All posts for the month February, 2009

Future of learning vs IT Services, Round 1

I just came across a very nice online photo editor and I thought I would share it with everyone here:

http://www.pixlr.com/

It does all that Photoshop&Co do – quickly, for free and without asking you to install any software on your machine. And it’s extremely user-friendly. Cute, humble and powerful.

There is the sheer joy of being able to cut off with great precision someone’s head in a photograph and place it where nature never intended it to be (on a bookshelf since you ask) in a jiffy. And then there is the joy of being able to do it without having to go through the hassle of negotiating with the IT services to install a piece of software that you want to try out but which is not on their list of vetted and endorsed technologies. Recap: If I wanted to edit an image to use for educational purposes on my university machine it would have taken me a day on average to get the software installed. The pricetag would have included the cost of the time of the IT person who would be dealing with my call, the cost of my time, the cost of the hard-drive space the software would have taken on my university-purchased computer and the price of the license for that proprietary software. Multiply this pricetag by the number of employees and students in a university and the average number of IT support calls related to software needs and the result can be an awful lot of money. So what if online tools like the one above proliferate? And educators and learners start using them? Money will be freed, yes. But also – there will be freedom. Freedom to find and use whichever creative tool you need in order to turn your ideas into educational content – the way you and your students want it, when you want it. And did I mention that the smart people at Pixlr have included APIs (the possibility for developers not associated with the Pixlr to create add-ons and little programmes, thus enhancing what Pixlr can do). The future of learning? To me the above is an example of what is to come…

 

Sandra, 26th of Feb 2009, BDRA

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 26, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 26, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/future-of-learning-vs-it-services-round-1/

Podcasting is still hot today

I attended the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes Special Interest Group (PPP SIG ) meeting at Leicester yesterday. Podcasting is not a new and emerging technology any more for HE. It’s becoming a more established and stable technology. However, it is still hot!

Attendees at the meeting were from academic development and support background, and they talked about their observations and statistics from their institutions that show the enthusism shown by their academic colleageus towards podcasting in 2008.

Another interesting thing I noted was that the PPP SIG will be producing a book on podcasting. At the moment, they’re still in the process of planning and calling for contributions. But I can see some differences between their podcasting book and ours. Our book took a case-study approach, and theirs have a different focus. For example, there will be some historical review on media enhanced pedagogy. Some chapter(s) will use a synthesised approach, for example, comparing audio and video, and some chapter(s) will focus on new dimensions of using podcast, for example, digital media assignment.

I noted that the participants were interested in using podcasting to provide audio feedback. I heard lots of examples of that particular approach yesterday. Chrissi talked about an audio feedback workshop offered by Academic Development University of Sunderland (http://audiofeedback.wetpaint.com/). They began the workshop with an activity – to draw a portrait of the colleague next to you, and to give feedback to each other. Without any prompt,  people started giving vocal feedback. They tried to use this activity to show people how natural it is to use audio to convey feedback. Their effort was well received at Sunderland. Now, the Psychology department provided audio feedback for all level 2 modules.

Claire from Reading talked about their experience of providing audio feedback to student assessment. There are three pieces of written assessments. They provided traditional written feedback to the 1st written work, a generic audio feedback plus written feedback to the 2nd assessed work, and individual audio feedback plus written feedback to the 3rd written work. In this case, written feedback was not completely discarded or replaced by audio feedback. Instead, the audio feedback was used to complement the written feedback through the re-phrasing, re-formulation and giving more details. Students loved the audio feedback. They found it very friendly, personal. One said that it felt like having a secret conversation with the tutor. However, at the same time, none of them say they don’t like written feedback! For the international students, there is a divide, depending on the background of students. The Arabic students love the audio feedback, whereas the Korean and Chinese students don’t like it very much! The international dimension is very interesting. Of course, it’s probably too soon to make any generalization about it. Staff are convinced the value of audio feedback, however, some felt exhausted because it takes time to produce the audio feedback. This is again, very interesting, because other people found providing audio feedback time-saving.

The discussion and debate about audio feedback brings out new dimensions to think about:
• Integration: replacement or complement
• Investment: time consuming or saving
• International dimension: how to engage international students

Ming Nie, 25 Feb 2009

1 Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 25, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 25, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/podcasting-is-still-hot-today/

Making teaching and learning environmentally friendly

Over the past years I have been quite interested and intrigued about the technological advances in space exploration. My keen interest started when I watched a television programme by Dr Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicists and co-founder of string field theory, on parallel universe. Last Saturday, I decided to take my children to the National Space Centre in Leicester to round off the half-term. Whilst there, my attention was drawn by one of my children to a notice that said “In the next fifty years we would be living in space”. My son asked if this is true, and if so what will happen to this beautiful world. I responded by saying, well I don’t know? No, wait a minute, maybe I do; would environmental pollution have rendered the earth uninhabitable? 

