Moodle Journal

eLearning Observations, Codeyear and Web Tools

2012-01-13T11:55:00.008Z

As our teaching staff here begins to take advantage of the training and resources that we have in place for including, it has come to raise for me an important issue with regard to classroom observations. As part of Learning and Teaching QA, observations by the quality team are carried out at regular intervals. The thing is this; observers are looking for a number of activities and practices that should be taking place in a classroom particularly, learning, collaboration, engagement etc and as such these will be recorded with comments in an observation record, this then eventually finds it way into the staff appraisal process; a practice that I feel certain is pretty much standardised everywhere in teaching.

The question arises however, if and indeed when learning activities such as these take place beyond the class, as for instance as part of an eLearning experience, how are they going to be captured by observers? After all just as in the classroom scenario, they are indeed equal to not only in value but by the same token have been facilitated by that particular member of the teaching staff in the first instance! And so should we not also recognise this within a teaching observation profile. Well not surprisingly we decided to schedule a further, more by way of a heads up session, where I took the opportunity to show where and how observers could capture eLearning activities and participation, along with some examples of good practice from trials that I had run in the past. I am looking forward to seeing how we implement this particular consideration, and will certainly post our experiences. I do invite comments from anyone who has had the same issue arise.

Well I must say I did not imagine commenting in my blog that upon discovering my class had abandoned a programming exercise I had set, and were all fully immersed with some page on the Internet, that I would be happy, but I was. Over the previous weekend I had posted a forum message asking everyone to try-out the new Codeyear initiative. If you have not come across this yet, its basically an interactive introduction to computer programming. I must say it seems to have become just a little addicted at the moment for many of my students. I guess one ingredient of Codeyear that is missing in my own classes is the competitive aspect of point scoring. A couple of days after this I was covering a class of students currently taking one of our Networking courses, a course by the way that does not feature a programming module, and it was all received very well with one student completing the first set of tasks within the lesson timeframe, excellent. Si I recommend giving this one a try, though at the present time you will require either Firefox or Google Chrome browsers to run the service.

A couple of new stumble-upons for me this week have been with new sites, new to me anyway, that offer free services for producing web presentations

The first was Glogster, this is a free sign up, that allows you to create presentation poster style glogs as they are called, really mashups of music, photographs, videos, links. If you already subscribe to photo / video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Picasa then you can connect to these also. Glogster tools include rotate, resize, image effects and animations. And if you are a serious social networker as I suspect you are to some degree, then a single click will publish your Glogs to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Tumbl. Worth a look

The next was Vuvox. The presentation styles here are created using three default toolsets of Express, Collage and Studio.

COLLAGE to quickly produce dynamic interactive panoramas with hot-spots.
STUDIO to build a personalized media presentation... and, place it in your COLLAGE.
EXPRESS to build presentations with dynamic content from RSS feeds and online albums.

Looking through examples they do present a new a refreshing approach and alternative to the more traditional presentations styles and approaches that we have become accustomed to using, and again I think you will find its worth looking this one over.

Be sure to stay in touch for future posts, regards Barry

First week of 2012

2012-01-06T11:57:00.007Z

Migration, Migration
As part of the college merger project, the Christmas break has been used to migrate Orpington College Moodle vle away from hosting with ULCC and onto our own internal servers, a move that involved a change from unix/Linux to Windows.
The rationale was primarily a cost saving exercise, and given that we have the in-house expertise to make it happen, we have, and all appears to be running very well. The next stage will be the move from our current Bromley College vle
from our own Linux to Windows server. This means that we shall be running two instances of the vle from a single server with two IP's, should be interesting.

Online OCR
Thumbing through some course hand-outs the other day, I found material that I would like to post onto the vle, but after much searching and delving could not locate the original electronic version; their fate no doubt sealed by the crash of my hard drive between my weekly backups a couple of years ago. The only electronic version that I could find though was in screen shot form, Ouch. Anyway a web search turned up a very useful discovery, and just in case as like myself you have not come across the facility yet, then try the online OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com/ the reCAPTCHA was an easy also, excellent.

SharePoint Guide

If you have been following this blog then you will know that we are in the process of adopting SharePoint as part of our Moodle deployment solution. Should you be in need of a SharePoint guide then take a look at this pdf from MicroSoft. Written as a companion to the SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide for Technical and Business Decision Makers, I found it very readable.

ePolicy time

With the training now in place to support staff in moving components of programmes away from the traditional class approach and toward an eLearning mode as part of our standard course delivery. This change in practice will inevitably begin to influence those activities that we would normally associate with the more traditional expectations of class work and lectures, specifically learning, collaboration and assessment. Within a working eLearning environment these components will inevitably begin to take place at times and locations beyond the more traditional physical and time constraints imposed on both staff and students by timetables.
As part of an overall eLearning strategy, I have put together an initial ePolicy discussion document that I feel should provide us with a reasonable set of outline suggestions and proposals to address thosew particular circumstances, expectations and requirements for eLearning covering :- Student Privacy, the use of email, forum and chat discussions, submission of assignments particularly with regard to deadlines, issues regarding the provision of technical help, Student Codes of Conduct, plagiarism linked to Intellectual Property Rights.
I finally sent the discussion document off this morning and so once these are worked on and approved we can commence thinking about installing them in handbooks and course materials.

Thats all for nowbut please stay in touch for future postings.

Study Stack Flash Cards

2011-11-09T13:39:00.004Z

I wonder if you have come across Study Stack yet. The site features collections of Flash Card materials that are organised into categories of Geography History, Business, Maths, Miscellaneous, Science, Languages, Agriculture, Law, Medical and Standardized Tests, that you can both use and contribute to. There are in fact even a number of ways in which your chosen Flash Card resource can be displayed, and these include :-
Flashcards, Study Stack, Study Table, Matching, Crossword, Unscramble, Type In, Quiz Test, Hangman, Bug Match, Hungry Bug, Targets, Notes, Apps, Print, Edit, Hmm...
Some of these, such as Hangman, Bug Match, Hungry Bug and Targets, have a definite game feel about them which was nice.

I was particularly encouraged by the inclusion of Apps in the list as it will allow you to make the resources available to smartphone, tablet, or laptops mobile technologies, and lets face it most students in my experience here at college these days are more than likely going to be carrying at least on of these around with them.

