Monday, November 19, 2012

Scooping Links for Moodle

scoopit
When it comes to presenting a course in Moodle I often find myself trying to think of alternatives to the default means of materials presentation through the links to documents and websites approach, and the other day I discovered Scoopit. I have actually seen these websites before, but not taken the time to look into them any further. If you have not come across Scoopit yet then the approach is basically this, rather than simply collecting a series of your favourite links for others to tryout, Scoopit organises and presents a snapshot of the target websites and organises them into a multi-row two column display. If you would like to give it a try then the whole set-up is extremely straightforward, simply create a free account, name your topic, enter a description and some keywords. To gather content for your topic you can either Click-On the Curate button that appears on the page, this will generate a set of suggested sites, or use the Bookmark facility, essentially by dropping the Scoopit bookmark onto browsers toolbar and Scooping while you surf, very effective.

By using my Scoopit Topic url as the website address in a Moodle course link the students can now simply use this to review the sites that I am recommending for them, much better than creating a link for each site.

Finally, and I do like this, every Scoop can be posted to your social networking sites and include among others Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, plus there are apps for the iPhone and Android, so you can Scoop on the move.
 
If you are using Scoopit, have discovered other means to display your links then please feel free to comment.

Friday, November 09, 2012

Running The Survey

Following the trial of our eILT skillset questionnaire for staff, where I ran it past a sample of nearly twenty, this week I applied the finishing touches and launched the survey for real. The initial trial took the form of a paper based exercise that allowed us to evaluate and apply changes to what would become the final electronic form delivered through our Moodle vle. Interestingly following some feedback observations from the first group, I went ahead and made a couple of the questions optional, a consequence really of trying to create a questionnaire that could be adapted for varying situations. All in all though, this has proved to be a preferred means of acquiring the information as opposed to a web database which had been my original intention. Not to my own surprise I also learnt a great deal from the whole exercise in how to write questionnaires. In fact if you are thinking of writing a questionnaire for the first time, then you may like to have a look at these two links, the first for SurveyMonkey, includes some very useful pdf’s and the second from accesscable, has some very useful general recommendations.  So having completed the questionnaire, and had it proof read and then running it past the first half dozen or so members of staff, eventually someone found a question with a repeat word! Why I find myself asking, did the error have to be in question 13 of all places.

If you would like to see a pdf of the finished product as it stands at the moment, then please follow this link to a pdf, a little untidy as I simply took a screen copy from Moodle to Word.

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

eBooks and Printed Books

I recall back in the early days of our vle here at College one of my selling points was that having materials in digital form would save not only on paper, but also those trips to the print room, and indeed this remains the case.

With all this in mind I was pleased to come across an infographic from onlinecolleges.net that extended the reasoning along with a host of  statistics on the benefits digital text including eBooks. For my own classes this academic year, I have provided links to both eBook libraries and specific publications with the result that predictably, perhaps, very little by way of actual physical books appearing, but is this always the case. While it would seem to be the case that an eBook would represent a saving in raw cash terms, this may not be the only of most important deciding factor, and so I decided to look (surf) around and get a view.

In the New York Times Business Day Technology  a very interesting piece By Claire Cain Miller and Julie Bosamn entitled "E-Books Outsell Print Books" , reports some very convincing sales statistics from Amazon, though I am drawn to the fact that much of the sales trend would not possible be representative for HE requirements, non the less, a powerful message here.

From StandarSpeaker.com in the article "Colleges adapting to influx of ebooks" by Amanda Christman, sites that according CourseSmart, the publishing industry has seen e-textbook sales double each semester over the past two year; not sure how sustainable this would be but even so the uptake is undeniable.

However now balance this with a more student oriented view in "Why Aren’t Students Using E-Books?" by Audrey Watters from KQED, and you begin appreciate some interesting points, and I quote "But students also share their textbooks because they are so incredibly expensive. And as the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on e-books makes lending someone your copy difficult if not impossible, students are likely steering away from e-books because they simply don’t work for them — practically or economically. After all, there is little savings to be found in many digital textbooks. They cost roughly the same as print, but come without the ability to sell back a used copy at the end of the semester".

So where does this leave me, well one thing is for certain, and that is we are not about to witness the demise of printed materials, and for me as both an educator and eLearning Development Coordinator ,will have some impact upon assumptions that I may have otherwise drawn regarding my approach to course content, how about you? Please feel free to comment.