:55 +0000

Have anyone across this? It is a kind of word processor, designed for scientists but produces teX files. So complex equations can be copied and pasted into moodle. It also says it is good for producing structured documents like reading lists

Lyx

From the link above

"LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, 'finger painting' font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth's legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output -- or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced -- looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes 'eating' your dissertation the evening before going to press. LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the Macintosh and modern Windows platforms."

Not tried it yet but the screen grabs are very impressive. It could be useful.

Electronic course pack service 2007-8

Jane Secker — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:09:16 +0000

The electronic course pack service is available to all VLE users (WebCT or Moodle). This allows you to request small extracts of core readings which are scanned and made available to your students through their online course. If you wish to take advantage of this service the deadline for submissions for the Michaelmas Term is 31st July 2007. If you used the service last year you will be shortly getting a message from us about 'renewing' these readings and we will also be shortly sending you usage statistics of your current readings. Requests or queries about the service should be e-mailed to epacks@lse.ac.uk Please note: * You must have a course in the VLE (either WebCT or Moodle) * Normally no more than 20 core readings can be included in a pack each term * Extracts should be no more than 5% of work / one chapter from a book / one article from a journal issue * Only readings NOT available in electronic format will be scanned - so please check the e-journal collections at LSE * Readings should be covered by the CLA Scanning Licence which essentially means small extracts from UK publishers - we cannot guarantee being able to obtain copyright clearance for non-UK readings as these can be very expensive New E-Pack User Guidelines available. If you wish to take advantage of the e-course pack service please read the notes for users before compiling a request. These are available at: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/Online-Readings/E-Course-Pack-User-Guidelines.php If you are interested in paper course pack services please visit the Course Pack One Stop Shop website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/tss/OSS/OSS.htm

Citing and Referencing: video lecture now available

Jane Secker — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:35:42 +0000

Knowing how to cite and reference properly is very important when you are preparing essays and other assignments. It's also important to know how to cite properly in your dissertation. The Library and Centre for Learning Technology have made available a selection of online resources to help LSE students with this topic. Please visit:http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/insktr/citing_referencing.htm A video lecture, a referencing best practice guide and further reading are available. This is a new initiative and if you have any feedback about the resources (particularly the video lecture) please do contact me.

Designing for Learning conference @ Greenwich

Kris Roger — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:18:15 +0000

It's taken a while but I've finally written up some notes from the "Designing for Learning" conference held at Greenwich University last Wednesday (July 4 2007). First up with the opening keynote was Gilly Salmon who talked about her visions of the new teacher moving away from traditional lecturing to being a facilitator of learning available 24 hours via wireless Internet access. I can't say I can see this happening soon at the LSE. She then went on to talk about various projects running at the University of Leicester brought together under Gilly's "media zoo" brand. Of course, each of the projects have animal acronyms such as "SEAL", "ELKS" and "IMPALA". These research projects are looking at the use of technologies such as iPods and podcasting, second life (of course). The first of the parallel sessions that I attended looked at Canterbury Christ Church’s solution to organising and cataloguing their various study skills learning objects to make them easily findable. The end product is a website with a number of nice Web 2.0 style features including an efficient and clean looking search engine and a tag cloud. The solution was developed partly out of frustration with other learning object repositories such as JORUM. My second parallel session looked at the use of Turnitin as a formative learning tool for students on "English for academic purposes" programmes. The rationale for their work was that there is a level of plagiarism that is a result of a misunderstanding of conventions and by using Turnitin on first draft essays the results can be discussed by the students and their teachers. It is made clear to the students that by submitting their first draft there will be no consequences if there is significant plagiarism found in the first draft. This approach has resulted in students using a greater number of sources, use of citation and appropriate paraphrasing. After lunch the University of Leicester discussed the Adelie project, which has been looking at ways of planning learning redesign. The Adelie team works closely with department teaching staff where the main planning activity is a two-day workshop. One interesting component of this is having a "reality checker"; in other words a teaching colleague who hasn't been involved in the initial planning who comes in to look at the outcomes at the end of the session. The focus of the final session of the day was very much on the learner and how today's students approach technology - "how well do we know our learners?" Linda Creanor from the JISC project "LEX: learner experiences of e-learning" talked a lot about Generation Y and MySpace and how these learners see elearning (VLE) as just another channel and in fact the term elearning could be viewed as a little anachronistic.

Social Software and Libraries Literature review published

Jane Secker — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:20:09 +0000

The literature review for the LASSIE (Libraries and Social Software in Education) project was published today on the LASSIE project blog. The report provides an overview of how social software is impacting on libraries, on issues relating to libraries supporting distance learners and on how the library operates as a social space.

Please update links in reading lists to Lexis Professional

Jane Secker — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:04:26 +0000

Lexis Professional has been replaced by Lexis Nexis Butterworths - access to Lexis Professional is likely to be withdrawn from academic institutions by the publishers before the start of term. If you have a course in WebCT or Moodle, then any links to law reports, legislation or journal articles within Lexis Professional unfortunately will need to be updated. It is possible to provide links direct to UK articles, law reports or legislation within Lexis Nexis Butterworths using the following linking tool: www.lexisnexis.co.uk/linkdirectplus CLT have a web page with information on how to create stable links to online documents within many of our databases: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/Online-Readings/E-journals/creating-stable-URLs.php Please contact Jane Secker in CLT if you require assistance with updating links within your course. (ext. 6530 ; email: secker,j ) Access to LNB On campus access URL to Lexis Nexis Butterworths is http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/legal Off campus (Athens) access URL to Lexis Nexis Butterworths is http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/legal/auth/athensredirection.do

It's all coming together

Steve Ryan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:20:58 +0000

I am sitting in a plenary at the ALT-C conference in Nottingham, listening to Michelle Sellenger's interesting talk. The talk is also being webcasted using e-lluminate. I can watch Michelle on e-lluminate as well as live (and blog) What really strikes me is that for the first time in my experience, I am sitting in a really large conference, the wireless is working fine as is all of the technology and we can actualy do, without any hassle, all the things speakers are describing.

Towards a social science of web 2.0

Kris Roger — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:29:29 +0000

This week I'm at the "Towards a social science of web 2.0" conference in York along with Jane Secker from CLT and Gwyneth Price from the Institute of Education. This generally seems to be a very multidisciplinary conference with people from social science, library and learning technology backgrounds; although I would say there are probably more from a social science and academic background. There were two keynote speakers to open the conference, the first of these was Bernie Hogan (University of Toronto) talking about how he has developed ways of analysing social networks and how these relationships form different distributions and clusters. Second up was Scott Lash from Goldsmiths who was arguing for a new 'new media' ontology. I’ll be back to provide a summary later, maybe. In the first of the parallel sessions I attended a paper looking at the spatial distribution of social networks by extracting location information from MySpace. The author (Tobias Escher, Oxford) then went on to clean and categorise this information and mash that up with with Google maps. This looks like a fascinating area of research which I hope to look more into later. Unfortunately I couldn't stay to the end of this session as Jane and Gwyneth were presenting the LASSIE talk in another room. Fortunately someone far more methodical than myself was blogging from Jane and Gwyneth's session providing a summary of the LASSIE paper as well as the two other papers in the same session. More to follow… Update: Jane has also been blogging from the conference and here's a further posting from me on the Andrew Keen and Charles Leadbetter evening session.

handout

Matt Lingard — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:09:23 +0000

agcas biennial

Careers Service Social Software Projects

Matt Lingard — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:15:50 +0000

I'm just back from the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) Biennial conference, where I presented a session with Kezia Richmond, the LSE Careers Information Manager, titled "Blog it, tag it, share it: learn the language of the Google generation". It seemed to be very well received judging from the immediate feedback we were given. We covered RSS, blogs, podcasting & social bookmarking and showcased the Careers Service's social software projects:

The Finalists blog
Careers Podcasts*
LSECareers del.icio.us bookmarks
Pageflakes website (public news reader)

*Strictly speaking audio recordings rather than podcasts! You can download our handout and see a list of sites we highlighted in our talk. If you are interested in finding out more about social software then look out for the social software sessions on the LSE upcoming training courses page. The CLT are particularly interested in further exploring how social software might be used in teaching and learning, so if this is something that interests you too then please get in touch: clt-support@lse.ac.uk

Web 2.0 is evil?

Kris Roger — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:00:26 +0000

Yesterday evening at the "Towards a social science of web 2.0" conference we witnessed an extremely interesting 'debate' between Charles Leadbetter and Andrew Keen; the former advancing a number of arguments that web 2.0, user generated content and open source development are essentially positive and good for the development of knowledge on a number of levels. His arguments were fairly balanced and well structured presenting both how web 2.0 could have both positive and negative effects on quality, democracy and the equality of access to information, especially in the developing world. But it has to be said his argument presented a definite positive outlook. Andrew Keen was essentially the pantomime villain and played up to the role with a passionate diatribe against user generated content and virtual worlds such as Second Life. His argument was that most of the content created by non-professionals, or amateurs is garbage and not worth paying for and that the availability of this free content will eventually endanger quality content provided by experts that we have traditionally paid for. He also has a big problem with San Francisco "hippy" counterculture and makes the point that while the founders and proponents of the current Web 2.0 phenomenon are essentially against government intervention they are also very pro-market by virtue of their libertarian worldview. His arguments as presented this evening did seem to jump around from one point to another, almost as some sort of taster to the arguments presented in his book which he shamelessly plugged during his speech. I am almost tempted to buy a copy to find out what he was actually trying to say but I'm not sure that I should for fear that I will have fallen into some sort of perverse marketing trap. He did present some interesting and positive opinions on the value of media literacy in response to a question from the audience; in that we need to educate our children on the interpreting of media to discern where there is bias, commercial interest or just plain incompetence. A good point was made by a fellow delegate while chatting over dinner; that both speakers presented a number of obvious truths amongst their more questionable arguments and so it was fairly difficult to establish any truth from the polemic. Overall these were two excellent speakers at least from an 'entertainment' point of view. It's only a shame that Charles Leadbetter had to get a train halfway through the session so we weren't treated to a full debate between the two.

Moodle Moot '07

Steve Bond — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:46:43 +0000

A report from the first day of this conference at the OU. Martin Dougiamas' keynote began as a sort of "State of the Union" address, telling us how widely used it is etc. But mostly he spoke about what's new in 1.9, and where Moodle will be heading after that. The major new features in 1.9 are:

Gradebook - completely redesigned. Hard to explain briefly what it now offers
Outcomes - can create a list of standard outcomes, assign selected ones to activities, and attach them to a scale so they can be 'graded'
Groupings - groups of groups so you can control which groups apply to which activity
Performance - problem with slowness in large installations in 1.8, now fixed
Tags - way of tagging users (and resources/activities?)

Beyond that, 2.0+ will focus on repository and portfolio aspects. There will be simple methods for bringing in resources from repositories and for exporting them to portfolios. The idea of 'community hubs' will develop, allowing sharing of resources between different instances of Moodle on different sites. Also there will be more conditional activities, dependent on outcomes from previous activities. However, these 2.0+ aspects will wait until after a period of consolidation - where 1.9 will develop through 1.9.x versions to fix all outstanding bugs, streamline and tidy up existing code, so that 2.0 starts from a robust base. My highlights from the rest of the day: Nicolas Connault from Moodle HQ spoke about the need to build automated 'unit testing' (i.e. testing of individual methods, using 'mock database objects' where needed) into code development. So, when you write a new class or method, you write the testing suite to go with it at the same time. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well for debugging existing code that may not be object-oriented. Chris Sangwin from Uni Birmingham demonstrated a Moodle version of their STACK assessment system. This allows Maths questions to be created where the student can submit an algebraic answer, which can be assessed according to an algorithm specified by the teacher. For example, you can ask them to enter an 'even function' (one that is symmetrical in the dependent axis) and it will be able to determine whether their answer (which could be anything) is indeed even. This is all open source and they want people to test it. A report on tomorrow to follow...

Moodle Moot '07 - Day 2

Steve Bond — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:07:41 +0000

I missed Niall Sclater's closing keynote from the previous report, mainly because I was writing it during his talk (sorry Niall). But it was good, delving into the debate about the role of VLEs in a world of personalised learning. He outlined various possible approaches, such as:

the "small pieces model", where a range of distributed web applications meet the student's needs. There is a problem here with the need for multiple sign-ons which has not yet been solved, and also the problem of having to deal with lots of different interfaces.
the "docking with the mothership" model, where students' own "personal learning clients" interact with a central VLE, such as Moodle. Here there may be ongoing problems with interoperability between the various clients and the central system.
the "PLE server" model, where personal learning facilities are provided centrally for students' benefit. Elgg and Mahara are examples.

In the process he mentioned the OU's new "Moodle on a stick" - an offline Moodle that can be synchronised with a central server. This is due to be released soon - by end of 2007 probably. His conclusions were that none of these setups is yet wholly convincing, and that the VLE still has a place in formal learning. Future PLE clients and e-portfolios will certainly have a role to play, but probably in concert with a VLE. So, on to day 2 highlights: Jonathan Fine from OU ran through some applications of MathTran, his system for processing TeX in web pages and serving up the output as images on the fly. There seem to be a lot of these systems knocking about, but this one is very impressive. Jonathan admitted that jsMath is also a very strong rival, and said that where jsMath wins on layout, his system wins on speed. In the last session of the day, Peter van der Hijden argued that the Moodle "World" was growing out of control and that it needed more structure. His solution is the formation of local Moodle associations, and used the Dutch Ned-Moove group as an example of how such groups can support users and developers. He argued that such groups should encourage personal membership, rather than having institutional representatives, to empower users of Moodle. Steve

More MoodleMoot

Matt Lingard — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:05:11 +0000

As Steve has comprehensively blogged on this already: day1, day2 I'll just add a few comments on e-portfoilos and some more stuff coming our way from the OU. E-Portfolios These have always been on the edge of my radar but they were highlighted in Martin Dougiamas’ keynote for v2 and again in Niall Sclater's excellent review of the thinking on the future of VLEs / PLEs. Without really planning to I ended up spending most of day 2 looking at portfolios. The idea with regard to Moodle is that external E-portfolio systems will plugin to Moodle allowing for data to pass from Moodle to the E-portfolio. So what is an e-portfolio and how might it be used? For me the best starting point is how the OU have named their own home-grown system: MyStuff which is an open source plugin to moodle to be released soon. It is intended as a personal space for students to create, organise & store their 'stuff': files, links etc and allows students to make them available to who they wish. The other system featuring highly at the Moot was Mahara (open source from NZ) which seems to go further and includes a CV Builder and social software tools. I liked the way the Mahara team were talking about developing links to other systems such as YouTube & Flickr, so not everything has to be in Mahara. I went to a Moodle-Mahara integration session and Enovation (an Irish Moodle partner) have already developed this bridge. It has added "Add to portfolio" links to Discussion posts, assignments and quizzes and will be available to all in v2. I like this idea of being able to provide students with their own spaces, linked to, but separate from the VLE. Mahara pilot anyone? Coming soon (from the OU) I attended a couple of sessions that highlighted stuff the OU have developed. Firstly they have done lots of work on the Quiz navigation / submission. This will eventually be included in the core code (for v2 I think). It includes a WebCT-style panel showing you which questions have been answered and a summary page before you submit and better options for instant feedback. Also available now from the OU is a new Resources Page - a Moodle resource that allows an editor to setup an index of files, links, feeds etc. This would allow you you take stuff off the homepage and i can see this working well. The other good one I thought was the "Calendar / Planner / Study" format for the homepage that they have developed, it just gives you more options for structuring your homepage.

Scanned readings: Lent Term deadline

Jane Secker — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:52:33 +0000

Due to the demand for this service, please do try to get your Lent Term e-course pack requests to us by the end of this week. The official deadline was 31st October, but we are still accepting last minute requests. Please consult the guidelines for requesting e-packs for further details of what we need from you. Please send your completed lists to epacks@lse.ac.uk. For queries about this service do get in touch with Jane, the Learning Technology Librarian. E-mail j.secker@lse.ac.uk. Feedback from this term has been highly positive, and well over 1500 scanned readings are now available to students through WebCT and Moodle.

Good looking wiki

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:27:38 +0000

I was sent this today (Thanks Tamy!) which has renewed my enthusiasm for wikis (if not SL!) http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/educationaluses It has convinced me that wikis can look good, so I’ve revisited wikispaces. As well as the basics you’d expect, you can restrict editing to named people, lock pages and use widgets to embed lots of social software stuff – a delicious feed, flickr slideshow, YouTube video etc. I’m planning on using this, rather than just a del.icio.us list for a future workshop. The idea being that as well as the resources I’m providing / demonstrating it will be a workspace for a hands-on wiki exercise and possibly a resource that gets added to after the event but that might be expecting too much. The only downside I've come across so far is the Google ads although they are quite discreet. I’m also wondering if there is a area of our website that it might suit… for demo purposes if nothing else.

Investigating Drupal

Matt Lingard — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:23:22 +0000

I have been looking at Drupal as part of a slow burning project which is aiming to create a repository for language teachers to share teaching resources. The project is a collaboration between 3 universities but will initially run as a pilot for the French department at LSE. It's still in the development stage but some real resources will be added soo. Project >> Drupal is essentially a content management system - see for example HarvardScience & MiNa - with social software features built-in: tagging, blogging, RSS etc. It's open source and one of the areas we'd like to explore, is content sharing through possible integration with Moodle, our virtual learning environment. At present integration only seems to go as far as single sign on which is aimed at those who might be using Drupal for a portal or intranet site alongside Moodle as a VLE. One of the aims of the OpenAcademic project is to integrate Drupal, Moodle & MediaWiki but it's not clear how far this has got. That project has produced DrupalEd which is a pre-configured version of Drupal for use as either "a social learning environment or a more traditional learning environment".

Inaugural Echo 360 users conference, Coventry

Kris Roger — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:51:26 +0000

Yesterday I attended the first-ever Echo 360 (formerly Apreso) conference which saw 40 or so people gather at Coventry University to look at how they are implementing lecture/event recording systems at their institutions. The day started with a number of presentations and rather than take you through every point I shall highlight some of the more interesting ideas raised during these presentations. First off was the University of Birmingham who talked about their experience. A couple of things I mentioned that might be useful at LSE was as well as recording an event with Echo 360 it is possible to simultaneously stream this live at a fairly minimal cost. This uses a feature of the standard Echo 360 Osprey capture cards that we previously didn't know about, called “Simulstream”. They also showed a rather nifty remote control camera which may be of use at LSE where the lecturer would like to zoom the image rather than use the standard wide-angle shot. This could possibly be integrated into future versions of the LSE standard classroom lectern/media controls available to the teacher. Newcastle University talked a little bit about evaluation and how they are going to assess the student experience of recorded lectures and pedagogical impacts for lecturers. Newcastle are unusual in the UK in that they are using Lectopia which merged with Apreso to form Echo 360 and they talked a little bit about their implementation. One useful feature of Lectopia they mentioned was that a 'scheduled' recording can be started using an audio trigger rather than starting at a set time. This means that there is less likelihood of five minutes of dead time being recorded before the actual lecture starts. this is hopefully something that will make it into a future version of the Echo 360 system. They also talked about the possibility of integrating the lecture recording schedule with their lectures timetable system. From the questions and discussion arising it also looks like the next version of Echo 360 will allow us to connect lectern controls to the lecture recording system which will allow easy operation by teachers if they want to stop or pause their recording. Jocasta Williams from Echo 360 talked a lot about evaluation, so I think we will have to get back to her regarding our evaluation later this academic year. She also provided a link to some useful evaluation resources (including further research projects on lecture recording). We were of course shown the next version (2.0) of the Apreso/Echo 360 event recording system and it looks as if they have certainly been listening to our feedback as most of the features/improvements that we've previously requested seem to have made it into the new product. We are just about to start beta testing the next version at LSE so we should the able to get our teeth into this pretty soon.

