All posts by James Clay

alt, octel

Playing by the rules – ocTEL

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Groups

One comment I read in the influx of e-mail for this ocTEL course said in terms of organising participants into groups:

I think we need to divide ourselves into subgroups for conversations to keep things manageable.  The question is, how to organise the subgroups? By type of job? By type of interest in this course? By level of experience with TEL? Randomly, by starting a new group when the last one gets to some number?

I think one of the real challenges in organising anything with lots of people is an assumption that people will play by the “rules” and will stick to the groups assigned, or even plan themselves into groups.

I think at this stage, though planning groups would appear to be a good idea, the problem will arise if you are in a group from which then everyone drops out from the MOOC; you will be left on your own.

I would expect after a week or two of frenetic and frantic activity that the dust will settle and groups will form organically and by themselves.

We shall have to wait and see.

alt, octel

“I can’t handle the amount of e-mail…”

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Envelopes

Actually I can, but there are a fair few people who are participating in ocTEL who don’t seem to be able to handle the quantity of e-mail flooding into their inboxes having signed up to the MOOC.

I will say I wasn’t expecting to get any e-mail, let alone the volumes that are coming through, as I didn’t (at first) realised I had been added to a JISCMail mailing list.

Of course once it was coming in, for me it was a simple matter of creating a rule in Outlook to move all e-mails sent to OCTEL-PUBLIC@JISCMAIL.AC.UK to a folder. I may even set up a secondary rule that automatically deletes the messages if I haven’t read them within a few days or a week.

Deleting them from my Outlook, doesn’t remove access to them, as there will be an archive on the JISCMail website. There are also various JISCMail commands I could use to receive NOEMAIL, a DIGEST or similar.

Of course there is no need to even subscribe to the mailing list and no need to read or engage or interact with the e-mail. I intend to get an idea of what other people are thinking.

Stephen Downes in an open letter makes some valid points that with a MOOC you should really avoid mailing lists or even discussion forums.

In all the MOOCs I’ve done I’ve never had an open one-to-many channel, precisely because if you have 1000 people using it, it becomes unmanageable.

You’ll find that web forums become unmanageable as well if used by 1000 people.

I have also discouraged the ubiquitous ‘introduction’ posts, for the same reason. A dozen introductions make sense. 1000 do not.

I do think these are really good points and if you are thinking about organising or planning a MOOC to take into consideration.

What didn’t surprise me though was the number of people who are apparently immersed into TEL and learning technologies who appear to not know how to organise their e-mail or mailing lists. You would think I would be, but I too often I have seen people who know a lot about learning technologies, fail to understand and use effectively the very technologies they talk about.

It’s not just simple things like e-mail, blogging, webinars, the Twitter, even Powerpoint!

One lesson that people should take from ocTEL is that never assume that people, even technically literate people, will be able to do stuff that you take for granted. This applies equally to practitioners and importantly learners.

Image source.

alt, octel

What is the most important question about TEL for you?

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Library Seats

Having avoided taking part in a MOOC since they became the latest fad, I have now taken the plunge and enrolled on the ALT ocTEL MOOC.

It only started yesterday, so it is way too early to tell if I will complete the course. One of my reasons for undertaking the ocTEL is to see if this is a format that could be used for staff development in my own college.

One of the first questions that we need to look at on the oCTEL is:

What is the most important question about TEL for you?

Having been involved in TEL (and all the previous variations for a while now) the most important question I seem to have asked throughout that time and continue to ask is:

How do we create a culture in which TEL can be effectively used by all staff and learners to improve learning?

From my perspective and experience, TEL encomapasses both technology and learning, however the real deciding factor in using TEL to enhance and enrich learning is through cultural change.

Culture change is possible, but not necessarily straightforward or easy.

What I want to know and learn from others on the ocTEL is how do we influence and achieve cultural change?

alt, gloucestershire college, octel, vle

Who are you? What do you want? – ocTEL

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Having avoided taking part in a MOOC since they became the latest fad, I have now taken the plunge and enrolled on the ALT ocTEL MOOC.

So who am I?

What do I want?

I have been working with using technology in learning since the early 1990s.

Prior to that I used technology as a learner. I remember sending e-mail in 1987 at the University of York and getting “flamed” by a technical administrator at Brunel University for sending the “wrong” kind of e-mail.

