All posts by James Clay

altc2012

Taking the Tablets

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James Clay presenting at ALT-C 2012

Here are the slides from my presentation at ALT-C 2012 this morning.

The tablet computer is not a new idea, but recently has had an impact on learning and teaching across a range of institutions in the UK and elsewhere. In this session I will try to tackle the following questions.

What do we currently understand to be a tablet? What is the primary functionality? How are tablets being used right now for supporting, and enhancing learning and teaching? What sort of learning activities and scenarios are making best use of the tablet format? Are these devices for content consumption, content creation, interaction, or all three? So where next? Where will tablets take us? Do institutions purchase tablets for all their students? Or do we let or require students to buy and bring their own? And if the latter what does this mean for how we organise provision?

I will conclude with a personal reflection on the overall direction of travel, and where I believe we may finish up.

Photo source

altc2011, altc2012

ALT-C Live

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ALT-C 2011 saw the successful launch of ALT-Live Beta; an informal conference backchannel streamed live to the internet and featuring exclusive interviews and chat with conference organisers, keynote speakers, presenters and delegates. The intention was to provide another channel which, along with social media such as the official conference Crowdvine, Twitter, and delegate blogs, would serve to amplify those hot topics and discussions from the conference.

ALT Live Beta at ALT-C 2011

Presenters James Clay (Gloucestershire College), Prof. Steve Wheeler (Plymouth University) and Graham McElearney (University of Sheffield) broadcast daily from 08:30 to 19:00 to capture both the breakfast bowl chatter in the morning and the end of day reactions as the sun went down. Over the three days various luminaries of the learning technology community graced the sofa. Miguel Brechner gave a fascinating follow-up to his opening conference keynote, Sugata Mitra – previous ALT-C keynote speaker and chair of that year’s closing keynote by The Observer’s John Naughton – gave his insights into conference hot topics.

ALT Live Beta at ALT-C 2011

Elsewhere, Diana Laurillard spoke about her most recent research project, Gilly Salmon provided fascinating insights into current learning technology debates in the Australian context, while Doug Belshaw, John Traxler, Fred Garnett, John Cook, Josie Fraser, Dave White, David Kernohan, Helen Beetham, Nigel Ecclesfield, Peter Twining and others fielded questions about their own conference presentations and shared reflections on the rest of the conference. Having been so well received in its first year, for 2012 ALT-C Live officially comes out of beta promising more of the same, as well as a few new features as well!

ALT Live Beta at ALT-C 2011

This year, thanks to the ALT-C planning committee, we have been afforded a more spacious studio area and will be hosting more joint interviews and roundtable discussions that allow us to reinforce this year’s conference strands: mainstreaming, entrepreneurialism, openness and sharing, sustainability and problem-solving.

Technical Support

We are looking to recruit volunteers to the technical support team for this year’s ALT-C Live. This is a great opportunity for learning technologists with an interest in audio/video production to gain experience of live broadcast. Full training will be provided in the use of Newtek Studio TriCaster and various cameras and microphones for broadcast but we would ask that only those who are confident and have some experience of filming apply.

Presenters

We are also looking to recruit volunteers to act as presenters for the ALT-C Live, this will be your opportunity to chat and interview live on camera. You may be interviewing one of the keynote speakers, you may be talking with ordinary members of ALT. It’s a chance to gain confidence in front of the camera, add to the experience that is ALT-C and have a new and interesting experience. Due to the nature of the broadcast you will not be in front of the camera for the whole time period you commit to.

Support and Runners

We we also need volunteers to help us run ALT-C Live to provide support and act as runners. So if you don’t have the experience to run the broadcast equipment, don’t want to be on camera, you can still help out with ALT-C Live and add to the experience that is ALT-C, whilst having a new and interesting experience.

Commitment

We are looking for a half-day commitment (AM/PM) from volunteers and this means that there will be plenty of available slots over the three days for each of the three roles (technical, presenter, runner). If possible, we would ask that volunteers are available on Monday evening for initial training.

Please let us know if you wish to volunteer for this year’s ALT-C Live. If you could please also include the following information:

1) First name, Surname
2) Job title / position held
3) Institution
4) Please let us know whether you wish to help with technical support, general support or to be a presenter.

Contact us on Crowdvine.