Edge Hill Portal

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:27:43 +0000

Universities, Blogs & Social Networks

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:29:03 +0000

Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks was organised by UKOLN. It was less focused on teaching and learning than many events I attend and attracted a wide variety of delegates including IT Managers, Web Editors, Lecturers, University Administrators as well as Learning Technologists. Control A recurring theme was the contrast made by Melissa Highton between the unrestricted nature of web 2.0 (a choice of services, user-created content and tags) and HE's tendency to want to control. In the first presentation, Stephen Clarke, from the University of Birmingham suggested that the best place for any course-based learning activity involving blogging is a Managed Learning Environment, such as Blackboard (WebCT) Vista. The argument being that this was necessary to have some control; for example to be able to archive the content or deal with inappropriate behaviour. While I can see the advantage of offering an institutional system if the blogging is to be assessed I'm not sure an MLE/VLE is necessarily the best tool for the job when it comes to blogging. In my experience VLE blogs aren't blogs - they lack functionality, they don't look good and more importantly they aren't fully connected to blogosphere which is a lot of what blogging is about... linking and being linked to... commenting and being commented on. Melissa Highton talked about the University of Leeds' Staff blogs: Leedsfeeds which is based on the open source elgg software. They were keen to host these blogs themselves, not necessarily from a standpoint of control but on the basis that Leeds bloggers are part of the university and their quality blogging should appear under the Leeds banner (if staff wanted it to). This follows the approach of Warwick Blogs where personal university-hosted blogs are available to all staff and students who want them. Melissa suggested that blogging could enhance both learning and research but she is particularly keen on elgg's community focus and how that works at Leeds. Whose facebook is it? The other main topic of the day was if and how universities should make use of social networks and whether, if we do, are we somehow encroaching on the students' territory?! My feeling before attending this event - based on anecdotes and articles I can't find (or imagined!) - was that on the whole students didn't want staff 'invading their space'. Speakers at this event suggested it's not so clear cut. Alison Wildish reported that lecturers at Edge Hill receive friend requests from students and thinking about it I know this has happened here too. At Edge Hill they see Facebook as another useful communication channel to students and are developing a Facebook application with this in mind. Tom Milburn from Bath University provided a student's perspective and demonstrated how facebook is used by Bath students for both peer support and for gathering feedback from students for student-staff liaison committees. Privacy & Security This was the other hot topic of the day. Stuart Lee, Oxford University explained how the Oxford Facebook Snooping Scandal (my title) had at least alerted students to how open Facebook can be if you ignore your privacy settings. David Harrison from Cardiff University stressed the need for educating students and suggested that providing guidance was more important than trying to control students' social networking. He introduced Cardiff's Stay Safe Online page. Edge Hills's Student Portal Finally a special mention for Edge Hill's excellent looking student portal. A nice clean design with everything you'd expect: library catelogue, staff directory, email, VLE, Campus News but also plenty of Web 2.o stuff for the kids: YouTube, Del.icio.us & Flickr feeds for 'edgehill' tags and an Edge Hill blogs feed. (Click the image for a better look). There are Slideshares for all the presentations linked from the event timetable

Facebook Pages

Matt Lingard — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:24:23 +0000

There's a relatively new Facebook feature called Pages which are profiles for organisations, products, artists, public figures etc. Instead of having friends, pages have fans. Here are a couple of University Pages (no login needed):

I was tempted to create the non-existent LSE page but instead just opted for our very own LSE Centre for Learning Technology page which I now need to find a use for! You can create more pages...

LSE shortlisted for the Institute of IT Training 2008 Awards

Chris Fryer — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:50:30 +0000

LSE's training website, which aggregates RSS feeds from multiple training providers across the school, has been nominated for an award. Luis Martinez in the Library, Jeni Brown in IT Training, and Jane Secker and I in CLT developed the system, which has subsequently been extended to include the Teaching and Learning Centre, the Language Centre, and the Staff Development Unit. We extended RSS by referencing additional namespaces -- the RSS Events and Dublin Core Terms namespaces. This allowed us to include additional metadata such as the date, time and location of the event, and its intended audience. Each training provider generates an RSS feed from their events database, which is collected using Magpie RSS. All the feeds are rolled up into one, with events sorted chronologically. Here, RSS is acting as database abstraction layer: the aggregator doesn't need to know details of each database implementation to obtain the information. If you're interested in the details, have a look at the technical documentation.

National Teaching Fellowship Scheme

Steve Ryan — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:57:27 +0000

The Higher Education Academy is running the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme again this year - see here for details. We can nominate up to three people from the School who can demonstrate excellence in supporting the student learning experience at LSE. The three criteria for nomination are: Individual excellence with students (here evidence might include high teaching scores, internal teaching prizes, and strong student recommendations); Raising the profile of excellence (here, evidence might include involvement in academic/educational development activities in your department and further afield. For example, organising an event on teaching in your department , mentoring colleagues/GTAs, running workshops on teaching in your discipline or some other aspect of teaching and learning outside the LSE) Developing excellence (here, evidence as to how you develop your own skills as a teacher is important. For example, researching aspects of your teaching practice, attending training, regularly reviewing disciplinary teaching journals) The application process does take time, and anyone interested in being considered should contact Dr Liz Barnett (l.barnett@lse.ac.uk or ext 6623), Director of the Teaching and Learning Centre in the first instance, before the 31st January, in order to meet the nomination deadline of 12noon Wednesday 12th March 2008. If we have more than three people being considered for nomination, there is an internal process to select the final nominees. Last year we had one successful nomination: Dr Clare Hemmings of the Gender Institute. This year, LSE will be host to the NTF Symposium in May. Successful nominees receive a £10,000 award which they can use as they please for personal and/or professional development in teaching and learning. Contact Liz Barnet in TLC if you are interested.

Emerging Technologies and Careers

Matt Lingard — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:16:49 +0000

I'm travelling back from Harrogate and the AGCAS "Emerging Technologies and their use in Careers" event and am taking advantage of the free wireless on the new National Express East Coast service. Excellent! My sessions were well received and I felt the whole event went really well with a great set of speakers today building on my introductory tour from yesterday: blogs, feeds, podcasts, screencasts, social bookmarking, social networking, e-portfolios & PLEs, virtual worlds and wikis... and they all stayed awake thru it all ;-) I used a wiki for an evening homework activity which worked really well. The AGCAS Harrogate wiki also contains all of the presentations from the two days. A word about the wiki I looked at three free wikis for this: wikispaces, pbwiki and wetpaint. I rejected wetpaint first as I felt it was too busy and I wanted something cleaner. I initially went with wikispaces but I wasn't happy with how it dealt with simultaneous editing which was an issue for this particular exercise so I selected pbwiki as it locks the page when someone is editing it. The delegates who in the main were using a wiki for the first time were very positive about it and I was very pleased with both how the exercise went and the performance of pbwiki itself.

LSE4You Blog

Matt Lingard — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:59:09 +0000

There is a new LSE4You blog run by the 'eDevelopment' team, which I guess is a new name for an old team, certainly new to me. There is also a Suggestions board. To get to the board you have to pass through the "LSE Authentication Service". The blog is WordPress but I'm not sure what's behind the board.

Losing the face

Matt Lingard — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:49:09 +0000

Although I've never been a huge Facebook user - just for demonstration purposes has been my usual line - there has been a definite decline in my use of it over the last couple of months. I think this is primarily because my 'friends' use of it has also taken a downturn and there isn't much point to social networking on your tod. There are only so many times I can try to top my Traveller's IQ! Plus I've never really used it for work-related communication, preferring to keep the two separate to a certain extent. Anyway that's a long introduction to the point of this post, which is to highlight some excellent posts over on Ed Techie: Facebook the holiday romance and Facebook Lessons. Martin also adds his thoughts on the the current social networking in HE debate over at the economist. And my favourite quote:

The modern day educational technologist needs to think of themselves as something of a Henry VIII figure - always falling in love then cruelly discarding the object of affection for the next one. But with less beheading.

VozMeExample

Matt Lingard — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:12:06 +0000

Type an mp3!

Matt Lingard — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:13:34 +0000

I just found VozMe on Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day. It's a simple tool for creating an mp3 from text you type. Here is my last blog post as an mp3*! You can type in English, Spanish or Italian. There are also WordPress and Blogger Plugins so it can become a feature of your blog. *I'm not sure how long VozMe keeps the mp3s for so I'm attaching it too: VozMeExample

LLAS E-Learning Symposium

Matt Lingard — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:21:56 +0000

There were some interesting sessions at Friday's LLAS (Languages Linguistics Area Studies) Subject Centre E-Learning Symposium. The first talk by Jon Dron, Athabasca University was a shameless plug for his book of the same name: Control and constraint in e-learning. It was interesting in parts but confusing in others. I liked his example from Brighton University where they use Bb, which has an announcements tool as the default course homepage. It is relatively simple to change this default, however less than 1% of academics had done so. However, when Jon surveyed staff around 50% said they would prefer to change this default to something else. He was trying to show how VLE design influences or constrains users who will usually opt for the easier (default) option. I quite liked the JISC-funded Learning Object Creator, a tool for creating simple learning activities. It has been developed with the aim of being easy-to-use as the primary consideration. It produces an HTML activity of simple "tasks" using multi-choice, text boxes etc. Examples In some ways, as one presenter suggested, it is similar to CourseGenie (now "Wimba Create") but I'd say it's different in two ways. Firstly, you're forced to include learning objectives and secondly it's easier to use. The flip side of the ease-of-use is a very rigid structure with little flexibility and limited formatting options. I'd like to take a further look but the developers at LLAS are currently not making it available unless you sign up for a workshop with them. I'm going to try and get it on a trial basis though. The last talk of the day - Learning Tools for the Web Literate Generation - was by Dave Millard from Southampton's Learning Societies Lab It covered a lot of ground I've seen covered before but it was an excellent, well-presented talk. Dave suggested a future of loosely coupled tools and highlighted some under development at the lab:

Peer Pigeon - for peer reviewing, available Summer 08
Synote - online multimedia / annotation tool (at prototype stage)
Faroes - a lightweight repository incorporating web2.0 features that will support the sharing of multimedia resources between individual practitioners

Horizons 2008

Matt Lingard — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:58:13 +0000

The annual Horizon reports from the New Media Consortium highlight emerging technologies that they believe are likely to impact on learning & teaching over the next 5 years. The 2008 Horizon Report (PDF) suggests the following are set to become mainstream in learning-focused organisations over the next few years:

On the immediate horizon: Grassroots Video & Collaboration Webs
Mid-term horizon: Mobile Broadband & Data Mashups
4-5 year horizon: Collective Intelligence & Social Operating Systems

Some new terms to me there. Looking back at a post on this blog about the 2007 report it seems to me that the horizons have previously been a bit optimistic... while user-generated content & social networking (last year's immediate horizons) may be considered mainstream in the wider world, I don't think that's the case in "learning-focused organisations", particularly UK HE institutions. Far from it. While some individuals within these organisations may be 'generating' and networking I don't feel its mainstream practice, certainly not here in the UK HE. Only a few organisations have implemented & encouraged such activities at the institutional level. Timing aside, an interesting look into the future.

Open Education

Matt Lingard — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:23:46 +0000

I have just come across the Cape Town Open Declaration, a "statement of strategy and ...commitment [to open education]". The focus is very much on the development and sharing of 'open educational resources' but there is stuff about the sharing of teaching practices too. It all seems quite reasonable but there is a bit of a debate around it of course, see Downes vs Wiley - Cato and Cicero revisited and Open education and the cape Town declaration. The declaration is supposed to spark dialogue so it's off to a good start, although I suspect that particular dialogue was already there! We're currently working with the French department here at LSE and colleagues at Columbia University on a repository for sharing French teaching resources and while the teachers behind the project are keen to share the fruits of their labour I know that other teachers here and elsewhere are not, particularly when sharing goes beyond the dept / institution. I'm off to become a sceptical signatory if they'll allow such a thing! Coincidently, I also came across U-Now: an open courseware initiative at Nottingham university this week. PS When did Martin Dougiamas relocate to Austria ;-) (See Cape Town signatories)

Wimba

Matt Lingard — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:09:02 +0000

Today Kris & I are at a Wimba Best Practices Showcase. LSE already use some Wimba tools (see below) so it was the chance to see what others are doing and to find out what's on the horizon that drew us here. Firsly, great lunch at the Strand Palace Hotel ;-) Now it's over to Kings for the main event. Part one is a Wimba talk / hands-on session in the rather swish Languages Open Learning Centre. The session covered Wimba Create (CourseGenie), Voice Tools, Live Classroom & Pronto. LSE already have the first three. Languages have been making use of the voice boards (audio discussion boards) for a variety of online discussion activities as well as to collect audio recordings from students for a while now. The voice tools' podcaster is also being used on other LSE courses to deliver audio recordings of lectures. Some staff have also used Coursegenie for web page creation, it's quite a nice tool as it generates web pages from Word. We (CLT) are just starting to experiment with Live Classroom which allows you to hold real-time virtual presentations - with audio, video, content (e.g. PowerPoint slides) and text chat. We hope to be showcasing it soon. If you're interested in finding out more please do get in touch clt-support@lse.ac.uk I'm still not convinced by the need for Pronto - Wimba's instant messaging system that would plug into Moodle - but perhaps I'm missing something? I didn't pick up much at the hands-on but then I didn't really expect to. The show cases were more interesting particularly good to see Adele Atkinson talking about successful use (PPT) of Live Classroom both with students but also with staff for meetings across multiple sites (in fact multiple universities).

Another eportfolio

Matt Lingard — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:24:05 +0000

Has anyone looked at Expo LX or any of the other tools produced by LearningObjects.com? I came across it at IoE Learning Technology Unit. It currently only integrates with Blackboard though the website states that integrations with Moodle and other systems are "on the roadmap". It's essentially a tool for creating personal sites including blogs with permissions built-in so it can be used for eportfolios. It might also be of interest to the web team for personal & group sites e.g. for academics, researchers & research groups. I'm going to download & take a look. No, I'm not, it only appears to come as a Bb building block, so forget that! Also on the LTU site were some 'technology tasters' which included this list of educational uses for wikis which is better than the one I had for our last workshop!

Lab Group Day

Steve Bond — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:36:34 +0000

Oracle Building, Moorgate, 20 Feb 2008 This was a chance for various e-learning labs to show off their work and look for opportunities for collaboration. There were 16 labs represented in all, and chances to see 4 different presentations during the day. Unbelievably, there was no internet access in the presentation rooms on the day, so live demos were impossible and presenters had to use screenshots. Notes from the 4 presentations I saw: Chimera, University of Essex This was previously a BT research lab that was taken over by the University, and it still has close ties to BT, who provide a lot of CASE studentships. They're not specifically an e-learning unit - their research covers a wide range of subjects around the personal and social use of ICT. On their site they have a dedicated 2-bedroom flat that they use for research into household technologies and ethnographic studies of how people interact with technology. Projects include:

DELTA, a system for searching distributed repositories, harvesting metadata and allowing users to tag the results. Their findings were that academic users weren't interested in sharing their own resources, and weren't interested in tagging others' resources either!
MiRTLE, a project in China to use a "mixed-reality" classroom. Provides a live link for distance students between a real classroom and a VR equivalent (using Wonderland, Sun's version of Second Life). I couldn't work out what the VR was adding, but then that is my usual attitude to VR, so maybe it's just me. Apparently China sends 20% of its school-leavers to university, but wants to expand this to 50% - requiring the construction of 400 new universities!
UIDM, an e-learning development model. Shows a cycle of needs analysis leading to technical development followed by implementation and evaluation, which feeds back to the start. They were also trying to cram institutional change in there, but weren't sure where it fitted.

CARET, University of Cambridge This unit is independent of faculty or colleges, and is centrally funded, so it has to justify its existence by being as useful as possible. There is no institutional VLE at Cambridge but Sakai (a.k.a. CamTools) is a de facto standard on all their projects now because they like it so much. They build bespoke specialist tools, such as a molecular structure visualiser, and integrate it into CamTools. Other projects:

Distilling the essence of the "supervision" sessions, i.e. tutorials, that are an important part of Cambridge teaching. They found that much time in these sessions was given over to correcting the same old misconceptions, so they videoed these sessions and created Apreso-style snippets that target these misconceptions.
Repositories, especially the Shahnama project to digitise the Persian Books of Kings.
Learning Landscape: an ethnographic study to find out exactly how students spend their time. Includes students videoing themselves and each other during the day, and SMS messages sent out at random times to ask "what are you doing right now?" Also the "Shutdown Challenge" to see how students behaved when denied access to the internet.
Facebook-CamTools integration. User can access their CamTools course resources from within Facebook. CamTools generates a unique key that Facebook can use to authenticate the user.

ILRT, Bristol They host Intute, BOS and TASi, which will soon have a moving-image remit as well. Projects:

Clinical case recorder: students can upload multimedia information about a case into a database where it can be viewed by others. Also the materials are then imported into ToolBook templates to create stand-alone multimedia case studies for use by future students.
Experimentation with new web technologies: HTML 5 and its
CREW - an attempt to collect information from conferences and meetings that is usually forgotten about shortly after the event has finished. Allows delegates to upload materials and make meaningful connections using sematic web stuff.

IET, Open University I didn't really get a great deal out of this one, but here are some disconnected tidbits:

They have a new building, the Jennie Lee laboratory, which is all kitted out with video cameras, other sensors, robots etc.
They've done a lot of stuff with eye-tracking, showing what users actually look at on a web page. The answer is very little beyond the first paragraph of text. Perhaps we could burn some budget on one of these machines (a TOBII monitor), the results could be very interesting.
You may remember some time ago I suggested that I should spend some of my working day investigating the educational potential of World of Warcraft, since it seemed so much better than Second Life. Well, they actually have a guy doing that.
50% of all the disabled students in the UK are studying through the OU
This rang true: "Evaluation feedback for new educational technologies is almost always positive - but it doesn't mean you are doing a good job".

All in all quite an interesting day. Steve

Wimba Connect 2008

Matt Lingard — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:47:02 +0000

Wimba Connect 2008 was the inaugural conference for Wimba, a software company that provides a variety of educational software, some of which is used at the LSE. The big announcement at the conference was a new version of “Pronto” a tool we don’t use. It is an instant messaging (IM) system and Wimba are calling it the “first academic centric IM platform”! They argue it is different to IM systems such as MSN & Yahoo as you pre-load it with students (and staff). Students then see a list of contacts for each course they take as well as having the ability to create their own ad hoc groups. A basic version of Pronto has been around for a while and it will continue to be available offering text and audio communication between groups of students. “New” pronto, due for release in June, offers the following additions:

Video
Queued chat – allowing staff to run office hours with a queue of students in a waiting area. (Potentially of use for help desks etc too and Wimba are pushing it as an institutional system)
Application sharing - users communicating via Pronto will be able to share documents, for example a word document
Institutional announcements

According to a Wimba case study video the phrase, "I'll Pronto you" has been heard on campus at Grand Rapids Community College who have been involved in the beta testing. Is it worth a look? Perhaps, but an immediate issue is that it has to be installed. Is there a point in trying it with students if it’s not available on the student PCs? Plus a Moodle integration will not be immediately available. So, first stage try it internally? Update... 12/03/08: Conference Presentations More on Wimba Connect to follow...

Wimba Classroom

Matt Lingard — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:41:00 +0000

At Wimba Connect 2008 I attended a couple of sessions on Wimba (Live) Classroom which were very positive... ...in contrast to the problems Hervé Didiot-Cook and I suffered in our joint presentation that used it! Hervé was presenting from London via LSE's Wimba Classroom but the internet connection was weak, causing him to lose contact with me and the audience in Florida. Also, others listening in from London heard echoing whenever I spoke and a colleague in New York was unable to hear me at all. Anecdotally I also heard of one other very poor showing of Live Classroom in an official Wimba demonstration at another university. However, an earlier presentation I did to an LSE staff development session was much better so despite the problems Hervé & I experienced I’m still keen to experiment further, probably starting with a Moodle Briefing for staff in May. Anyway, back to the positive Live Classroom sessions at the conference... They covered the most obvious uses we have already considered: remote presentations & training, meetings, office hours & student group study areas. However, bear in mind that Wimba now see "new Pronto" as the place for the latter two with Wimba Classroom being for more formal presentations including those with external participants and any that require archiving. There are two uses for Live Classroom that I hadn't really considered:

Digital Storytelling - It might be possible for students to record and archive a presentation in Live Classroom, combining presentation, audio & video. I need to explore this further though. Digital storytelling is in use in languages this year using a combination of Wimba voice tools and showbeyond.com
Pre-recorded presentations - by using archive a lecturer could create and distribute a short presentation for students to review before a seminar etc, allowing for more discussion face-to-face in the classroom.

