Notes by Jules

Thoughts on the 2011 Blackboard Usergroup in Durham

2011-01-12T12:34:00.000Z

The theme of this year's event was around location. The sessions I attended were pretty diverse in their approach to this, but there were a few key themes that stood out for me, so I've tried to collect my thoughts on these below.

Location
What do we mean we we talk about location? A number of ideas were raised around this, which draw attention to the risk of oversimplification in some of the discourse around mobile learning ('you just give a student a smartphone, right?'), and highlight the complexities of supporting learning in a 'mobile' age.

Malcolm Murray spoke about location as points in time and space where learners get together and learning takes place (the slide on Torsten Hagerstrand illustrates this idea). John Traxler echoed this in his observations on locations as physical, social and cultural points of convergence or divergence - opportunities are created when learners have something in common, or even in conflicting opinions (the example of mobile-enabled citizen journalism is a particularly powerful one I think). Carl Smith spoke about the augmented reality, and the learning potential created by introducing virtual locations into physical or subjective ones (there's a good report on his session by Matt Cornock). A lot of these points reflect the ideas of user- or learner-generated contexts, that learners will bring together the people, environment and tools they need for learning (see Cook and Kukulska-Hulme, Traxler and Pettit for more on this). This has a lot of implications for how we think about our models of 'teaching', and demonstrates the increasing irrelevance of the traditional model of transmission (or imposition?) of information in defined physical spaces at defined times.

Crossing boundaries
A 'location' is arguably only defined by its edges, or the boundary around it (physical, personal, social, institutional). Many of the sessions drew attention to the idea of boundaries, permeability and and enabling both staff and students and move between contexts. Some of the discussion in my session on mobile learning illustrated the increasingly uncertain boundaries around how we define 'learning' in the mobile age (my report on the session is on the MALT project blog). Sessions from Simon Davis and Matt Cornock (York), and Mike Cameron (Newcastle, on work carried out at Durham) focused on identifying the position and needs of the learner, how these relate to or conflict with perceived academic ideals, and how we might enable a transition from one position (new student, information consumer) to another (effective independent learner). Sessions from Julian Beckton (Lincoln), Tim Neumann (Institute of Education) and Ralph Holland (South Tyneside College) focused on enabling staff to make a similar journey, to meet the increasing challenges of teaching/facilitating with technology. And for the first time I can remember, there were even sessions on the permeability of the Blackboard VLE, brought about by the wonders of LTI.

Freedom and constraint
A lot of the sessions spoke about the potential of technology to enable more flexible, learner-centred, mobile learning, but there were also a number of comments about the constraints. John Traxler spoke about the potential of mobile for both exploiting and overcoming location, and noted the challenges of cost, connectivity, device constraints, and ubiquity (the intrusion of the digital into formerly social or private space and time). Mike Cameron and Andy Ramsden also spoke about inclusion, and access to/ownership of technology. These were important notes of caution, and raise questions that need to be addressed as we explore the possibilities of mobile learning.

On a lighter note, the conference itself was a great event, well organised and with lots of opportunity to network and catch up with fellow Blackboard users, as well as other suppliers. Some interesting new developments from Bb to look out for (uploading images in Bb mobile, grading rubrics and learning object repositories in Bb 'proper'), and the vibes around upgrade experiences were more positive than last year (see the #durbbu twitter feed for notes on this). Big thanks to the Durham LT team. I will add links to this post if, as and when people post their slides. If you attended I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on my ramblings...

All I want for Christmas...

2010-12-21T13:06:00.000Z

First of all, apologies for the long silence on the blog. It appears that moving institutions requires a good three month catch-up period, and I have of course resolved to be more vocal (for better or worse!) in the new year...

In the meantime though, today I am driven by a considerable level of frustration to appeal to my PLN for help (that's you folks!). A lot of little techie niggles have been getting to me lately, and I thought how nice it would be if I could find an answer to these things - some tools that just, you know, work. Not saying it would make my Christmas (I'm not quite that sad - nearly, but not quite) but it would definitely make my life easier, and probably make my boss happier as I would (in theory at least) spend much less time faffing around.

So here are the top 5 tech tools that I want for Christmas. Have I missed some really obvious options? Do you have any of them? Would you be willing to share? Recommendations would be great but recommendations for free tools would be even better. 'Tis the season of good will after all...

1. Screen capture (stills). A tool that will capture full screen, selected windows, and also do timed captures (for contextual menus etc), in broswers and desktop apps, and save to jpg and/or png. Basic editing would be a plus. So far I've tried Jing (no timed capture), Snippy (no timed capture) and Snagit (love this but I don't want to pay for it unless I have to).

