Category Archives: youtube

Coronavirus: What if this had happened in 2005?

Over on the BBC News Site, Rory Cellan-Jones, their technology correspondent has written an interesting “what if” piece.

But as I spend my day holding video-conferencing sessions with colleagues, FaceTiming my son and granddaughter stuck in a flat across London, and updating my various social networks, one thing strikes me: what if this had happened in 2005, just before the smartphone era began?

It got me thinking along similar lines about what would have happened in education if this had happened in 2005.

Rory does mention education:

With millions of children home from school, online education platforms are feeling the strain. But while there was plenty of talk about “edtech” back in 2005, most of the focus was on improving IT systems within schools rather than introducing remote learning at a time when many children would not have had a computer or a broadband connection at home.

This got me thinking about the services and platforms that we were using back in 2005 and would they have been able to cope with the increased demands that something like coronavirus would have put on them.

We did have VLEs across universities and colleges back in 2005. Many of these systems though were self-hosted in university server rooms, the concept of cloud or hosted services wasn’t really a thing back then.

As most of these learning platforms were under-utilised by staff and students they were often placed on under-powered servers and infrastructure, and very likely would have struggled if they needed to be scaled up to be used by a whole organisation.

We are all probably use to the single sign on and IDP these days, that we may forget back then that this wasn’t the norm. It wasn’t a simple matter of students and staff signing into a learning platform, they needed accounts created to use the learning platform.

Moodle for example was only at version 1.3 way behind where it is now, not just in version number but also functionality.

So who would be creating these accounts and importantly how would you get the information to the students?

The main form of electronic communication across universities and colleges in 2005 was e-mail, however though everyone these days have an e-mail account for their institution, this wasn’t necessarily the case back then. Certainly students weren’t often given institutional e-mail addresses relying on free e-mail services such as hotmail and yahoo. There were still quite a few people using AOL.

Without collaborative tools such as Slack, Teams, you can imagine people’s inboxes suffering from overload (though that may also be happening today as well).

As Rory points out in his article, home broadband connections were not the norm and there is no way you could expect all students to have a connection.

More than half of UK homes had broadband in 2007, with an average connection speed of 4.6 Mbit/s. That means half didn’t and those that did may have had slow connections.

Some people were still on dial-up connections, which tied up the phone line and was much slower than DSL connections.

If this crisis was to happen in 2005, then more use was probably going to be made of postal learning.

Today lots of people are using video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Teams to deliver teaching or for discussion.

Back in 2005 there were tools that could be used to deliver webinars, the precursor to Adobe Connect, Macromedia Breeze 4 was released in July 2003 with version 5 released in May 2005.

ADSL connections were okay for most things, but they were asymmetric, which meant upload speeds were significantly slower than download speeds. This would mean that it would be challenging to stream video from home connections, as well as challenging for people to view multiple video streams.

Today most laptops (if not all) have a built in camera, smartphones have two cameras (one in the front and one at the back). In 2005 a camera was a peripheral that you needed to buy to add to your computer or laptop. So thinking that at least we could stream low quality video would be scuppered by the lack of cameras.

Similar story with microphones as well, just in case you thought you could go audio only…

It’s not surprising that in 2005 most online learning was asynchronous text based, as that worked across most devices and connections of the time.

As for content, today we are awash with content, back in 2005 not so much…

In 2005, Wikipedia became the most popular reference website on the Internet, according to Hitwise, with the English Wikipedia alone exceeding 750,000 articles. Well in 2020 there are in excess of six million articles on the English Wikipedia site.

Much educational content was on CD-ROMs (remember them) and delivering materials online were fraught with challenges.

However at least journals were available online, but again problems with authentication would cause challenges for staff and students trying to access these collections from home.

Today many learners will be accessing their learning via their smartphone. Though there were (expensive) phones that could do the internet stuff back in 2005, those who did have mobile phones used them for calls, SMS text messages and the Snake game!

3G was in its infancy, was not available across the whole of the UK and was very expensive. 4G wouldn’t arrive in the UK until 2012.

Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay
Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

Though we did have social media in 2005, it wasn’t on the same level as we have now. Today we are connected with others much more easily, our peers, colleagues and our students. We can share things online and feel very connected even though we are physically distant..

In 2005, YouTube was just a month old. Facebook was only opened to the public in September 2006, maybe they would have opened earlier in a crisis, but back in 2005, who had even heard of Facebook? There was no Twitter, no TikTok, no WhatsApp or Instagram.