One session that I attended which was demonstrating an economic case for their use of Wimba over face-to face sessions for their state-wide training programmes also provided stats on how Live Classroom was reducing their carbon footprint!

Columbia Wikis

Matt Lingard — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:41:26 +0000

At a meeting with Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching & Learning (CCNMTL)we talked a lot about wikis. They offer their staff wikis for teaching through an externally hosted service - wikispaces - which is one of several good-looking hosted wiki services currently available (others being pbwiki & wetpaint). There are 100 wikispaces at Columbia though not all are active. However I did get to see a couple of really good ones, unfortunately they are not available for public viewing as they involve assessment. On one, an English Lit wiki, students are given a poem or text of some kind which they have to type into the wiki . They then have to select phrases and link them to new pages where they provide an analysis of the phrase. They have to tag the entry with its theme(s) and also a tag that is something like "week1"or "assign2". The lecturer then uses the built-in RSS feeds to create "Assignment X" submission pages which are populated by feeds of the appropriate tag. The wiki builds into a resource for all students as well as collating the weekly assignments for the lecturer. What was also particularly good is that the lecturer uses the wiki and the students entries in the classroom for the basis of discussion. A second private wiki called Sacred Gotham works on the same model - students' individual submissions building into a shared resource. This one involved extensive use of Google Earth which CCNMTL said was generally growing in popularity at Columbia. In Sacred Gotham students were using it to map things like the route of Catholic Parades through the City which were then embedded in the wiki. Other current projects at Columbia are listed in their project portfolio.

Leadership, Support & students

Matt Lingard — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:49:27 +0000

By far the best talk I attended at Wimba Connect was the final keynote given by Darcy Walsh Hardy, who heads UT Telecampus, a central unit supporting online education initiatives within the University of Texas. The talk was a general educational technology one rather than having anything to do with Wimba. Darcy made a lot of interesting points and showed some great video clips to make her points - my favourite is below. Part of her talk focussed on the need for more support for learning technologies in institutions and the need for more leadership in the field. Nothing revolutionary but it was particularly interesting to me as in our talk earlier that day Hervé & I had suggested leadership & support plus user-friendly technologies & collaborative working as being 4 factors necessary for the wider adoption of technologies such as Wimba. The talk also focussed on the need to involve students to a greater extent in the selection and implementation of learning technologies. I think this is very important and we certainly learnt a lot from our student focus group in our recent VLE evaluations. Something we should do more of. Darcy's message to educational software vendors - stop cold calling us & research who we are / what we need before any form of contact went down well too! Best Clip of the talk: Microsoft Surface Parody

Wimba Assess

Matt Lingard — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:40:06 +0000

The final post from Wimba Connect (I promise!) There is another new product on the horizon to be called Wimba Assess. Wimba recently bought Brownstone who have a number of products including Diploma, Tutor & Edu. The first two are desktop applications and are currently distributed by publishers rather than Brownstone / Wimba themselves. Diploma is a question editor like Respondus but appears more powerful and easier to use. Questions are all rtf format though which apparantly limits options for import / export. Although you can import to certain VLEs (not Moodle though), it is not possible to retrieve questions from a VLE. Tutor is for students and is simply sets of question banks from publishers. Edu is web-based system for developing & delivering of self-scoring assignments. It seemed to be pretty good a Maths Questions including some that involve plotting graphs. Questions can also be authored in Diploma for use in Edu. Edu's used at Keele if we want to know more from a user.

Fiesta

Steve Bond — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:42:56 +0000

Fiesta is a game developed by Tamy Zupan of the LSE Language Centre and Steve Bond of CLT. It was designed for use by learners of Spanish, but it can be re-purposed for use in teaching other languages and potentially in other disciplines. The game has been released under a Creative Commons licence and is now available for download here: Fiesta

Shock of the Old 2008 – Instalment 1

Kris Roger — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:37:09 +0000

Well, another week another web technology focused conference another broken WiFi network. I managed to get online for a total of 10 minutes so no live blogging from this conference.

Stuart Lee (Oxford) kicked off with a very entertaining introduction to the day with some informed jokes and a healthy dose of web 2.0 scepticism. I guess the main question really was how relevant web 2.0 is to mainstream higher education teaching in the UK. Can we stick our heads in the sand and hope it'll go away? Do we want to?

In a way this was a very refreshing point of view as I was beginning to beleive I was quite out of step. If I was to believe many of the blogs out there we should be well on the way to planning, if not developing, personal learning environments based on every web 2.0 application site available. Especially if it involves Twitter (Facebook is Old Hat). Anyway, this was an energising start to the day.

The keynote speaker for the day was Professor Ronald Barnett from the Institute of Education. He lent academic weight by looking at what it is to be a student in the digital age and reminding us of the aims of higher education and posing many tough questions regarding the use of digital technologies. His ultimate conclusion is that there are so many unanswered questions that we barely understand the value of digital technologies because we barely understand our educational aims in higher education. We cannot therefore assume that digital technologies will be worthwhile and assessment of them is problematic. This does however mean that there are real opportunities for research. One nice comment that came out of the questions, was that enabling the student to enjoy themselves while attending a course does not necessarily mean that they are effective learners. As educators we sometimes have to take our students to uncomfortable places so that they can potentially transform their knowledge and attitudes to go into the presently unknown.

Niall Sclater from the Open University was next to speak regarding the perceived threat to the VLE from the PLE. He started off with a devil's advocate approach by questioning whether we should be investing time and energy into developing our use of VLEs when there is all that free Web 2.0 software out there that we could and should be using. He then went on to look at the various PLE models out there. The main arguments against the PLE are the inability to brand, integration difficulties (very important to the Open University), reliability questions, accountability and other questions over the separation of the education and social space. Another query was whether the PLE model will fit the formal learning approach of universities as opposed to a more informal approach. Unsurprisingly, Niall's conclusion was that we still need the VLE – his preferred model is to use his laptop as a PLE which links all these applications and services together.

More to follow...

‘Said Business School’ photo courtesy of dipfan from Flickr.com (licensed under Creative Commons)

Web2.0 wally

Matt Lingard — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:23:14 +0000

wallyweb2.jpg

Matt Lingard — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:23:43 +0000

Wally is lost in Web2.0

More Shock

Matt Lingard — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:59:34 +0000

Kris has already blogged comprehensively on yesterday's excellent event so I'm going to limit my comments to a few things that struck a chord during the day. I say excellent, there were of course a few duff talks but what I really liked was the varied backgrounds & viewpoints of the speakers - see the programme. Towards the end of his talk Ronald Barnett stressed the need for more evaluation and highlighted the need for cross discipline research as well as the importance for some 'vertical talk' to ensure pro-VCs etc are engaged [or least aware!]. It was agreed during the follow-up questions that we should dive in, use this stuff but that critical evaluation must follow. Niall Sclater made the point that the majority of students demand and need simplicity, as do staff I would say. For me, one of the great things about many of the emerging internet services are their easy-to-use interfaces. The ease-of-use of our new Moodle VLE has certainly been very popular with LSE staff. In between sessions I had a quick chat with Melissa Highton from the University of Leeds, who I saw talk at a blogging event late last year. Melissa has been involved in establishing the excellent LeedsFeeds, blogs for Leeds' staff - see my earlier conference post. I asked her how many staff bloggers Leeds had and tongue-in-cheek she suggested that that was a very Web1.0 question and the numbers didn't matter. The important thing was that Leeds staff have the possibility to participate & blog under the Leeds banner if they wish. (She did also point out that with elgg there is the possibility to blog privately or to "friends" so there is stuff not publicly available). Back at home, LSE doesn't have an institutional blogging system but there are a handful of bloggers. There was an interesting quote from a student video in the talk by Amanda Jefferies from Hertfordshire, about how he used his computer all day, except when attending lectures (and to eat!). To be honest I'm not sure what the situation is at the LSE but I recently had a conversation with a colleague at an American university where allowing laptops in lecture theatres was being hotly debated! Is it just me or is this ridiculous? Of course the above student may have been choosing not to take his laptop into class but it seems unlikely. Amanda's talk and another referred to the JISC learner experience studies, for example see In their Own Words (PDF). Earlier this week we ran a "web2.0" workshop and a number of participants fed back that they'd like more data on student usage. Which kind of leads nicely back to the opening comments on research & evaluation!

A Regular Expression to match any URL

Chris Fryer — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:13:44 +0000

A bold claim, but I think I've got one: |([A-Za-z]{3,9})://([-;:&=\+\$,\w]+@{1})?([-A-Za-z0-9\.]+)+:?(\d+)?((/[-\+~%/\.\w]+)?\??([-\+=&;%@\.\w]+)?#?([\w]+)?)?| An online events booking system I developed doesn't allow HTML in the event description field, primarily to protect against annoying scripting attacks. But what if you want to provide a link in the description? I need to detect plain text URLs stored in the database, and turn them into hyperlinks when displayed in the browser. The regular expression above allows me to do that quite easily in PHP:


$pattern = |([A-Za-z]{3,9})://([-;:&=+$,w]+@{1})?([-A-Za-z0-9.]+)+:?(d+)?((/[-+~%/.w]+)???([-+=&;%@.w]+)?#?([w]+)?)?|;
$html = preg_replace($pattern, '$0', $text);

But the regular expression has several submatches. They provide a means to break down the URL into its constituent parts, including protocol, user info, server name, REQUEST_URI, query string and anchor. Here's a PHP class I wrote that uses this Regular Expression to analyse a string, detect URLs, populate an array with the constituent parts of the URL, and replace URLs with hyperlinks. Here's an example of usage:

$text  = 'Please visit http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/';
$text .= 'script.cgi?variable=value&variable2=some';
$text .= '+url+encoded+text#section-1 to find out more';

$urlf = new URLFinder();
$html = $urlf->make_links($text);
echo $html;

If you print_r($urlf), you can see how the URL is broken down. I haven't managed to find any exceptions to the expression, but if you do, please post an example.

Assessment for Learning

Matt Lingard — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:44:07 +0000

I'm just back from a Netskills workshop Assessment for Learning: Harnessing Technologies. It was a well-structured, varied day involving presentations, discussion and lots of hands-on exploration, which I hadn't expected. There was stuff I've covered before - Bloom's bloomin' Taxonomy and TurnitinUK but plenty of other stuff too. I was partly there to find out more about eportfolios and we spent a fair bit of time exploring Newcastle University's Generic Eportfolio system which looks quite nice. It's supposed to be freely available but we couldn't suss out how and I must follow this up with the presenter. Over on 'Reluctant Technologist' (my new blog!) I'm starting to get my thoughts on eportfolios together. Completely off topic I heard about diigo for what must be the 23rd time this month. It's a social bookmarking site with loads more functionality than del.icio.us which we already use at CLT (LSE CLT del.icio.us). I've been put off so far because I've felt it has too much going on... too busy. However, I'm going to take another look as today I've discovered it does re-orderable lists which can be easily sub divided with labels (great for training session resources) and groups - lists of bookmarks contributed to directly by multiple users which is something else we've had interest in.

Web conferencing a-go-go

Kris Roger — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:43:14 +0000

Today has ended up being a day for looking at web conferencing software! This morning I went with Matt to London Knowledge Lab to look at Elluminate. We already have a licence for Wimba Live Classroom and unfortunately so far it hasn't proved to be a reliable enough platform to recommend for use by LSE staff. Hence we are currently investigating various options in anticipation of interest from various LSE collaborative projects with other international institutions. This isn't however an invitation for lots of phone calls from salespeople! We were fairly impressed with the functionality provided by Elluminate as well as hearing good things about its reliability. One interesting feature is that it buffers audio so that should there be any net congestion it will play catch-up with the audio by playing it at a faster than normal rate. I was slightly disappointed to find that it uses Java technology, including a rather (un)impressive 20 MB download before you can even get started. I guess this isn't an issue so much when most people now have broadband access but it does provide a significant delay before you can get going. The big java applet does however mean that the interface is fully featured and not dependent on your web browser. It seems to do everything most people would need from a web conferencing system and most importantly it seems to make it fairly easy and it apparently just works. The only thing lacking in the current version seems to be a sensible way of managing video from more than one participant. Only one video feed is viewable at any time and the video doesn't follow the audio automatically as it does with Live Classroom. There is also no way for the session moderator to switch the video feed from one participant to the other. We are hopefully going to try this out for ourselves sometime over the summer. Coincidently our centre director forwarded me an invitation to a demonstration of dim dim being run by Jim Judges at the JISC Regional Support Centre for the West Midlands, so definitely not a sales pitch - just a straight demo/experimental web meeting. I'd already come across dim dim a couple of weeks ago and have been playing around with it so kind of already knew my way around; but I hadn't tried using it in a live web meeting situation - which of course is the only way to test these things. I've been very impressed with the look and feel of the software and it uses a Flash streaming server for the audio and video rather than Java, which I'm happier with, but I guess not everyone would be. My experience at the meeting was pretty good, I could see and hear the main presenter perfectly and apparently everyone could see and hear me pretty well too. There were problems however with some of the participants having problems with their microphones - nobody could hear them or they were very quiet. It's hard to know whether this was a fault with dim dim or not. However, there was one poor soul who didn't seem to be able to see or hear anyone very easily and could only really contribute through text chat. There also seemed to be a few user interface problems - there were the volume slider bars for each speaking participant but for me they seemed to have no effect on the speakers' sound level. I'm using Firefox so that shouldn't really be a problem. Interestingly, both of these systems integrate with Moodle - they appear as new activities and integrate user accounts, but I've not seen either of these integrations in action.Unfortunately it appears that the dim dim integration is limited to the open source "don't use this in a production environment" version of the product, which is limited to 20 concurrent users. There isn't much documentation on the dim dim website so it's kind of hard to know whether this is true or not, maybe someone will read this and correct me! I shall update here if I hear otherwise. Anyway, I think I've gone on long enough - if you`re at the LSE and you`re interested in using this kind of technology please get in touch and we`ll see what we can do. ‘conference hall’ photo courtesy of shinemy from Flickr.com (licensed under Creative Commons)

Vacancy for a Learning Technologist

Steve Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:23:17 +0000

We are looking to recruit a Learning Technologist. Closing date is 3rd June Here are the bare bone details London School of Economics Centre for Learning Technology Learning Technologist £38,212 - £44,624 PA An experienced Learning Technologist is required to join an active team. Click here for further details Informal enquiries to Steve Ryan

Networked Learning conference

Jane Secker — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:35:57 +0000

I've posted on the LASSIE blog about the recent Networked Learning Conference I attended at Sani Beach in Halkidiki, including thoughts from day one and day two. Some nice photos as well! I didn't want to duplicate by putting it on this blog, but lots of useful stuff about e-portfolios, web 2.0 and the need to focus on teaching rather than technology.

George Soros live webcast

Kris Roger — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:39:18 +0000

George Soros is speaking tomorrow (May 21st) as part of the regular LSE events programme but this is the first time that LSE has streamed such an event live. I mention it here because we've been able to do this on the back of our investment in Apreso (now known as Echo 360) and the automated recording of teaching lectures. Using Osprey SimulStream we've been simultaneously capturing and streaming some of our public lectures to extra LSE lecture rooms as an overflow facility. If you'd like to watch the web cast live there will be a link from the LSE events page tomorrow from 5 p.m. (BST) and The Washington Note are also hosting the webcast. Mr Soros is funding the back end of the streaming infrastructure. FinChannel.com have posted an article if you would like more detail. George Soros photo used under a Creative Commons licence courtesy of WorldEconomicForum at Flickr.com

CLT staff survey

Steve Bond — Fri, 30 May 2008 09:20:14 +0000

If you're a member of LSE staff, we'd be grateful if you could complete a short survey about your experience of our services this year. The survey only takes about 5 minutes to complete and can be found here: https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/lsewebsite/clt2008

Lecture capture evaluation: report of the focus group

Jane Secker — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:38:54 +0000

Methodology and design

A focus group was conducted in place of the survey that has previously been used to evaluate video lectures. A series of open ended questions were devised in order to gather opinions about student experiences of lecture capture including both video and audio lectures. This report includes student feedback, problems and issues and the value of recorded lectures as a learning aid.

Three students attended the focus group, so generalising about their experiences is difficult but their experience was varied and offered valuable insight. The first student recorded lectures himself with an audio recorder with permission from his lecturers. He said that the lectures were so inspirational that he wanted a recording to be able to listen to them again and again. A second student had access to recorded lecture material centrally provided by the Media and Communications department. The third student had access to both audio recordings (podcasts) and video lectures and could comment on the value of both types of recordings.

Value of Lecture capture

All three students commented on the value of recording lecture material. In particular they said it was extremely useful for revision. One student found recorded lectures very useful for a statistics course, commenting that they were especially useful for postgraduates who have to work and study at the same time. All students mentioned that recorded material was useful if you couldn’t attend a lecture or you want a recap, saying it’s “like having your lecturer with you any time you want”.

The students commented that were more likely to dip into certain parts of the lecture rather than watch the whole lecture again. This approach was particularly useful for revision but also really helpful for grasping a point they might initially not have understood. Students talked about how lectures could be extremely content rich or ‘dense’ and that the ability to go back and review the material really helped their learning.

Audio verses video

The student who had access to podcasts and video lectures commented that video lectures are much easier to follow than audio lectures. He said:

“Podcasts have the effect of nearly dosing off, you try to concentrate but all you see is the PowerPoint slides…because you lose the personal touch, you don’t see the face, you don’t see someone moving, interacting”.

Being able to see more than just PowerPoint slides was particularly valuable in economics courses for example, where the recordings are of limited value if you can’t see the graphs or additional notes the lecturer makes. However, one student felt that audio would be sufficient in his subject, which was not so reliant on visual material. Overall, in terms of retaining interest, the video lectures where the lecturer and the PowerPoint could be seen were preferred.

Access and Quality Issues

Students reported no real problems accessing video lectures both on and off campus. That said, later on in the focus group the students stated that the recorded lectures should be easier to find. They thought it would be helpful to have a podcast web page, perhaps under departmental headings or an archive of recordings. Another student commented that it was difficult to find the statistics lectures on the Methodology Institute website. In terms of navigation, the students did not report any problems with the format of the videos. One student felt it might be nice to divide the video into chapters, although he appreciated this would involve considerable post-production work.

In terms of quality, it was felt that the audio could be improved. The audio quality of public lectures in large theatres was noticeably better than some of the recordings from classrooms.

Value as a learning experience

One student commented that it was reassuring to know that certain lectures in statistics were being recorded, so they could go back and revisit the material. Another student found many of his lecturers inspirational and knowing there was a recording of the event allowed him to enjoy the lecture without having to take detailed notes. Again it was commented that being able to review the material for a second or even third time was valuable to ensure they grasped everything that was being said. The students felt this was especially good for students for whom English was not their first language.

The challenge of taking notes and listening to a lecture properly was mentioned by students, who felt it was “Humanly impossible to make notes in full” without listening again. This student felt you might miss around 35% of what was said during a lecture. They found it both reassuring to know the video lectures were available and extremely helpful for their revision. Students also commented that being able to listen to the lecture again often saved the students from needing to consult their lecturer with questions at a later date.

Lecture capture and attendance

The students were asked specifically about whether lecture capture affected attendance and certainly some of the students had friends who didn’t attend some lectures because they knew it would be available as a video lecture. Students tended to skip those subjects that were perceived as less interesting or more generic if they knew it was being recorded. However, in general the students we questioned talked about enjoying attending lectures and didn’t think the recordings had affected attendance overall. They reported that even if they didn’t attend a lecture they still needed to dedicate the time to listen to or watch the recording, so it was really easier for them to attend. As one student said:

“You need to go to the lecture to make it real, solidarity with your friends…you want to see the people, ask questions and see your friends asking questions.”

Future Developments

The students were keen to see all lectures at LSE recorded if possible and they also thought it would be useful to have access to recorded lectures after the course finished.

Students were asked specifically about whether they might be interested in listening or watching the lectures via mobile technology, such as on their mobile phone. Two of the group felt this might be useful, although they felt they were more likely to listen to public lectures and inspirational lectures on the bus, rather than material you needed to concentrate on in detail.