2. Screen capture (video). Colleagues and I have been having problems with Camtasia and Camstudio lately - although I have (better than) the recommended processor etc I still seem to get terrible delays and a jumping cursor on my recordings. I've also tried Jing, but our current video streaming server doesn't like the .swf output. Mp4 would be nice - MS Expression recordings looks good but only the Pro version allows saving to mp4...

3. Basic video editing. A tool that will accept mp4 files from flip cameras (or the above screen capture tool!) and allow users to do basic, non-scary editing. This would need to be tough enough to handle the HD mp4s our users are producing with their flipcams - I like Flipshare for this reason - and preferably allow us to install it with a customised expert setting built-in for web delivery.

4. Desktop sharing. For when a tech-uncomfortable user calls me and says "I can't see that button in Blackboard...", and the last thing I want to say to them is "could you just install this client...".

5. Blog tools. I really want a blog tool that will let me have both categories and tags (like Wordpress), and also embed video, without being hosted (so not Wordpress then).

Any comments would be much appreciated, and may even stop me banging my head repeatedly against the desk...

Happy holidays all.

Talk Nerdy to Me image source

Desk image source

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Some thoughts on iTunesU

2010-10-19T09:15:00.002+01:00

Last week I attended a one day event hosted by Apple, looking at all the great things you can do with iTunesU. The statistics presented by some of the universities present, including the Open University, Duke and UCL, were impressive to the point of being almost intimidating - it's clear that some of the content being out out there by these institutions is massively popular, globally and way beyond their respective student populations. Brian Kelly's recent post gives a good sense of the scale of uptake in the UK.

The presentations I saw did challenge some of my assumptions about iTunesU, never having been a heavy user of the service in the past, and I was pleased to see that it had much more potential than simply a service for hosting recorded lectures. Here are some of the uses that I found inspirational (please note most of the links go to the relevant web pages rather than directly into iTunes U):

Recorded interactive whiteboard sessions. The KhanAcademy produces these for maths support, and they are all freely available to users around the world
Publishing of rare/inaccessible archive material, e.g. Duke's digitisation of rare TV advertising footage from the 60s, which was previously stored on 16mm film and so very difficult to access.
Extracurricular student use, such as uploading and peer review of produced videos/tracks by student bands (Duke again)
News-style materials produced around important events, such as the Open University's pieces on Darwin's anniversary and the launch of the Large Hadron Collider (iTunesU link)
Digitised documents, e.g. LMU digitising all their theses, in ePub format (which, if I have understood it right, allows simple pdfs but also embedding of animation/video)
New ways of presentation/improving the 'findability' of content. Tagging and categorising lets you present resources in topical ways (e.g. Nottingham have a page specifically for new students coming into the University, the Open University site currently has a list of resources for World Food Day), and resources from across all institutions are gathered together by subject.

The presenters also shared some useful tips about going through the application and set-up process, including ideas on project management, supporting staff to move from content providers to creators/producers, addressing copyright, focusing on what's special about your institution, and embedding support for production of high-quality resources using open standards.

There were two main things that I took away from this event. The first was the inevitable focus on content ('content is king' was repeated like a mantra at several points during the day). Much as I am a fan of the OER philosophy and the permeability of HE boundaries, publishing content as a meaningful standalone product outside the context of teaching has implications for staff development, resource design, and the repurposing of existing materials. And perhaps inevitably, there were few conversations about interaction and active engagement.

The second thing was a little more difficult to pin down, but I can best describe it as a feeling that I had missed the start of a conversation - the part where everyone in the room had already agreed that iTunesU was the tool they needed for aggregation and dissemination of their digital learning resources. Perhaps partly due to my cynicism over Apple's increasingly proprietary ethos, I found myself asking, what is the added value of this tool? Is it simply promotion and visibility? And if so, if my institution already has a streaming server, and a repository for digitised resources, do we simply need to present these more effectively to users outside the institution? I also have questions about inclusivity (I have no clue how I would attempt to access iTunes U on my Android phone, for example), and about granting Apple 'distribution rights' (what happens if you need to take something down?)

At the event, I got a sense of the 'everybody's doing it so we mustn't get left behind'. And while I do think that it has its advantages - the application process would be a great vehicle for starting important conversations about the resources, training and support required to produce quality learning resources for the web, and there is no denying the impact in sheer weight of download numbers - I still think that the tools we choose should have a pedagogic value for our students, rather than simply a marketing one. Or perhaps that makes me already a dinosaur in the post-Browne age?

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this...