York

I also recall a friend of mine at University creating (what today we would call) a social network on the VAX system, it was very similar to Facebook! That VAX system was also my first introduction to WordPerfect.

After a few different things I settled down as a Business Studies and Economics teacher at colleges in the South West. It was in this role that I started to make use of various technologies to enhance my learners experiences. This started with using DTP programmes such as PagePlus to create engaging handouts, Freelance Graphics (and an early version of Powerpoint) to print off acetates for use with an OHP (no projectors back then). I made my own VLE (okay a website) back in 1998 to enable my learners to access links and resources and have discussions. Due to the sort of things I was doing I started doing a lot of staff development, helping staff at City of Bristol College where I was working to gain new skills in using technology to enhance learning.

City of Bristol College

From there, apart from working in a museum for a while, I worked for a consortium of FE Colleges all using a common VLE, TekniCAL’s Virtual Campus. Following five years there I got a job at Gloucestershire College as ILT & Learning Resources Manager.

Gloucester Campus of Gloucestershire College

In this role I am responsible for the strategic direction in the use of technology to support learning, the VLE, mobile learning, libraries, use of ebooks, digital and online resources and a fair few other things too.

Over the last few years I have been researching and looking at the use of ebooks and also mobile learning.

Have always had an holistic approach to embedding the use of technology, lets get everyone moving forward and where possible try and avoid shiny things unless they help and support learning. Okay yes I do have an iPad.

mobile

Forty years later…

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Mobile Phone

The first handheld mobile phone call was made forty years ago, on the 3rd of April 1973. There had been mobile phone before, in cars and lorries, but forty years ago saw the first phone call from a handheld cellular mobile phone. Well you also needed to carry a bag too (for the battery).

I suspect most (it not all) the people reading this blog post have a mobile phone, or if they don’t they did at one time.

It’s interesting that a technology, which has reached such a milestone, is still seen by many teachers and practitioners as disruptive and should be banned in classrooms.

The reality is that learners don’t use mobile phones in classrooms in the way they were envisaged, for making phone calls! The problem many practitioners have with mobile phones is not with the phones themselves, neither with learners making phone calls in lessons, the problem is a very different issue.

The mobile phone today is a very different device and in many ways a different concept to the one we saw back in 1973. The mobile phone today is much more than just a voice communication device, it can do so much more. I have done this exercise at many mobile learning workshops, I ask the participants to list all the different things they do on their phones. Interestingly, making phone calls is either not mentioned or very low on the list. The sorts of things that people today do on their phone includes (and is certainly not limited to) texting, social networking, photography, film making, audio recording, playing games, reading books, looking at magazines, listening to music and other recordings, watching video, streaming video, doing quizzes, creating content, and so much more…

It is this functionality that makes the mobile phone so much more than what was first seen back in 1973, and it is this functionality that teachers see as disruptive and challenging to manage.

Banning mobile phones or asking students to turn them off, is not a real solution, at most conferences and events when delegates are asked to turn off their phones, most will turn them to silent mode. So much so that conference organisers seem to ask people now to turn them to silent mode rather than turn them off. I am sure many learners in a classroom situation will do something similar.

The question you have to ask is why are learners switching off in lessons and using their mobile phones? Yes there will be the odd learner who is addicted to their phones and can’t help themselves using it. However these learners are in a very small minority. Think about if this was the case for all learners, then in all lessons, all learners would be disengaged and using their mobile phones; now that doesn’t happen.

Rather than blame the learners, the key is to think about why they are disengaging in your lessons. Why are they switching off from learning and switching on their phones?

Another possible solution is to embrace the use of the mobile phone and make it part of the learning process, as well as making the learning engaging and interesting. The very functionality that can be so disruptive or attractive to learners, can also be effective in supporting learning and assessment.

Engaging doesn’t always mean interactive and doesn’t mean that it can’t be hard or difficult. Thinking about challenging problems is an effective learning process.

The mobile phone is forty years old, in many ways the disruptive nature of mobile phones is new, but only because the mobile phone has evolved into something very different from a device used to make mobile phone calls.

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #76 Learner feedback

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Desks

So how was it for you?