JS / SL

May 2008

Ireland's National Digital Learning Repository

Matt Lingard — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:14:25 +0000

I had a really interesting meeting this morning with Paul Gormley & Michelle Tooher, staff at CELT, NUI Galway. We were swapping notes on our respective teaching material repositories. On the face of it the projects are very different but as we discussed there are lessons to be learnt from each other and ideas to pinch! The National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR) is a national project bringing together all Irish universities & Technology institutes. It is similar to the UK's Jorum in some respects and also based on the Intra library software. I don't know much about Jorum but a key difference to the NDLR approach has been to base it around communities of practices and devloping these communities first in the hope that the use of a shared repository will follow. The guys at Galway are the leads for the Modern Languages' Community of Practice. Each community has a blog (see previous link) which acts as a focus for the community. Before 'selling' the repository across the institutions the MFL team populated it with 100 locally avialble resources (mp3s, PPT files etc). The collection has now grown significantly (I forget exactly!). I was introducing them to our more informal joint project with the University of Columbia which is being piloted with LSE French teachers having worked successfully in NYC with other languages. Earlier this week we held the first training session for teachers so that they could start uploading resources. The repository is based on drupal and is open to all to browse resource titles and descriptions but retrieving a resource requires a login. It uses a predefined taxonomy which staff use to 'tag' their resources. Items can be located by searching or by browsing the tags. The NDLR Galway team mentioned they are looking at introducing creative commons licensing for the repository and this is something we should look at too as well as joining in there existing community of practice. The other area we touched on and both want to explore further is how we encourage staff to provide feedback on how they've used each others' resources without diminishing their desire to make their stuff available and subject to comment. Image: http://flickr.com/photos/bhalash/123929842/

Walking the Walk

Matt Lingard — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:46:53 +0000

After giving an Emerging Technologies talk yesterday I have used some of them as a follow-up to the session. So there's a wiki page which includes a link to the presentation on slideshare, one to the all the links on Diigo (a social bookmarking site), an embedded YouTube video, a photo from Flickr to brighten things up and a chat window just because I can! Image: Galway Cathedral http://flickr.com/photos/slinky2000/217514055/

Moodle & WebCT Summer 2008

Matt Lingard — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:37:58 +0000

Over the summer all remaining courses using WebCT will be moved to the LSE's new virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle. There are full details of this project and specific instructions for the remaining WebCT users on our website. For staff already using Moodle there is also detailed information on the Moodle 'rollover' from 2007/8 to 2008/9. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us

Languages Show-and-Tell

Matt Lingard — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:02:59 +0000

Today I attended a Language Centre show-and-tell organised by Hervé Didiot-Cook and attended by teachers from the LSE as well as our good friends from Columbia University Language Resource Center - Bill & Stéphane. Challenges/Risks of Second Life Tamy Zupan, the LSE's SL evangelist (!) talked us thru' some of the challenges we are going to face as we look at introducing Second Life. These include an interface with a steep learning curve, negative attitudes from staff and students, a lack of narrative (as it's a virtual world not a game), unclear moral & ethical boundaries and some cultural challenges and of course the pedagogy: how to take advantage of the potential that it offers for for language teaching and how to assess this. CLT will be supporting the Spanish teachers in a pilot which, for now, will very much be an opt-in for students who are keen to explore the use of SL in their Spanish studies. Drupal Learning Materials Repository An update from Hervé, Bill & myself on this project. The LSE French teachers are using Drupal as a repository for their teaching materials. It's an idea we stole from Columbia, thanks Bill! As the project grows the aim will be to involve non-LSE contributors and with this in mind on I was keen to highlight the success of the community of practice that the Modern Languages arm of the Irish National Digital Learning Repository have built up, which I blogged on earlier. EXPLICS - Case Studies & Global Simulations Alison Standring, Mercedes Coca & Lourdes Hernandez-Martin introduced the EXPLICS project. They have been involved in developing an Italian case study and aSpanish and an English "global simulation". The spanish one focuses on NGOs and was used on an UG course last year accounting for 1/4 of the contact hours. Take a look at the NGO site to get a better idea of what's involved but essentially the project is made up of a series of tasks that students work thru' individually or in groups. they have to produce various reports, presentations and recording as part of the project. The feedback from students has been very poistive. In addition to helping with their language learning the students particularly liked the positive effective the project had on the class dynamics & real employment-related skills they developed (collaborative working etc). Wikis @ Columbia Bill also showed us a Wiki used for German teaching. I've mentioned the Columbia wikis here before. One thing he flagged up was just how easy it is to insert a YouTube video into modern wikis such as wikispaces and wetpaint. He also introduced us to the new YouTube annotation tool which is one for me to try out later! And finally just because i can, a Youtube "Show & Tell" video. Take it away Al:

Goodbye WebCT

Kris Roger — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:16:40 +0000

I couldn't end the day without a quick goodbye to WebCT. After 9 years of reliable service to LSE, WebCT is finally being switched off - well the licence expires at some point over the weekend. See our short account of the move on our website. All postgrad courses were migrated to Moodle last summer and now all of the undergrad courses have been migrated ready for the 2008-09 academic year. Anyway, cheers to WebCT (well - versions 3.6 through 4.2 anyway!). Kris.

CLT Staff Survey 2008

Steve Bond — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:08:18 +0000

The CLT staff survey was conducted using Bristol Online Surveys between 30 May and 4 July 2008. There were 86 respondents, recruited from members of the clt-announce mailing list and from the readers of this blog. Report The following summary highlights the key results.

The vast majority of respondents thought that their course had benefitted from the introduction of a VLE. However, several commented on the high initial workload required to get a course online.
Respondents identified the following changes that they had made to their teaching since starting to use a VLE. Some respondents, however, commented that they felt they were not yet making the most of Moodle’s potential.
- Enabled blog-type comments on course readings
- Measured students’ extent of use of online resources
- Used quizzes to monitor student progress
- Provided online support outside office hours
- Followed up issues online after seminars
There was an overwhelmingly positive view of the e-packs service, with personal commendations for the work of Mei Pang and Jane Secker. There were also, however, some comments that the process was rather time-consuming.
All agreed that the Moodle Training run by CLT provided the skills needed to get started developing a Moodle course.
More generally, there was almost complete satisfaction with the support and training offered by CLT, with several complimentary comments.
Areas that respondents wanted to see CLT cover in future workshops included the following. We shall be reconsidering our training programme in light of these requests:
- Demonstrations of exemplar courses, to provide inspiration and directions for good practice. This was repeatedly requested.
- Use of screen capture
- Use of quizzes
- Turnitin (plagiarism detection service)
- Special workshops focussed on particular departments
- Audio / Podcasting
- Virtual Worlds (such as Second Life)
- Techniques to motivate students
The question "Would you be willing to have your lectures video- or audio-recorded and made available to students?" produced a 3-way split between "Yes", "No" and "Maybe". Amongst the Noes and Maybes, some of the reasons given were as follows:
- It discourages students from attending lectures. This was the most widely-cited reason.
- Worries about intellectual property – about how long recordings will be kept, and to whom they will be distributed. This was also a common concern.
- Discomfort about being recorded
Other requests and suggestions included:
- Requests for an ‘Advanced Moodle’ course. (Note our "Moodle Next Steps" course is now available.)
- Use of Personal Response Systems

One final comment we particularly liked:

"CLT has done a magnificent job over the past year and there are no suggestions for improvement."

Given that, and the fact that it's 6pm on Friday, I'm going home.

ALT-C 2008 posters

Kris Roger — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:58:05 +0000

Just looked at a poster by Bangor University (Psychology dept) who are using a Mac mini as a kind of Echo 360 recording station developed in-house. It uses a VGA to USB dongle so captures everything displayed through the projector. Interesting as a low-cost alternative to Echo 360. Had an interesting conversation with a guy from Waikato University in New Zealand who has been using Moodle for staff development. Use of discussions was the most successful element and staff hadn't really found use of a wiki of great benefit but can see its potential. Unsurprising I guess. His team has also developed extensions that allow automated creation of courses from the University management systems. I mentioned our reading list management system to him, which made me think that we should really do a poster (or paper) about it next year. Kris.

ALT-C 2008 - some thoughts

Kris Roger — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:59:13 +0000

Well, here I am on the second full day ALT-C 2008 and I would usually have written a full summary of the least a couple of sessions by now but this year there seems to be so much blogging and twittering already going on that I'm not sure how much value I can add to all of the chatter. My highlights so far have been Hans Rosling and a crossing the chasm workshop. I've now got to get ready to go to the conference dinner but hopefully I shall follow this post up with a bit more content as the conference ends. In the meantime see my ALT-C 2008 links to everyone else blogging and twittering, if you really want to! Kris.

Learning Technologies Conference Report

Matt Lingard — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:08:07 +0000

Earlier this week I attended the annual conference of ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) which I previewed last week on my personal blog and I have already written one post there on the first keynote and the digital continuum. Staff development The conference session on the latest survey (PDF) from UCISA /JISC: 2008 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK highlighted the following conclusion:

Staff skills were overwhelmingly noted as the greatest challenge that these new demands [in particular streaming media, mobile computing, podcasting and Web 2.0] would create, with staff development and strategies being seen as the primary remedies

At a symposium on staff development by Sue Westerman from Canterbury Christ Church reported on the DEBUT Project. This has focused on improving digital literacies amongst staff, something that's also done here as part of the e-literacy programme. However the format of the Canterbury programme is quite different and appealing. Staff attend a short introductory session and then are given a choice of 25 tools from which they have to choose the 6 most relevant to them. Training is then provided in different formats depending on the tool: tools & formats (PDF). Sue reported that in addition to significant increases in understanding the programme has also resulted in greater integration of these technologies into teaching. Typing Exam Essays At Edinburgh University Nora Mogey has been investigating the use of computers as an alternative to hand-written exams (for essays). Students spend all year word-processing (including coursework) but then for their final exams they have to pick up a pen. Edinburgh carried out a pilot last year on some mock exams and this year they will be extending this to some final exams. Students on the pilot were offered a choice of hand-written or word-processed (with the computer option using special software - exam4 - installed on students' own laptops to lock them down). The research from the pilot concludes:

...variation in marks between handwritten and typed scripts is negligible compared to variation between markers and therefore offering students the choice to write or type should be feasible. This means that variation in typing ability need not be a major concern...

The practical problem of having a suitable location was also raised: multiple power sockets! The use of the students' own laptops is recommended so that students are familiar with the keyboard (which also tend to be quieter on laptops). Other bits and pieces The above UCISA / JISC survey also reiterated that we are not alone in our switch to Moodle:

Blackboard continues as the most used enterprise or institutional VLE. However, when also including VLEs that are used more locally, e.g. within departments, then Moodle is most used with a rapid rise since 2005

In Formative Audio Feedback: is FAF a faff?, Robin Johnson from Manchester Met reported on his use of audio recordings for providing students with feedback on dissertations and other (draft) assessments. He was using a voice recorder & email but it's something we could do here with the Wimba Voice Tools in Moodle. He found that the audio recordings either saved him time or allowed him to give more detail. The feedback from students has been positive and he plans to continue and encourage other colleaguers to join him. He highlighted the need:

For a clear introduction
To control emotions
For a method for naming the parts of the document
To think about the structure of feedback

One delegate suggested that although it might be less work for the teacher it was potentially more work for the student, as audio feedback would be more difficult to navigate in conjunction with the written text then comments written/typed in-line.

ITN/Reuters newsfilm archive now available to LSE teachers

Kris Roger — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:34:38 +0000

Great news, after a Herculean effort digitising a ridiculous number of hours of news footage (3000 to be precise) the newsfilm online project has made the full ITN/Reuters archive live and available to all LSE teachers. You'll find all the usual famous news clips from ITN and Reuters plus some very obscure clips dating all the way back to the 1st of January 1910 (footage of German military action if you're interested). If you are on the LSE campus simply login using the direct access button. If you're off campus you need to login via the UK Federation button. Please contact us at CLT if you would like to make use of any of these clips in your teaching. We can provide advice on how best to present video in your Moodle course or how to include them in your PowerPoint slides for class teaching. You can e-mail us at clt-support@lse.ac.uk or phone extension 7833.

Web 2.0 and the Law

Matt Lingard — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:43:24 +0000

Last week I attended (and presented) at Web 2.0 Senior Managers Workshop - Liability and Law a JISC Legal event. The session focused on the legal implications of using Web 2.0 services (e.g. Facebook & YouTube) in teaching and research. My 5-min overview of Web 2.0 use in HE was followed by scenario-based presentations from Alison Bryce & Gillian Cordall from Maclay Murray & Spens LLP. The scenarios & presentations touched on a wide range of potential issues including data protection & privacy, intellectual property, discrimination against students with disabilities, liability for content and copyright. Further details of the issues are available on the JISC Legal website [link to follow]. The main problem identified was not the Web 2.0 services themselves but a lack of understanding about how the services worked and the potential issues. It was suggested that there are two approaches needed to deal with the legal implications of using Web 2.0: Regulation & Education. Regulation - institutions should make sure their IT conditions of use for both staff and students encompass Web 2.0 services. It was suggested that this might include some kind of a "Web 2.0 Project" policy that requires staff to sign an "agreement of understanding" (my phrase!) if they are going to use external services in their teaching or research. Education - the main focus, and the one that interests me, needs to be guidance & support. As the lawyers pointed out really it's all about informed decisions. We need to make staff & students aware of the pitfalls and regularly. Having a policy is fine but making everyone aware of it and understanding the issues is key. This is quite a challenge... 'Web 2.0 & the Law' workshops are unlikely to pack them in, so we need to be more subtle. For me a key approach is to get staff taking advantage of these services on a personal basis - which would both sell the potential benefits for teaching and allow the issues to be highlighted. Our Web 2.0 sessions in the Library's e-literacy programme already do this but it's an area we'll be looking to expand on this year. Image: http://flickr.com/photos/48745248@N00/225249268/

Brush up your digital literacy skills with CLT

Jane Secker — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:23:12 +0000

We've just re-branded our E-literacy for E-learning classes aimed at LSE staff and PhD students as the Digital Literacy Programme and added a few new classes to the schedule for later in November. Classes such as 'Going Beyond Google' and 'Keeping up to date' are still on offer, but look out for some new classes focusing on managing website using delicious and using wikis and other collaborative writing tools. For the full list of courses on offer in the coming month see the CLT courses and workshops page or the LSE Training Portal.

Pre-Conference Reading

Matt Lingard — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:25:01 +0000

Pre-Conference Reading

Online Conferences

Matt Lingard — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:31:04 +0000

From tomorrow I'm 'attending' an 4-day online conference Innovating e-Learning 2008. I'll be blogging about the conference here and on my own blog. I'm not sure about online conferences, this is the third one I've attended and I haven't found them as useful as traditional face-to-face ones but I think this has been partly due to my approach as well as the format. There are some clear advantages: you can attend from anywhere (subject to connectivity); for many of the sessions you can attend at anytime as they are based around asynchronous discussion; you can attend multiple sessions simultaneously and leave sessions whenever you like without being noticed! So on the plus side, I've already listened to (part of) the conference welcome - an audio file. These welcomes never keep my attention even face-to-face! I've browsed the list of attendees and said hello to a couple I know (via email). The programme descriptions and much of their content -slides, papers, audio files have been available for two or three weeks so I've already decided what sessions I'd like to focus on and looked through some of the material (right). Attending an online conference requires discipline and this is partly where I've fallen down before. It's very easy to get distracted by your day-to-day work so this time I'll be spending some time attending from home rather than office. When I'm in the office I'm going to block out specific times and maintain conversation / email / telephone silence. But I will be online taking advantage of the conference backchannel and accessing related resources on the Internet. At this stage I'm not convinced by the platform that the conference is using, it seems too resource driven - lots of folders and not enough social networking elements. It took me an age to find the list of participants. The last face-to-face conference I attended used Crowdvine which worked really well, the social networking elements put the focus on the delegates and allowed people to connect with each other. However, to be fair it's too early to be critical and I'm sure once discussions are under way then the online conference space will feel different. Although it would reduce the 'anytime' aspect of the conference I feel there is a need for more varied types of sessions at these events. I'd like to be involved in live discussions not just asynchronous ones and more activity-based sessions. Although all sessions include a discussion board most kick off with powerpoint-style presentations. The session that i have immediately been drawn involve either live action - a presentation via Elluminate, a live tour in Second Life or activities beyond watch these slides. At the end of the day my biggest problem is that I just find it difficult to be strict with myself, it's all too easy to get distracted or to flit between sessions without taking much in. Hopefully I'll fare better this time around...

New Year, new literacies

Jane Secker — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:06:49 +0000

The Digital Literacy Programme, run by CLT and the Library offers hands-on training for staff and PhD students and will be running an exciting range of classes throughout the Lent Term. Classes such as ‘Going Beyond Google’ and ‘Keeping up to date’ are on offer in February, but also look out for some new classes focusing on managing web resources using the social bookmarking tool Delicious, using wikis and other collaborative writing tools plus a new course where can find out more about the micro-blogging site, Twitter. For the full list of courses on offer see the CLT courses and workshops page or the LSE Training Portal.

Using Virtual Worlds for Teaching

Matt Lingard — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:04:03 +0000

The CLT are currently working with LSE Spanish teachers to create an extracurricular Spanish Club which will be held in the virtual world Second Life (SL) on an island called Castor's Retreat. The club will provide online activities such as role plays for students studying Spanish at the LSE. Last week I attended a Virtual Worlds event at Strathclyde University: Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning where I discovered that all but one UK university have a prescence in SL! I particularly enjoyed the session by David White from TALL who spoke about two SL pilots - one for Philosophy and one for Art & Design - that he has been involved in as part of the Open Habitat project. David reported that the activities that had gone well were those where the environment was part of the discussion (eg discussing Digital identity) or where the process rather than the product were important (collaborative building tasks). He suggested that the 'shared experience' was the key affordance of a virtual world platform. He also highlighted the need for ground rules for communication because, as with standard text chat, communicating in SL is not straight-forward! If you'd like to know more about the use of SL at the LSE don't hesitate to contact us below or via clt-support@lse.ac.uk We'd be happy to show you around Castor's Retreat and explore possible uses for teaching.

Castors Retreat

Matt Lingard — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:06:37 +0000

Tomorrow's Teaching Technologies

Matt Lingard — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:51:16 +0000

Or rather, today's technologies for tomorrow's teaching. The 2009 Horizons Report has just been published. The annual report highlights 6 technologies that are likely to enter into mainstream use at educational institutions. The six technologies and their likely time frames for mainstream use are:

Mobiles & Cloud Computing (within 1 year)
Geo-Everything and the Personal Web (within 2-3 years)
Semantic-Aware Applications & Smart Objects (within 4-5 years)

The horizon reports are always interesting and provide food for thought but the time frames rarely ring true to me for UK education (but perhaps they are not supposed to as the report advisory board is pre-dominantly North American). This time around, the one prediction that does seem likely is the idea of a personal web:

a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it... ...[to support] one's social, professional, learning [activities]

There are many free tools already in use that allow this - delicious, Wordpress, twitter, flickr, netvibes, citeulike, rememberthemilk - to name but a few. Some of these tools are looked at in the workshops that we run for staff. The report also highlights critical challenges facing educational institutions over the next five years, these include:

A growing need for formal instruction in information & digital literacies
Teaching materials, methods and assessment need to be more engaging to the 'new generation' of students (but see Digital natives a Myth?)
Need for innovation and leadership in approaches to assessing emerging scholarly practice for 'tenure' and promotion of staff
Delivering services, content and media to mobile devices (with their ever-improving interfaces)

Blogging Course Re-arranged

Matt Lingard — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:46:17 +0000

The "Blogging for beginners" course that was postponed due to the inclement weather has been re-arranged for Tuesday 24th February. See Workshops & Courses for further details and online booking. There are also a few spaces left on:

Friday 13th Feb - Introduction to Twitter and micro-blogging
Weds 25th Feb - Introduction to e-resources and e-journals for staff
Monday 2nd March - Collaborative writing with wikis and Google docs

Language Box

Matt Lingard — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:53:07 +0000

Today I've been attending a Language Box event at Kings: Rethinking Teaching and Learning Repositories. Language Box is a JISC-funded e-repository. I arrived, as is my way, with a healthy scepticism (and a scepticism that's always higher when it comes to repositories)! However, I think I've been won over. In essence Language Box is an online location for teachers to upload, store, find & share teaching materials. Resources (videos, links, worksheets, powerpoints etc) are added to a single collection but you can then easily manage your own sub-collections and favourites. The project has three approaches that I particularly like and that might just make it a success:

Asking the practitioners what they actually want. (Current repositories don't seem to work, why not?)
A focus on making it work for individuals to manage their own resources... and if sharing & re-use occurs then that's a bonus
Simplicity (we were asked to fill in a usability survey :) )

Language Box has some similarities to the work we have been doing with Columbia University: French Language Teaching Resource but also some key differences:

Our project provides lists of tags to choose from to classify material when adding it to the collection, whereas choosing tags in Language Box is left to the user.
But the real difference and one that perhaps gives Language Box more potential is that the material can be visible, accessible & usable by students without needing to transfer it to the VLE (although you can also do that if you want to, but why bother when you can link).

