Category Archives: twitter

altc2007, altc2010, altc2023, twitter

Which talk, presentation, workshop or person do you remember from previous ALT Conferences and why?

1 Comment

James Clay talking at ALT-C

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q6 Which talk, presentation, workshop or person do you remember from previous ALT Conferences and why?

There are quite a few keynotes, presentations and workshops across the twenty odd years I have been attending the ALT Conference that stick in my mind. Some that I participated in probably stick in my mind the most.

There is one talk though that has stuck in my mind and even many years later was from ALT-C 2020 and was given by Dave White.

“Sailing against the trade winds? How online distance learning could help maintain the character of higher education in stormy seas.” Invited speaker session by David White, Senior Manager: Development with Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) at the University of Oxford

The talk by Dave followed the infamous keynote from Donald Clark about HE lectures. Donald Clark had opened the conference with his keynote, and riled people and annoyed them with a blanket attack on the lecture. What Donald Clark did was to challenge our perception of the lecture, and it appeared to me that the over-whelming consensus of the audience was that the lecture still had some place in the delivery of education.

Dave with his extensive experience with TALL at the University of Oxford certainly well qualified to understand the benefits and limitations of online delivery. However he discussed during his talk the importance of the social benefit that physical lectures provide for a community of learners. The phrase he used, which I have borrowed numerous times, was eventedness. The synergy and social impact that happens when a group of people come together physically for an in-person experience This is though not impossible to recreate online, is very challenging.

This was something that came up again and again in our research during the covid pandemic, talking to students about their digital and online experiences. The students often spoke about how they missed the lecture, digging deeper it was apparent that what they were missed was the eventedness of that in-person lecture, and this wasn’t being recreated online in the Zoom and Teams calls they were attending. As Dave said in 2010, recreating that eventedness online isn’t impossible, but it is very challenging, and it isn’t about creating a digital copy of the analogue physical experience. You have to do different things to build that community taking advantage of the affordances that online and digital can bring, making the most of asynchronous discussion for example.

The presentation from Dave is the talk that I remember most from the ALT Conference. I should add that the Web 2.0 Slam sessions from 2007 and beyond were a very close second.

altc2023, twitter

What would be one piece of advice you’d give yourself in the past about learning technology?

Leave a comment
Group working
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q5 What would be one piece of advice you’d give yourself in the past about learning technology?

It’s always about the people. Always.

With technology it is easy to focus sometimes on the hardware, the software, the shiny.

When discussing learning technology about their experiences with technology, I often found that whilst my peers were messing about with computers in the 1980s, I ignored the Commodore VIC-20 we got as a family Christmas present and was more interested in other stuff. Really didn’t see the point of computers, apart from playing the occasional game.

For me technology was a solution to a different problem.

Being able to create edit a document, rather than using a typewriter, well WordPerfect was perfect for that. The problem was that I wanted to create something, and WordPerfect allowed me to do that. Looking at cashflow forecasts, Lotus 1-2-3 meant that I could make quick changes to the forecast and the spreadsheet would automatically recalculate the cashflow forecast. If I wanted to add graphics and pictures to a document, something like PagePlus would allow me to do that so much more easily.

One thing I did discover as I started to use technology more and more, was that there were people who were interested in the technology and what it could do. However, there were a lot more people who were not interested in the technology, but were interested in something else, and once they recognised how technology could enhance what they were doing, or make it easier, or make it faster.

That really became my focus, working with people on their challenges, problems, and issues; then seeing if technology could make a difference.

altc2023, twitter

Which ‘next big thing’ that didn’t quite take off do you most remember?

1 Comment
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash
Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q4 Which ‘next big thing’ that didn’t quite take off do you most remember?

I probably have a list….

PLEs

MOOCs

OER

Second Life

There was often a lot of excitement about these technologies, but they never had that big impact that people thought they would.

For those of us involved in extreme e-learning or technology enhanced learning, we sometimes focus on the innovative, the exciting, the new, the shiny stuff. Well it’s where we want to be isn’t it, cutting edge and all that? We want to be using iPads, Android Tablets, the latest and best Web 2.0 tools and services. We get so excited at times that we even do projects and research on them, before writing it up, putting the stuff on a shelf and moving to the next new shiny thing.

So thinking about this tweet I was trying to think of something that did take off….

Probably PowerPoint. The use of email is another thing that did take off.