Sadly, sources of environmental pollution have been traced to Higher Education, around energy use connected with heating and lighting for large lecture halls, carbon emission associated with ICT, waste production including paper and equipment disposal and physical infrastructure using materials which are not environmentally friendly.

Can we as academics create learning futures whose values, principles and practices lead to sustainable development in all aspects of education? The time to act is now!

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 25, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged , , ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 25, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/making-teaching-and-learning-environmentally-friendly/

Old dog learning new tricks

This old dog is a day late and hasn’t followed the rules. All the same, this blog is a great opportunity to see what other younger dogs are thinking about and what tricks they’re getting up to.

My own thoughts have been wandering round the issue of whether and how e-learning will be sustained in our global society of the year 2050 (or, if you like, 2100). It seems to me that the shortages of energy, water and fertile land may by that time render e-learning either absolutely essential or somewhat fragmentary or both. Being a prophet is a job for a madman or a fool, so I don’t want to be either. Instead, I feel some affinity with James Lovelock, who combines hope with pessimism.

E-learning is the only solution on the horizon that would enable higher education to continue when campuses have been abandoned. Its excellence needs to increase: being robbed of face-to-face human contact is a high price for teachers and learners to
have to pay. Can virtual systems improve sufficiently? I hope to learn new tricks as they do.

Like John Fothergill, I’d like to add a joke at the end, but that will have to wait until next time.

David

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 23, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged , ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 23, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/old-dog-learning-new-tricks/

Venture Capital for Higher Education?

What’s next? What are the possibilities opened up by innovation and technology trends for the immediate future?

An audience of more than 100 gathered on Friday 20th of Feb at the London Technology Summit 2009 http://www.londontechnologysummit.com/ to hear what CEOs from businesses like Amazon, Vodafone, Cisco, Google and McKinsey think about the future.

I went, curious to see whether education would be mentioned at any time during the debates. My hopes were high, since the audience consisted overwhelmingly of students and the event was organised by the Tech Club of the London Business School – surely someone would discuss the future of education I thought. The students, because of the importance of education for their future job prospects and the Big Guns CEOs because education determines what the workforce and customers that generate their profits will be like.

Well, whatever the hundred plus audience thought mattered, it was not education. Perhaps because they, as students of mostly elite universities, took it for granted; or thought they would be out of university by the time change happened; or maybe because they believed that change in education was something beyond their control that would happen anyway. The few times education came into the discussions were in relation to the ways in which technology opened up opportunity for delivering education in developing countries and emerging markets. While everyone was enthusiastic about the idea of children in Africa learning through their mobile phones, no one seemed to consider the possibility of the same learning innovation happening at the Said Business School in Oxford.

I managed to elbow my way to several of the speakers, surrounded by young people eager to get their hands on some VIP business cards. I asked what changes they anticipated technology to bring to education. They startled, paused and gave me a safely vague response.

Puzzled, I cornered a young venture capitalist from a leading firm (a very leading firm it is indeed) dealing with web innovations, and asked him if there were any interesting start-ups bringing new technologies to education. He wiggled a bit and then said “Not really, but then, there are no money to be made in education really, so why would anyone invest efforts to do things differently there?” I wanted to say “Ha, matey, how wrong you are!” but then I thought “Do I have evidence to the contrary?”

At a forum populated by people, whose decision-making is all about questions like “What are the costs?”, “How big is the market?”, “How to monetize this?”, does higher education have the answers? If someone wants to invest in an innovation for mobile phones, they can easily find information about what the market in mobile phones is like, was like in the past and perhaps (but very cautiously these days) what it will be like in the future. The boom in innovation in technology is enabled by the emergence and flourishing of a market for technological innovations. Markets however exist and perform their magic for spiriting in innovations only if they have information. What is necessary to enable people external to higher education to invest into innovations in higher education? Perhaps digging up and feeding into the innovation markets information about the possibilities to make money while helping education grow. Or, oops, was that an inappropriate thing to say? Venture capitalism in higher education? Still, the food offered at the summit consisted mainly of digestive biscuits, so instead I returned with some food for thought:
•    Is making money out of investment in higher education technology and start ups a bad thing?
•    What will encourage people to invest and universities to accept their investment?
•    What information is necessary and how to make it available?
•    Are there regular sources of information about the annual spending on technology and web services by universities in the UK? Compared to the US for example? By segments and trends?
•    Do we know how much do students today spend on personal technology? How much are their prepared to spend for technology and web services enabling their studies at university? Do institutions underestimate students willingness to buy their own learning gadgets?

