Category Archives: altc2023

altc2023, gloucestershire college, twitter

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

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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?

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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?

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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.

altc2023, weeknotes

It’s a new year – Weeknote #231 – 4th August 2023

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As I was about to go on leave for two weeks, I ensured that everything with a deadline was done, and that my inbox was empty.

I made a start on my Q4 Review paperwork, which also covers the previous 12 months. Our new year starts on the 1stAugust. I also started some planning and scaffolding for the next 12 months as well. This included creating a new Confluence site for my objectives and my work, as well as a new JIRA project. I have been using the same JIRA project for the last few years, but as a result it was getting complicated by previous years’ work. So decided to start afresh.

As part of our Cyber Essentials accreditation, I had to return some old kit, so spent time erasing and cleaning an old Microsoft Surface tablet and an iPad. The Windows machine, which can’t run Windows 11 was a really nice machine, and I quite enjoyed using it over the years, so it was somewhat sad when I had to hand it back in. It was also relatively easy to wipe and clean.

I spent some time reading and reviewing QAA briefing: Reconsidering assessment for the ChatGPT era: QAA advice on developing sustainable assessment strategies.

This paper sets out QAA’s advice for providers on how to approach the assessment of students in a world where students have access to Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. The principles set out here are applicable to both higher and further education. This resource develops a theme first introduced in our earlier advice – Maintaining quality and standards in the ChatGPT era: QAA advice on the opportunities and challenges posed by Generative Artificial Intelligence – published in May 2023, around the (re)design of assessment strategies to mitigate the risks to academic integrity posed by the increased use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools (such as ChatGPT) by students and learners.

I am planning to attend ALT-C, so have been planning, researching, developing, and preparing my presentation for ALT-C.

Looking through that digital lens

The pandemic crisis gave universities serious challenges and required creative thinking to provide solutions. Universities have needed to act at pace and scale. They’ve needed to do this whilst staff and students are coping lockdowns, social distancing, and restrictions. One aspect of higher education that gained more prominence during the emergency response, was the importance of digital. Knowing that digital has been critical to dealing with the challenges of the pandemic, the question now remains: how and what role will digital play in the post-pandemic strategic priorities of the university?

There are two key questions facing universities?

Does the strategy still meet the needs of the university in this new, changing, and uncertain landscape?

What role does digital play in helping universities achieve their [new] strategic aspirations?

Any departmental or methodology strategy should always link back to the organisational strategy and how the objectives and actions will support the organisational strategic aims. If you apply a digital lens to the corporate strategy, you can demonstrate how digital technologies can enable that strategy. So rather than talk about how you are going to increase the use of digital technologies, the strategy talks about how the use of digital technologies will enable the strategic aims (Clay 2018). Digital does not exist in isolation and there may be other strategies, such as teaching and learning, assessment, environmental, wellbeing or community. The concept of a lens can be used here as well. The digital lens approach, as outlined by Jisc (Phipps and Clay 2018) can enable effective and transformational behaviours to emerge by helping staff to understand and develop their capabilities and confidence in the context of their own work. The results can include an improved status quo and the identification of new goals for individuals and their organisations. There is a history of people talking about applying a lens to challenges, to look at things differently. (Phipps and Clay 2018) To give a different perspective on what has been written or talked about. In this session we will reflect on the various ways in which universities can respond to these questions, you may want to create new strategic priorities, which reflect the new landscape in which universities will operate.  A question that we will also discuss is, do universities need a separate digital strategy? There are challenges with having additional strategies that are an addition to the core strategic priorities, and with more strategies in place it is sometimes easy for things to fall between them.  Additionally, the provision of a new strategy, with new digital priorities, may be seen as some kind of extra or addition to what staff are already doing. The end result is that the digital strategy is often ignored or left to one side (Clay 2018). In the session we will look at how this can be avoided. In this session participants will gain an understanding of the importance of digital in strategic planning and decision making.

Phipps, L and Clay J (2018) Delivering digital change: strategy, practice and process. Senior leaders’ briefing paper Jisc

Clay J (2018) Why does no one care about my digital strategy? – eLearning Stuff [online] eLearning Stuff.

My top tweet this week was this one.

 

altc2023, apple

Vision Pro announced – Weeknote #223 – 9th June 2023

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Somerset Levels

A full week back working after a week off. I nearly wrote a full week back in the office, but these days I rarely am physically in the office for the whole week.