Even with services such as Friendster and MySpace, though available, they didn’t have the same reach that today’s services have.

If this crisis had happened in 2005, I think that education for most would have been a very lonely affair, with staff and students feeling very disconnected from the whole process of learning. What do you think? What have I missed?

Top Ten Blog Posts 2018

This year I have written only 17 blog posts, in 2017 it was 21 blog posts, in 2016 it was 43 blog posts, in 2015 I wrote 24 blog posts. In 2014 I wrote 11 and in 2013 I wrote 64 blog posts and over a hundred in 2012. In 2011 I thought 150 was a quiet year!

Do signs work?

The tenth most popular blog post in 2018 was asking So do signs work? This article from 2013 described some of the challenges and issues with using signage to change behaviours. So do signs work? Well yes they do, but often they don’t.

The post at number nine was my podcast workflow, published in 2011, this article outlines how and what equipment I use to record the e-Learning Stuff Podcast. This is only one way in which to record a remote panel based podcast, and I am sure there are numerous other ways in which to do this. I have also changed how I have recorded over the two years I have been publishing the podcast due to changes in equipment and software. It’s probably time to update it, though I am not doing as much podcasting as I use to.

Dropping three places to eighth was 100 ways to use a VLE – #89 Embedding a Comic Strip. This was a post from July 2011, that looked at the different comic tools out there on the web, which can be used to create comic strips that can then be embedded into the VLE. It included information on the many free online services such as Strip Creator and Toonlet out there. It is quite a long post and goes into some detail about the tools you can use and how comics can be used within the VLE.

The post at number seven, climbing one place, was Comic Life – iPad App of the Week. Though I have been using Comic Life on the Mac for a few years now I realised I hadn’t written much about the iPad app that I had bought back when the iPad was released. It’s a great app for creating comics and works really well with the touch interface and iPad camera.

Sixth most popular was a post from 2018, called “I don’t know how to use the VLE!” This blog post described a model of VLE embedding and development. This post was an update to the model I had published in 2010.

In at number five, is also a post from 2018, Why does no one care about my digital strategy? This post described some of the background to the leadership briefing I wrote with Lawrie Phipps on the digital lens.

digital lens

Holding at fourth, is Can I legally download a movie trailer? One of the many copyright articles that I posted some years back, this one was in 2008, I am still a little behind in much of what is happening within copyright and education, one of things I do need to update myself on, as things have changed.

Dropping one place back to third, was Frame Magic – iPhone App of the Week, still don’t know why this one is so popular!

FrameMagic - iPhone App of the Week

Back in 2015 I asked I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? in relation to the Area Review process and this post was the second most popular post in 2018, last year it was in sixth place, so it’s getting more popular.

Once again, for the sixth year running, the number one post for 2018 was the The iPad Pedagogy Wheel.

The Padagogy Wheel

I re-posted the iPad Pedagogy Wheel as I was getting asked a fair bit, “how can I use this nice shiny iPad that you have given me to support teaching and learning?”. It’s a really simple nice graphic that explores the different apps available and where they fit within Bloom’s Taxonomy. What I like about it is that you can start where you like, if you have an iPad app you like you can see how it fits into the pedagogy. Or you can work out which iPads apps fit into a pedagogical problem.

So there we have it, the top ten posts 2018.

“I don’t know how to use the VLE!”

A model of VLE embedding and development

Despite many people talking about the death of the VLE over the years, the institutional VLE is still an important component of most colleges and universities offer in the online space. Whether this be supporting existing programmes of study, those offering a blended approach, or even for fully online programmes.

For most universities and colleges, growth in the use of the VLE is relatively organic, with little planning on either side. Training is often focused on the mechanistic and technical aspects of the VLE. Some training looks at the learning first, but without understanding the potential of the functionality or the affordances of the VLE, it can be challenging for practitioners to work out how to use the VLE to meet the needs of that learning activity.

The end result is an inconsistent approach to how practitioners use the VLE which can be confusing for learners who have multiple modules or courses delivered by different people. The other end result is that sometimes an inappropriate function of the VLE is used resulting in a challenging experience in learning something, with the challenge being using the technology, not understanding the learning.

One of the attractive aspects of any VLE is the range of functionality that it offers allowing practitioners (academics, teachers, lecturers) many different ways to engage with learners and create learning activities.

Continue reading “I don’t know how to use the VLE!”