The main reason why these technologies are important is that the majority of practitioners within an institution will not be at the cutting edge, will not be using all technologies innovatively. This means when planning training and staff development it is vital that dull technologies are included and allowed for. Just because we are bored with something doesn’t mean that someone else in your organisation will find it exciting and just the thing to solve the particular problem they are facing.

Dull as in not shiny rather than, dull as in boring.

altc2023, gloucestershire college, twitter

What’s been your biggest achievement in learning technology to date and why?

Leave a comment
Gloucestershire College
Gloucestershire College by James Clay

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q3 What’s been your biggest achievement in learning technology to date and why?

I wrote this on the Twitter

I still think what I did at Gloucestershire College in changing the culture and approach to the use of technology in the organisation. Approaching it from a holistic whole college approach. Lots of small steps from everyone. Anchoring the change.

I wrote about this in a blog post called: Why does no one care about my digital strategy?

At Gloucestershire College I was asked and I delivered a digital learning strategy, well back then it was called the Information and Learning Technology or ILT strategy. Historically it had come about because of funding from Becta to colleges was given on the basis of colleges writing an ILT strategy. This was often distinct from the IT strategy. The IT strategy was usually focused on the technical infrastructure to support the college business, whereas the ILT strategy was focused on the embedding of technology into teaching and learning. What often happened though was that both strategies weren’t linked together and weren’t always linked to the corporate strategy, of if they were those linkages weren’t always clear. The end result was that sometimes these strategies were at odds with each other.You had an ILT strategy was advocating a student BYOD policy and the IT strategy was clear that non-organisation devices could not be connected to the wireless network. It wasn’t just the IT strategy, I am aware of heated discussions between managers, where the ILT strategy was advocating a student BYOD policy and the Estates strategy was clear that non-organisation devices could not be plugged into the power sockets.

I also wrote this tweet.

Too often I see pilots, limited projects, small scale approaches, champions, and so on. When it comes to embedding digital technology, I approached it from an all-college approach. Everyone doing one small thing has more impact that one person.

Over the years I have written about the problems of having a pilot mentality.

How many pilots do we need? Or is it more a question that we need to run a pilot at our institution before we think about “rolling” it out across all curriculum areas. I am also aware of successful pilots in one curriculum area which have been followed by virtually identical pilots in a second curriculum area… Why? Well the learners are different! Really! How different, they have two heads or something? That actually raises a question on any pilot, well successful pilots have resulted in a roll out across the whole institution?

Much of what I experienced and learnt at Gloucestershire College, as well as other experiences and my work at Jisc, is feeding into my ALT-C presentation next week.

altc2023, ipad, twitter

If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change in learning technology?

Leave a comment
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q2 If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change in education / learning technology?

What has always frustrated me has been the focus on consumer technology fads or jumping on the latest bandwagon.

A simple example, tablets have been around since 1973, but no one really got engaged with them until 2010 when Apple released the iPad.

The focus was always on the hardware, not how they could be used.

You still see this today with edtech companies, who talk about the features of the technologies, and less on how it actually helps and supports learning.

Of course the way in which the iPad was (and still is) marketed, actually is often less about the technology, but much more about how it can enhance and improve what you do. I want to watch a film, the iPad allows me to do that at a time and place that suits me.

If I had a magic wand, I would really like people to focus on the potential and possibilities of technology and then focus on what they are doing, and then working out how technology could improve, enhance, or enable that. This isn’t about putting the pedagogy first, this is about the context of the role of technology in supporting teaching and learning. Often you need to know about, and understand the potential of technology, but it is the pedagogical challenges that need to be prioritised, then think about how technology can make that happen.

The other aspect of the frustration of following fashion, is when people don’t understand the research and work that has been in place already.

Like many people in the 2000s I was looking at how mobile technologies could be used to support teaching and learning. I was using Compaq (later HP) iPAQs for doing stuff.

Compaq iPAQ
AssetBurned, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These were Windows CE devices that actually could do quite a few things, but the lack of connectivity, storage capacity meant they had limitations. However the potential of these meant that when a device like the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad came along, the experience of those using devices like the iPAQ could be transferred to using these newer more powerful devices.

The reality was that more often than not, the lessons learned using these earlier devices was ignored and then the research and understanding was duplicated, again and again.

altc2023, twitter

What was your first experience of learning technology in a work setting?