These days if you go to any kind of coffee shop or restaurant, or buy something from a retailer on the high street, get an MOT or your tyres done, the waiter, retailer assistant or mechanic hands you a little card. The card usually offers you the chance to win an iPad, a £100 or something similar, with a web link (sometimes an QR Code) and asks you for feedback on what you’ve just done.

Now it is generally accepted that we should be asking our learners how the lesson they are in went. Asking questions such as “what went well?” and “even better if?” allow practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of what the learners learnt, and how they learnt it.

There are many ways to do this, post it notes are an obvious one, that can then be stuck next to the door on the way out. We have practitioners using tools such as Wallwisher (now known as Padlet) for a similar virtual type activity.

As you really need to be asking for feedback at each lesson, it makes sense to have a variety of ways to collect and collate feedback. The VLE has a number of tools that can be used to collect this learner feedback.

As might be expected a tool like the Feedback block in module is designed to do just that collect and collate feedback. You can create a series of questions, or even a single question. The key is getting the learners to add their feedback and importantly for the practitioner to reflect on the feedback and ensure it feeds into their future planning.

If there is a quiz tool on the VLE then using an open-ended format quiz will work in a similar manner to the concept of a feedback module. Just make sure that it doesn’t mark the quiz and give the students a score!

Usually the data from quizzes and feedback style modules can be exported as a spreadsheet file for further analysis.

You could use a discussion forum, where this works well is if you want group feedback and for the learners to reflect and discuss their feedback, collaborating together to provide that feedback to the practitioner.

One advantage of the VLE for gathering feedback is that it is recorded and is also accessible in the future. Perfect for analysis feedback over a period of time.

I wouldn’t use the VLE every lesson for feedback, there are many ways of gathering learner feedback, however it is one tool that you can and should use.

mooc

What are MOOCs?

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This Prezi, What are MOOCs? History, pedgagoy, myths and media, explores where we’ve come from, where we are and where we’re going with the MOOC phenomena.

If you are still confused over what a MOOC actually is and what it could be, then this presentation is well worth a look. I also found the video from Dave Cormier useful that explains the original concept of the MOOC.

I have no strong opinions on the MOOC as a concept, I do think there is the possibility they are a bit of a fad, and in a few years we might have moved onto something else to talk about at edtech conferences on the Twitter. Think about how no one these days talks about the PLE in the same way they did back in 2009. I think we should also be critiquing the model of MOOCs where the focus is on content and not learning. Retention figures of 4% and 90% male dominated does indicate that this model still has someway to go.

However I also can see how they may change societal perceptions of what universities and colleges offer prospective learners, and allow a back door for publishers and private educational institutions to start offering, what they would call MOOCs, but in reality would be the privatisation of higher and further education.

I am hoping that the end result is not closed private universities, but that the open aspect becomes dominant and makes it much easier to share and reuse concepts, materials, structures and resources in ways that we have not done before. If we can create a culture of openness and sharing.

MOOCs could offer (for FE) an opportunity for FE Colleges to collaborate on building courses, however my experiences of doing that model back in 2000s with the WCC was that people like the concept, but either aren’t willing to share or more importantly have very little original content to share.

I don’t see MOOCs as particularly revolutionary or transformative, in many ways the concept has been around for a while, the key difference is the connected, participatory and collaborative opportunities that MOOCs offer. Maybe that is the revolutionary aspect.

app of the week, ipad

Noteshelf – iPad App of the Week

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Noteshelf Icon

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is Noteshelf.

The most beautiful note-taking app ever designed for the iPad. Noteshelf is the handwriting note taker that features super natural digital ink, a stunning UI and a comprehensive toolset that will increase the benefits of owning an iPad by leaps and bounds.

£3.99

I am still trying to work out the best way to take notes using the iPad, actually it’s not just about making notes, it’s also about sharing notes, annotating notes and transforming notes into articles, reports and other stuff.

I have already reviewed some note taking apps before, including Microsoft OneNote for iPad and Bamboo Paper however I realised I’ve not covered Evernote in this series, though that is one app I do use a lot, maybe that’s one for another week. I will also be looking at some other note taking apps too.

I do wonder though Noteshelf looks nice and has lots of nice features, if it is too pretty and is form over function.