I was further impressed to find that having selected the Flash Card subject and type, there is a text field of copy-n-paste code that you can drop into your web app or vle, which is in fact exactly what I did.

You will see from the screen shot here that as I had simply dropped the code into a web page Resource and emailed everyone to have a try and feedback to me, I did feel the need to include something by way of brief instructions on use at the top.

If you are into the Flash Card approach then I can recommend this site, it is very easy to use there are plenty of resources to choose from.

Please feel free to comment, Barry

Creately Web Based Diagramming Tool

2011-10-28T15:52:00.002+01:00

A little bit of cross posting between my blogs here but if you have use for a diagramming tool and not come across Creately yet, then I think it is well worth paying a visit to the site. There are a number of pricing models available, including a free version that has plenty of features. The models available cover Business Diagrams, User Interface Design, Software, System, Network Diagrams and more. It was the inclusion of software design particularly UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams and Database design diagrams that particularly took my attention. You will find that in creating a new document the examples list will provide sets of templates, some of which seem to be partially complete, these would be particularly useful for teaching. AS well as the many diagrams available, the user interface also includes a standard set of drawing tools, basic shapes, arrows, call outs, you can add notes, comments and share your diagrams thought the free version limits you to five of these. Upon completion diagrams can be exported in either png, jpeg or Creately format. As a unique virtual trial I decided to create a shared media block at my landing point in Second life, so feel free to get a couple of avatar friends together a try it out. Please feel free to reply to this post with your impressions.

regards Barry

The LMS is Dead!

2011-10-25T13:53:00.006+01:00

Have you come acrosss OpenClass yet?

It's a new kind of learning environment that goes beyond the LMS. It’s open to everyone, easy to use, and completely free — and it's making an amazing impact on education. (quote)

The ambition for the OpenClass LMS, utilising cloud and Google Apps for Eduaction seems to be centred on transforming outcomes by leveraging modern social technology to encourage collaboration and communication for students, faculty, institutions, and administrators around the world. (partly quoted)

There is a Take a Tour option that’s worth looking at because it provides a nice insight into the appearence and feel of the system in operation. I look after a Moodle installation here at the college and its hosted internally, a good option really as you get to have control over many issues such as upgrades and local management of the system, so I am not to sure how these would translate for cloud based solutions, but lets see.

Will OpenClass compete with Moodle, who can tell. One thing is for sure though, and that is competition is always good, at least that’s my view, so let’s sit back and see what happens in the coming months.

I for one have signed up to the service and will be staying in touch with developments and interested to see the uptake and use for this new and welcome initiative.

Do take a look at the video, it does seem to suggest to me that there is a certain implicit assumption, though I could be wrong, that by leveraging the benefits of social networks we will see a transformation in outcomes and the student experience.

If you are using Moodle or any other vle for that matter, do you make use of the social networking tools such as WiKi, Forums and Chat, and if so, have you been drawn to any conclusions? If you have then please feel free to reply to this post.

Personally, I make use of these features regularly. Take a look at the chart here, it measures transactions from twelve students over a one month period; in fact the chat was about double the figure shown as some were using msn and I only included Moodle stats. Is this typical of your own experience, please comment. My experience is, and a recent effort on my part just last week proved to be little more than a self fulfilling prophesy, that unless a grading outcome is clearly established as part of the activity, as was the case for the transaction results in the screen shot, then all to often I find Forums are empty and chat rooms silent, do you find the same? please comment.

Kind regards Barry

Preparing for elearning the first run

2011-10-21T19:42:00.004+01:00

This week finally saw the launch of the third phase of our Moodle vle roll out at the college with the delivery of a new 2 hour cpd staff training session Preparing for e-learning. If you have been following the blog here then you will know that this centres on the use of Wimba Create, in the production of learning objects from otherwise standard materials or handouts produced in Word. I see these new materials, as putting into place the final part of a resource package for implementing an e-Learning strategy that draw upon those other tools available in the vle in support of collaborative learning. From this last statement, you can correctly conclude that a certain amount of discussion took place on the very subject of learning objects themselves, principally some definitions and advantages they represent for both students and staff / developers alike.

The objective of the session was to take a typical class handout and see how it could be converted into a learning object with navigation, embedded videos, an embedded website and various question and answer feedback question types. I was pleased enough to see a range of IT skills among those attending especially as everyone completed the task in good time. After the initial production work we exported the material in scorm format and upload onto the vle. In fact I think it was the features of this last stage i.e. the launching and tracking of the object by Moodles Learning Management System that impressed the assembled group as much as the transformation of the material itself.

Since this first run of the course this week, I have already received requests to run more training, one in particular was for everyone in a single department, so very promising.

My objective then remains very much unchanged, and that is to move learning beyond the physical boundaries and time constraints of the scheduled curriculum. In the near future, when students enrol at our college, they will be enrolling into a very real vibrant working social environment, while at the same time enrolling into a very real, social virtual environment.

Please stay in touch for future posts and feel free to comment.

Barry Spencer e-Learning Project Coordinator

Innovation Showcase

2011-10-01T13:13:00.004+01:00

Our Technology School are exhibiting at the Excel Conference Center WorldSkills London 2011 05 from Oct 2011 to 08 Oct 2011, so for that alone, I would certainly recommend getting along for a visit in this coming week, I should be there myself on Friday, and really looking forward to it. I was even more pleased when on Tuesday Afternoon of this week, I was informed that a group of delegates from the conference would be visiting us at the college, and so would it be possible for me to arrange / organise a suitably impressive innovation technology type of showcase for them. I ran through a few of the broader possibilities, which I must say seemd to all go down very well. It occured to me, that we should together with our Marketing department, assemble in addition to any visitors pack that may already be in existence, include a folder, pad, pen and coloured flyers. The flyers being my suggestion would naturally be my job, OK with that. I finally delivered the draft version (shown here), to the Marketing team on Thursday afternoon and they did a great job of applying some desktop publishing effects.

I am planning for three of us staff to deliver the sessions, each lasting around 15 to 20 minutes, and taking place in separate IT rooms.