Headphone image source

Apple image source

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Thoughts on ALT-C: students and technology

2010-09-16T12:08:00.001+01:00

One theme that seems apparent to me from the sessions I attended at ALT-C is the increasing emphasis on students as independent learners. I'm not sure though if this is because they are actually becoming more independent - I'm pretty sure the drive to learn has always been there, since Frankenstein and co. went grave-robbing to further their understanding of anatomy. So is it simply that their reach has been extended by technology, which allows Sugata Mitra's students to learn advanced scientific concepts without lifting a scalpel or having access to a microscope? Is it simply that the point bears repeating - with access to learning opportunities, and the right framing, students will learn? Or is it that we are noticing it more because their learning choices and strategies are increasingly diverging from the practices of formal education?

Professor Mitra's keynote was pretty inspiring - if you missed it, you can get an idea of the content from his TED talk. Aside from putting the presentations skills of some of the other speakers to shame, he also made some great points about the role of the teacher, and about motivation, emotional engagement and peer support – showing off to friends in the street or getting positive reinforcement from ‘grandmothers’ inspires kids to do better. Arguably these are models we can transfer to the HE classroom, if we can make space in the curriculum for trial and error, and encourage adults to get over their egos and fears and be more like children…

Sadly I missed what was clearly the talk of the conference (if you believe the Twitter hype at least!) by Dave White, but the sheer level of interest did point me to his blog and his revision of the 'digital natives/immigrants' dichotomy. The suggested alternative, 'digital residents/visitors' (based on the findings of the Isthmus project), indicates that a sense of belonging online, and the co-opting of web tools to “support the projection of ... identity and facilitate relationships” is equally if not more significant in take-up. Although I think it's unclear how far we as educators can (or should try to) facilitate this degree of online presence, the update to Prensky's model is welcome not least because it reminds us not to generalise - these are points on a spectrum, not an either/or choice based on your date of birth, and also not an indicator of skill level or effectiveness at online research. Dave’s presentation from last year is available, pending the recording of this year’s talk.

Research from the NUS on student expectations and experiences confirmed some things we already know (although students like to have and use institutional VLEs for their studies, they also use social networks and mobiles) and some things that definitely bear repeating (only 46% feel that ICT has enhanced their studies). In his presentation, Alex Bols also reinforced the idea that students who are familiar with the web are more likely to use a ‘trial and error’ method of learning (similar to gameplay), and also noted that students might not attend skills/ICT training because they believe they already have the skills (although 81% of them are self-taught and so don’t know what they don’t know).

In a similar vein, the JISC study of user behaviour in relation to information literacy confirms that some students lack the necessary skills in finding and evaluating information. Interesting though that the fault is not entirely with the students (more on the 'deficit model' of skills 'teaching' later). The report also raises issues (that those of working in HE may be long familiar with) about the design of formal databases and the frustrations with the nature of academic publishing and licensing (particularly around embargoes) that direct students towards ‘easier’ tools like Google Scholar.

In many of these instances, it seems that the formal structures of education are putting up barriers. But it's also very evident that students are finding their own ways around them.

Sugata Mitra image source

Diversion image source

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Thoughts on ALT-C: the lecture is dead/not dead/half-dead/a zombie

2010-09-16T10:27:00.003+01:00

Any report from this conference could not avoid a few notes on Donald Clark’s controversial keynote. Some good points on why sometimes lectures (in particular bad lectures given by academics that are not good at teaching) are a waste of everybody’s time. No news there, although his comments were (I suspect deliberately) quite loaded, and some of the twitter backlash that followed clearly demonstrated that he was not the only one who could make unsubstantiated, unconstructive and emotive statements on the subject.

Here are some of the points I found interesting (some stated and some derived)...

Perhaps we should rename ‘lecturers’ as ‘teachers’ across the board, to help bring about a shift in associations and expectations (or perhaps we should simply be supporting them to teach better).
Perhaps student time might be better spent watching experts who are ‘good’ teachers (e.g. on iTunesU or TED) and spending their contact hours at their own institution in other ways.
Perhaps institutions should stop investing in so many physical teaching spaces that replicate transmissive teaching models.
Perhaps some academic staff would be more effective as pure researchers and should not be required to teach – and vice versa? Although personally I think there is much to be gained from a closer interfacing between teaching and research, there is no doubt that the pressure on academic staff is skewed towards research (publishing) rather than improving teaching. Until we learn to value and celebrate good teaching as we do research, on a broader scale, this won't enable changes at the 'coal face'.

The debate continues on Donald Clark’s blog. The backlash also raised some interesting points – that students expect to be lectured by experts (even that this is part of what they are paying for), that ‘lecturing’ is constantly being developed as part of the ongoing teaching and learning relationship between academics and students, that good lectures should be one element among many in effective teaching and learning, that the inefficacy of lectures may in part be a cultural issue, and some comments on the need to address the barriers of cost and assessment models before radical change can take place. It also sparked a Google docs project on What else can we do with lecture theatres?