1 Comment

Expanding on the ALT-C #LTHEChat

On Wednesday 30th August there was an #LTHEChat hosted by the ALT-C 2023 co-chairs, Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps.

LTHEchat will host a summer special chat led by #altc23 Conference Chairs Santanu Vasant and Lawrie Phipps. Dual hashtags will be used #altc23 and #LTHEchat. This special summer special takes a look back at 30 years of educational technology as the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) celebrates 30 years, as do Jisc, and the Staff and Educational Developers Association (SEDA). Educational or Learning Technologies have shaped higher education, especially in recent years during the pandemic, but the history of educational technology goes way back. In this LTHEchat, we ask you to remember your first experiences of learning technology in a work setting, what learning technology might be, if we had unlimited financial resources, what new ‘next big things’ didn’t take off and what do you remember from previous ALT Conferences?

I had initially planned to participate, but in the end, I went to the cinema instead.

So the following morning I did some responses to the prompts from the chat. I thought though I would expand on some of my answers to the different questions in a blog post to go beyond the character limit on the Twitter.

As a result I have written six different blog posts.

Q1 What was your first experience of learning technology in a work setting?

This was a bit of a challenge to answer as I have been working in this field for over twenty years, and before that I was an academic using learning technology, and before that I was working in schools supporting teachers.

I wrote this on the Twitter.

How do you define learning technology? I used a laptop in 1992 to create learning materials using Aldus PageMaker. Does that count? I also remember the solitary 286 PC and dot matrix printer we had for the whole department in 1994.

I had been working in a school creating resources and I borrowed the headteacher’s laptop to create content. Eventually I was given my own laptop. In the main I used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but also did content using Aldus Pagemaker.

I remember how powerful WordPerfect 5.1 was, of course being a DOS based piece of software, it wasn’t WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and I remember pressing the keystrokes for the print preview quite a bit to check the page was looking as I needed it.

There were plenty of keyboard shortcuts that you had to use (no mouse or button bars here).

I also used WordPerfect at (what was then) Brunel College. I was in the Faculty of Business, Food and Hairdressing and initially we had a single 286 PC that we all had to share. It did’t really help that the only printer we had was a dot matrix printer that didn’t really do the job.

So, like many academics of the time, I used my home PC and also bought a budget laser printer to print things off.

I did add another post to the Twitter thread.

Later that decade we had a luggable projector and screen, which I remember heaving to my classroom and connecting my home PC tower, so I could show video using a Rainbow Runner video card embedded into a presentation.

I would on a regular basis bring my home PC into work to show off presentations.

I was reminded writing this blog post that I did this back in 2021, my edtech journey.

One of the most influential pieces of software I used back in the 1990s was PagePlus, a budget DTP software for Windows.

I was using technology to support learning, was this a learning technology? Is using standard business hardware and software something different to hardware and software for learning?

If this was technology that was specific to education was probably the FirstClass LMS in the late 1990s. That was my first introduction to a virtual learning environment.

twitter, weeknotes

Twitter is dead – Weeknote #234 – 25th August 2023

Leave a comment

I have been on leave for previous two weeks, so this was my first week back at work and I spent a lot of time in the office in Bristol. It was a lot busier than I thought it would be, which was nice.

While I was away on leave, we saw more and more changes to what was called the Twitter and has now been rebranded X. It’s got to the point where I am practically not using Twitter anymore. I did say back in 2009 that Twitter would eventually wither and die. I gave, what I thought were ten good reasons, why Twitter would not survive. Nowhere in that list was that a billionaire would take over the company and kill the brand and community in just a few months. Shows what I know!

I have been using Threads, though isn’t quite there for me yet. Not the level and depth of engagement that I would like. I do realise some of that is on me.

The analytics (stats) are also not working correctly, so doing my top tweet of the week has become nigh on impossible. I also checked that I can’t even do my top ten tweets of the year either, so 2022 was the last year for that.

coffee
Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

I published a blog post on coffee, analytics, and wellbeing          .

Could we use data from coffee machines to deliver a better retail experience to students and maximise their wellbeing.

Slightly tongue in cheek, but coffee analytics is in fact a thing.

Asked on Wednesday to log into Slack using SSO, when I moved in 2019 from (what was) Digital Futures in Jisc to a different team, I really stopped using Slack, as the team I was in mainly used Teams. I did, in the first few months, popped in now and then, but working on different things meant that engagement went right down. I did log in, but didn’t stay…

Finished my Q4 review paperwork. I use these weeknotes and a combination of weekly updates to confirm progress on my objectives and other areas of work across Jisc.