One of the most interesting debates today was whether or not students should be allowed to add material to Language Box. There seemed to be a 50:50 split on this one., with some feeling that giving students an opportunity to create resources would be a great learning activity but others wanting it kept as a teachers' collection of 'quality materials'. This is not the first time this week that I've been looking at storing stuff.

Slidecasts

Matt Lingard — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:45:05 +0000

Yesterday I gave a short presentation to the Humanities Department at Imperial College as part of an e-learning staff development event. The live presentation wasn't recorded so I decided that I should finally get around to producing a "slidecast", something I've meaning to try for a while. A slidecast is a PowerPoint-style slide presentation with synchronised audio.

E-learning Examples from LSE Languages

Making the Slidecast

Here's what I did:

Step 1 - Preparation (10-mins): I started by making a few edits to the original PowerPoint slides - adding a title slide & hiding the students names. I also had a quick practice with the Wimba Voice Tools. Step 2 - Recording (20-mins): I recorded the audio using Wimba while clicking through the actual PowerPoint slides. I decided I would restrict myself to one 'take' with no post-editing. However you could edit (& record) with free audio editing software such as Audacity. After making the recording (12'58'') I exported the audio file as an mp3 and then uploaded it to the Internet Archive. Step 3 - Publishing (25-mins): This involved uploading the PowerPoint to Slideshare, a free service for sharing presentations and other types of files. I then used the built-in slidecast tool to synchronise the the audio file with the slides. This meant listening thru' the whole recording again, hence the time required. The final presentation is available via the slideshare website but can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. It was a very straight-forward process and not too time-consuming for a first attempt. This is just one way of producing a "slidecast" and there are plenty of other options, so if it's something you are interested in doing don't hesitate to get in touch with us: clt-support@lse.ac.uk

Launching JISC Digital Media at BAFTA

Kris Roger — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:10:19 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I went off to the salubrious surroundings of Piccadilly to BAFTA headquarters to attend a launch event for the newly rebranded 'JISC Digital Media' service. The new service previously existed under the name TASI, which we were told, in no uncertain terms, we are no longer allowed to mention. I came across TASI many years ago as a very useful support website for using digital images in teaching. Not only providing the technical know-how, but also some very good pedagogical reasoning for using images. Video and sound too! As part of their relaunch and new funding, the new JISC Digital Media service also supports use of video and audio material in addition to still images. To quote the launch booklet "JISC Digital Media exists to help the UK's FE and HE communities embrace and maximise the use of digital media". They've redesigned their website, with a bright new look, to make it far easier to find useful support guides and related materials, such as upcoming training workshops. Digital media helpdesk One thing that had passed me by previously was that they also run a national helpdesk. They can provide technical and copyright advice for institutions looking to set up support for digital media use within their teaching and learning. They can also provide help for more complex requests such as setting up a digitisation programme within an institution - possibly leading to consultancy. Upcoming training courses run by JISC Digital Media include "Copyright and Digital Images", "Colour Management", "Building a Departmental Image Collection", and "Essential Photoshop Skills" and many others. If you are an LSE member of staff then please contact us at CLT if you have any questions about the JISC Digital Media service or about digital media in general. Kris.

HEFCE launches strategy for technology-enhanced learning

Jane Secker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:27:32 +0000

HEFCE has today published 'Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology - a revised approach to HEFCE's strategy for e-learning' (HEFCE 2009/12). This revised approach follows an independent review of the strategy and is designed to provide further support to higher education institutions as they develop their own e-learning strategies. Find out more from the press release.

Moodle Conference

Matt Lingard — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:36:17 +0000

MoodleMoot UK 2009 was held at Loughborough University before Easter. The conference brings together learning technologists, systems administrators and teachers from all education sectors to discuss all things Moodle. The main keynote was given by Moodle-founder Martin Dougiamas and focused on the ongoing development of Moodle and in particular the next version, Moodle 2.0. It was great to hear Martin talking about usability and openness in particular. I think one of the key factors for the popularity of moodle here is its ease-of-use (particularly when compared to our previous VLE!) so it's always good to hear that usability remains high on the agenda. From the Moodle wiki:

Users should be able to easily learn what is there for them

Users should be able to move around "their world" within Moodle with a minimum of effort.

By openness I'm referring to the ability for Moodle to be integrated with other systems such as repositories and eportfolios but also changes that are being made to make it really easy to include other content from the 'open web' such as Youtube videos & Flickr photos in your Moodle course. There's much more on Martin Dougiamas's keynote on Nitin Parmar's blog. Sloodle The best session I attended was the one on Sloodle which is the Second Life - Moodle integration. We have been working with the LSE Spanish teachers over the last year on a Second Life project so it was interesting to see what's possible. Sloodle allows you to make direct connection between a Moodle course and a location in Second Life. For example using Sloodle you can:

Create a slideshow in Moodle which is visible in Second Life
Take a Quiz or answer a Choice in Second Life which is also recorded (and answerable) in Moodle
Combine a Moodle chat with the local chat in Second Life
Link students’ avatars to their Moodle user accounts

Over Coffee Outside of the main Moodle sessions, some good stuff from the elearning guys at the University of Bath:

Their Moodle FAQs which are powered by phpMyFAQ
The use of QR Codes with the Library catalogue
Elearning Case Studies

And finally a mention for the Balsamiq Mockup tool which is now being used by Moodle Developers. Looks great. Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan_poltawski/3421221976/

Plymouth e-Learning Conference Report

Matt Lingard — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:34:12 +0000

The 4th Plymouth e-Learning Conference was an excellent event and for once I made good decisions in choosing which of the many parallel sessions to attend. I've not had a good track record recently! The best learning technology tool I discovered was Marginalia. It's an open source annotation tool which can be plugged into Moodle discussion forums. You can try it out - on it's own or in this Moodle course. I don't have an immediate use for it but it's always good to have an answer when you hear: it would be great if Moodle could... If you [LSE staff!] are interested in finding out about or using Marginalia please let us know. There was plenty of discussion over home-made flapjacks in the well-planned E-pedagogy: Emperor's New Clothes or New Directions? and I thought the format of the session worked really well. Prior to the session the flapjack baker had elicited thoughts from a wider audience (via Twitter) on "What promotes learning?" resulting in 42 responses. The session itself was a good mix of presenting, discussion and feeding back as we worked towards how (if) technology changes or enhances learning. Participants were invited to post an answer online afterwards: "Does ICT really change what good learning looks like? And if so, how". Unlike the pre-session task this has not been answered yet! I suspect it was never tweeted ;) I also attended a great hands-on session run by James Clay on Mobile Learning, which James defined very broadly to include: learning using mobile devices; learning while mobile & learning using mobile web technologies. Or as he summarised - it's all about the mobility of the learner. It's a really important area that we need to start paying more attention to. I've never been big on mobile devices myself but am starting to play now. The second keynote (video), Social Software, Personal Learning Environments and the Future of Education, given by Graham Attwell revisited the VLE (virtual learning environment) vs PLE (personal learning environment) debate. If you are new to this one, it is essentially concerns institutionally chosen / hosted / managed systems (such as Moodle at LSE) versus a loose collection of external web tools & services chosen by the individual student or teacher. I'm going to write about this separately soon so for now I'll just mention a related session at PELC09. MeAggregator, a JISC-funded projected, is a tool for teachers & learners to manage their online content & communities, including content provided by institutional systems (e.g the VLE). It's not available yet but I'll be looking out for it. And finally, a quick mention for an interesting project based at the University of Reading. This is Me is an Eduserv-funded project on digital identity. In the session that I attended I discovered that I am the Association of Learning Technology (ALT) Editor which came as a surprise to Frances Bell, the real one!

LSE Teaching Day - book your place

Kris Roger — Fri, 15 May 2009 11:29:05 +0000

As you may have heard, the first LSE Teaching Day will take place on Tuesday 9 June. School director Howard Davies will open the proceedings, which will include a programme of workshops, seminars and panel discussions including innovative approaches to teaching and the latest technologies and resources for staff. The main speech of the day will be given by Dr Jonathan Leape, senior lecturer in Economics, on 'Thinking Like A Social Scientist'. Professor Janet Hartley, LSE pro-director, will close the event with a presentation of the Teaching Excellence Awards at a wine reception. Response has been good and there are a limited number of places left. To book your place and view the full programme, visit www.lse.ac.uk/teachingday. Registration closes on Thursday 28 May.

Echo360 "EchoSystem" reviewed

Kris Roger — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:03:01 +0000

Here at LSE we've been using lecture capture systems for a few years now, starting with Anystream Apreso and moving on to EchoSystem by Echo 360 over the last academic year. I've been meaning to post a review of our experience of implementing these systems on this blog, never quite getting around to it. Eventually, the editor of the Association for Learning Technology newsletter asked Chris Fryer and myself to write a review, which you can find in full on the ALT newsletter website. Kris Roger.

Futurelab Research Day

Matt Lingard — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:53:01 +0000

Today I attended the Futurelab Research Discussion Day at the British Academy, an event that's slightly off my usual radar. Firstly it was a research day and secondly, although Futurelab's work is very much relevant to the whole education sector, their focus is more schools than tertiary education. Most of the day focussed on an ongoing research project: Beyond Current Horizons which is aiming to "build a set of challenging and long-term visions for the future of education in the context of social and technological change". This morning 5 research-based trends were highlighted:

Development of a denser, deeper, more diverse information landscape
Weakening of institutional boundaries as well as a blurring of: work/leisure, public/private, education/work/retirement
A greater reliance on technology for learning and work and an increase in the support needed
While the separation of information & location continues other factors, such as access and identity will still be dependent on geography
Increase in 'working with machines': outsourcing human tasks, redefining intelligence, devolution of responsibility (leading to a dependence?)

And with these trends come challenges:

Designing educational practices for networked individuals
Helping learners navigate complex learning environments
New educational goals in context of economic uncertainty

In a later session emphasis was put on collaboration as a key emergent trend that future education spaces, environments, systems & tools will need to fit with. This all makes sense and most of the talks were very interesting but next I needed some discussion of what this all might actually mean practically. I didn't really get that but to be fair it hadn't been promised either! If you want to read more I bookmarked several resources during the talks.

Ceiling at the British Academy

Matt Lingard — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:15:29 +0000

Google Wave for e-learning

Kris Roger — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:33:27 +0000

Something that's come to my attention very recently is Google Wave - Google's reinvention of e-mail/instant messaging/collaborative editing/blogging/discussion boards etc. into one combined platform. The name still sounds a bit ominous to me, you'll know what I mean if you've seen the film "Die Welle" - I was initially concerned that Google would be trying to route all forms of conversation through its servers for advertising targeting purposes. However, my fears are tempered for now as it seems that Google Wave will be a completely open source platform that can be installed on any server. Apparently no messages need to go near a Google server, but I guess we are still at the early stages of its development and implementation. Looking at the announcement video (embedded below or available from the Google Wave website), the concept does look very impressive and I can see all sorts of potential benefits for elearning and academic research. Especially, if the server side technology can be hosted in house. The first 30 minutes of the video are enough to get an idea of what it does and how it works. Alternatively, Wilbert at CETIS provides a more thorough description of the technology and its potential applications, advantages and disadvantages.

DIVERSE video and teaching conference 2009

Kris Roger — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:30:10 +0000

This week I'm attending the 9th annual DIVERSE conference in Aberystwyth. DIVERSE stands for "Developing Innovative Visual Educational Resources for Students Everywhere" and the focus of the conference tends to be on video resources, although it is not entirely limited to that subject. It has to be said, I was expecting to be subjected to a certain amount of wind and rain, so came prepared with umbrella and raincoat which of course haven't been out of my bag as the weather has been fantastic (see photo). Highlights so far include a talk by Mark Childs of Coventry on the subject of students developing a sense of virtual presence when using virtual worlds such as Second Life. Fundamentally, his message was that not a small amount of time needs to be invested in generating such a sense of presence. From his research he also found a correlation between those students that valued their Second Life activities as a learning experience and those that felt a sense of presence when using Second Life. Mark also came up with a couple of good words, my favourite being "cyberdisinhibition". I don't think I need to explain its meaning. I also went to a session presented by Olaf Schulte who was talking about the Opencast project, which intends to develop a completely open source lecture capture system over the course of the next year. It certainly looks an interesting project and I'm keen to see what they come up with. He also mentioned a couple of other projects developing along similar lines that already exist, his own REPLAY project and also one called MediaMosa which I previously hadn't heard of. Today's keynote speaker was Obadiah Greenberg from YouTube who talked a lot about his background setting up a lecture capture system at UC Berkeley and how they used as many distribution platforms as possible to widen the availability of Berkeley lectures. He certainly prompted me to think why aren't any regular LSE lectures available through either iTunesU or YouTube.com/edu, which I guess was his intention. Finally, today's most entertaining presentation was by Steve Hull from JISC Digital Media who gave a talk on the basics of producing good quality films using basic equipment, such as a Flip camera. Rather than try to describe the talk I can recommend watching when it becomes available. Which of course prompts me to mention that all of the sessions at this conference are being recorded by Echo 360, so if you aren't at the conference you can just go to the conference schedule page and click on the link to each session and then find the Echo 360 link for the recording. There are of course the now usual Twitter and Flickr feeds and I think this conference definitely has the highest ratio of iPhones per participant that I have been to so far. Maybe I've only noticed because I've just acquired one myself :-) but then given the subject of the conference there's almost certainly a high concentration of Apple fans here I think. It's the conference dinner this evening, then a few sessions tomorrow morning and of course the 5 hour train journey back to London to enjoy.

making it personal - 7th annual @greenwich conference

Sonja Grussendorf — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:18:24 +0000

Yesterday I attended the 7th annual eLearning @greenwich conference "Making IT Personal", which focused on the practical and theoretical, technical and pedagogical issues surrounding the notion of "self-regulated learning", summarised by the key notion of "personalisation". How can optimal (pedagogically beneficial) personalisation be achieved using eLearning tools? I missed the first ten minutes of the keynote by Professor Jonathan Drori: "Personalisation - the good, the bad, and the ugly". The first thing I learnt today was to remember never to underestimate Deptford traffic gridlock. Leaving the house at eight to arrive at ten for a journey that would have taken me only 30 minutes to cycle is one of those valuable offline lessons life insists on throwing at me. I bat them away.

The morning keynote set the tone very gently. Learning is (obviously) an experience, but unlike personal pleasurable ones to which we return on our own accord, learning experiences are often imposed; worse, they are generally ill defined, their relevance to the students left unclear. Asking the audience to shout out some pleasurable personal activities, Jonathan used the answers to illustrate key adjectives that explain why theses activities are engaging. (I was one of the few to participate and shouted "having a political discussion in the pub", which earned me an "aw, how sweet!" and giggles from the audience. An outrage! ). Pleasurable, personal experiences can be characterised as being: 1. Defined 2. Fresh 3. Accessible 4. Immersive 5. Significant 6. Transformative. This is an assertion by Jonathan, but judging by the tweets, many in the audience agreed that this was a useful list. Learning experiences however often don't fit any of those adjectives, they can be imposed, badly designed, irrelevant, indifferently presented, repetitive. They are not personal, they lack the personable. (So far, so fairly obvious. The ideal of personalisation is old and almost intuitively right: better teachers are engaging, performing, personable and pay attention to each individual student. They are also rare - what can we do to improve the situation?) Professor Drori maintained that "the harder the concept, the more personal the learning experience needs to be." If you want learning to be effective, or indeed at the very least to "actually take place", then the best teaching emulates what we now know good experiences to be about. Thus, any tool, particularly eLearning tools need to be chosen according to how much they support this ideal of personalisation. Finishing on 'the good, bad and downright ugly use of technologies', I was struck by his unquestioning allegiance to the common instrumental definition of technology; and he was not above using the dreaded comparison that technologies can be like, say a kitchen knife: it can be good (for chopping onions) and bad (for stabbing people) - in effect employing the tired "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument characteristic of the neutrality view of technology. But issues surrounding technology - including their use in an educational setting - are rarely this simple and need much more critical appreciation. I wasn't too bowled over by the speech, and found a final almost fatalist note surprising. Commenting on the importance to engage our children from an early age (fair enough), he asserted that if you start a bad habit early enough, be it smoking, disrespect, or indeed a bad attitude towards learning, you will continue to practice this bad habit. Which, I would suggest, does not bode well for any idealist conception of adult education. I will listen to it again, to see if I missed some salient points. I have been told it will be available as a podcast soon. After coffee I attended a very interesting presentation on eLearning & social inclusion by Alan Clarke, formerly of NIACE. Alan was enthusiastic and almost overwhelmingly positively charged: IT can do so much to support those whom he prefers to call disadvantaged, rather than excluded: prisoners and ex-offenders, adults with almost no formal education, teenage mothers, disabled students... people, aged from 16 to death who have often very poor basic skills, the lowest confidence in their own abitlies and a history of educational failure. Due to the very nature of the learners NIACE supports, the approach can but be personal: these learners have no common learning skills, if they have anything in common it is a deep-seated suspicion of the processes of formal learning. He told us a variety of positive stories to illustrate how elearning, and the adaptive use of technology in a variety of settings has had an enormous impact on bringing disadvantaged learners "back into the fold", giving them back confidence. My second chosen presentation, led by Mary Kiernan and Ray Stoneham, both of Greenwich University, considered the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation: The Danger of Impersonalisation in Mass Personalised Learning: Can Socialisation and Personalisation Co-exist? As an ice-breaker we were asked to write down our names and answer the question "if you had to ask one question about personalisation what would it be and why." Our neighbour was then to introduce us with that question. Becki, to my left asked why personalisation was such a difficult task to accomplish, and I had her read out "is personalisation only this year's buzz word to be replaced by a cool new one next year", which had started to crystallise even before we were asked to perform this little "socialisation task". We'll be sent a list of the other questions, most of which were pertinent.Their key thesis in a nutshell: we have a basic human need to socialise but tend no longer to do this on PLEs (VLEs). There may be personalisation, but no socialisation. The question is: what happens when we neglect the social integration? Lack of connection will lead to demotivated students. Of course personalisation is nothing new, denoting the effort to personalise learning for large cohorts of people, whilst aiming for the same goal but with different routes and different starting points. Plato's Socratic dialogues often embody the principle, the Oxbridge model is another example, and special educational needs another. But within these models, socialisation is implicit. In PLEs, socialisation is often left out, or at most paid lip service to. Further, personalisation itself brings up a set of dichotomies: individuality versus mutuality, social learning versus isolated learning etc. The issue for elearning is therefore to prevent that social learning, community learning falls by the wayside. An interesting discussion followed on from here, with participants sharing their experiences, worries and ideas about how social software can be integrated into PLEs, and what potential hurdles must be overcome. (My thinking is that our focus needs to be on the teachers - they need to understand the use and abuse, the potential and dangers of social software to make informed choices about how to use them in their teaching. I don't think the burden of choosing tools for learning delivery should lie with the students). Lunch was edible and fresh fruit abounded, and stimulating chats with colleagues were had, so that was me happy. After lunch I decided to do a little writing and thinking before I joined the herd again for the final keynote, by Serge Ravet. It was fast and furiously delivered in a heartening French accent, challenging conceptions about personalisation. It touched on a myriad of topics and ideas, flitted from worries about personal data management to social networks, from hosting to aggregating, the concept of the "Internet of Subjects", individualisation, Jean-Claude Kaufman's book The invention of the Self (available in French or German...). A key message of his was that not only is there much more to personalisation than many contemporary discussions (in education, for example) will have you believe - data management, regulation, ownership, creation, sharing - but also that it may be the wrong concept to focus on: Ravet emphasises the importance of individualisation, and instead of personalised learning, which he considers old, trite, adaptive, he favours self-regulated learning, which is both individuation and individualisation, and thus a type of identity construction. I liked his challenge to the idea that we all speak of having different identities, an online identity, an offline identity. I do think this is a dangerous metaphor to perpetuate, as it gives rise to the idea that we are becoming fractured, split personalities, schizophrenics, or superheroes (Bruce Wayne/Batman) - and that the source for this clinical "wrong" is our being tied to technology. Our identity may be fragmented, but it is not therefore broken. He was quick, and touched on various ideas I will have to follow up in the near future. Hopefully there will be a podcast of his talk too.