With thanks,

James & Darren
ALT-C Live Executive Producers

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #97 Visual Discussions

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Old Camera

Using forums on a VLE is a great way of providing a place for text based discussions. The asynchronous communication medium offers a very different experience to a face to face discussion in a classroom situation; one that some learners may prefer. I have never thought that online discussion forums replace classroom discussions, no much more they complement what happens in the classroom. Different learners will prefer different discussions, some will enjoy the spontaneity and immediacy of a face to face discussion, others will prefer the reflective thoughtful aspect of a text based asynchronous discussion. Similarly the context may affect the choice by learners, they may prefer face to face for certain topics and textual for others.

It can be easy to focus on text when using online discussions, but it is very easy to use images (even video) in a forum to create a visual discussion.

Images can be used as the stimulus for a discussion or learners can use images for their responses. In a similar manner you could use video.

Video and images can be really useful for those learner for whom writing is a challenge and can make what was a text based discussion an accessible discussion.

Adding images and videos to a text based discussion on the VLE is one way that you can engage learners to make use of one of the more useful and interactive features of the VLE.

lwf13

This is Learning Without Frontiers

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I have always enjoyed the Learning without Frontiers conferences and they have made me stop, think and reflect.

Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) is a global platform that facilitates the ongoing dialogue about the future of learning.

LWF attracts an engaged and open-minded audience who are forward thinking, curious and receptive to new ideas and perspectives about education, teaching and learning.

They are an international audience of thought leaders, policy makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and leading practitioners from across the education, digital media and technology sectors.

They are education leaders, intellectuals, social and political theorists, artists, designers, futurists, architects, publishers, broadcasters, technologists, parents, teachers and learners.

They come to ask the big questions, discuss the big challenges and seek to answer them by innovation, enterprise and an enduring optimism.

app of the week, ipad, keynote

Keynote – iPad App of the Week

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Keynote – iPad App of the Week

Keynote - iPad App of the Week

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 Keynote.

Keynote is the most powerful presentation app ever designed for a mobile device. Built from the ground up for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, it makes creating a world-class presentation — complete with animated charts and transitions — as simple as touching and tapping. Highlight your data with stunning 3D bar, line, area, and pie charts, animated with new 3D chart builds such as Crane, Grow, Radial, and Rotate. Use full-screen view to present right on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Or use video mirroring to present on an HDTV, and preview your slides and notes on your device using the Presenter Display. The Retina display on the new iPad makes everything you do in Keynote even more brilliant. Keynote works with iCloud, so your presentations stay up to date on all your devices — automatically.

£6.99 – Update, the app is now Free.

Keynote

I actually purchased Keynote (and the other iWork apps) before my first iPad had arrived so I could use these apps straight away. I remember trying out Keynote and been initially very impressed with the app and how it worked. I then rarely if ever used it for a while, hence it hasn’t featured in my App of the Week series until now. However in the last few months I have been using Keynote on the iPad for both creating, editing and presenting presentations. Though I much prefer the desktop version of Keynote, the iPad version certainly is very usable and has a lot of flexibility.

My reason for using it was one of convenience, but also as I was presenting about the impact of mobile devices I wanted to use a mobile device, not just for creating the presentation (or in some cases editing the presentation) but also for delivering the presentation.

Creating presentations in Keynote is simple, but the app is very powerful and has a lot of functionality. There are a lot of themes from which to choose, there is of course a smaller range than you get on the desktop app.

Keynote opening screen

Continue reading Keynote – iPad App of the Week →

stuff

aMAZEme

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A vast labyrinth of 250,000 books, entitled aMAZEme, has been installed on The Clore Ballroom in the Royal Festival Hall, London between 31 July – 25 August, as part of Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World.

Visitors will be able to navigate the maze, which has been constructed from 250,000 remaindered, second hand and new books. 150,000 of these books have been loaned by Oxfam, which will be returned to the charity’s shop network at the end of the project. The remaining 100,000 books have been gifted by publishing houses from around the UK.

When the maze is deconstructed at the end of the exhibition, all of the books will be donated to Oxfam to raise funds for their work fighting poverty around the world.

ipad, stuff

Losing the shinyness

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A dead netbook

Why aren’t we talking about netbooks anymore?

It wasn’t that long ago that everyone in the edtech world was talking about cheap netbooks and how they would revolutionise learning and change education forever.