Have been thinking about my objectives for the next review year.

My top tweet this week was this one.

social networking, twitter

Threading a discussion

1 Comment
Threads
Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

I joined Threads from Meta partly to try it out and partly to ensure I had my name as my username. 

Back in the day I would talk about early days of the Twitter. Of course back then no one (as in normal people) used Twitter. It was full of chat and status updates. There was the odd joke or three. 

Those first few days of Threads it did to me feel like those early days of Twitter. Though the main difference was that rather than a chronological stream of postings from people I followed, on Threads it was a stream of postings from people and companies I wasn’t following. Meta were filling my stream for me, in a similar way they do on Facebook and Instagram. 

I did quite enjoy some of the threads, Channel 4s social media team seemed to be really enjoying themselves. In the past on Twitter these postings would have come from parody accounts. Today on Threads the companies are parodying themselves. 

I haven’t really got into a Threads vibe and am not posting as I did in the early days of Twitter. 

Popping in now and then I have noticed how Threads is like an accelerated Twitter model. I see people constantly posting about how and what you should and shouldn’t post on Threads. That use to happen all the time on Twitter. 

There is a constant stream of posts and requests from people basically asking if Threads could have all the features and functionality of Twitter. Is Threads just going to become a copy of Twitter? Will that actually work?

Sadly I am also seeing a lot of the toxic postings that I would see on Twitter appearing now in Threads. Like the for you stream on Twitter the algorithm is pushing this content into my Threads stream as it is getting engagement and traction. 

I will give Threads time and engagement, as experience tells me it takes time for a social media platform time to bed in and become part of people’s lives. 

So are you on Threads? You can find me there maybe talking about coffee.

coffee

digifest23, twitter, weeknotes

Back to Birmingham – Weeknote #210 – 10th March 2023

Leave a comment

Monday I was spending time planning and working on the  Intelligent Campus community event for the 24th May 2023 and the Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June 2023. I also did some more planning for Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meetings on the 20th March and 21st April, including producing slides for the meeting I am planning some internal and external personalisation events.

The government got slammed on the Twitter for talking about innovation, through the use of a QR code and some weirdly animated AR text.


I published this in 2011 which was a little while ago, though for some I guess it only feels like yesterday… Ten ways to use QR Codes.

Sorry, this is not a blog post on ten ways to use QR Codes, but it is a blog post about what you actually can do with QR Codes. Once you know what you can do with QR Codes then you can build learning activities round those functions.

Still one of my favourite bizarre uses of a QR code.

Remember holding your phone whilst driving is illegal.

In the middle of the week, I was in Birmingham this week for Jisc’s Digifest conference.

I did a few sketch notes of some of the presentations.

I undertook a fireside chat with Dom Pates on the Intelligent Campus, early indications were forty plus people attended the session. It was also recorded. In case you were wondering where the slides are, well we didn’t use slides, we literally had a chat, with a video of a fireplace on my iPad.

It also coincided with the launch of the revised guide to the intelligent campus.

Many colleges and universities are working on ways to improve their students’ experience, business efficiencies and environmental performance by better utilising data. This data can be directly related to learning and part of the overall campus experience.

I was intrigued and enjoyed this article, Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed on The Register.

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In the article, Alexander Hanff, a computer scientist and leading privacy technologist who helped develop Europe’s GDPR and ePrivacy rules, talks about how ChatGPT killed him off and even tried to fabricate URLs to a fake obituary. A scary thought on how relying on AI could result in you trying to prove to people that you’re alive, though the AI says you’re dead!

Though there is an upside to ChatGPT, Essay mills ‘under threat from rise of ChatGPT’.

The emergence of chatbots and other writing tools powered by artificial intelligence may pose a far greater threat to the future of essay mills than legislation has proved to be, experts said. There are early signs that firms which specialise in selling assignments are already having to shift their business models in the face of more students using the likes of ChatGPT to generate answers of a similar or better quality to what they may have been tempted to buy previously.

At the end of the week I was doing some logistics for future travel and events.

My top tweet this week was this one.

twitter, ucisa23, weeknotes

The digital camera is back – Weeknote #206 – 10th February 2023

Leave a comment

A busy and unbusy week, in the sense, fewer events and meetings in my diary, but lots of things to get done.