Symposium at York University: lecture capture, content production & Second Life

Sarah — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:24:32 +0000

Jane and I participated in a one day in-house symposium at the University of York this week. The audience were made up of both academic and support staff interested in learning from other universities about lecture capture, audio and video content production and Second Life. We were asked to talk about audio and video content production and so showcased some of the video & audio that’s produced here. We focused on lecture capture momentarily as although it is the most prolific output of media at the LSE, with 909 lectures having been captured in just one term this year, two other universities: Birmingham and Newcastle had already given extensive presentations on this subject. Instead, we wanted to highlight the idea of audio and video as a part of teaching, not just as a means to capture the teaching that’s already going on. We played examples of interviews & discussions, role playing scenes, groupwork, screencasts, video and audio podcasts as well as highlighting some of the Wimba tools and audio feedback. We also talked about the issue of scaling up to meet increased interest in media, professionally produced video vs the DIY approach and touched on the copyright issues involved. It was an interesting day with good discussions both formally and over coffee/lunch and it was really nice to meet people in similar roles. The most lively debate came from the lecture capture sessions. It seems that across the board, the majority of students really value lecture capture (no real surprises) and staff are cautious about the educational benefits and fears about attendance. There were certainly many parallels between the student and staff surveys at both Birmingham Medical School and Newcastle university and the LSE. Rob Jones’ findings from Birmingham were particularly interesting because they compared the relationship between usage stats and grades. The findings look promising where the mean rose from 51% to 55% and the failure rate dropped to 2/69. The quality of answers also improved with students indicating a greater breadth of knowledge and looking at a wider set of resources. The Second Life talks in the afternoon reminded me that Second Life is good for simulation and specifically designed educational activities but that perhaps we should be looking at other virtual worlds for better communication, movement, role play etc. Sheila Webber from Sheffield and Steve Warburton from King’s College agreed that Second life is probably not sophisticated enough for a young gaming audience; the average age of SL users is apparently 33. Steve flagged up MetaPlace, OpenSim (open source) and Blue Mars as potential Virtual World’s to explore, so perhaps another pilot project is due. Read Jane’s Social Software, Libraries and E-learning blog for more information on the lecture capture and Second Life presentations.

Staff Survey - lecture capture

Sarah — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:33:08 +0000

Every year we send out a survey to staff to gauge the effect of various technologies, such as Moodle and it’s many components, online readings and lecture capture on their teaching. This year 138 people completed the survey. I was particularly interested to see the feedback on the automatic lecture capture system and this proved to rouse the strongest comments. We wanted to get a general sense of who was using lecture capture and what they thought about it, but more specifically, we wanted to hear from lecturers who might use it in their teaching. Breaking down the stats and looking at solely the responses from lecturers (59) it was interesting to see a very distinct divide between those who had used the system and those who had never used it. By looking at the stats in this way it was clear that the majority of lecturers who have doubts or fears about the technology have never used the system and those that value lecture capture and think it is a benefit to students are already using it. There were one or two instances where people had used the automatic system in the past and were put off by technical problems etc. Whatever the case, it seems that lecture capture is polarising opinion and that a number of fears about the technology are adding to this. One of the biggest fears about lecture capture is that it will affect student attendance and although there’s no evidence to back this, there’s little evidence to quash it either! Perhaps we need to do some focus groups with lecturers who have been using the system for a few years to gauge the feeling about class attendance. However, if some courses find that attendance has gone down and others don’t, what then? And is lecture attendance really an issue if you’re giving students the choice? There is also a fear that lecture capture will replace live lectures altogether and that somehow lecture capture is taking the emphasis away from face to face contact via lectures, seminars and office hours. Lecture capture is designed to be a revision tool, a way to help students recap and further understand a lecture, fill out any missing notes from lectures and to help those for whom English is not their first language. These benefits are what students list when they say they like the system. Lecture capture can be recorded and released for a short period of time, such as revision period, and yet there are still fears about students skipping lectures, declining note taking skills and lethargy from students. So, how do we respond to all of these comments? We’re very much aware that a survey can only give a slice of staff opinion, especially as only 138 people responded. Would it help to have a wider debate about this issue?

New audio recordings: ICA talks & debates

Matt Lingard — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:14:09 +0000

Previously unpublished recordings of ICA talks from the 1980s went online last week on the Britsh Library's Archival Sound Recordings website.

"Featuring talks and debates with top cultural, artistic and political figures of the day, this latest addition the archive offers a chance to explore in detail cultural directions in the UK from 1981 to 1994. The talks comprise over 880 recordings, over 1000 hours of audio, on subjects including art, literature, performance, fashion, film, music, philosophy, psychology, biology, feminism, AIDS and politics"

These recordings are publicly accessible and as the LSE Library also subscribes to this collection many are available to download for academic use. Read more about the collection or access the collection Example recording From 1987, Politics of Exile: Asia, Caribbean, East Europe A conference on the political situation in Asia, the Caribbeans and Eastern Europe, speakers include Tariq Ali. Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtsofan/2232111990/

ALT-C 2009 Highlights

Matt Lingard — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:10:15 +0000

Earlier this month staff from CLT attended ALT-C 2009, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology. Conferences can be hit-and-miss affairs and I find it's usually wise not to set one's expectations too high; however, for the second year running, ALT-C was excellent. For me the keynotes usually provide the conference 'edutainment', you can be fairly sure that they will be humour, some memorable nuggets and an underlying message (although that's not always clear!). Overall the ALT-C keynotes delivered and I took something away from all of them. I think because I'd seen both Terry Anderson (live) & Mike Wesch (lots of videos) speak before, it is Martin Bean's keynote, A Journey in Innovation, that particularly sticks in my mind. Martin is the Open University's Vice Chancellor Designate. He's an excellent speaker and his keynote is worth a look even if it's just for the initial stuff on innovation scepticism & his overview of the current (changing) HE landscape. His talk finishes with enthusiasm for the OU's SocialLearn project which aims to provide students with a personal web platform for their learning; one I'll be following with interest. You can watch Matin's keynote in full below and you'll find the other keynotes & invited speakers on blip.tv There appeared to be two hot topics in the parallel sessions. Firstly a number that touched on the VLE - PLE debate. The VLE is Dead session in particular attracted a lot of interest, thanks to plenty of pre-conference marketing from the main protagonists! I missed this session as I was attending one on the other hot topic, Audio Feedback, which involves giving students recorded (spoken) feedback on their work. This is something we have been looking at over the last few months and that staff will be starting to use during 2009/10. We have Wimba voice tools integrated into Moodle which makes it really easy to record and deliver audio to groups, individuals or the whole cohort. Finally, I find that conferences often serve as a good reminder of something you already know you should be doing but haven't yet got round to acting upon. The message I took away this year came from one of the invited speakers Jonathan Drori who told us to know everything about your audience. So this year that's my aim... so if anyone out there wants a shadow please let me know! Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsugden/3905375500/

eLearning 2020

Sonja Grussendorf — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:46:09 +0000

On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise... education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. What I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) "information"in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who'd be a Vulcan, eh...* Watch the video, it's nicely provocative and entertaining. *yes, I know he's half-human.

eLearning 2020

Sonja Grussendorf — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:26:35 +0000

video still with Steve & Jane

CLT has moved to S169

Kris Roger — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:57:00 +0000

At the end of last week CLT left its home of 9 years and moved all the way across the corridor to S169. The main office is a tiny bit bigger and more open plan (and a bit noisier), but we now have a dedicated demonstration/training/meeting room. Watch this space for news of an informal 'housewarming' sometime in the near future.

Old man reading

Sonja Grussendorf — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:22:09 +0000

on reading

Sonja Grussendorf — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:24:38 +0000

Last night on Radio4's Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading. She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and suggested that "if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don't have that complete concentration for two or three hours." With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading. Skim-reading is of course a useful skill, especially for (budding) academics whose bread & butter is to read – and to read quickly. Students need to be able to scan across pages and articles to quickly decide which material can be safely ignored and which needs to be read more deeply. A problem arises if the habit of skim-reading comes to dominate one’s reading behaviour and affects one’s concentration so that settling down to really immerse oneself in a book becomes difficult. In January 2008 researchers at the UCL published a briefing paper entitled “information behaviour of the researcher of the future”, in which they reported that there is now a tendency towards “shallow, horizontal, ‘flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries.” (They also noted, importantly, that this applied to everyone, from undergraduates to professors, i.e. that it was not something the “google generation” did, but rather all of us). I have noticed that my reading habits have changed over the last few years now that I spend large amounts of time in front of a computer, for work, research, study, leisure. On the rare occasions that I switch all electronic media off & settle down with a book, be it for pleasure or work, it takes me an alarmingly long time to stop fidgeting, to stop wanting to “just quickly” google this factoid or that half-thought or even just to update my anonymous readers on twitter “wow guess wht- im readn a real book & switched off comp 2 do it. Yay. (only now i switchd bck on 2 tell u)”. The internet is one of the most fabulous things to have come to us, the idea of giving it up seems not only impossible but preposterous: for what reason would one give up *the* research tool? But there has to be equilibrium. Reading on a (networked) computer invites fracturing one’s concentration, or at least it invites the less disciplined amongst us to do so (just quickly checking my email, hey is that a new blogpost, ha ha, failblog! I wonder what’s on at the Picturehouse, what exactly is a guava, etc etc). In order to maintain an equilibrium, perhaps it is good practice to shut down for a few hours a day, to switch the machine off (and the [i]phone), and turn one’s mind to a printed paper, or a physical book. Perhaps even today’s students should not “never be out of touch”. Picture by pedrosimoes7 on flickr.

Making group work work

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:42:57 +0000

Learning & Teaching Competition Winners

Matt Lingard — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:03:34 +0000

The Jorum* Learning & Teaching awards are given to innovative learning and teaching resources that have been created under a Creative Commons license. You can find out more about all six winners on the Jorum website and below I have highlighted two in particular. All of the resources are free to use and can be linked to from within Moodle. Making group work work This video resource is aimed at giving students and tutors a better understanding of the challenges of group work and how to overcome them! There are 10 episodes such as Managing conflict and Assessing group work which can be used independently or worked thru' in order. The website includes help for students and staff. Reading Skills Tutorial Produced by the Skills@Library team at the University of Leeds, this is an online tutorial to help students (and staff!) improve their reading skills. *Jorum is a JISC-funded online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK colleges and universities. It exists to encourage sharing, reuse and re-purposing of learning and teaching materials created by the community for the community

Screen Recording Made Simple

Matt Lingard — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:10:12 +0000

Update October 2010: ScreenToaster is back, ignore text below that says otherwise I've just finished testing various free web-based screen recording tools. I've been looking at them for a new course at the LSE run by the LSE Careers Service & the Language Centre called English for Career Success. As part of the course students have to give a 5-minute presentation to the class. As a practice exercise before the live event they have to record themselves doing the presentation using a screen recording tool. They then receive feedback on it from the tutors before delivering the real thing. Here is an example of a screen recording I just made using Screenr and below it you will find notes on it and my other two best finds ScreenToaster (no longer available) & Screenjelly. I recommend watching in full-screen mode. All 3 tools are web-based, free & require an account. They publish with a unique URLs & can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. The quality of the output is good for all three and they can all be viewed full-screen. However there are some important differences between them which may affect which you choose.

Recording Length - ScreenToaster has no limit, Screenr 5-mins max, Screenjelly 3-mins max.
Ease-of-use - they are all easy but Screentoaster comes third on this (and its interface isn't as modern!)
Privacy - ScreenToaster & Screenjelly allows for private recordings, Screenr does not.
Navigation - Only Screenr allows your audience to navigate to any point in the recording. The others only allow you to pause or return to the start.
Publishing time - Screenr is slower to publish, taking over 5-10mins for a 5-min recording. The other two publish in seconds.
Screen capture size - Screenjelly is restricted to full-screen capture, the others allow any size.
Number of views - shown by Screenjelly & ScreenToaster but not Screenr. Update: Both show views, thanks @sboneham
Extras - Screenr simultaneously publishes an iPhone/iPod version, has .mp4 download & YouTube upload options; ScreenToaster allows you to add subtitles, to capture a webcam view in addition to the screen & has .mov download.

For English for Careers Success we have opted for ScreenToaster based primarily on privacy but my overall favourite is Screenr with the lack of navigation letting the others down. Update: bad choice!

Presenting Prezi

Matt Lingard — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:47:01 +0000

I was reminded on Friday by the ever-innovative LSE Careers Service that I never shared my attempt at using Prezi, so here it is. I'd seen it used at a couple of events earlier in the year so when I was preparing for this year's new academics induction I thought I'd give it a go for my Social Software in Teaching slot. While it's nice to sit in a presentation where PowerPoint doesn't feature I'm not wholly convinced by Prezi. My main gripe is that I found it incredibly fiddly to use. It took me a long time to put this together, OK it was my first attempt, but I'm not sure it was worth it. The main advantage it seems, putting the occasionally sea-sickness inducing animation aside for now, is that it doesn't need to be a linear presentation. It's very easy to jump around and as most of my presentation could have been in any order I let the audience decide! The LSE Careers Service Prezi I saw on Friday is below. It wasn't created for delivering a live presentation but more as an online advertisement. Perhaps this is a better use as it's certainly more appealing than plain text and, like I've done here, can be embedded in multiple locations. I've set this one to autoplay although it doesn't seem to so you may need to click More to do that.

Hotseat: social networking for the classroom

Matt Lingard — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:01:54 +0000

I wrote last month that I love lectures. As part of that post I highlighted the use of Twitter in the classroom by a History lecturer at The University of Texas at Dallas. In a similar vein Purdue University have developed and are trialling a social-networking tool for the classroom called Hotseat. It allows students to give feedback, ask questions & have mini-discussions initiated by the lecturer (or themselves) while attending classes. The great thing about Hotseat is that students aren't restricted to a particular input method, there are many ways students can contribute - via the website, SMS, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. There also seem to be iPhone/iPod Touch Apps. There are a couple of videos from Purdue explaining it further: Hotseat at Purdue University What is Hotseat in your own words? It's not clear from the website whether Hotseat will be available to the wider world (for purchase or otherwise).

Electronic voting systems (or PRS) workshop in Leicester

Kris Roger — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:50:12 +0000

Yesterday, was definitely PRS day for me. CLT was running its first lecturer training session for use of PRS/EVS on the new LSE100 course, which I have been helping to prepare and was originally intending to facilitate along with my colleagues. Unfortunately it clashed with a workshop on EVS, co-ordinated by a special interest group called "ESTICT: Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology" which I had already booked a place at. I'm told the training session went very well, but I'm glad to say it was well worth going along to the ESTICT workshop in Leicester. As you can see, I still don't know how to refer to this stuff. We've been calling it PRS (Personal Response Systems) but the accepted norm, at least to this group, seems to be EVS (Electronic Voting Systems). So I will try to refer to it as EVS from now on, at least to the world outside LSE.

One more substantial concern of mine is that students may soon become fatigued by constant EVS questions during a lecture. This had definitely been experienced by other lecturers in the room and one approach to avoid this trap is to create questions where the students are interested in the results. Not just whether they are right or wrong, but they also need to be interested in how the rest of the class answered the question. Also key, is whether they can see that the teacher is interested in the outcome. For example, by reflecting on and changing the course of the class based on the results. It is important not to feel obliged to use EVS every time you want to ask a question to your students. Mark Goodwin, from Leicester University, talked about this along with some interesting tactics employed by some students who had become tired of using their clickers, the best of which was a game of chicken where everybody would wait until the last second of a countdown to press the button to see who could be the last to answer. Mark Russell, from the University of Hertfordshire, showed us some great examples of linked EVS question sets that help to show where students are failing to understand a concept. In conjunction with student tracking by EVS handset, his system is able to detect where students choose an answer that contradicts an answer that they chose in an earlier question. Where there is a contradiction, the system flags the contradiction. This implies that the student has fundamentally failed to understand the subject matter, and if this continues to happen then the system will send an automated e-mail to the student. Apologies to the two Marks if I have fundamentally failed to understand their approaches! Steve Draper talked about different methodologies and recipes for use of EVS. One interesting finding he highlighted was that learning is delayed in schoolchildren until well after the lesson where EVS had been used. So if you were to ask a question at the start of a peer instruction exercise and again at the end of the exercise the students may not yet have have fully understood. On a technology note, I was quite impressed by the capabilities of the WordWall/WordPad system that was used during the day. However, I fear that many of our lecturers wouldn't have enough time to invest in learning how to use the system. Also, it required a fair amount of tinkering during the session to use it to its full extent, therefore requiring an extra operator in addition to the speaker. Although, I'm sure this wouldn't be the case once somebody had become fully accustomed to the software. Kris. EVS Wordle image shared by AJC1 on Flickr

Coming soon-ish

Matt Lingard — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:08:51 +0000

The annual Horizon reports track emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on teaching and learning in the future. The predictions of earlier reports are available elsewhere on this blog: 2009 2008 2007 and if you want to go further back see the Horizon website. A short preview of the 2010 report (PDF) is already available. The technologies it highlights (time frames for becoming mainstream to be taken with a pinch of salt perhaps) are:

Mobile Computing & Open Content (mainstream in the next year)
Electronic Books & Simple Augmented Reality (2-3 years)
Gesture-Based Computing & Visual Data Analysis (4-5 years)

If you want to know more about any of these then the preview is short, worth a look and has links to examples. The other aspect of the Reports are the key trends and challenges that it highlights: Trends

The abundance of resources and relationships induced by open resources and social networks is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching and credentialing.
More and more, people expect to be able to work, learn, study, and connect with their social networks wherever and whenever they want to.
Technologies are becoming more decentralized.
Students are increasingly seen as collaborators, and there is more cross-campus collaboration.

Challenges

The role of the academy—and the way we prepare students for their future lives—is changing.
New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly lag behind or fail to appear.
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key 21st century skill, but there is a widening training gap for faculty and teachers.
Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.

No time for commentary today, so I'll return to this when the full report is published in the new year. Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjblackwell/2807009000/

Our survey says....

Jane Secker — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:17:10 +0000

....95.7% of LSE students are very satisfied (45.3%) or fairly satisfied (50.4%) with Moodle. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="158" caption="By Brockvicki licensed under Creative Commons"][/caption] The results from our survey carried out in June 2009 are finally revealed. We found in terms of whether they were satisfied with Moodle, there was no significant difference between postgraduates or undergraduates or with students whose first language was English. Most students used Moodle either weekly (49%) or daily (43%) and 90% were encouraged to use it by their teachers. 84% of students said they would like to see more of their courses on Moodle. As with previous surveys, reading lists with links to full text material were one of the most popular features of Moodle. Many students now submit their assignments online using Moodle, and a growing number have some form of multimedia (recorded lectures or digitised audio /video) in their course. On the less positive side, the use of online forums is disappointingly low, and many students didn't seem to be aware of the Library search block. Feedback comments above all reveal that students are concerned about the number of broken links in some courses, and complained that some Moodle courses were not updated enough. Some reported problems with PDF files. Student feedback on the lecture capture process was that it was useful to them - 51% reported they had access to recorded lectures in Moodle. Students generally found lecture capture helped their understanding of the content of a lecture, although there was no significant difference between first language English speakers and other students. If you'd like further details, do drop us a line, and if you want to ensure your Moodle course is up to date (with no broken links!) for the start of Lent Term why not book yourself in for a Moodle MOT in early January? Further details coming soon on the CLT courses and workshops page.