From the screen shot you can see that I finally settled on four, which are :-

The CISCO lab that we have as part of tour BTEC BXD Networking programme, with units that cover IT Essentials, CCNA – Discovery, Exploration, Security and CCNP.

Producing e-Content with Wimba Create. This is part of a wider eLearning initiative with the ambition of extending learning beyond the traditional curriculum boundary, using a learning objects approach for course materials.

Mahara, our fully featured open source electronic portfolio. Mahara is integrated with our Moodle system, and provides the tools to set up your own personal learning and development environment; used mainly in our Work Based Learning Projects for Foundation Degree students.

Finally Open Simulator, a web 3.0D collaborative face-to-face working environment, that we are deploying to enhance student communication and social skills both within the college and as part of the Comenius project, that will link us with two colleges in Holland and one in Belgium.

Looking forward to the coming week.

Free Content for Educators

2011-09-22T22:43:00.003+01:00

I was putting together the finishing touches to my new training notes on producing eLearning content today and came to the section on content repositories. If you have read this blog of recent then you will have seen that I am intending seizing the opportunity to push the use of our DSpace repository with a quick how-to guide. Working on the idea of a supplement to this, I set about compiling a list of similar repositories and teaching resources by way of showing the value of this very open approach to course materials; and not least to help strengthen my own view of, 'should we not start getting into the practice of assembling material instead keep creating'.

To demonstrate the value of adopting this more open approach, I decided to compile a list of free repositories and resources available on the Internet for teachers to use. I started by including those that I have known about for some time and often browse for myself such as Merlot, OpenSpace and Jorum, and then decided to trawl around for anything new, and as it had been a while since my last search, felt sure that I would turn something up. I was pleasantly surprised to very quickly stumble upon 12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online. At first glance I thought it was 12, but no it was 12 dozen, though I confess to having not actually counted, but the list is very long. The collection of resource topics should prove to have something for just about everyone:-

Science and Health
Business and Money
History and World Culture
Law
Computer Science and Engineering
Mathematics
English and Communications
Foreign and Sign Languages
Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous
Free Books and Reading Recommendations
Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media
Online Archives
Directories of Open Education

As I am sure you can imagine, the materials vary enormously from collections of MP3 podcasts and video’s to standard web pages. There was one particular site, and I did forget to tag it, that will allow you to convert the text into web content that you can copy and paste into your own site, interesting. If you have not come across this collection before, I would certainly recommend taking a look and tag.

Comments welcome, regards Barry

Training and Workshops

2011-09-17T11:08:00.006+01:00

Apart from all the very predictable events and chores of a post enrolment week, I have managed to get a good amount of time both in college and out for the production of new phase 3 vle training notes. If you have read any my earlier posts on this then you will recall that I am using Wimba Create as the tool to leverage Word skills in the production of eLearning content. One initiative that I do intend driving forward in this new approach to our production and delivery of materials though is to recruit student feedback. After all lets face it, we are all in one way or another going to be learning here, and I feel this would seem a reasonable way forward for us all, so next step, use the vle to produce standard feedback, and there will be more on this in a later post.

Looking into the longer, maybe medium term, during the course of this week, and I am happy with the way things are going, I really am, but also aware that there is a bigger picture here. The ambition for sustainable eLearning in reality is actually going to require the adoption of wider application and practice. These new efforts some may say amount to little more than e-Delivery, a reasonable point maybe. For my own part I anticipate the inclusion of a collaborative delivery framework and new assessment strategies are essential, do feel free to comment.

So more training sessions? My own initial reaction was yes, but the list begins to grow, and I thought why not produce a set of small eLearning modules, for instance:-

An appreciation of what we understand by the term eLearning
Developing - adopting a delivery and assessment framework
Considerations for eLearning content design
Integrating Moodle web 2.0 tools
Using content repositories

Much of this does actually exist in the form of case studies anyway, thinking particularly of JISC here and hopefully the whole process will attract a realistic amount of cpd hours, once again more in later posts.

I am not sure, but would like to know so please comment, if others find a fare frequency of re-booking takes place on their courses. My own guideline for course notes presentation has been in the style of click-n-go, basically a sequenced approach with screen shots, while keeping text to a reasonably informative minimum. And yet, we do have repeat bookings, even though in the vast majority of cases the information that is required is clearly in the handout. So in an endeavour to resolve the issue, this week I have launched one-2-one and small group 30-minute workshops. Naturally I am still available for any ad-hoc requests and meetings that come along, but feel a more formal workshop is going to be of value, we shall see.

Well that’s my week, please stay in touch for future posts

As virtual environments merge

2011-09-11T19:11:00.004+01:00

The arrival of shared media in Second Life, has meant among other things, that I can now give access to our vle and all its facilities to students from inside the virtual world. The effect of this is producing not only a merging of the two virtual environments, but also my two blogs it would seem, and so I post a link to this latest article on Shimmer-Island from here.

I am also pleased to inform everyone that the fan for a downed server is on order and will hopefully arrive soon, and so restore our full range of blog features.

regards Barry (Skipper)

New Year Starting

2011-08-31T16:21:00.003+01:00

I will start with an apology for the broken links on the blog, the server that I am using here at the College has recently been moved and has since developed a problem with the fan, which eventually failed. The server itself is a little on old side, and so we are unable to get a replacement and so have decided to virtualise the server, hopefully all will be well very soon.

I am pleased to say, that on a personal note, it appears I am being awarded a new job description that will be based around the general theme of eLearning, and that this role will account for half of my usual contracted lecturing hours. This has actually come at a very timely moment for me given the imminent role out of my Moodle phase 3 training that will go considerably beyond the traditional single period sessions of phases 1 and 2. In the third phase of the planned Moodle rollout I will be introducing content design specifically using Wimba Create. The exercise will not simply be on how to create or convert existing Word documents, but equally getting everyone to start thinking in terms of Learning Objects and eLearning for future materials and their long term storage in a content repository; we have been running DSpace for some years now and it will be really rewarding to see it being used in earnest. My ambition here ultimately is to deploy our Moodle system more as a Virtual Learning Environment and not just a Course Management System, so you may like to stay in touch to see how we get on.

Another project that I am pleased to have acquired is to evaluate the integration of Moodle and SharePoint, it was at a recent ILT strategy meeting that a majority vote was carried to run down and close our staff network storage drive and replace it with SharePoint. I spent some time looking around the net for case study material as a starting point and came across a really useful guide from Microsoft Education Labs, this looks very encouraging, so we are giving it a try.

