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One month later…

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I recently noticed that I’ve not posted to the blog for a while, nearly a month!

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say, much more I have been busy doing other things, holiday, mainly work, but also moving house. June is also a busy month in terms of events and I have been out and about a bit too.

I have posted to my other blogs, notably on my technical blog.

Voice Dictation – trying out Apple’s voice dictation.

Lost my Fibre – having moved house I lost my FTTC connection.

Music, books, movies and tan slacks – YouTube’s speech-to-text transcription can sometimes result in amusing closed captions.

In terms of events I went to the RSC Turbo TEL event where I presented four ten minute sessions on various learning technologies.

I also blogged at Anglia Ruskin’s Learning and Teaching Conference in Cambridge. I particularly enjoyed the keynote session from Bob Duke.

Lord Ashcroft Building #ltaconf

I have also delivered two webinars as part of an LSIS project on learner owned devices which was useful and interesting.

Yesterday I attended the RSC SW Learning Resources Forum, a really useful opportunity to share ideas and issues with colleagues who do a similar role in other colleges.

So hopefully not long now before I write another blog post.

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Making the move to Speakerdeck

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For the past few years when I have needed to share my presentations online I have been using Slideshare.

There were two key reasons for this; firstly it allowed people to view the presentation within a webpage, without needing to download it and open Powerpoint and where appropriate in context. Secondly, I generally use Apple’s Keynote for my presentations. Most people don’t have Keynote (you need a Mac) and because of my style of presentation most of the presentations were too big for downloading, usually in the region of 100-200MB. I liked Slideshare as I could then embed my presentation into my blog and also into other webpages and sometimes the VLE. You can read about my presentation workflow here.

However in April, Slideshare brought in a 10MB limit on uploads for free accounts. Not wanting to spend £19 a month on a service I probably use once a month, I asked on the Twitter and Google+ for solutions.

Doug Belshaw said to save as PDF and use ColorSync Utility (part of Mac OS X) to reduce the file size. This I did and I did managed to reduce my presentation to an 11MB PDF, which alas was still too big for Slideshare. However this was certainly a useful tip for sharing other PDFs by email for example.

Two people on the twitter, @hjames and @sboneham both recommended Speakerdeck to me. So that’s what I did and went and had a look. I actually found I already had an account and had tried it out once, but didn’t use it again. I suspect I tried it, found it didn’t add anything at that time over Slideshare and then didn’t go back!

You upload your presentation as a PDF and the service will convert it into an online presentation that people can click through slide by slide (in a similar manner to Slideshare).

The process was pretty straightforward and in many ways I much prefer the look and feel of Speakerdeck compared to Slideshare.

Speakerdeck works well on iOS devices too, which is useful. As well as sharing by link you can also use an embed code to add your Speakerdeck presentation to a blog, web page or a VLE. As a result I have placed most of my recent presentations on Speakerdeck.

When writing this blog post I wanted to check a few things and have found that Slideshare have relented on their 10MB limit and have raised it to 100MB. So will I go back to Slideshare…. hmm not sure.

app of the week

MindGenius – iPad App of the Week

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MindGenius – 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 MindGenius for iPad.

MindGenius for iPad is the perfect tool for capturing information on the go.

Use it for taking notes in meetings and seminars, creating quick to do lists, and anywhere else you require a fast, intuitive method to collect ideas and information and think things through.

MindGenius for iPad can help you improve your personal productivity and can be used in conjunction with MindGenius for PC. Open maps created in the desktop version and vice versa.

Free

Within my college the standard mind mapping application on the desktop is MindGenius. Though there have been various mind mapping apps for the iPad, I have been using iThoughts HD for a while now (see the review), it wasn’t that simple to transfer mind maps from the iPad to the PC and back again. As a result when I was told that there was a new dedicated MindGenius app for the iPad I was pleased as this would mean that it would be much easier for staff and learners to transfer mind maps between their iPads and the PC.

As you might expect, the app makes it very easy to create mind maps, adding text, child and siblings is simple and quite intuitive.