And what about the questions with which the Technology Summit started – what’s next? What will the future for technology be like? Well – whatever we make it.

Sandra Romenska

1 Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 22, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 22, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/venture-capital-for-higher-education/

Do. Or do not… there is no try. Or is there?

It is with these words that Yoda inspires the brash Luke Skywalker to master the Force and become a Jedi knight. How might they work, I ask, when applied to learning technologies and their uptake by academics?
Like the severe challenges that Yoda poses to Luke – challenges of the will and body, more challenges than Luke had ever faced before – helped mould a reckless youth into a Jedi knight, academics in Higher Education face a range of internal and external obstacles in their day-to-day work, before even engaging with learning technologies.
These challenges range from making sense of wider, sectoral issues like student retention and ever shifting, government education policies, to more ‘at home’ issues like meeting research and recruitment targets, battling institutional cultures and keeping up with the ‘state-of-the-art-knowledge’ in their chosen disciplines.
An earlier post to this blog suggested that there is a widespread but misinformed trend among academics of converting Word Documents to PDFs, putting them into a VLE and declaring that they have come to terms with learning technologies and that they are ‘do e-learning’. The author, rightly, declared these approaches to be wrong!
Is there then a case for academics to ‘unlearn’ their preconceptions?
When asked to raise his sunken craft from the Dagobah swamps with the power of his mind alone, Luke responded he would try. ‘No,’ chided Yoda … ‘Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try’.
Luke did not believe the Force could lift such a massive object. He was proven wrong when Yoda telekinetically lifted the X-wing fighter and placed it on dry land. Again, Luke was incredulous. And Yoda, pointed out that he failed because he did not believe.
The challenge is to get academics to believe in learning technologies and commit to their use in learning and teaching. But unlike Luke, they HAVE TO TRY it first. The thought of University academics transforming their courses en masse, with learning technologies overnight – and unlearning the experience of several millennia worth of face-to-face teaching is barely credible.
So beware of the Yoda who prophesizes that unlearning will be easy. Easy not it will be!

Jaideep Mukherjee, 20 Feb 2009

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 20, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged , , ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 20, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try-or-is-there/

Tactile Thinking

For a number of years I have been interested in the idea of students developing tactile thinking skills to explore relationships and narratives, both individually and as a group. I have previously used the idea of StoryCubes in the Primary School Classroom and more recently Virtual StoryCubes in Second Life with students from London South Bank University as part of the MOOSE project.

Now a new tool could be on the market soon that will combine these ideas with more advanced applications in Web2.0 and Cloud Computing – known as Siftables:

Here are some ideas of how you might use tactile thinking with your students:

  • as a brainstorming tool to help people share and discuss ideas;
  • as an evaluation tool;
  • to help students collaborate on group work, enhance negotiation and debating skills and develop tactile and spatial construction skills;
  • in community projects for intergenerational work – helping people see each others’ perspectives on shared issues;
  • for storyboarding: to help organise storylines for writing, animations or films.

Now imagine the future and opportunities with Siftables!

 

 

Matthew Wheeler

Keeper of the Media Zoo

Cubes being developed @ LSBU

Virtual StoryCubes @ LSBU

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/tactile-thinking/

An encounter with an e-book reader

Last week I was on the train to London (to attend a conference at the University of London).  As I was looking around for a seat (no chance, of course!), I saw, as usual, mobile phones and iPods everywhere. Then I saw one person glued to his Sony e-book reader. The device has a brown leather case, so if I hadn’t seen one before I wouldn’t have known what it was. I saw a couple more e-book readers on the tube later on.

I think it won’t be too long before e-book readers claim a space in our jackets, handbags, rucksacks etc.

I had my own experience with an e-book reader last night. I managed to read a 65 page document (all of it!) on a Sony e-book reader. I didn’t feel much of a difference between reading the text on paper (except that I saved 65 pages of printing paper)!

E-book readers have a lot to contribute to distance and mobile learners; and their access to learning and reference material. The Duckling project (one of BDRA’s animals) has several trials going on with e-book readers for distance learning – so we’ll have a lot to report in the coming months on this. Watch this space!