Bye for now

Facebook for Educators

2011-07-27T12:12:00.005+01:00

I have in past postings made both positive and not so positive remarks regarding the use of Facebook as part of course delivery. In one particular year, I certainly managed to get pretty much wholesale agreement with using the social network for both easy contact and handing out achievement comments’ and graphical badges and general course information. In the following year, a similar attempt led to me being almost completely unfriended, strange? Given all this, I do still continue to see articles and postings where clearly the application has worked well, then the other day I came across a YouTube video ‘The Basics of a Facebook Page for Educators’ If you have not seen this for yourself then I can recommend it as a good starter. The Movie walks you through the layout and tabs, which include:-

Discussions, that student can join and post into

Standards, that relate to course and using the medium

Documents, that teachers can upload for students to access

Strategies, on the use of social media and Facebook

Polls, these can be setup to gather student feedback

Basically it all looks very much like a Facebook / vle / teachers website solution, and if you are in need of such a facility then this would seem as good as any.

I went on to look around the net for more on this and soon discovered http://facebookforeducators.org. This really does tell you all about it, and there is a pdf download guide, agian worth a look.

I also came across this rather large sample of (The teachers guide to using Facebook)
Facebook the missing manual from OReilly. This is one of those, have a read before you buy promotions that I seem to be seeing with increasing frequency these days, and I must say the sample pages are extensive, so again you may like to take a look at the link if you get the time.

Finally how about ‘7 Best Practices For Educators Using Facebook’ I always like reading these little summaries of best practice, after all if someone has gone to all the trouble of teasing out the details its certainly going to save the rest of us an equal and unnecessary amount of work.

So am I going to use Facebook, well probably not, because I have Moodle, would I discount Facebook, absolutely not, clearly it can and does work.

Please feel free to comment

Regards Barry

Moodle training news

2011-07-12T14:28:00.008+01:00

Last week was our official end of term and so classes are now over for the academic year, which opens the way for other activities such as staff training, and this morning I delivered the Introduction and Web 2.0 sessions for our Moodle vle. I of course run sessions most weeks for these and usually attract three of four candidates for each, but this morning sessions were very much full with fourteen for the first and sixteen for the second, almost filling our training room. I think I could a make tentative assumption from this that for many staff the idea of training during term time is still difficult to manage. Overall the whole morning ran very smoothly and candidates have been generous and encouraging with feedback. Of all the aspects in using the vle that we covered today -Forums and Chat seemed to attract the most enthusiasm and time, all very good, and often amusing.

On a common thread, I am getting on with the new course notes for the phase three training and really looking forward to rolling that out in September, which brings me into a very interesting and chance meeting that I had with a colleague who on their own initiative have a new mobile learning project that will get underway in the coming academic year. The thrust behind the proposal is that for some students, finding themselves timetabled into rooms with no computing facilities, wouldn’t it be a good idea to provide some low cost, low spec netbooks and make use of the college WiFi provide access to web resources including Cloud apps. You can certainly see the rationale here, when you have group of students where course delivery has increasingly drawn in the use of the technology in both teaching and learning style, suddenly get themselves dropped back into pre-digital, though not impossible, does take some degree of willing flexibility. And so if all does indeed go according to plan, in the coming year you will be able to provide students timetabled into those rooms with standard Word style electronic hand-outs distributed from the vle, very nice, very smooth, much better than issuing ball point pens; by the way the original patent for these was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud. Just a thought though, as MS Word actually dates back to 1984, which makes the technology almost thirty years old itself, is it not time for us to move on once more? A comment that drew a somewhat frowned expression, to which I replied - book into my Moodle phase 3 training program, you will enjoy it.

Please stay in touch for updates, regards Barry

Techno rant but not really

2011-07-08T14:41:00.011+01:00

I was at little gathering recently when I overheard a conversation between delegates from a college who had apparently made the case that engagement and achievement would be improved simply by providing students with access to the very latest technologies. So you are going to throw a shed load of money at it, and that basically is it, and this is going to work? I really do wonder sometimes whether the message will ever get through that Silver Bullets only work for the Lone Ranger.

All in all this was reminiscent for me of a presentation that I was attending, possibly presenting at, on one of the many events led by a leading FE and HE support service. The presentation started with an image of an operating theatre circa 1900+, a click of the mouse and we see a picture of an operating theatre 2000+. The question was posed: could a surgeon from 1900 function in a modern operating theatre? Not much in the way of audience participation to that question as I recall, but no doubt everyone was having similar thoughts.

In the next slide we see a classroom circa 1900, teacher at the front of the class with chalk and blackboard, students in orderly rows equipped with chalk and chalkboards. A click of the mouse, and the image was joined by a classroom circa 2000. The question was posed, how much has changed? Well given there would be a very brief explanation of how to remove the cap from a dry wipe pen for the teacher and similarly for ball point pens for students, granted not much seems to have changed at all, unlike the world of clinical surgery it would seem.

But what am I supposed to draw from this? While at the time I was reluctant to be reactionary, especially given my own evangelical disposition with eLearning, let me put it this way. Using what is essentially teaching and learning styles that have clearly changed very little in a century, or so it would seem, we have been able to stand on the Moon, understand the cosmos back to a micro second after the big bang, crack the genome, have all the benefits of consumer micro electronics, super computers, artificial intelligence, anti-biotics, fly in machines at over twice the speed of sound dressed in casual clothes while sipping champagne and eating canapés. Is it being seriously suggested that we have it wrong with teaching and learning? From the preceding list, surely even the most casual observer would conclude, no, but a serious question of course remains, how can engagement and achievement be improved, because of course it can, and should, given all the surrounding technologies and best practice at our disposal.

From my own early experience of running vle’s where chat rooms are silent, forums are empty and class notes that did not work or were not read in class were similarly useless when posted online, I have come to appreciate that the change we need does not lye with the introduction of techno paraphernalia alone, but must be accpompanied with the necessary collaborative delivery frameworks, content and assessment strategies that allow us to make use of the technology in support of learning.

I think Fire and forget really does belong firmly in the domain of heat seeking missiles not teaching and learning, rant over.

