Conferences

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|

Networked Learning conference

Roman carving from Museum of Archeology Thessaloniki

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.

May 14th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

More Shock

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.

April 4th, 2008|Conferences|1 Comment|

Shock of the Old 2008 – Instalment 1

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)

April 4th, 2008|Conferences, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Wimba Assess

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.

March 11th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Leadership, Support & students

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.

March 11th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Wimba Classroom

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…

March 10th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Wimba Connect 2008

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

March 10th, 2008|Conferences, Tools & Technologies|1 Comment|

Lab Group Day

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 <canvas> tag for drawing, the W3C X-Forms spec for easy form-building.
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

February 25th, 2008|Conferences, Reports & Papers|Comments Off|