Matt Lingard

More MoodleMoot

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.

October 30th, 2007|Conferences|2 Comments|

elearning conference report

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.

June 1st, 2007|Conferences|Comments Off|

Explaining RSS

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.

Click To Play

Alternative Version: Windows Media

May 3rd, 2007|Social Media, Tools & Technologies|3 Comments|

VLE Languages User Group

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).

March 29th, 2007|Conferences|Comments Off|

Teaching with Technology

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…

March 28th, 2007|Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|