Food for discussion? comments welcome, kind regards Barry

Making Mobile Learning Work

2011-07-01T15:35:00.003+01:00

Thinking about and talking to the project team as I am right now regarding the likely and best use of our new iPad’s when the initial project ends. I have started to look around the net and came across this really interesting publication ‘Making Mobile Learning Work’, this is a free pdf from escalate featuring five mobile learning case studies. If you have been a reader of this blog, then you will no doubt recall that I have been posting on the subject of mobile learning going way back, what I immediately liked about this publication was the 12 page introduction by John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton. These early pages clarify and establish extremely well where mobile learning originated, where it can make a difference, for instance with respect to:- contingent , situated, authentic, context and personalised learning. It does make very clear among other things, that we need to establish the difference between material that we may feel is suitable for a vle, and so typically being viewed from a desktop machine and material for a mobile learning resource. I can certainly sympathise with this last point, as a similar shift in perspective exists between class hand-outs and vle eLearning materials, which is precisely why we are heading down the Wimba Create route at the moment, but that’s an on-going story so please stay in touch for that. There is a very pertinent and real point raised here also, that many students these days already own a device i.e. smartphones, Galaxies, iPad’s, tablets etc that is perfectly capable of handling the requirements of mobile learning, and that we consider for many reasons, moving away from the concept of an institutionalised product for the purpose, mmm.

I can without any doubt recommend this as a worthwhile download and read for the daily commute if you have that opportunity, and given the many facts and insights, I suspect like myself to will choose to keep a copy. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.

regards Barry

The iPad has arrived

2011-06-28T23:19:00.004+01:00

Today I had first site and contact with our new iPad collection. This eLearning project has been a while in coming to life it seems, but I can certainly appreciate the constraints of wise prequrement, given the arrival of the iPad 2 at such a sensitive time for us. Our network support team are managing connection issues right now and this week we are going to be looking at how we will be deploying these resources beyond the initial project once it completes. I was really impressed by the still and movie camera performance and some of the more entertaining apps that have been installed, like talking to the cat, not sure about the apps app, if you get my drift, but it was so smooth. I guess my first impressions are that we should introduce the technology to one of our media courses and see if we can start to make use of the mobile activity / learning potential, but that needs some thinking into at the meeting. I will be sure to blog on any decisions that come from that, so please stay in touch, and do post any experiences and use that you may have put the iPad to.

Regards Barry

Serious about eLearning

2011-05-28T09:11:00.002+01:00

If you have been reading this blog and any others of a similar nature, then I guess it will go without saying that in answer to the post title, you most certainly are serious about eLearning. Which is why I am posting a link to an article I came across from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online? The article pulls no punches, and this becomes very clear from an early statistic quote 'With countless studies showing success rates in online courses of only 50 per cent—as opposed to 70-to-75 percent for comparable face-to-face classes'. Well I remain convinced that while that is not a global statistic, certainly the selection of courses appropriate for full blown eLearning and the need to adopt a blended approach are clearly principle contributing factors. The article has a lot of feedback responses that are equally worth reading and like myself I feel sure you will find some serious food for thought, much of which I am pleased to say I felt was reinforcing and positive. Please feel free to comment.

Regards Barry

Preparing for eLearning

2011-05-17T13:40:00.006+01:00

If you have been following this blog recently then you will no doubt have come across my Moodle trading level document that I posted on . The three levels ultimately translate in the first instance to training options for our staff and the first two levels really deal with learning how the use the most common Moodle options available in the standard distribution to get a course up and running, with second level showing how to make use of what I have come to refer to as web 2.0 features. Toady I managed to get5 approval for the third and final level training, which is going to be centered around the design, production and storage of eLearning content. My ambition here is to encourage everyone to begin designing materials in a form that is more inline with the concept of learning objects as opposed to complete topics or classes, and part one of the course will comprise an introduction to and examples of learning objects. Next creating the content, and potentially that could be very difficult, in that am I really expecting everyone to either rewrite existing material, and fortunately the answer is not really, instead we are going to be using Wimba Create. I first began using Wimba Create a few years ago now, when it was called course- Genie. The software is basically a Word plugin that using a series of new style tags that will allow you to insert features from navigation to quizzes. Finally I want to include the practice of storage, not just dropping the files onto an intranet, where discovery given the changing nature of folder structures, can make the practice all to often less than likely, but instead using a content repository. A few years ago now, and it is a post somewhere on the blog, we managed to get DSpace up and running. Myself and a few others have used it and remained committed to idea, but despite demo’s and the odd presentation we have had very little by way of real success, but as part of the course, I am more than hopeful that this will now change, as we have been harvested for some years now.

Comments welcome, regards Barry

Hone Virtual Presentation Skills

2011-04-20T14:04:00.003+01:00

I was looking through my emails today and came across what appears to be a useful little publication on virtual presentations. I have downloaded a myself copy, and after an initial signup of course, it does look to be an interesting read and so I thought I would pass it on. I have copied the introduction text from the webpage below:-
Research shows that the top fears for online presenters are: "How can I deliver a powerful presentation to an audience I can't see?" and "How do I compensate for the loss of body language and eye contact?"

The truth is that any medium changes how messages are sent and received. The good news: with The Virtual Presenter's Handbook, you can transform presenting online from a second-rate alternative to a potent new asset in your professional toolbag.

In this handbook, webinar veteran Roger Courville will teach you:
• How to prepare and deliver online presentations that stand out
• Ways of grabbing and keeping your remote audience's attention
• How to avoid the 'webinar killers' made by most presenters
• Powerful new techniques that aren't possible when presenting face-to-face

Please feel free to reply with your impressions and comments

regards Barry

New eLearning Projects Approved

2011-03-09T20:05:00.002Z

Well I am pleased to say that the eLearning project proposals have all been approved. We are currently in the process of generating an instance of Open Simulator for one and the iPad’s will be arriving soon for the other. One late request was from myself for the acquisition by the college of a licence for Wimba Create. For those of you out there who remember courseGenie, Create is the new incarnation. This is in fact all part of our phased Moodle rollout, detail below.