Great Scott! – Back to the Future at FOTE15

There wasn’t a FOTE conference in 2015, which was a pity as it was one of my favourite annual events. I spoke at many of the conferences, most recently in 2014 when I spoke about the conflict between the light and the dark and used a Star Wars theme.

I remember reflecting on the conference on the way home that it would be a lot of fun to do a Back the Future themed talk for 2015.

Back to the Future

Alas it was never to be…

However I thought it might be a little fun to explore what might have been…

Continue reading Great Scott! – Back to the Future at FOTE15

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #078: My Digital Footprint

So what is your digital footprint? Where can others find you online? What can you do about other people who post stuff about you on services such as Facebook, Google+ and the Twitter. Are you CMALTed? How many apps do you have on your iPhone?

With Zak Mensah and James Clay.

This is the seventy eighth e-Learning Stuff Podcast, My Digital Footprint.

Download the podcast in mp3 format: My Digital Footprint

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

Shownotes

  • Not on Facebook? Facebook still knows you.
  • Facebook announces that you can use video calling within Facebook.
  • Search for Gloucestershire College on YouTube and you might find this video hidden in the results, it use to be the number one result!
  • Not yet open to all, but we talked about Google+.
  • If you are a learning technologist you may be interested in becoming a Certified Member of ALT.
  • If you want to make notes on the move, have a look at Evernote which is available for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 as well as OSX, Windows and through a browser.
  • The most expensive iOS App James has bought is TomTom for the iPhone.
  • Audioboo lets you record and publish audio files along with an image the the geodata.
  • It was a normal busy Friday morning in the small West Yorkshire market town of Wetherby when someone working in a café spotted a man acting a bit suspiciously on the street. He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.  Geocaching: the unintended results.
  • JISC Digital Media
  • There are various magazines available for the iPad including Empire and Wired.
  • Zak’s personal website.

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #063: I’m the Mayor of Morrisons….

Bits and pieces of news from the realm of e-learning. James gets all excited over the MacBook Air. QR Codes are back in fashion and are flavour of the month. Does the top ten YouTube videos a symptom of the death of user generated content? FOTE 10 and videos and combining video with Twitter. Some more commentary on the Kindle. James really doesn’t understand FourSquare, or to be honest Places on Facebook. James however does like Instagram. Finally James talks about the JISC Online Conference 2010.

With James Clay.

This is the sixty third e-Learning Stuff Podcast, I’m the Mayor of Morrisons….

Download the podcast in mp3 format: I’m the Mayor of Morrisons….

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Hairdressing Video

If you are learning about hairdressing, reading about it is okay, but doesn’t really show how to do things even with nice colour pictures. Video is a much better way to reflect on a process, to prepare for a process or learn about a new process.

Worcester College of Tech and Hairdressing Training have placed a series of short, useful videos on different hair cutting techniques on YouTube.

See more videos.

Hairdressing Training is run by Mimas (http://www.mimas.ac.uk). It provides you with a range of resources to help with your teaching. These include a suite of web resources with photographic step by step guides combined with lessons and handy tips and techniques, suiting a variety of learning styles. Hairdressing Training is also available via mobile devices.

Clean and tidy

One of the annoyances of using YouTube in the classroom is the “untidy” YouTube interface. It has got better recently, but one annoyance remains, the comments.

For some reason many people who comment on YouTube videos seem to have to use profanities or make weird or rude comments.

As a result when you are showing a YouTube video in a classroom or at a conference, people get distracted by the comments and miss the video.

I did mention QuietTube in a post last week, I was recommended by Ellen to have a look at SafeShareTV.

Not only does SafeShareTV remove distracting and offensive elements around YouTube videos, but it also allows you to crop videos before sharing them.

A neat little idea to sending YouTube links by e-mail, or posting links in the VLE.

It helps avoid some of the distractions that the main YouTube sites offer and is in some ways better and easier than trying to embed the YouTube video.

Another way of showing your videos in the classroom is to use the channel and find the videos that way rather than using the direct URL.

As you can see you also avoid the unecessary comments and distractions, but stil not as clean as SafeShare.

Tools for YouTube

YouTube has some great content, the tools described in this video will make it much easier to use YouTube in the classroom.

QuietTube – To watch web videos without the comments and stuff, just drag the button below to your browser’s bookmarks bar. On any of the supported video pages, click the bookmark button to watch in peace.

Tube Chop – TubeChop allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it.

The final tool in the video, Keep Vid isn’t to be recommended as I explain in this blog post.

Via Simon Finch