Conferences

Wimba

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.

February 8th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

LLAS E-Learning Symposium

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.

January 28th, 2008|Conferences|Comments Off|

Emerging Technologies and Careers

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.

January 11th, 2008|Conferences|1 Comment|

Inaugural Echo 360 users conference, Coventry

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.

November 20th, 2007|Conferences, Images, Audio & Video|Comments Off|

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|

Moodle Moot '07 – Day 2

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

October 26th, 2007|Conferences|1 Comment|

Moodle Moot '07

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…

October 24th, 2007|Conferences|1 Comment|

Web 2.0 is evil?

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.

September 6th, 2007|Blogging, Conferences, Research Skills, Social Media|6 Comments|