Definition of Moodle use at Phase 1
-Schemes of work Available for student review from a Moodle link
-Assessments calendar A document or use of Moodle Calendar
-Assignment hand-outs Typically Word documents
-Assignment submission Electronic hand-in of material and feedback
-Learning materials Word documents, presentations, spread sheets, images etc
-Links to external resources Websites, audio clips, movies, images etc
Definition of Moodle use at Phase 2
-On-line assessment Quiz, Questionnaire
-Live Chat Recorded session of tutor student communication’s
-Forum Questions and responses
-Glossary Students activity in populating course glossary
-RSS Live feeds form external websites
-Blogs Used as private or course level resources
Definition of Moodle use at Phase 3
-Podcasts Internally produced or links to external audio files
-Video casts Internally produced or links to external movie files
I-Interactive learning Internally produced or links to external instructional materials i.e. nln, scorm
-Collaborative work WiKi

As you can see for the phase 3, this involves the production of scorm content and I feel that Wimba Create is a really straightforward way of achieving this, plus given that the vast majority of handouts are produced in MS Word. I am already producing some training notes from the trial version that I have installed. When it comes to the actual delivery, I really do want to package this up to include learning object design, and using our Dspace content repository for long term digital preservation. So a busy time ahead and of course some more frequent postings to this blog and of course to our blog for Open Sim.

Astronomy Wednesday

2011-02-09T19:32:00.004Z

This is an usual type of post for this blog, because while it does make use of our Moodle vle, I am not employing it strictly for curriculum delivery. I guess it is the case that all of us in teaching at sometimes find ourselves engagaed in conversation with our students in those extra curricula areas of interest that attract the attention of a group, and for me those conversations tend to centre around the general area of astronomy and spaceflight. I have to say that I have on many occasions found myself hi-jacked in discussions on black-holes, exploding stars and time travel etc etc; I am certain this experience is not exceptional and rarely without real value. It was after having one of those protracted casual chats with a small group of students the other day, during a period of free time, if there is such a thing, that I hit on the idea of starting a casual drop-in lunchtime club, I have named it AstroWed, because we meet on Wednesdays, and today was the first. I had kept the announcement to a single course, six turned up and it went really well. We started with a look at the night sky in February, then moved on to an interactive Flash animation of the solar system and finished with a YouTube video to the music of I think Pink Floyd of the earth being hit by something very big from space. I have naturally set-up a Moodle course and invited discussions, postings and suggestions for future weeks. For now I am going to simply see if awareness spreads by word of mouth. On winding up this lunchtime, I invited suggestions for activities, upon which one of the group enquired would it be possible to design, construct and fly a rocket, well I have done more than a little of that in my time, all very STEM, so literally, please watch this space.

New eProjects

2011-01-22T20:04:00.003Z

Back at college and things Moodle seem to be swinging into action again. On Wednesday of this week 26/01/2011, I have been invited to present on 'Innovating with Moodle' for HE by Greenwich University, and I am really looking forward to that, likely catch-up with a few people that I have seen for a while as well.

At my own college where I manage the eLearning projects, things most certainly starting to look promising. I have one project approved already for the Mahara ePortfolio. Then came a request for two collaborative projects with a college in Holland. First they will require a platform where they can store images, resources, post messages, and communicate, so that looks like a Moodle job. Then, and real good news for me, they have requested access to a virtual world! As we now have OpenSim (BromSim) running on our servers, this will do nicely. So it looks like I will have some OpenSim training to deliver, hopefully in-world, excellent.

Finally I have a project myself. Following a request from a former student who completed the first year of a two year programme and now wishes to complete just one unit from year 2, but is unable to leave their place of residence. Well this sounds a chance to try some real eLearning approaches to me, and will be a first for that particular course. I am of course going to make use of our Moodle vle, buttrial the web based real-time editor EtherPad, as the live session editir. This very nice little tool went OpenSource, and we have it running on our own server, so looking forward to trying this out.

I will be posting updates on these projects, so if you are curious to know how things are going please stay in touch.

Creating a Moodboard

2010-12-06T14:58:00.000Z

One of my courses this year is in Website Production, and I was interested to see that the design stage included a moodboard, I was a little unclear about exactly what that meant exactly, so I decided to make a start with Wikipedia. OK that is a lot clearer now, but I need to see one really, so try YouTube and up comes this really instructive tutorial on making a moodboard for a website, really nice, and thanks to David Perel for that. Of course I then anticipate the next question from my students, what should we use to create a moodboard. I move over to Google and enter the string Moodboard creator and at the top of the search I see Olioboard. Olioboard is a free web based “moodboard creator”. The application provides you with a canvas to create your board on, the facility to upload your own images and you get some basic editing tools, and to save the final version as a jpeg. It seems that you can also invite up to 10 friends along to make the whole exercise a more social experience. From what I have seen so far Olioboard does appear to have not only the necessary facilities for creating the moodboard, but those important ingredients that would place in the category of social networking tools ever popular with my students and well worth exploring by educators. If you have had experience of using Olioboard then please feel free to comment .

Moodle winterland

2010-12-01T11:49:00.001Z

Well winter has arrived with its usual surprise and caught out here again in England; I thought you might appreciate a snap of my garden. College closed early yesterday just after lunch and is closed completely today. I have just finished marking some HE test papers and uploaded the results into our Moodle vle. While posting this blog, I have actually moved on and am now waiting in Moodle chat for any students who may drop by requiring assistance with coursework. You may well be wondering if had arranged this, well not exactly, but they do all know that if I am out of college then they can usually try this option, but today for extra measure I have messaged them all on Facebook, usually works a treat.

Bye for now, keeping warm, Barry

Blog but beware

2010-10-13T19:14:00.012+01:00

One of the VLE training courses that I run here at the college, Moodle Web 2.0, introduces those features that are part of the standard build such as Chat, Forums, Glossaries, Blogs and RSS.

With regard to the Blog feature and the way in which we have it installed, I always emphasise the need to post a blog as 'Publish to yourself (as Draft)'.

The reason for this is two fold. For one, given the removal of the Journal facility in Moodle it is good to still have an easy means by which students can record their progress, thoughts and findings etc. Second, publishing to anyone on this site is literally that. A problem developed recently following some postings from a particular student. To begin with it turned out that tracking down the blog was not as easy I first thought. I discovered somewhat belatedly, that by simply not having the blog block running in a course, will restrict the use to only those courses and students where blogs are enabled. Beware, because if you look at the user profile screen, Blog is an active tab, allowing anyone to post.