A Word in your Ear

Steve Bond — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:07:20 +0000

A Word in your Ear was an excellent one-day conference on the use of audio feedback (AF) in higher education. The keynote was by Bob Rotherham, who as leader of the JISC/Leeds Metropolitan project Sounds Good, has become the go-to man for AF for the UK. I was already familiar with the Sounds Good outputs, but it’s the way he says it that makes the difference. A really good, engaging, no-nonsense speaker. Bob tried to move the agenda on by pointing out that we all know now that most students like AF – it’s been demonstrated time and time again – but we don’t know whether it is actually more educationally effective than written feedback. Unfortunately I didn’t get the sense that any of the other presenters were trying to answer this question, or even proposing ways in which it might be answered. In the first session, Patricia Fell from Birmingham City University reported on a small case-study – too small to draw broad conclusions, but interesting in the questions that it raised. For example, the one student who didn’t like AF found it so off-putting that they felt unable to even listen to it, thus depriving themselves of any feedback at all. In questions afterwards, Phil Ice commented that there may be cultural factors that make certain groups of students less receptive to AF. Sue Rodway-Dyer from Exeter University then presented a really excellent piece of research on the use of AF with first-year geographers. I seldom see research this thorough at learning technology conferences. AF had been given to 73 students on a piece of coursework, and student attitudes evaluated by means of questionnaires at the time they received the feedback, further follow-up questions by email later, focus groups, and a final, surprise questionnaire at the start of their second year which sought to determine how their opinions had changed over time, how they felt their performance in later coursework had been changed, and how much of the feedback they recalled. This last question was particularly revealing, with some students able to reproduce verbatim whole sections of the AF they had received. Furthermore, the researchers conducted ‘stimulated recall’ sessions with the lecturer, where they played selected extracts from the lecturer’s own recordings, and asked them to comment. This allowed lecturers to reflect on their approach to giving AF and point out what they would do differently next time. Next up was the ‘Challenge Circle’. At the start of the conference we had been asked to write down a ‘challenge’ facing us in the use of AF, stick it on a board, and these would then form the basis of discussion. In our group we discussed “how do we make AF dialogic?” and “has AF improved grades or outcomes?”. These sounded promising but neither question was really addressed properly. Some interesting things came up anyway. Anne Nortcliffe from Sheffield Hallam advocated recording face-to-face sessions with students, and further, putting the responsibility for recording them onto the student themselves. Recording and dissemination of peer discussions was also mooted. Phil Ice from the American Public University was next, giving some very quantitative results from a long-term study involving over 1000 students. He appears to have refuted the ‘novelty effect’, showing that students retain enthusiasm for AF into their second year of using it. His study showed that students preferred different types of feedback at different levels of detail: audio feedback for broad, overall themes; a mixture of audio and written for mid-level feedback about specific arguments in the text; and written feedback for detailed feedback such as grammatical corrections and citation styles. He also mentioned that US law requires the archiving of up to 7 years’ worth of student material – so far they have about 8 TB of audio data stored and indexed so that it can be retrieved easily! Next up, Gabi Witthaus of Leicester University spoke on the language of AF as compared to written feedback. AF is characterised by much greater informality and colloquialism, but especially so when the feedback is positive. Teachers giving negative feedback seem to retreat into more formal language to deliver the bad news. There was also evidence of a more ‘sharing’ approach, for example where a teacher criticises a piece of work by explaining how they once made the same mistake. The final session of the day was a student panel, where 4 students spoke about their own experience of receiving audio feedback and of their impressions of the conference. I am a big fan of giving students a voice at these events, and this was a good panel. It felt like a bit of a cheat though, because the students concerned were doing a course in education, so were actually using audio feedback themselves. They were clearly advocates of it from an educator’s point of view, rather than necessarily being so from the student point of view. A key theme that emerged from the panel was that of the students’ initial scepticism being overcome – both concerning audio feedback and peer feedback. Overall, a thoroughly worthwhile trip to Sheffield.

Do you need any scanned readings for Moodle?

Jane Secker — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 11:59:35 +0000

The School's Copyright Licensing Agency licence has recently been extended and the Library would like to invite you to select essential readings from your reading lists for scanning. In addition to the UK and US which were already covered, a further seven countries have been added to the repertoire of the licence. A full list of the territories and works not able to be scanned (excluded works) can be seen at http://www.cla.co.uk/excluded_works/international/. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="235" caption="LSE Library by CarlosfPardo on Flickr"][/caption] Please note our licence does not cover copying from digital originals. All scanning undertaken under the licence needs to be processed by the Library because of the annual reporting requirement. Additional readings selected needn't be exclusively from the new territories but must be covered by the licence (not on the excluded works lists, a second chapter or from a country not covered by the licence). For further guidance on requesting an Epack see http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/tss/requestingE-pack.aspx. Please send your list of selected readings to the Epacks team - Epacks@lse.ac.uk

Txting Moodle

Matt Lingard — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:25:41 +0000

We have recently added a text messaging service to Moodle called moodletxt (powered by txttools) . The primary use for this service is to receive text messages (SMS) in Moodle. Using Moodletxt in Teaching & Learning In some respects moodletxt is just an alternative communication channel to existing ones (office hours, email, Moodle forums etc). Two key differences are that texts are anonymous and can of course be sent from all mobile phones. Some suggested uses:

‘Muddy’ points – after lectures or classes students send in points that they are unclear about. This is being trialled on LSE100.
Administrative Queries
Feedback – students’ comments on any aspect of their studies

It is recommended that responses from staff are delivered through other communication channels. Although moodletxt can be used to send messages these texts must be paid for by the LSE so there is an additional financial cost (if you are interested in this then please do contact us). As some students may not wish to pay for texts it is also recommended that moodletxt is always used in conjunction with other Moodle communication tools to give an alternative option. How it works Students send a text preceded by a keyword (usually the course code) to a dedicated mobile number. The keyword acts as a filter directing the texts to an Inbox within the Moodle course. This inbox is only accessible to Moodle 'teachers' on the associated course. If you are interested in adding this feature to your LSE Moodle course or would like to discuss potential uses then please contact clt-support@lse.ac.uk Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/305425495/

Second Life exhibition: Déja vu?

Matt Lingard — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:16:15 +0000

Next week CLT are supporting the LSE's first Exhibition in Second Life. The Déja vu? exhibition is being organised by the students & teachers of the French Language & Society course (LN330) as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of the LSE Language Centre. The exhibition will be held on Thursday 25th February from 4pm onwards on the LSE CLT island Castor's Retreat. It will feature work by Michel Herreria, a Bordeaux-based French visual artist with whom the French language team have been collaborating since 2003. Attending the Exhibition Déja vu? is open to everyone. If you would like to attend you will need to create an avatar and arrange access to the Second Life in advance of the exhibition. Full instructions & support If you already have an avatar & access to second life you can visit the exhibition here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Castors%20Retreat/198/68/25 What is Second Life? Second Life is a 3-D virtual world. It is created and inhabited by avatars, 3-D representations which can walk, talk, fly and interact with each other. Second Life replicates many activities of the real world, there are shops (and a currency!), museums, conference centres and much more. The vast majority of UK Higher Education institutions now have a presence in Second Life, for some this is purely a marketing exercise but for many it is a location for teaching & learning. Second Life allows students to immerse themselves into a character, via their avatar and is an ideal platform for simulations and role-playing activities. It also provides an opportunity to explore virtual locations around the world including museums, art galleries, historic buildings & events. As with next week's exhibition it can be used to host events that involve participants from outside the LSE community.

Backchannel Communication

Matt Lingard — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:34:00 +0000

The latest in the excellent Educause 7 Things You Should Know About... series is Backchannel Communication which is described as:

secondary electronic conversation that takes place at the same time as a conference session, lecture, or instructor-led learning activity

The backchannel at a live 'event' is usually informal and takes place on tools such as Twitter with the audience sharing comments, questions and links with each other while continuing to follow the the formal presentation. The 7 Things guide notes that increasingly the backchannel is being brought to the fore as speakers & lecturers positively encourage the audience to participate and then respond to questions posted. In some cases the communication is being displayed on screens within the lecture theatre. Some institutions in the States have gone as far to create their own backchannel tools, for example Hotseat from Purdue University & the free to use Live Question Tool developed by the Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. There are a number of opportunities & challenges raised by the backchannel and I recommend reading the 7 Things guide in full: 7 Things You Should Know About Backchannel Communication (PDF) Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordedtech/2091114345/

slpenguin

Chris Fryer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:49:27 +0000

Testing Syndicated Posts

Matt Lingard — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:32:23 +0000

I’m experimenting with syndication and if it is working then this post, originally written on Reluctant Technologist, will also be published on CLT@LSE. The syndication feature is an add-on called FeedWordPress. It’s available in the version of WordPress that we are running at the LSE but doesn’t appear to be included on wordpress.com blogs.

It works using an RSS Feed. I simply add my blog feed to the CLT@LSE blog and my posts are published there too. Rather than publishing all the posts I write here I’ve set-up a category called Syndicated and added the feed for that category to the CLT Blog. That’s how it works, in theory…

Finger-crossed it does as I’ve been neglecting this blog recently but writing over on CLT so hopefully this will help get me back here/there too!

OERs: what’s stopping us?

Matt Lingard — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:09:15 +0000

The recent M25 Learning Technology Group meeting focussed on Open Educational Resources (OERs). Despite my somewhat limited knowledge of this topic it fell to me, as the meeting’s organiser, to provide an intro. So here it is once again if you missed it. OERs are teaching & learning materials available for reuse without charge. They are one element of a much wider Open Education movement (not sure that’s quite the right word but it’ll do). While reading about OERs I came across an interesting video lecture Openness, Aggregation and the Future of Education (50-mins) by David Wiley that’s worth a look.

In my introduction I gave examples of 4 different OER-related areas as well as highlighting some upcoming OER conferences & UK projects:

Gateways & Portals – OER Commons & OpenCourseWare Consortium
Open Courseware providers – MIT Courseware (80% of MITs course material freely available) & the OU’s OpenLearn
Repositories – JorumOpen, Merlot & YouTube EDU
Licensing – Creative Commons

I also highlighted two blog posts that put the case for and against OERs: The OER Debate (Patrick McAndrew) Those OER Issues (Martin Weller). The UNESCO OER Wiki is another place to look for further information on OERs.

Back to the meeting and I just wanted to highlight one of the four sessions which was a discussion led by Leo Havemann, Sarah Sherman & Bryony Bramer from the Bloomsbury group of UoL colleges.

They got us all discussing the barriers that prevent people sharing and those that prevent the use of others’ OERs. Their This Educational Resource Could not be Opened slides includes a compilation of both the barriers and potential solutions we identified in our discussions (slides 6 & 7). Despite the success of the likes of MIT & the OU – in terms of getting stuff shared if not re-used – it seems there is more than a long way to go & much to overcome for most institutions and their teaching staff.

Error message from Bloomsbury slides was generated here: http://atom.smasher.org/error/

This post is syndicated from: http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/oers-whats-stopping-us/

EduCampLondon: an ‘unconference’

Matt Lingard — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:14:23 +0000

A few weeks ago now I attended my first unconference. For the uninitiated an unconference is a conference that is organised & delivered by the delegates. For example, take the programme, it was complied in this Google Spreadsheet with the delegates simply adding a title to a slot. No submitting of abstracts 6 months before the event and still a great quality & variety of sessions. Other than that EduCampLondon felt pretty much like any other conference/event. The format of unconference sessions is supposed to be less chalky-talky and more discursive or off-the-wall but in practice many sessions, including my own, were fairly traditional.

My session, Audio Feedback: it sounds good, can we make it look good?, covered some work we’ve been doing at LSE with audio feedback and then looked at the potential for using screen recording tools for giving more visual audio feedback. I got my talk out of the way first thing (I do like this self-scheduling!) which enabled me to relax for the rest of the day.

The Student Viewpoint

I attended a couple of presentations given by students and it was really interesting to hear their perspective. One, by students from Central Saint Martins & UCL, was all about iPoodle an Moodle iphone App that they are developing, as part of a course project. They hope it will be in the App Store soon. The second student session was a Q&A with a UEL student simply chatting about how she used technology in her everyday studies (much more unconferency I think!). What I took away from both was a stark reminder of the students’ love of content. All the other stuff web technologies might offer is very much second fiddle to students’ desire for easy access to the PDFs, PPTs that their teachers provide them with.

I also attended talks on Moodle & Turnitin integrations, Google Wave , iTunes U and an interesting discussion on where Learning Technologists should focus their energy: developing a basic use of technologies by all or working with enthusiasts to experiment & innovate. I know what the students would like us to be doing.

This post is syndicated from: http://mattlingard.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/educamplondon/

Moodle Moot 2010

Steve Bond — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:20:22 +0000

On 13-14 April I attended Moodle Moot 2010, hosted by ULCC at the University of London's Senate House. I didn't find it as enlightening as last year's Moot at Loughborough, but it had its moments, and I believe my colleagues were luckier in their choice of parallel sessions, as further posts here may reveal. The first keynote was by Sugata Mitra, speaking about his "Hole in the Wall" studies. His presentation was excellent and inspiring, and can be seen on the MoodleMoot videos page, but as he's done it many times before and much has been written about it already, I don't really need to add. Later, Martin Dougiamas, on Skype from New Zealand, gave his now-traditional "What's in Moodle 2.0" presentation, which was pretty much the same as last year's as far as I can remember. As for the parallels, not a lot to report, but a couple of presentations caught the eye. Eoin Campbell highlighted the clumsiness of the Moodle question-editing interface, and introduced a way to allow teachers to quickly and easily create quizzes by entering the questions, answers and feedback into a table in Word, and then converting that to Moodle questions at the press of a button (http://www.moodle2word.net/). Pieter van der Hijden talked about the potential of Moodle for running educational games and simulations. It was surprising how much of the scaffolding required to build a simulation could be supported using basic Moodle features, but what's missing at this stage is the ability for users to store variables within Moodle, and a simple scripting language to allow those variables to be processed. These are pretty fundamental to simulation, and it doesn't look like they will be native to Moodle any time soon. I did wonder, though, whether one couldn't just use JavaScript and cookies to get around this limitation. Overall: not bad. ULCC did a good job of running the show. I especially liked the no-nonsense approach to the evening entertainment, consisting of canteen-style tikka masala, a pub quiz and a free bar all night. Steve

LSE Teaching Day

Jane Secker — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:23:33 +0000

Last week was LSE Teaching Day, which was the second time we ran an event focusing on good practice in teaching for LSE staff. The day was opened by Dr Jonathan Leape who is the Course Director for LSE100, the new core course for undergraduates, which teaches them to 'think like a social scientist'. Jonathan gave us an overview of lessons learnt from the pilot this year and spoke of the challenges of running a core course. These include the heterogeneity of the students, coming from different disciplines in the school, but also the diverse nature of the teachers on the course. He talked about the extensive teacher training that has been undertaken for the course tutors, the need to promote active learning and raise student engagement and the importance of feedback and evaluation from staff and students involved in the course. The course has used a variety of new technologies, including audio feedback, lecture capture, PRS and texting of 'muddy points' from lectures. In addition Moodle is used to provide support and resources. Our keynote was given by Professor Nicola Lacey, from the Department of Law, who told us she was going to be controversial. She talked about the skills agenda and asked whether teaching skills was at cross purposes with research led teaching at LSE. She asked why there was a pressure to teach skills now, and gave us four reasons for this, which she emphasised were her beliefs and not based on research. Her reason included changes in schools and education, the expansion of higher education, the emphasis on research (which has led to less emphasis on teaching) in universities and the reaction of universities to student surveys. Interestingly she didn't mention technology, which I would have seen as underpinning all these factors. Nicola believed that teaching quality is actually far higher now than ever before, but felt students have heightened expectations of what university education can give them. She also questioned the value of lecture capture, believing it can make lecturers more cautious, and students more inclined to see the lecture as being a definitive tool for revision - rather than reading books and journal articles. She also worried about hyperlinking every reading in Moodle, seeing this as spoonfeeding . She finished by illustrating how they are dealing with this in the Law department, by developing a skills module for students embedded into the core course for undergraduates. Resources are available in Moodle and there are lectures about study skills and surgeries for students who need help with essay writing. We then went into parallel sessions and I was involved in a debate with colleagues Dr Claire Gordon, Dr Ernestina Coast and two students, where we debated whether we were teaching the Google Generation. We started by playing the Michael Wesch video: A vision of Students Today. Claire then introduced the session and talked about what the Google Generation might be, and what are the characteristics of this generation. I spoke about my experience of teaching information skills at LSE, including the areas where students seem to struggle - with citing and referencing, with good searching, with knowing how to find scholarly sources. Each of the panel talked for a few minutes and we then took questions from the floor. It was a fascinating session which Claire and I hoped would start a debate over the support and training that students at LSE might need, and what assumptions teachers might make about them in terms of what they know (often incorrectly). Other sessions I attended during the day included, 'Using social software tools for teaching Geography' by Dr Hyun Shin. He had used an amazing range of tools to engage his students, from making his own You Tube videos, to using Facebook and Google groups. His research on cities and urban processes in south east Asia could be shared beyond LSE using many of the tools, and he felt Moodle could be quite restrictive. He was a keen advocate of open access. The final session I attended was the Lecture Capture debate, where an academic and student took opposing sides to discuss the motion 'This House Deplores Lecture Capture'. Dr Michael Cox from International Relations, argued that lecture capture was a bad thing while Dr Tim Leunig from Economic History argued it was a good thing. It was a light hearted look at what has been vexing many staff at LSE and is the subject of some research that CLT are currently undertaking. Students generally like lecture capture, but for a range of reasons some staff are opposed to it. The day ended with a presentation of teaching excellence awards and a wine reception on the eighth floor of our New Academic Building. Well done to my colleague Athina and everyone who made the day interesting and good fun.

Twitter at LSE Teaching Day

Matt Lingard — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:05:13 +0000

For LSE Teaching Day 2010 we heavily promoted the use of Twitter as a backchannel communication tool and were very pleased with the results. Twitter updates relating to Teaching Day were identifiable by the event tag: #lsetd10

Participation

The 249 updates* were made by 29 people, 16 LSE staff & students and 13 non-LSE showing how backchannel communication can extend beyond the walls of a face-to-face event. The event had 180 delegates. A large majority of tweets came from a small number people:

Only 7 people reached double figures
One person, @tweeduizendzes was responsible for almost 1/3 of the updates
Top 5 tweeters accounted for 77% of the updates

Types of Updates

Tweets can be standard updates, replies (directed at someone in response to an update), mentions (an update referencing somone else) or retweets (one person re-posting another’s earlier update).

Updates 63%
Retweets 26%
Replies 6%
Mentions 5%

I have attempted to classify the 249 tweets based on their purpose with the following results:

Reporting 43%
Commenting 29%
Enhancing 16%
Assisting 7%
Asking 6%

Below are some examples of updates from a wide variety of people (so the top tweeters are heavily under-represented!)

Reporting

The largest group of tweets (43%) were ‘reporting’ what was being said, what people were doing & so on.

@Puplett: #lsetd10 Leape: challenge is to share good teaching practice @jsecker: LSE Teaching day Nicola Lacey says skills should embedded in a course #lsetd10

About a quarter of the reporting updates were retweets. So in the following example my original update was retweeted by @Dcotton11 (non-LSE) amplifying the message by forwarding it to a wider audience.

@DCotton11: RT @mattlingard: ‘Digital refugees’ have been thrown into the mix by student panelist those who don’t engage or see a benefit #lsetd10

Commenting

Almost a third could be classified as commenting. This may be a comment on what is being said or being done at the event as well as comments on other online comments.

@jenibrown: Definitely agree that there is too much PowerPoint in teaching talks conferences etc. #lsetd10 @jobadge: @mattlingard I see your point another of out staff @jon_scott does 6 mins audio summaries of key points much better for revision #lsetd10 @amber_miro: #lsetd10 really enjoyed the lecture capture debate

Enhancing

There were 39 updates that I have classified as ‘enhancing’ because they add some further information such as an example, a link or a photo .