Noteshelf App

The key with any note taking app, is, is it easy to use, does it allow you to easily make notes, annotate stuff and also share notes. Noteshelf does work better with a stylus.

What I like about Noteshelf is that there are lots of different tools allowing you to be very creative with your note taking. You can make your notes using a variety of paper types and pens.

Noteshelf App

Not a great fan of in-app purchases in many instances, however in this app they are mainly used to add features, rather than add functionality that should be in the app in the first place.

Yes this app is a little pricey to many note taking apps, but you will have the best looking notes on your iPad.

Get Noteshelf in the iTunes App Store.

presentation

Loud Prezi

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Speaker

One of the reasons I like Prezi is that it allows learners accessing the presentation to see the “whole thing” and then focus on the area of the presentation they want to review or see again. In many ways you could use Prezi presentations as part of a flipped learning approach in terms of collation of resources and links. Prezi have added a new feature that allows you to add audio to the paths in your presentation.

This is quite easy to use, the only downside I found was that I couldn’t record direct to Prezi, I had to make the recordings separately and then upload to Prezi.

I made a copy of my PSP Prezi and started to add audio to it.

You can see the original non-audio version here.

I think it adds another aspect to Prezi making it much more useful for remote and flipped delivery models.

I would prefer though to do what I can do with Apple’s Keynote and record a “soundtrack” as I present the whole presentation. At the moment I need to record individual tracks over a single flowing audio track. The end result for some parts of the presentation means that you don’t get a nice flowing narration, you get an automated railway station announcement.

apple, ipad

Should I buy an Apple TV for my classroom?

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Apple TV

I noticed the following tweet on the Twitter over the weekend and was inspired to reply.

https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/310515754636279809

This kind of response is just as short-sighted and blinkered as those by people who would say “buy an Apple TV”.

I agree with the sentiment that if we work within education, then we shouldn’t waste public money, but to assume that going down the Apple TV route is a waste of money, makes too many assumptions about the context.

So why all this “fuss” in the first place? What is the significance of AirPlay and as a result the discussion over Air Server and Apple TV.

One of the features that Apple have had for many years is the ability to stream media across your wireless network to a device on that network.

You could stream your iTunes audio to the original Airport Express, which was then connected to speakers (usually better speakers than the ones on the Mac) or speakers in a different room. This was known as AirTunes.

The name was changed to AirPlay in 2010 when it could be used to stream video content from your Mac. In 2011 with the release of the iPad 2 it was now possible to stream (mirror) your screen using AirPlay.

What then excited people in education was the ability to mirror your iPad (and now your Mac desktop) over the wireless network. This meant you didn’t need to worry about cables and you could hand round your device without needing to come up to the screen.

Additionally everyone with a device could use also use the technology could use it, so if all your learners had an iPad they could all stream their screens.

Though initially such a technology was restricted to Apple devices, it wasn’t long before developers came up with solutions for other devices.

Your PC could, through the use of Air Server act as an “Apple TV” and allow devices to Air Play or mirror their screens. Software such as Air Parrot allows older Macs and PCs to stream and mirror their screens to Apple TV.

So what was initially an Apple centric solution now didn’t need a single Apple device.

So what about that tweet?

https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/310515754636279809

Well if you already have a classroom setup, there is a PC, a projector then I agree an Apple TV is probably not the cheapest solution, I would also suspect that the projector doesn’t have an HDMI connection. In this instance and context then Air Server is the cheaper solution.

However this is not the only context and to say the Apple TV is a waste of money is not correct.

When equipping a new room, or replacing equipment, if you consider the cost of a PC, a projector, an IWB or an iPad, then compare that to the cost of an iPad, a TV and an Apple TV then the Apple TV solution would be a much cheaper solution. Add a wheeled stand to the TV and suddenly you have a mobile solution.

The important consideration when purchasing any equipment is not to favour one solution over another, but consider the context, what do you have already, what do you want to do, where are you going to do it.

In my libraries we have large plasma screens with a Mac mini underneath, in this instance we have gone down the Air Server route to allow us to stream through AirPlay. However if I already had the iPad and the screen, to buy a £499 Mac mini would cost a lot more than a £99 Apple TV.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about the context. Be informed and think about solutions.