The answer really is not to simply rely upon site defaults, but to make use of the various options available in Administration > Security > Site policies. From the available options you should be able to find one that allows you to manage blog posts. Blogs are a really useful resource, its really a matter of fine tuning.

If you have had any similar experiences with the use of blogs then please feel free to comments.

New eILT Strategy group

2010-09-26T14:30:00.004+01:00

I was invited to attend a meeting to look at the expectations that we should be adopting for the coming academic year in the department, where I must say, I did seem to attract a somewhat disproportionate number of action point, but no matter. Toward the end of the agenda of items that we were covering that day, I was asked to put into place a proposal for a department ILT strategy. I was not particularly enthused by this one, as I am already an active and consulting member of the College Wide ILT strategy group anyway, which is by its nature fed by department needs, and so it all felt a little like replication. I went away from the meeting and decided to think outside the box on this one a little. What is a strategy anyway? a plan by which you can achieve some ambition or aspiration, right, so how about instead the usual ILT what do we have, is it available and what do we need, think more in terms of how should it be used, and that thought interested me far more and here is my proposal.

That we should compliment the existing College ILT Strategy, but taking the attributes of best practice in ILT application within an academic environment as our terms of reference.

In order to inform on a fully inclusive basis, I recommend that three fundamental requirements be put into place.

1: The inclusion of a new item in the core meeting agenda that will typically include the following within the general umbrella of eILT:-

· Availability: are the resources that we need actually in place i.e. standard build +
· Reliability: are the resources functioning as they should
· Procurement: Is there a case for new resources
· Use: how are we making use of ILT in our teaching, what seems to work, what does not.

2: Establish a regular meeting forum, where we can discuss, demonstrate and share best practice.

3: Contribute to a repository of documented recommendations and examples for wider dissemination.

I emailed this to our Head of Department and very soon received an extremely enthusiastic reply.

There are in my recommendations though just a few agendas of my own and I shall reveal these as time goes by, but here is the first. For some years now, I think it may be about four, and you can actually check on how long by reading back through this blog, I discovered the content repository Dspace. Dspace I felt would form the ideal means of storing and retrieving learning materials and other course specific content. Well that was a long time ago and despite the use of Dspace by myself and one or two others, the application has seen little use and attracted equally little interest, despite demonstrations and presentation across the period. Well the third option of my list of proposals is going to begin changing that, because at the very first meeting, I shall be recommending Dspace as the principle repository, Wow here we go at last.

Please stay in touch for regular updates and do feel free to comment.

regards Barry

New Experiments in e-Learning

2010-09-19T20:29:00.003+01:00

After all the inevitable turmoil of applications and enrolment for the new academic year, I finally got down to some regular classes. I met with my new first year level 3 students and during the session introduced them to the vle. I demonstrated how we would be using the various resources that it has available, and wound up with an invitation for them to contribute to their own learning resources for the Website Production module by contributing to an online Glossary. At the end of the class I suggested that they might like to join my Facebook; so much faster communication than college email for some reason!. Not a bad start for a first class of the term, but that’s not what this post is really about. The other day I came across a video from the Ted talk series, where Sugata Mitra was presenting the results from new experiments in self-teaching. The video has really caused me to stop and think around the whole idea of collaborative eLearning and the problem we are possibly inflicting upon ourselves it seems with issues of plagarism. At the end of the video Sugata suggest that we should consider that - ‘Education is a self organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon’, fascinating and well worth a look-n-bookmark.

Please feel free to post your comments, regards Barry

20 video sites

2010-07-19T14:50:00.002+01:00

One media that I am increasing making use of these days is movies. Whether they are screen capture, short clips or whole programs, I think can make for a really flexible and engaging resource that I can so plug them into our Moodle platform with ease. I suppose my principle source for this has been YouTube, but I just came across a useful list of 20 sites that provide content, in most cases its free and though with some they do actually include YouTube, I still think its worth tagging, anyway see what you think here's the link

Transforming the consumption of education

2010-07-17T13:46:00.002+01:00

If you would like to publish your course materials on the Internet, but have no access to a virtual learning environment, then Nixty.com, with a promotion handle of ‘Empowering Education for Everyone’, could very likely be just the service that you are looking for. I registered as a user, had a good look around the facilities and the look and feel are good. Once in, you will find there are a whole range of courses already available many of them free. There is a course manager that allows you to set-up and manage your courses, where you can embed existing PowerPoint’s, Word files and PDF’s, setup quizzes, forums etc. In fact rather than me telling you about Nixty here is a link to setting up a lesson and another on using Nixty’s ePortfolio. In these days of inclusion and accessibility I am getting the feeling that the Nixty approach could be the start of something big. If you have used Nixty or have any views, then please feel free to post a comment.

regards Barry

Free eLearning Books

2010-07-12T14:00:00.002+01:00

If you have not come across the eFrontiers blog yet then let me recommend that you pay it a visit. The site features among other things a really interesting and useful list of free books on eLearning. While some are limited chapter downloads others are the full version or their web based equivalent. The link for the books feature is here however I am sure tht you will find the blog has just as many other resource postings that will be of use and interest.

regards Barry

Project case studies arriving

2010-07-11T15:07:00.003+01:00

With July well underway, the first of the eLearning project case studies have started to arrive. From the original group of proposals and for a number of reasons a few have dropped by the wayside. One was discontinued because the member of had their timetable changed so lost contact with the target group. Another member of staff left, which accounted for two projects and two more projects have failed to be completed for no other reason than available time. I think this last point is going to be an ongoing danger when you are looking at long term i.e. 30 hour projects for someone that already has a full timetable, and I shall need to factor this issue into the equation for futures proposals especially when somebody request a double project. Having said all this I will be getting a completion of the projects for Mahara e-portfolio’s, Comic Life and Open Simulator; though this last one was is in fact my project.

What form will the case studies take? Well in the first instance everyone completing a project will complete an evaluation document, there is an example of the template here so just click on the link. The evaluation will be placed into our Moodle vle along with any supporting reference materials such as screen shots, how-to guides, videos etc. When I have my own project material complete, I shall be posting a copy onto this blog so you may like to stay in touch for that. If you have any comments on e-Learning projects, then please feel free to post.