@mattlingard: ASKe website that Liz just highlighted in the Feedback session http://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske/ #lsetd10 @dave_lew: #lsetd10 in the final session before the wine reception http://twitpic.com/1ow3sp

Assisting

‘Assisting’ tweets include announcements & answers to questions. They mainly originated from the conference organisers.

@tweeduizendzes: RT @mattlingard: LSE staff – watch Nicola Lacey’s Teaching Day keynote online from 10am http://ow.ly/1Moo6 (LSE login required) #lsetd10 @lseclt: First session is the keynote by Nicola Lacey Teaching Skills through Substance starting soon in Sheikh Zayed #lsetd10

Asking

15% of the updates were questions:

@NanaChatzi: #lsetd10 how do we assess effectiveness of P-S? @authenticdasein: most imp question of the day – what shall I wear for #lsetd10?

Promotion of the Backchannel

The use of twitter for backchannel communication at #lsetd10 was promoted by running two pre-conference workshops (slides) and a flyer in the delegate pack as well as making sure the tag was included in emails, on the website & mentioned in the welcome speech. During the event we also used visibletweets.com to display updates on various plasma screens at the venue. * The statistics in this post are based solely on the 249 updates that were tweeted during the event.

CLT staff survey 2009-10

Jane Secker — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:23:48 +0000

If you're a member of LSE staff, a Moodle editor or a GTA we'd be grateful if you could complete a short survey about your experience of our services this year. The survey only takes about 5 minutes to complete and can be found here: https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/lsewebsite/cltstaff2010/ Many thanks CLT

Text Message (SMS) Pilots

Matt Lingard — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:22:49 +0000

Volunteers needed! The CLT is looking for LSE teaching staff to pilot the use of text messages (SMS) in teaching. If you would like to participate in the pilots let us know by email to clt-support@lse.ac.uk Some ideas of how text messages (SMS) could be used for out-of-class and in-class activities include:

Polling students before, after or during a class
Reminding students of a deadline
Prompting students to complete an (online) activity between classes
Collecting short answers/questions from students

The SMS pilots will use txttools integrated into Moodle. If you have any queries or you would like to discuss this further please contact Athina or Matt via clt-support@lse.ac.uk Image: SMS by pixel_addict

Moodle unavailable: Thursday 2nd September

Matt Lingard — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:29:13 +0000

Moodle will be unavailable all day on Thursday 2nd September from 10am onwards. This downtime is for an essential end of year process to prepare Moodle for 2010/11. Further details: End of Year arrangements

Moodle RSS block displaying a feed from EchoSystem

Chris Fryer — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:39:43 +0000

Moodle RSS block displaying a feed from EchoSystem

Echo Recorded Lecures resource displayed in Moodle

Chris Fryer — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:50:00 +0000

A Moodle resource displaying Echo recorded lectures

Chris Fryer — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:55:40 +0000

Publishing Echo recorded lectures in Moodle

Chris Fryer — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:17:33 +0000

[caption id="attachment_533" align="alignright" width="162" caption="WTH?"][/caption] EchoSystem, the lecture recording service we are running at LSE, provides various methods for publishing links to recorded lectures in Moodle, our VLE (LMS). The "Moodle Publisher" places the links in the course calendar, with each recording listed as a separate "event". This is useful, but it is not immediately apparent to our students that they should look there for the links. If configured to do so, EchoSystem will generate RSS feeds for each course's "section" or "module". This is also useful, because RSS feeds can be used in a number of contexts, including Moodle's Remote RSS feeds block. But there's a problem: unless you have given your presenters the ability to edit their recordings (we haven't), or you have the time to edit them yourself (we don't), all the recordings from a particular section end up with the same title. In EchoSystem version 2.6, Echo360 added the date of each recording to the "title" element of each RSS item, which makes identifying the recordings easier. But the nature of Moodle's RSS block means these resources are pushed off to the side of the Moodle course page. You might think such resources would warrant greater prominence. Some of our Moodle course editors want complete control over when and where the links to each recording should appear, so they tend to create a new Moodle resource for each recording at a time of their choosing. But most would prefer to provide a single link at the beginning of term, and let the automated system take care of the rest. [caption id="attachment_536" align="alignleft" width="125" caption="The resource, as it appears in Moodle"][/caption] So I wrote a new Moodle resource type called, inventively enough, Echo Recorded Lectures. All a teacher needs to do is choose "Echo Recorded Lectures" from "Add a resource", give the resource a title, paste in the "Podcast RSS Feed" URL, choose whether to display the presentation's title or its date & time, and click "Save & Display". Feel free to download the resource and install it yourself. Just tar -xvvzf the file into your Moodle mod/resource/type/ directory. You can preview the code first, if you prefer. We also have some documentation for the users. It's partly ready for internationalisation, because it uses Moodle's language strings. But it will need more work if your Echo feeds are not in the English language. The resource was designed for Moodle 1.9. At some stage, I will need to rewrite it for Moodle 2.0, but I don't plan to do that immediately unless the comments suddenly fill up with expressions of interest. If you want a really fully-featured Moodle plug-in that gives course teachers loads of control over the way Echo recordings appear in Moodle, take a look at San Francisco State's Moodle Integration.

dIsfluEncY

Sonja Grussendorf — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:02:06 +0000

Last week, we were sent this article by a colleague in the philosophy department, entitled “Fortune favors the BOLD (and the Italicized ): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes”. It’s an interesting short paper that describes the outcome of two experiments which support earlier research claims about the educational benefits of using disfluent, i.e.“slightly difficult to read”, fonts. The motivation for these studies stems from earlier research into fluency, the feeling of ease we associate with a particular thinking operation. Apparently, we tend to have a bias in favour of fluency, so much so that it affects our judgment, e.g. to the extent that “stocks from fluently named companies are judged to have higher value, [driving] purchasing decisions, which inflates the actual value of stocks” (Oppenheimer, 2008). Fluency, it is suggested, might even impair the quality of our judgement and our processing, by making us feel too much at ease. Disfluency, on the other hand can make us work that little bit harder so we overcome gut instinct and choose to problem solve more carefully (with more correct results). According to the authors, this was demonstrated by these two experiments, especially the second one, which was set in natural conditions, i.e. in a school, over a term, without neither teachers nor students being aware of what exactly was being tested. In conclusion, the authors are hopeful that this insight can lead to “improving educational practices through cognitive interventions.” But is disfluency just a matter of keeping learners on their toes, of putting extra cognitive hurdles in their way? Would our students be more successful with their problem sets if they were asked to juggle tomatoes while they’re trying to solve them? Apparently not: “It is worth noting that it is not the difficulty, per se, that leads to improvements in learning but rather the fact that the intervention engages processes that support learning.” They also point out point at which disfluency turns into illegibility is still to be ascertained. It’s not, as yet, an exact science. Nevertheless, and this is the encouraging part, if simple, subtle changes in font can have a positive effect on understanding and retention of learning material, then this is something well worth investigating further – not least because such subtle changes would cost almost nothing. As our philosophy colleague jokingly put it: “The implication is the harder Moodle is to read, the better students will learn!” Not quite, of course. But almost. Expect our Moodle to look very different in the future... PS this was also picked up yesterday by the Today programme on Radio4: “Neuroscience blogger Jonah Lehrer discusses his own gut feeling that we remember ugly fonts much more easily.” (Though he isn’t as good as the genuine article) Ref: Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(6), 237–241.

Moodle service update

chatzig1 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:43:08 +0000

CLT sincerely apologise for the Moodle outage which occurred at 0632 on Sunday 30th and continued until 1033 Monday and for the inconvenience caused. Technical explanation of the problem. The SSL certificate for moodle.lse.ac.uk expires on 17th February this year. On Thursday, new certificate signing request was submitted to GlobalSign so we could start the process of obtaining a new certificate. In so doing, it was discovered that GlobalSign no longer support certificates signed with 1024-bit keys, which Moodle has been using until now. So a new pair of 2048-bit keys was created, and used to generate the certificate signing request. When GlobalSign send a certificate, it is not deployed on the Moodle application server, but on the Moodle load balancer. This is because the certificate is issued to sign encrypted communications originating from moodle.lse.ac.uk, and it is the load balancer, not the application server, which is accessed at this address. The load balancer then forwards all traffic to the application server, having decrypted it first. It was believed that the application server did not use the SSL certificate at all. However, Apache, the web server on the application server, is configured to listen on TCP port 443, which is used for secure web communications. It therefore requires the certificate, and the server's private key which was used to sign it, in order to start. A new private key with the same name as the old one was generated, having renamed the old key to retain as a backup. On Sunday morning, a maintenance script on the application server restarted Apache so it could create a new weekly logfile and compress the old one. But since the certificate file and private key did not match, the server could not start. This caused a complete loss of service until the issue was identified and resolved. Appropriate lessons have been drawn from this episode and this type of error should not occur again

Emerging Technologies

Matt Lingard — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:26:10 +0000

The 2011 Horizon Report includes predictions on the technologies that will enter mainstream use in Higher Education over the coming years. I'm a bit sceptical of these predictions as they always seem overly optimistic. For 3-years in-a-row Mobiles have been listed as entering mainstream use in one year or less... (or more it seems). This year's report suggests the following will be entering mainstream use in: One Year or Less

Electronic Books
Mobiles

Two to Three Years

Augmented Reality
Game-based Learning

Four to Five Years

Gesture-based Computing
Learning Analytics

The report also includes sections on Critical Challenges:

Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching
Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university
Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike

Previous Reports (on this blog): 2010 2009 2008 2007 Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wtlphotos/2139923706/

Screenshot of Blogging Help website

Matt Lingard — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:22:01 +0000

Blogging Help & Support

Matt Lingard — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 14:32:36 +0000

We are developing a new website to support LSE bloggers Blogging Help & Support is a guide for LSE Staff & students on creating & contributing to blogs. It provides general guidelines on blogging and specific help with WordPress, the blogging tool used by the LSE Blogs service, edublogs.org & wordpress.com We recommend that you visit the site and subscribe for either email or RSS feed updates to receive notification of the latest additions. Blogs can be used for a variety of purposes and there are already a large number of LSE Bloggers. If you want to join in please see the new website or contact us for a chat.

7 uses for blogs in Higher Education

Review of social citation tools

Jane Secker — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:48:19 +0000

I have recently reviewed a number of social citation tools to see how they might support the work of a large research team. I thought my notes on these tools might be of interest.

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com /

Mendeley is both a reference management tool and an academic social network. It is a desktop application as well as a website. Some of the features that Mendeley supports include:

Automatically generate bibliographies
Collaborate easily with other researchers online
Easily import papers from other research software
Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
Access your papers from anywhere online

The desktop application allows you to keep all of your citations, references, and papers sorted, searchable, and neatly filed away on your hard drive. You can tag them, search the full text and annotate your PDFs using the Desktop application. You can also use it to create bibliographies. A shared library allows you to collaborate with colleagues or other researchers as part of a project, however everyone will need to sign up for an account to get access to a shared library. You can also upload a profile and find researchers with similar interests to your own. Currently Mendeley is used by researchers across the disciplines, but researchers in biological science and medicine are some of the heaviest users. Data can be imported into Mendeley from a variety of other reference management tools, such as Endnote and Zotero. Groups are a way of allowing researchers to share libraries – there are three types of groups:

Private groups - These private groups are visible only to members, who can share papers and notes. These work like the shared collections in previous versions of Mendeley.
Invite-only groups - These groups are visible to the public, but each has an owner who administers the group. These work like the public collections in previous versions of Mendeley with one major change - now any member can add documents.
Open groups - Anyone can join and contribute to these groups. We think they’ll be a great way to build community-driven collections of literature around a subject.

Storage space is up to 500MB per person for a free account. You get more space if you pay for a premium account. Premium accounts start at £4.99 per month to allow 7GB of storage, 10 private groups and 15 users. The £9.99 per month deal gives you 15GB of storage, 25 private groups and 20 users.

Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/

Zotero is a Firefox add-on which sits in your browser and allows you to collect, organise cite and share your research sources. You can use Zotero to collect many different types of resources including books, journal articles and web sites. You can also store PDFs, files, images and links in your Zotero library. Zotero is primarily a personal reference management tool, but does also allow you to share resources with colleagues by creating group libraries. Similarly to Mendeley, group libraries in Zotero can be private, public or open by invite only. You can upload documents to a group library to allow users to share resources. All users must have a Zotero account to be able to use the groups feature. Each user gets 100MB of storage space – if you want more storage you can pay – prices are as follows: 1 GB $20 ($1.67/month) 5 GB $60 ($5/month) 10 GB $100 ($8.25/month) 25 GB $240 ($20/month)

Connotea http://www.connotea.org/

Connotea is a reference management tool aimed at researchers and scientists. It is a web based tool and doesn’t have any storage limits. You also don’t need to install any software on your computer. Unlike Zotero and Mendeley Connotea manages the references rather than the files. It does have collaborative elements allowing references to be private or shared with groups of colleagues. It can save links to anything you find on the web in addition to scholarly material, so it could be an alternative to a social bookmarking tool. Saving a reference is one click using a bookmarking button. Connotea was created by Nature publishing. Anyone can set up a new user group in Connotea. Once you're logged in, the Create a new group link in your tool box will take you to a form for creating a group and adding users to it. Groups can be either public or private — if private, only the group's members will be aware of its existence. If public, all users and visitors can see the group, and the name of the group's owner is displayed. A group is owned by the user who created it, and only that user can add or remove members. Groups are a good way of tracking what your colleagues or collaborators are reading, or for co-operating on the creation of reference collections. They are also a useful way of finding new and related articles. Every user's library page has a box at the top of the left-hand column that lists the groups that they either created or are a member of — click on the group name to navigate the list of articles posted by members of that group. Note that there is no requirement for you to be a member of any group you create, and that currently there is no way of requesting to become a member of an existing group.

CiteULike http://www.citeulike.org/

Another social citation tool from Springer publishers. It allows you to manage and ‘discover’ scholarly references. CiteULike has enables you to store references and PDF files. You can also share your references with colleagues using CiteULike. You don’t need to download any software as CiteUlike is a web based tool. A host of publishers and journal platforms are supported by CiteULike enabling you to post articles from these sites very easily. You can add a link to anything on the web however, but may need to add bibliographic details manually. Groups are collections of users creating shared libraries of links. They are useful for keeping track of a particular topic or what everyone else in a project, class or academic department is reading. You can start your own groups and join existing groups.

Why LSE is sticking with Moodle 1.9

Kris Roger — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:49:40 +0000

A little while ago LSE decided that it would stick with Moodle 1.9 and not move to Moodle 2.0 for the academic year 2011-12. The LSE Centre for Learning Technology (CLT) started looking at Moodle 2.0 pretty much as soon as the first usable beta version was released. At that stage we decided on a number of criteria that needed to be met before we would make the decision to upgrade during summer 2011. We needed to make the decision at least by our Easter break so that we would have time to implement the upgrade and design and provide any training that might be required. The decision not to upgrade was made after some criteria had not been met and CLT testing concluded that Moodle 2.0 wasn't ready to go into enterprise level production at LSE. The main blocking factor was the lack of readiness of third-party modules that we use and rely on. Aside from waiting for them to be released we would have also needed to implement a testing programme for these before we would have felt confident in going ahead with the upgrade. During testing we of course also discovered some of the significant changes that Moodle has undergone from 1.9 to 2.0. The main one that we felt would affect the user experience is that of file management. In light of these changes and the fact that we have chosen not to upgrade this year we can now look at other alternatives such as integrating a repository system with Moodle. It will also give us extra time to look at using the new web services in Moodle 2.x to integrate with our student management systems at LSE. We now hope to upgrade during the summer 2012 break. And no, this isn't an April Fools' day story.

2011_quote-logo for print

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:08:32 +0000

LSE Teaching Day 2011

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:08:54 +0000

2011_quote-logo for print

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:13:27 +0000

2011_quote-logo-for-web

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:18:25 +0000

logo2011-web

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:19:34 +0000

logo2011-web

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:20:09 +0000

logo2011-web

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:20:47 +0000

logo2011-web2

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:22:02 +0000

Register for LSE Teaching Day 2011 - Places are going fast!

chatzig1 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:22:49 +0000

LSE Teaching DayRegister now - Places are going fast! DATE: Tuesday 24 May 2010 Registration is now open for LSE Teaching Day 2011. This year academic staff, students and support staff will lead an exciting programme focused on: • Feedback and assessment • Innovation in teaching • Research led teaching • Student skills development in HE Book your place and view the full programme and abstracts on www.lse.ac.uk/teachingday/ Registration closes on Monday 2 May 2011

Ask the audience - again and again.

Sonja Grussendorf — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:03:02 +0000

Asking students (or any audience) questions breaks up the monotony of unidirectional lecturing/ presenting, keeps minds from wandering, turns them into active, reciprocal participants, engages them beyond listening. At large or online events, which lack the intimacy of small seminars, there are a variety of online tools or classroom technologies that can be used to help enable this. At LSE we use TurningPoint as our PRS (Personal Response System) or EVS (electronic voting system) - a software/ hardware combination that allows lots of participants (500+) to respond. Questions are created in PowerPoint (the software works as a plugin, and question slides are created as easily as PowerPoint slides), and students vote with little remote controls (officially called "response cards", but everyone refers to them as clickers.) The LSE100 course uses this system extensively, and students are asked to borrow a clicker for the year from the library to bring to all their LSE100 lectures. Main advantages: It's easy to set up, has a great arsenal of question and activity slides, and students don't need to own devices like laptops, smartphones or mobile phones. In those large lecture halls on campus that don't have mobile phone reception, this is a very good solution. Disadvantages: Unfortunately, the hardware we bought doesn't allow free text entry, so any polling, surveying, feedback entreating must be done via multiple choice. And of course, the clickers themselves need to be remembered by the students, or worse, handed out and collected back before and after sessions, which is a bit of a fiddle. An alternative online tool is Polleverywhere, the self-proclaimed "easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print — anywhere." Polls are created online, and participants can vote for options/ send in free text answers by sms, twitter or web browser. The ££-free option limits each poll to 30 respondents (which is enough for many occasions) and doesn't allow you to create any reports (you can download the results as a .csv file). Even the free option lets you download the poll as a PPT presentation slide. Main advantages: simple set-up, remote participation (= anywhere!), no need for clickers, free- text answers, pleasant interface, £-free for 30, consistent URL for polls (http://poll4.com plus code per poll). Disadvantages: costly if you need more respondents, no reports on the free option, limited to 3 poll types (multiple choice, free text, "goal poll") See below for a sample poll we created a while back (feel free to answer it, simply follow the instructions as per image below)

Build television sms voting polls at Poll Everywhere

Preview on large screen: http://www.polleverywhere.com/free_text_polls/LTc4NDY3ODE0Nw?preview=true TwtPoll: there are countless online polling and survey tools. TwtPoll is both - it allows you to create polls and surveys online and to distribute these quickly and easily via twitter and facebook, though you don't need a twitter or facebook account to participate. The free option allows up to 400 respondents per poll and 100 per survey, they say they have 20+ question options, though it's really only 9 basic types, some of which can be asked about a picture or a map, rather than text. The polls are easy to embed on a blog (see below) and surveys can be linked to, like this test survey (can you spot the mistake?). Advantages: good choice of question types, combined polling and survey tool, large audience in free option, easily shared through social networks Disadvantages: each poll has a different URL; participation possible only via twitter/ web browser. There are lots more out there, but in the meantime, these three types of technologies should cover the basic needs of the feedback hungry.

Watch Teaching Day 2011 online

Matt Lingard — Mon, 23 May 2011 16:11:53 +0000

Tuesday 24th May, 2011 is LSE Teaching Day. You will be able to participate online as follows. Keynote - this year's keynote is by Professor Niall Ferguson: 'History Teaching & the History of Teaching'. All LSE staff are welcome to attend in the Sheik Zayed Thetare from 09:45-10:45. You can also watch it live online:

Watch Niall Ferguson Keynote (From 09:45, Tues, 24/5/11)

Twitter & Social Media - you can join in online via Twitter. You should include #lsetd11 when tweeting. You can see what others are saying at Teaching Day via this #lsetd11 Twitter search (no twitter account required!). If you are using other social media & social networking tool make sure you use the lsetd11 tag!