If conclusions can be drawn from this, they are not about the role of lectures - there was little consensus beyond the importance of context and the danger of generalisations. I think one possible conclusion must be the value of debate, and how it is enabled and extended by social media. I'm sure there is another possible conclusion to be drawn too, although it might be a little more controversial, and is only really half-formed. The sheer extent of the reaction to the keynote speech surprised me, and because it did, I realised how uncommon it is (I'm not sure even last year's 'VLE is dead' debate stimulated such heat). Regardless of who is 'right' or 'wrong', perhaps there is a point here about how we react to challenges in the field - when was the last time, at ALT-C or any other e-learning type conference, you heard someone say something that you thought was just plain wrong? And what did you do when you did?

Image by Steve Wheeler

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Thoughts on ALT-C: conferences, community and social learning

2010-09-16T10:09:00.003+01:00

This blog was inspired by the Association for Learning Technologists Conference, which was held last week in Nottingham. I've been lucky enough to attend this conference a few times now, and generally write up my notes, for my own reflection (and usually at the request of my line manager!), and this time a few of the things I saw and heard made me decide to put these notes out there to add to the general conversation.

The first of these things was the sheer scale of the conversation. Even from inside the conference, everything I learned was amplified and extended by the online community - by the blog posts, twitter feeds and social networking sites. The conversation was (for the most part) open, friendly, helpful and not intimidating, and IMHO created a genuine atmosphere of sharing, which made it a little ridiculous to think of hundreds of delegates going home and writing separate, private reports of their views on the same things. It also made it clearer than ever that one person's (my) view of the event is a tiny fragment of the whole. Perhaps one way to address this is to put it out there in the context of the whole, rather than siloed in a document on my hard drive.

In a lot of ways, the online 'presence' of the conference reminded me of Chris Anderson's idea of 'crowd accelerated innovation'. In true Amazon style, if you liked Sugata Mitra, you might like this:

This talk has echoes I think of both keynotes (I'm pretty sure I detected some positivity towards TED in Donald Clark's keynote, although others may have interpreted it differently). The power of online content (video or otherwise) and the transformational effects it can have on learners is a message I will take away from ALT-C (and to be honest, is one reason I will keep wanting to go, it's a kind of re-affirmation). Another reason is the ALT-C community itself. Every time, I meet new people with expertise in new areas, and these connections are invaluable in such a fast-moving field where it's impossible for one person to be an expert in everything. Luckily for me, the ALT-C crowd are in my experience genuinely happy to share, and although the conference is perhaps not innovative in itself, the extended community that forms around it has I think the potential to "create an ecosystem from which innovation emerges". So the second reason I'm sharing my notes (although they may not be ground-breaking) is to help "shine a light" on some of the key thinkers and ideas that made an impression on me.

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

They make it look so easy...

2010-09-15T19:05:00.003+01:00

So, I decided to blog.

More on my decision to make my musings public will follow in the next post, but at least part of it is due to the huge amount that I've learned from the blogosphere over the past few years. I must confess, though, that I didn't expect it to be quite such a steep learning curve, and my admiration for those people who share their thoughts on a regular basis has only increased as a result...

The first part of the maze was deciding which tool to use. Let me say first that I am very grateful to all those friendly tweeps who offered suggestions and advice. Let me also say though, that twitter is probably not the best place for a newbie to ask this question. The advice I received was short and to the point, in most cases just names of tools - entirely appropriate to the medium I used to ask the question, which in turn reflected my own perception of my 'web savviness'. Armed only with these suggested brands, and my newbie enthusiasm, I confidently set out into the blogosphere.

The second part of the maze began when I tried to set up a couple of blogs, on different services, to compare them. Not for the first time in my experience of web exploration, I found myself confronted with a whole new language I had never needed before, and a whole new set of decisions to make. Some of these were entirely bewildering even for a seasoned consumer of blogging goodness - do I need a domain, a blogroll, what widgets do I need and in what order? Other decisions, relating to colours and themes and creating an online 'brand', not only made me recognise my own self-consciousness about my web 'presence', but also managed to completely distract me from the task I had set out to achieve (the actual writing...).

In the end, I decided to adopt my usual approach: "get on with it, I can always change it later". I'm sure this approach is probably indicative of my web experience; perhaps it makes me a 'digital native', or maybe a 'digital resident' (more on this later), but it is driven as much by impatience and frustration as by confidence. And as with every really new technology that I try (new to me, that is), this experience has been a humbling reminder of the experiences of the less techy people that I spend my work days trying to support, and of how uncomfortable it is to be the new kid in class.

Image source

This work by Julie Usher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.