Using the sidebar it is possible to add more information to the mind map, information on each part of the mind map, add tasks to the nodes and add notes.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t change the default colours of the different branches.

Where this app falls down is how you can share your mind map. You can either e-mail the mind map or save it to Dropbox in the native MindGenius .mgmx format.

You can’t export as a PDF or PNG (image file), neither can you export in a different mind mapping format. You can’t print your mind map either. As a result the only way to do any of the that is to e-mail it to a PC and open the mind map on the PC and then export, save or print.

As a result as a standalone free app, it’s fine for making notes, but you won’t be able to do that much with your finished mind map. As a result, even though it is free, you will find it quite limiting. However if you already have MindGenius on your PC then you may find this app useful for making mind maps on your iPad on the move or in the classroom.

Get MindGenius for iPad in the iTunes App Store.

alt

15%

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So could your institution replace 15% of their curriculum with online study packs?

At the ALT Large Scale Curriculum Redesign, Peter Kilcoyne of Worcester College of Technology explained in his presentation how his college did just that.

Every course had to replace 15% of the students guided learning hours (or contact time) from classroom delivery to online study packs. These study packs, called PALs (Personally Accountable Learning) were designed to be delivered by the VLE (Moodle) and accessed remotely and independently by learners.

This was, according to Peter, a real challenge, with lots of issues and problems. As well as the inevitable, “I don’t have the time” and the usual sceptical resistance from staff, there were also lots of other real issues such as curriculum planning, technical training, course and activity design. All this taking place in a time of transition and concerns about jobs and pay. There was also some resistance from learners.

Curriculum areas were given a degree of freedom about how they would use their 15%. Some courses for example made 15% of every module delivered in this way. Whilst other courses found some individual modules were more attuned to this method of delivery and therefore most modules were delivered as before with a couple of modules delivered in their entirety through the packs.

Overall the main reason for this approach was to reduce costs. This was achieved by reducing staffing costs for courses by reducing teaching time by 15%. To ensure that the independent learning that took place in the 15% gap was covered by staff using OER (Open Educational Resources), YouTube, NLN Materials and other resources to create study packs.

There was an interesting “discussion” at the end of Peter’s presentation about was this really about saving money, the increase in workload that this approach would bring. I think there was some confusion between what we would call e-teaching and e-learning. What I understood from the presentation was that 15% of “guided delivery” by teachers would be replaced by “independent learning” through the internet. In terms of marking assessment, this is never part of the guided learning hours so replacing 15% of the learners’ classroom time with remote learning wouldn’t have an impact on the time taken to mark assessments, as marking wouldn’t happen within classroom time anyway.

This approach may appear to be controversial to some (and certainly some members of the audience weren’t too keen on it) but if your institution is facing a difficult economic climate it might be a solution to cut costs.

On a more positive note though, I can see this also as a great solution for small class sizes. Can’t fill a group, well use study packs so that the class can proceed, as I am sure learners may prefer to attend a course then have it not run at all!

Where this could really start to save time and money too, is if institutions start to share their packs. How that could happen and work is a bigger different kind of problem.

alt

Large Scale Curriculum Redesign

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First Great Western HST

On my way to Birmingham to attend the ALT event on large scale curriculum redesign.

The aim of the event is to provide participants with practical ideas and strategies for technology-supported curriculum redesign which will have an impact on large numbers of learners.

I am interested to hear from the many different (and in some cases controversial) speakers about what they have done in their institutions, and how they have used technology to make change happen.

Where this event, hopefully will be different, is that the approach many of the speakers have used in their institutions has been holistic and large scale and involved all curriculum areas. This must have been a real challenge, but is really the only way forward to make change happen within an institution. I am hoping to hear about some of the barriers they faced and how they overcame them.

Often in education we focus on the small scale pilot and project to look at the impact of technology on learning, and then before we embed it across the institution, we move onto the next shiny thing!

altc2009, stuff

What do you mean, someone made them up…

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Anyone who has attended one of my keynote or conference presentations recently will know I have made use of a series of quotes that I first encountered at an ALT-C Keynote by Martin Bean in 2009.