Of course, the first day back was spent dealing with the bundle of email in my inbox. Though I use this approach to deal with my email, I also plan my work and communication, so that when I do get back from leave there is generally nothing urgent or critical to deal with. However, I did have one critical thing to do which was contribute a board report. As I have a range of smart objectives, use of JIRA, and these weeknotes, it was relatively simple to put a report together.

My submission for ALT-C this autumn was accepted. This is the first time since 2017 that I have presented at the conference. I didn’t submit a session in 2018, I didn’t attend in 2019, the conference was cancelled in 2020, it was online in 2021, I did attend in 2022. At this point the only thing I will say is that the session is not about dead VLEs.

Apple Vision Pro

I was totally impressed with Apple’s new Vision Pro, and totally disappointed that it will be US only in the first instance!

The more I hear and read about the Vision Pro, the more I am intrigued and impressed. Will it be a game changer? Don’t know, but I do see it more as a (remote) individual technology compared to say a class set of iPads.

I’ve blogged about AR quite a bit over the years, this post was 13 years ago in 2010. What I think Apple’s Vision Pro will do (in the future when it is cheaper) is make this a more engaging AR interaction. The key, will it be *better* than a flat screen?

Agreed with this comment from Alex Lindsay on the Twitter about the WWDC keynote.

The event video was so great… I can’t go back to watching stage events. The era of the “Keynote” has less than 3 years left before it’s gone everywhere.

Freeform

Discovered Freeform for the Mac and the iPad. It looks like a great planning tool, I did wonder if it would be useful for sketch notes, it could be, but it is missing many of the functions that I use in Paper by WeTransfer.

Spent time organising the final Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting for this year, which takes place next week.  Originally planned to be in Scotland, it will not be happening online.

Library

Did some work organising and planning Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June, which is now pretty much full, which is nice.

Got some feedback from the Intelligent Campus Community Event I ran a couple of weeks back. There was 100% satisfaction with over 66% very satisfied.

Small group forum worked well, good space for interactions, right duration.

Had an excellent meeting with a University about their current work in the smart and intelligent campus space. It was really refreshing to see an institution actually delivering on the theoretical and vision concepts we imagined in this space five years ago.

I take way too many photographs like this….

My top tweet this week was this one.

altc2023, connectmore2023, ucisa23, weeknotes

A Hard Day’s Night – Weeknote #212 – 24th March 2023

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Royal Albert Dock

Monday I was in London at the Jisc offices in Fetter Lane. We had our Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting with 12 PVCs (including a VC and DVCs). As you might expect ChatGPT and AI was a hot topic of conversation in the meeting.

After the meeting I was heading up to London for the UCISA Leadership Conference in Liverpool.

I did some sketch notes while I was up there.

I did enjoy the conference, not sure if I enjoyed it as much as the previous year, but it was still an excellent conference. Various sessions got me thinking, and I am contemplating writing some of my thoughts up from the conference.

The equality, diversity, and inclusion sessions were interesting and useful. Why don’t universities try and be more flexible in their recruitment practices, for example how many offer term time only contracts (reduced hours) to attract working parents. Family friendly policies can widen the talent pool. Why are so many jobs 37.5 hrs 52 weeks? Also why is it so often that recruitment for an individual, rather than recruiting for the team. A more diverse team is often more effective.

Was a little disappointed that one of the opening sessions talked about digital natives. They don’t exist, never have.

Wondered if any university was looking at implementing a four day week?

This BBC news article reflects on the experiences of those involved in a four day week trial.

The scheme, organised by 4 Day Week Global, took place between June and December 2022, and involved organisations across the UK, including some non-profit organisations, as well as private firms in recruitment, software, and manufacturing. A report assessing its impact has found it had “extensive benefits” particularly for employees’ well-being.

I spent time reviewing the Connect More 2023 themes and topics with others across Jisc.

Started reflecting on possible ideas for ALT-C 2023 now that the call for papers is out. In 2021 I did a blog post about the digital lens, based on earlier work, so looking at possibly revisiting this.

Continued my researching AI in education. Have had early access to Bard, which looks very good.

Saw this on the Twitter – Fake Trump arrest photos trigger a new AI panic. The quality of AI images is getting better and better, and as you might expect, the images they are creating can be problematic.

Spent time writing and reviewing some ideas for next year, including looking at the rumoured Apple Reality Pro.

Final comment, often we know where we are, and where we want to be. The harder job is working out how to get there. What do we need to do to make it happen. How do we get there?

My top tweet this week was this one.