Where are those netbooks now?

Back in the autumn of 2007, Asus launched their Asus EeePC. I managed to get my hands on one in February 2008; a small form factor PC running Xandros (Linux) with a 7″ screen. There had been small laptops before, but they were usually around £2000, the Asus EeePC was less than £200!

In 2008 everyone was talking about how wonderful the netbooks were and that finally here was a device that would revolutionise the use of learning technologies in the classroom.

It wasn’t long though before the “issues” started to arise. Screen size and keyboard size meant that before long the 7” netbook started to grow and today when we look at netbooks in most computer retailers, they have 10” screens and almost full size keboards. In a similar manner, the “free” operating system wasn’t liked by users or consumers and now virtually all netbooks come with Windows 7. The Linux revolution touted by some never happened. Also the storage limitations, the original EeePC only came with 2GB of storage, meant that the robust flash memory was replaced by more delicate hard drives so that users could have the storage needed to do what they wanted on the device. Another big issue was battery life, for some netbooks, 90 minutes was the norm, this meant that the portability of the device was sacrificed as you needed to be connected to the wall by the power cable.

The final nail in the coffin though has to be the MacBook Air and the Ultrabooks, which take us full circle back to the £1000 sub-notebooks that the netbooks were suppose to replace. These devices with their solid state drives, full size(ish) keyboards and high res screens.

Perhaps another nail in the coffin came from the release of the iPad in 2010, we suddenly realised that we didn’t want a cheap netbook, what we actually wanted was a tablet.

Market research firm ABI Research reports that Q2 2011 global tablet shipments rose to 13.6 million units, compared to just 7.3 million netbooks.  (Pinola 2011)

It’s not to say that netbooks are dead just yet, they are still for sale but we’re not talking about them in the same way that we are talking about iPads and tablets.

Are people using netbooks? Yes they are, people I know who have one, really like it.

Are they embedded into our educational institutions? No.

Have they revolutionised education as predicted in 2008? No.

Have we stopped talking about them? Yes.

Have they lost their shinyness? Yes!

Pinola, M 2011, Tablet Sales Overtook Netbook Sales in Q2 2011, accessed 20th July 2012.

altc2012, jisc

No sudden moves…

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JISC Experts Meeting, Bristol, March 2008

Four years ago, March 2008, I was at a JISC Experts Group meeting at The Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. There was a range of interesting sessions, one I remember well was a report from Bob Rotheram, National Teaching Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University on the Sounds Good project.

This session will give members the experience of receiving audio feedback on assessed work, learn about the Sounds Good project funded under the JISC Users and Innovations Programme, and consider the potential of this approach.

This was a really interesting project that was looking at the use of audio feedback for student assessment. With the new technolgies that had become available, it was a lot easier to record feedback and importantly distribute it to the learners. Recording audio was something that happened a lot in Universities for interviews and research, but it was usually to tape (as in cassette tape, I am sure there are a few people out there reading this, thinking to themselves, what is this “tape” you are writing about, is it “sticky tape”?) The downside of recording cassette tape was that they weren’t free, and was a logistical hassle in not just recording, but also getting the tape to the learner. In the last ten years, we have seen portable audio recording move away from cassette tapes to mp3 recorders. It is very easy to make an audio recording, save as mp3 and send it by e-mail A lot of smartphones now have that capability built in, though I am sure a lot of people will use specialised mp3 audio recorder. This change in technology made the concept of providing learners with audio feedback, not just practical, but also easily achievable. Bob and the team at Leeds Metropolitan were as a result able to undertake a detailed study of the issues and implications of providing audio feedback.

I do remember been quite taken by the idea and when I was back in the office went over the idea with a few members of staff who went off and had a go themselves.

Bob published a final report in 2009. The students feedback said

Students were overwhelmingly positive about receiving audio feedback on their coursework. They frequently remarked approvingly about its personal nature and the detail provided, evidence that the lecturer had carefully considered their work. On the other hand, a small minority of students said they preferred written feedback; a few asked for both audio and written comments on their work.

The final report is well worth reading.

On Friday the 6th July, there was a Teaching and Learning conference at Plymouth University. I wasn’t there but quite a few people I follow on Twitter were.

Steve Wheeler asked the question.

Pete Yeomans responded

https://twitter.com/ethinking/status/221166441423060992

Remembering the Sounds Good project and a paper by JISC Digital Media I replied and posted the two links

That JISC Digital Media paper not only referenced the Sounds Good project, but also other similar work.

Chaing, Dr. I-Chant Andrea (2009). Which Audio Feedback is best?: Optimising audio feedback to maximise student and staff experience. Aberystwyth University

Bunyan, N, King, D & McGugan, S (2008). Does it make a difference? Replacing text with audio feedback. Practice and Evidence of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Vol. 3, No.2, pp. 125 – 163

Merry, S & Orsmond, P (2007) Students’ Attitudes to and Usage of Academic Feedback Provided Via Audio Files. Bioscience Education ejournal, Vol. 11.

I did then ask in the same tweet if we should…

…ignore all previous research?

What followed was a discussion on the value of that previous research. The question that was never answered, partly as I didn’t ask it, was having seen the outcomes of those audio feedback projects, were staff at Plymouth going to start using audio feedback, or were they going to do some more research on the effectiveness of audio feedback? I did feel from the responses I was getting that some people didn’t value the research and therefore were going to ignore it.

This happens all the time with regard to research in learning technologies and I am sure is pretty much the main reason change takes to long to happen and for various technologies to be adopted.

I would go further that mainstream adoption of learning technologies is rarely the result of what has been learnt through projects and research, but just “happens” slowly as teaching teams pick up technology from others who just so happen to use it, or they see others using it and decide to give it a go.

I would add that most decisions about learning technologies are probably made without any regard to the research about it, and is taken by IT directors or management teams based on what their competitors are doing or some article in a national newspaper. Okay that newspaper article may be based on a piece of research, but more likely was a PR piece from a technology company.

Think about all those technologies that are currently embedded into the institution, ignoring those that are used for administration, why were those technologies adopted and for what reason? Was the use of Powerpoint by teaching staff as a result of a range of research projects? On the contrary I would suspect very few staff have even looked at research into the use of Powerpoint, or presentation techniques, because if they had, we would never talk about “death by Powerpoint” and we would never complain about horrible slides at learning technology conferences.

So why don’t we trust what others have said and written about the use of learning technologies? Why do we think that our own institutions and learners are so different to others? Why don’t we learn from the research of others?

The end result, more often than not, is that there are no sudden moves to adopting new ways of working or embedding new technologies. Think about audio feedback, four years after the Sounds Good project, we are no closer to making use of the research, avoiding the lessons learnt from the project and wasting time and resources recreating or duplicating the work in our own pilots.

Are pilots just a way of playing with toys or are they an useful tool to support the embedding of new practices and technologies to enhance learning? If you are interested in discussing this further then I am running a symposium at ALT-C 2012 called Pilot Mentality. I have also written a previous post about running pilots.

e-book

Everything is out…

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Old Books

When I visit my local library and look for a specific book, I might be lucky and it’s on the shelf, if I am less lucky it’s not at my local library, but is available from another library. If I am unlucky then someone else has borrowed it and though I can out in a reservation, I have to wait until it is returned.

This is one of the disadvantages of having just a single copy of a printed book. Of course one of the advantages of the digital ebook is that it would be possible to make and lend it to as many people who wanted it… or so you would have thought.

My local library service, LibrariesWest have recently launched an ebook lending library. It uses Adobe Digital Editions so works fine with the Bluefire Reader app on the iPad, so no need to worry about having a proprietary ebook reader.

However I was a little taken aback when I looked at the range of books available to find that most of them were out on loan!

All out on loan

I couldn’t actually download a digital version of the book I wanted as it was on loan to somebody else. Now the reality isn’t that the digital file is on someone else’s computer and not available, no of course this is a DRM limitation placed on the library service by the publishers.

The publishers have taken the traditional business model they have used with libraries before with printed books and applied it to digital ebooks.

So if someone “borrows” an ebook, then it is not available to anyone else. This isn’t a technical restriction, it’s a business choice.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the business model only allows the books to be borrowed for a certain number of times before it “wears out”.

I am sure that LibrariesWest could spend a lot more money and have ebooks that can be borrowed by multiple users all at the same time.

What this does tell us, is that we are still at the start of the ebook lending model and at this stage publishers are trying to duplicate a traditional business model in the online world. As with a lot of other traditional business models, this will change at some point in the future.