E-book readers will become more popular with the average reader (I mean those who are not the ‘early adopter technophile’ type), as the manufacturers of e-book readers improve the technology, according to an article in the Economist (‘Well read’, Feb 14th 2009. pp. 73 – 74). With devices that can be connected to the internet wirelessly, and with dedicated book / paper downloading services (similar to Apple’s iTunes) becoming available, we’ll be looking at distance and mobile learners reaping the beneficial effects of this new mobile device. We’ll be looking at the ‘iPod moment’ of the text.

Palitha Edirisingha (BDRA, 19th Feb 2009)

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 19, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/an-encounter-with-an-e-book-reader/

The BDRA animal kingdom

Over the past 3 years we’ve seen many research bids go in. We have had many successes. We’ve seen several projects start and end. We’ve got better at things. We’ve helped others to change and we’ve changed ourselves. We recognise that there’s a lot of learning to be done, not least by ourselves – which makes this adventure exciting and rewarding.

What once was a modest enclosure with a couple of tame animals in it has grown bigger and more widely known, with a number of wild beasts yet to be fully understood. This animal kingdom will no doubt continue to grow in the future.

As internal and external partnerships flourish, as we look for new research opportunities and as we disseminate what we learn, let us continue to make teaching and learning better, and let us all enjoy the process of research and enhancement.

A. Armellini

Leave a Comment
by ILI Leicester on February 18, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged , , ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 18, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/35/

The First Graduate of the Learning Futures Academy

The time has come… and I am on my way.

It is with a bank of enjoyable experiences and great memories that I exit my role as a Learning Technologist at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance. I very much intend stay involved in Beyond Distance’s activities and continue to contribute to the Blog (Lucky you!). Also, I depart Beyond Distance with the self-proclaimed title of the ‘First Graduate Learning Futures Academy’.

The Learning Futures Academy (LFA) is something you will certainly hear a lot about over the next few years, through the CALF and other Beyond Distance projects. The LFA is not a physical entity (yet!), but more an approach or state of mind. Therefore, as I move on to pastures new, although not that ‘new’ as I am still going to be with the University! I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on my experiences and LFA state of mind.

Going back three years when I joined Beyond Distance as a former Secondary level Physics teacher, with miniscule pedagogical knowledge and some experience of face-to-face teaching, but equipped with variety of ICT skills. However I since discovered, from my Beyond Distance experiences and LFA state of mind; it’s not skills you have. It is what you do with them that counts.

 

The most important thing that underpins the use of learning technologies is the process of putting ‘research into practice’. This – however – is an overused, and even abused, phrase. However it is fundamentally important to be successful in education and especially learning technology. The practice of converting Word Documents to PDFs, put them into a VLE and hey presto you’re doing e-learning … just doesn’t work.

 

To do e-learning effectively you need to engage learners in activities and this can only truly be achieved by using appropriate and innovative technologies. You could always start with a learning design that follows a tried and tested pedagogical model, which is informed by high quality research carried out at Beyond Distance. It is for this key reason that I will forever endeavour to keep my ties with Beyond Distance as they will continue to inform most things that I will be working on in my new role.

 

What about the technology, then … I hear you ask.

 

Even in the three years that I have been with Beyond Distance there has been a dramatic shift in technologies, not to mention the accompanying terminologies! When I arrived, the term Web 2.0 was the buzzword with new, whizz-bang technologies like Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts, and the challenge was to deploy them effectively. Within three years the term ‘Web 2.0’ has morphed into ‘Cloud Computing’ and the key skill that most crave has become managing personal data, learning and even friends/colleagues which are spread all over the web on a range of social networking sites and learning environments. The challenge is staying on top of all manner of accounts and services you are already using and keeping up with new and emerging technologies. The insider tip I can suggest is that you design, create and manage a Personalised Learning Environment for yourself. As Darth Vader said… ‘The Force is strong with this one’.

 

So there we go… three years in eight paragraphs. I promise that will be my last ‘looking-back’ blog post and from here on, I will only look to the future.

 

It was the philosopher Maximus Decimus Meridius (i.e. Russell Crowe in Gladiator, for the uninitiated) who said ‘what we do in life echoes in eternity’. And what I read from this is that we need to make our choices carefully and these can only be informed by experience. Also … shouting very loudly, helps!

 

And finally, here’s another gem from the legend that is Maximus, to help you on your way… ‘At my signal, unleash hell’!

 

Matthew Mobbs

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 Comments
by ILI Leicester on February 17, 2009  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged ,

Posted by ILI Leicester on February 17, 2009

http://beyonddistance.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/the-first-graduate-of-the-learning-futures-academy/

« Older Posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 503 other followers

%d bloggers like this: