NEWSLETTERISSUE 4 - November 2009

Richard Glover recently attended two events hosted by Oxford University at Saïd Business School, Shock of the Old and Beyond Walls. Here’s his account of Shock of the Old.

Shock of the Old 2009 was Oxford’s 8th annual conference on educational technologies, a day packed full of interesting sessions led by academic, technical and support staff. There were 11 sessions throughout the day including keynotes and a Q&A at the end of the day.

It kicked off at 9:45AM with the keynote presentation from Lynne O’Brien, Director of Instructional Technology Innovation at Duke University, USA. Duke started to give their students Apple iPods in the autumn of 2004, departments throughout the University had started to create digital content that would enable students to learn on their own terms and so the Duke Digital Initiative (http://is.gd/4xJI8) was born.

The Duke Digital Initiative enables staff and students to experiment with, develop and implement new and emerging technologies in support of teaching and learning. It has made

available devices such as digital video cameras, high definition video cameras, video editing software, iPods, webcams, screen capture software, tablet PCs and a whole host of other devices to staff and students.

Podcasting became an overnight success at Duke, through the digital initiative staff members at Duke created media rich materials for their students and made it available to them, their languages department in particular being a very big user of the medium. However they found that each discipline used the materials very differently, languages students for example tended to methodically go through resources given to them, medical students however tended to skim through resources only visiting the parts they needed to, a handy reference guide if you like.

Duke also took the step of making much of this material available online to anyone for free. By using the iTunes U (http://is.gd/4xJRp) services offered by Apple, Duke has an online repository known as “Duke on iTunes U” (http://is.gd/4xJTe) where users can browse content uploaded by academics at the University.

Kate Boardman

Shock of the Old | Beyond Walls

The challenges faced by Duke were varied, to create rich content, to deliver materials when needed and in a format likely to be used, working with publishers on providing portable versions of their content and planning for the archiving and searching of materials. Institutional innovation was also a challenge, to energise this Duke has integrated technology in to existing work flows and pedagogy. They have kept the barrier for experimentation low to encourage adoption of the initiative and they are honest about their success and failure (http://is.gd/4xJWq).

Ricardo Kompen from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Richard Mobbs from the University of Leicester talked about Web 2.0 based Personal Learning Environments. Initial investigation into PLEs came about because of their dissatisfaction with existing VLEs, high infrastructure costs, poor use of provided tools and limited interaction were all factors. After talking to students they gathered that they were unhappy with institutional VLEs because the tools the students used were not under their control and they were told what they can and cannot do with them. Using the PLE approach gave the students back control over their approach to learning.

They came up with 4 routes to explore for a PLE, Wiki-based, Social Network-based, Start Page-based and Browser-based. Wiki based although named after wikis also included the use of tools such as Picasa, Google Docs, GDrive and Blogger as well as wikis. Social Network based was heavily centred on sites like Facebook and MySpace but also used tools such as YouTube, CourseFeed, GMail, Flickr, tagging, simple RSS and wikis. Start Page based took an aggregated approach like NetVibes, allowing the students to pull in data from different feeds into one page that they organised

however they liked. Browser based used the Flock web browser which integrates social networking and sharing through its in-built media tools.

The 1st phase of the project introduced students to Web 2.0 tools, Twitter was used for class communication and within 2 weeks it overtook e-mail and instant messaging. Students also started to use Twitter outside of the classroom and used it to organise their social lives. “Team Tools” such as Podcasts, screencasts and free wiki tools were then introduced along with individual tools such as Clippers, Jooce, g.ho.st and FriendFeed.

27 out of 33 students adopted Twitter as their main communications tool after 3 weeks, 25 of the students submitted Web 2.0 connectivity diagrams, almost all had the PLE centred around themselves.

Josie Fraser, ALT Learning Technologist of the Year presented “Digital Literacy: The new challenge for HE” explaining that Digital Literacy can easily be explored using a distributed model, the use of Web 2.0 tools creates a low cost entry point.

Most users are not concerned about the amount of information about themselves that is online. For example people often misjudged the number of people who could see images they uploaded to the Internet, especially on services such as MySpace or Facebook. A lot of the time the default privacy settings do not protect the users content, this is also the same for Twitter, users often don’t realised that anything they tweet unless specifically marked as protected is added to the public timeline which is searchable. Exploring this can yield interesting results, try searching Twitter for “Drunk” or “Stoned“.

In stark contrast having no information about yourself online can be a disadvantage. Employers now routinely search the Internet for information on candidates to see how they conduct themselves outside of work. The Internet can be a very good forum to promote work that you do and activities you take part in, but if they can’t see anything about you there will always be other candidates that do have information available online, hopefully good and not bad! Think about all the tweets, blog posts, forum posts, posts to mailing lists that are now archived online and your wikipedia edits, how much of a digital trail do you leave and should we be teaching our students about how to manage this properly?

Blackboard Workshops

DEC

EMBE

R 2 2pm - 4pm Distance Leanring

JAN

UA

RY

13 2pm - 4pm Scholar & Social Bookmarking

20 2pm - 4pm Surveys, Tests & Assignments

All of these sessions are for M701b which means there will be 14 spaces available per session.

To book a place email clqe-workshops@tees.ac.uk

Shock of the old continued....

DEC

EMBE

R 2 2pm - 4pm Distance Leanring

JAN

UA

RY

13 2pm - 4pm Scholar & Social Bookmarking

20 2pm - 4pm Surveys, Tests & Assignments

E@T Lunches

Lunch provided (booking required) To book a place email clqe-workshops@tees.ac.uk

All sessions are followed by a stay and play workshop where the E-learning Team can help you try these out for yourselves. Book workshop separately

9 DECEMBER 2009SecondLife

13 JANUARY 2009.................

Podcasts|Student Support TipsWelcome week is over in a blur. How much gets remembered from it? There is so much information thrown at students that we can hardly expect them to keep up with it. Nor to take in all the material we give them in printed form, nor, if we’re honest, for them to file that printed mass into easily retrievable order for when they do need to find deadline details or mits forms. And we’d like people to be able to get supportive ideas throughout the year. So Dr Diane Nutt, Head of Retention, has been creating a series of podcasts for new students, to cover a range of info from what to expect on arrival at university to what is a lecture through to making friends and managing money. These are being drip-fed into Blackboard into the New Students Start Here site, but we shall look to bring them somewhere more central in order for students to refer back to them whenever they like. Perhaps we shall look at iTunesU, following the examples Richard mentioned in his write-up of Shock of the Old.

In fact we’re going to ramp up the amount of podcasts available after Christmas in lots of areas. Diane has proved a natural, so we’re going to get her to record lots more guidance on some of the other areas that she has expertise in so that we will have lots of short audio that you can listen to while sorting out your email. We’ll also expand this to the wider L&T development team, so you can look forward to some podcasts on RIT and curriculum planning as well.

Lots of people twitter at Teesside. We haven’t yet come across anyone who is using it directly in a teaching situation, although this doesn’t mean that people aren’t but just not telling us. (If you are, please do!) There are a few people looking into possibilities and some staff attended a lunchtime workshop this term. Use it for what? Well yes, you could create a backchannel of commentary on a lecture, but we understand you might be uncomfortable about that, although if could provide the chance for real-time questions to be asked for clarification and understanding. But more creative uses might be for example for design students to go out and photograph things for discussions on ‘street furniture’ which can be sent via twitter into an aggregated collection in Blackboard. Adding a twitter feed to Bb modules is really easy with the ‘Add RSS Feed’ under the More button in the edit view. Here, as well as your own or your students’ updates, you can bring in dynamic content from individuals or organisations which are relevant to your modules. As well as their own updates, many professionals also now tweet events, identified by # tags, so you could feed in combined streams without having to search for individual contributors. You could also use tagging to define a tweet as relevant to a particular module and then feed them to different Bb sites.

We know twitter is easy enough for everyone to use. And we know many of you are twitterers. So the next time you share a link or have a discussion about a news item relevant to your professional practice, think about whether your could be including the students in that conversation and critical engagement. Twitter might not be for teaching in 140 character lecture notes, but it might be a great way to prompt research-informed teaching by bringing your field to the students

TWITTER

If you have any queries, suggestions or comments please do not hesitate to contact the E-learning Team

elearning@tees.ac.uk

created by Jennifer Gutridge - E-learning Team

I recently led a workshop as part of the E@T Lunch series. In this session, attended by approximately fifteen colleagues, I presented the use of an exciting online software that had been introduced to me earlier in the year by Kate Boardman, head of E-Learning in CLQE. The technology is called Screenr and it enables users to create five-minute screen casts where the content on the screen of your PC is recorded along with any audio content you may wish to add.

My exploration into the world of Screenr started when I was seeking a medium to guide and signpost students through issues relating to induction and transition. I wanted to publish information via a Blackboard site called New Students Start Here which has been designed by Paul Pinkney from the E-Learning team in CLQE. In the past I had used podcasts for similar purposes but I wanted future presentations to be more visually stimulating for students. I found Screenr to be an excellent way to get my message across and by using PowerPoint slides with commentary I was able to get lots of information across to students on a very focussed topic. I then created a series of bite size micro-lectures related to transition that students could access through links in blackboard and that they could download and view through their iphone or pc if necessary.

It may seem that five minutes is quite limiting in terms of the scope but the more I use this software the more I see a short period of time get my message across in advantageous. Having such a short recording time really helps me to focus on what the exact message is I want to get across to students. I think it also helps to discriminate between what students can take from lectures and a seminar sessions and what they get from these screen casts. For projects requiring casts of greater than five the University does have licences for bespoke software but this is less accessible and requires booking of appropriate software and laptops which is not very convenient when you have an idea that needs to be made available to students immediately.

Since making the initial microlectures I found several more uses for this software. I have created several user guides for my students such as how to find journal articles for a modules I run. I found this was really complimentary to the central guides offered by the Library. If fact I was able to show the students on a Screenr screen cast where to find the Library user guides by directing them from the University homepage to the appropriate pages via the link the Library homepage. I have also developed short user guides to equipment and procedures the students will use

in laboratory sessions as part of their course. The Screen cast has the advantage of being able to show the students how to perform such procedures as well as provide verbal and written guidance. I have also developed interim tutorials to keep students on the right track in terms of study in between lectures and seminars. Using a Screencast to provide a summary of a previous session I have then provided tasks, questions and reading students should consider ahead of forthcoming sessions. I think this has been a really useful addition to keeping in touch with students in between sessions.

Using the software and recording your voice can be rather frightening at first and when I first used the it I became frustrated at having to re-record the screen cast because I had fluffed my lines. However, I eventually developed a strategy involving a bit more preparation and prompts on a sheet of paper in front of me that has help me become a one take wonder- well most of the time anyway. The beauty of Screenr is its simplicity. In just seven minutes I can record a screen cast and have it published and a link placed on Blackboard for the students to access. It is simple to use, simple to publish and simple for the students to access. The other great thing about this software is that it is absolutely free! All a user needs to do open an account to be able to store your completed screen casts. You can do this by going to screenr.com. Using Screenr has really provided a really useful tool to my teaching toolbox. Should you wish to discuss the use of this software further you can contact me at m.portas@tees.ac.uk

Matt Portas lectures in Sport and Exercise in SSSL and is a University Associate Teaching Fellow

Student Support Screencast