I have used the quotes to remind the audience that scepticism and concerns about the introduction of new technologies or new ways of thinking are not new and that it is “normal” to be concerned about change.

Now I’ve always had my doubts on the validity or authenticity of the quotes as my brief internet research showed that lots of people used the quotes, but there was very little real “evidence” on their authenticity. However in terms of the message I was getting across the essence of the message was much more important than the content of the message. Audiences related to the essence of the message and the scepticism that they had encountered. In more recent messages I have used actual quotes and newspaper headlines about the “dangers” of technology to reinforce the essence of the message.

Recently I used the quotes in a presentation at an ebooks event at UWE. I posted the slides online and I’ve had a couple of comments plus a really useful link that once and for all casts doubts on the quotes and pretty much says that someone in the 1970s made them up!

This set of statements was printed in the Fall 1978 issue of “The MATYC Journal”, a publication that focused on mathematics education. The quotes were assigned the dates: 1703, 1815, 1907, 1929, 1941, and 1950. But they may actually have been created in 1978. Copies of these quotes have been widely distributed and posted on many websites. They also have been published in multiple books and periodicals.

Ah well…. I knew it was too good to be true.

Though of course if you have listened to my presentations you will realise that the quotes were a theatrical device to make the audience to stop and think about change and people’s reactions to change. This is still valid, the quotes merely add a bit of dramatic licence!

So willI use the quotes again?

Probably not, but then I could do and point out that they were “made up” and use that point to make people think.

conference

Mobile Technologies in the Library

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These are the slides from the keynote presentation I gave at the Mobile Technologies Information Sharing Event in Birmingham.

The aim of the keynote was to remind those attending where we had come from, where we are and where we might be going. It was important to ask the question with all the mobile technologies that are currently available, why aren’t they already embedded into the provision of library services?

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #45 Adding an URL or a web link

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I have often thought of the VLE as a portal for learners to discover new things, undertake activities, assess their learning, communication, interact, create, understand, apply analyse and evaluate.

The web, of which the VLE generally is part of and connected to has a wealth of knowledge, information and content waiting to be discovered and used.

In terms of discovery adding an URL or web link to a course on your VLE, will allow learners to make that journey to support their learning.

However one of the very advantages of the web, putting in a link, is also one of the key disadvantages. A link placed on its own lacks context and direction.

Now in some cases this may be sufficient, think of a reading list of useful websites.

However even then providing guidance to learners about not only why they should be browsing to those links but also what they should do on those web pages is important if the learners are going to get some value from them.

We sometimes think providing a reading list of books is useful for learners, but unless they have the necessary study skills to make use of those books they may find they either don’t find them useful, spend too much wasteful time looking through the books or not making the most of what could be a real valuable resource.

Likewise with a series of web links, without the digital literacy skills to deal with the content on those web pages then learners will not get the real value from those pages that they could and should.

Similarly just pasting a link into your course on the VLE without context or guidance may result in the learners not using the link or if they do browse to the web page not understand what they should do there or how to use that web page. Of course there are exceptions and sometimes it will be very self-explanatory, but generally it won’t be.

For some links, rather than adding them as they are to the VLE, it would make more sense to add them to a “page” with extra content, or maybe even more logical to put the link into a forum post with the context and suggested activity. A forum would then allow learners to ask questions about the link, or post their reflective thoughts about the link.

The VLE can be a fantastic repository of content and learning activities, sometimes though using the wealth of stuff on the web means adding links. Adding context to links is an important part to ensure that those links enhance and enrich learning and don’t just confuse the learners.

vle

Moodle Audit

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I recently gave a presentation and had a discussion on auditing your VLE installation at the RSC SW VLE Forum.

Gloucestershire College has recently undertaken an external audit of both their current VLE setup and their recent procurement process with outsourcing the VLE to ULCC. The audit process is a useful way of looking at the systems and processes an institution has in place for such a mission critical system like the VLE. This session will go through the key aspects within an external audit and delegates will discuss with colleagues how they would “fare” if they were to undergo an external audit. This may also be an opportunity to think about peer assessment and auditing.  

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