According to a BBC report, digital cameras back in fashion after online revival.

Digital cameras from the early 2000s are becoming must-have gadgets for many young people because of a burgeoning trend online. And in the past 12 months, videos with the hashtag #digitalcamera have amassed more than 220 million views on TikTok.

…and to think I still consider this *new* technology!

One of my favourite photographs. Taken with a Sony Cybershot Digital Camera in 2004.

BR Class 4MT - 80136 at Minehead Railway Station

On Tuesday I headed off to the Bristol office by train. My usual train use to be a GWR Castle class HST train, but today it had been replaced by one of the newer GWR Intercity Express Trains (IET). I believe that the HSTs on GWR are being slowly withdrawn from the services they currently do as they are expensive to run, and also produce more emissions than the IETs.

Attended an Intelligent Campus guide launch and engagement planning meeting. We reviewed the complementary materials to go alongside the launch of the second edition of the Guide to the Intelligent Campus. We clarified that this was not a big launch. Also discussed potential sessions for Networkshop on the foundations required for the Intelligent Campus. I am doing a fireside chat at Digifest in March, and we will launch the guide there. I spent some time reviewing and proofing the  Guide to the Intelligent Campus.

Had an interesting conversation in our office on issues around the concept of the Intelligent Campus including security of IoT devices and smart devices. There are lots of smart devices out there, and across many institutions, people are plugging them into the network, without necessarily thinking about the security implications. I am reminded of the chaos caused when a series of soda vending machines and lamp posts hijacked the network of an American university. In my own home I have a smart washing machine, have I attached it to my network, no I have not.

Google’s AI search bot Bard made a $120bn error on day one. This does demonstrate that we are at early days with AI supported search. Also, this week Microsoft added AI search to Bing. This will make it easier and simpler for students to utilise AI when making (internet) searches for content related to their studies. I do think we need to start thinking about both academics and students understanding these tools, and the potential of these tools and what it means for teaching and learning. The essence of assessment is something else that will need to be rethought.

blocks
Image by mohamed ramzee from Pixabay

Read this article Block teaching advocates team up after ‘explosion’ of interest.

Advocates of “block teaching” are teaming up in an attempt to hasten its adoption by universities worldwide.

This isn’t new, as the article says, it has been around for fifty years.

Read this tweet responding to the article

I have to agree that this isn’t a one or the other situation, it’s about doing both, a spectrum of teaching. Back in the day when I was teaching at City of Bristol College (in the 1990s) we designed a GNVQ programme that was a combination of block and linear, for those very reasons. Some areas benefited from a deep dive and others were about building knowledge and skills over time. We had to design the whole programme to then fit the timetable. The main challenge was that we couldn’t devote one person to deliver each subject block, so we shared the teaching. The students had block learning, we had linear timetabled teaching.

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

Booking events and conferences for April. I am attending the UCISA Spotlight 2023 and LILAC 2023. Various issues with the LILAC booking, so had to redo the whole purchase order process for this conference.  Spotlight 2023 is in Leeds, so will be nice to be back there. The last time I was in Leeds, was in January 2020 just before the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Also booked into an online event, UCISA Starting the year on the right foot happening next week.

Sent out information on next Senior Education and Student Experience to members of the group, and inviting new members to the group. The group in the main consists of PVCs in the Education and Student Experience space, but also has some DVCs and VCs (or equivalent) on the group as well.

On Thursday I attended a technology for teaching discussion meeting with the Department for Education. It reminded me that a research informed evidence base is critical for many conversations in this space.

IFTTT let me know that changes to the Twitter API means that some of my IFTTT applets will probably stop working.

Starting Monday, February 13th, 2023, Twitter will no longer support free access to their API. As a result, we expect that any Applet that connects with Twitter will stop working.

I am mainly using IFTTT at the moment to post native images from Instagram to Twitter. However in the past I have used IFTTT to collate tweets to specific hashtags.

We’ve not seen the complete collapse of Twitter as many were predicting a few weeks back, but we have seen problems this week and many other issues as well. I am still using Twitter, but also drop in on Mastodon as well.

Most Kipling cakes come in sixes. Why do the Battenberg cakes only have five in the box? Is someone at the Kipling factory eating that extra Battenberg cake?

My top tweet this week was this one.