Matt Lingard

About Matt Lingard

Learning Technologist at the LSE Centre for Learning Technology

Language Box

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.

February 19th, 2009|Conferences, Open Education, Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

Blogging Course Re-arranged

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

February 11th, 2009|Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off|

Tomorrow's Teaching Technologies

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)

February 2nd, 2009|Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

Using Virtual Worlds for Teaching

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.

January 20th, 2009|Conferences|2 Comments|

Online Conferences

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).

November 3rd, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Web 2.0 and the Law

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/

September 30th, 2008|Conferences, Social Media|Comments Off|

Learning Technologies Conference Report

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.

September 12th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Languages Show-and-Tell

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.

July 7th, 2008|Conferences, Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|

Moodle & WebCT Summer 2008

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

June 30th, 2008|Announcements, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|