Kind regards Barry

Web Conferencing with OpenMeetings

2010-05-20T15:36:00.002+01:00

One of the recent project proposals that I received this term was for the use of a webcam based conferencing system. We did try a couple of the free web based services for this, but ran into some problems with privacy and to a certain extent security. Anyway we began dig around on the web and found OpenMeetings. This is free open source browser-based software that allows you to instantly setup a conference in the Web. You can use text chat or microphone - webcam, share your screen including documents, make drawing and even your record meetings. While the application can be run as a remotely hosted service, it can also be integrated with Moodle and Facebook. We have integrated ours into Moodle and will be using OpenMeeting as part of the eLearning project trial. One very useful feature is the calendar that allows you to schedule meetings, and send emails to everyone that you include. If you have used OpenMeeting then please feel free to drop a reply to this posting and let us know what your experince has been so far.

regards Barry

eProject Requests

2010-04-29T12:54:00.002+01:00

Since the email went out here at college offering staff the opportunity to apply for funded learning projects I have so far received a number of applications. For each of these I arranged an initial meeting where we discussed the level of funding, which takes the form of hours that would be paid for development time, plus any resource costing. All the projects will commence during this coming summer term. Below I have included a list briefly outlining each of the proposals.

Course: Level 3 eMedia
Project: Use tiny chat discussions
Anticipated outcome/benefits: 1. Identify possible disengaged/disaffected students and 2. Improve engagement with the unit’s concepts

Course: ESOL
Project: WallWisher text wall posting
Anticipated outcome/benefits: Self review evaluation of personal development, teaching feedback. Links to Wallwisher provide extended to parts of classes.

Course: Entry level 3
Project: Comic Life
Anticipated outcome/benefits: 1:Explore new ways to present material beyond Office applications. Students will find approach more engaging and fun to use, new means of self expression with confidence to gain greater access to main stream project work. 2: A unit that could be run by a wider skill set of staff where specific application experience is not a requirement i.e. adult literacy, esol, motor vehicle, animal care.

Course: Level3 Networking
Project: Use tiny chat discussions
Anticipated outcome/benefits: Make use of web audio / visual real-time communication service in order to engage students in effective class learning activities beyond the normal table tabled delivery.

Course: Level 3 Networking
Project: An.Notate online documents
Anticipated outcome/benefits: Efficient and timely communication, releasing class time from long feedback sessions.

Course: Level 4 Networking
Project: Mahara ePortfolio
Anticipated outcome/benefits: Online portfolio submission and assessment, more timely and flexible

Course: Level 3 Software Design
Project: Open Sim Virtual World
Anticipated outcome/benefits: Opportunities for investigations into games based learning and simulations

Upon completion of a project, I will be getting together with each member of staff where we will put together a case that will be posted onto our eLearning Projects course on Moodle. I intend for each of the case studies to have both an evaluation component based on actual outcomes and student feed back, plus there will be a how-to guide for anyone else wishing to make use of the particular technology.

If you have any similar experiences or views on eProjects then please feel free to comment.

regards Barry

e-Learning projects to go

2010-03-06T16:07:00.004Z

It was a while ago now that I was asked to head up an e-learning project initiative here at the college. Just this week the proposal finally received that seal of approval, funding. The idea, is that now teaching staff are beginning to make more use of the vle, which after all is really little more than an e-Learning delivery platform, they should now start to think in terms using it deploy and track learning activities rather than just as a means of distributing course notes, which so often is how these systems end up. The set-up that I have proposed is that we start with a staff wide email advertising the service, if you click-on the accompanying image for this post you will get the full draft pdf. I feel certain that there are plenty who would like to give the whole idea of e-Learning a try, but where to start. Well, they start by making a request for a short meeting at which we discuss what they would like to see happen and what the preferred outcome will be; I actually have a detailed form for this, that I will complete with them at the meeting. Of course there will be the need for some training in new applications, but that is something that we equipped to put in place. As you can see from the flyer, projects will fall into three categories of short, medium and long, each attracting a payment in the form of paid hours, that’s the sweetener. In all this my task is going to be to manage the various projects up to the point of their go-live date and then to collect feedback at completion. I am looking forward to this, and will be posting findings on this blog, so if you are interested then please keep in touch for that.

Bye for now best wishes Barry

New round of training starts

2010-03-02T22:57:00.002Z

Just into a new round of vle training in Moodle. We have now completed the rollout and trials. From experience of trying to deliver the basic course in year 1 and then move on to the more advanced features in the following year though seemed to not produce the desired effect.
The problem appeared to be that if staff were slow to take up use of the vle fairly soon following the training, they seemed to loose confidence and I found them returning to the course again the next term or later. Now we are going to try and deliver the basic course over three weekly sessions and then move on to the more advanced courses in subsequent three weekly blocks. I am hoping that the idea of a quick progression to advanced features may prompt early adoption and use. In case anyone is interested in the content of the courses on offer I have listed the indexes below.

An Introduction to Moodle
System settings
Labels and headings
Editing facilities
Managing files and folders
Linking to resources
Assignments

Moodle web 2.0
Forum
Chat
Glossaries
Blogs
RSS feeds

Moodle quiz
Creating a Quiz
True or False
Multiple choice
Short answer
Numerical
Calculated
Matching
Random Short Answer
Description
Cloze (Embedded answers)
Reviewing a quiz

Any comments on your own experineces are welcome, regards Barry

eLearning and accessibility

2010-02-04T10:50:00.003Z

If you are reading this blog, then the chances are that you also actively produce eLearning content. Given that we certainly need to avoid the pitfalls of just dropping standard class handouts onto the vle and thinking that's fine; chances are if they are not read in class, they will not be reading these on-line, at least that's my experience. That said there is the whole area, and I am not sure upon reflection that I give it the attention it deserves of accessibility. Well I have just found some really useful guides from JISC and can recommend them as a source of reference.

please feel free to comment

2010-01-11T13:13:00.002Z

Are you trying to Twitter with students, I like to, but network filtering has started to become more than a problem of late. So how about a microblogging system that has been designed specifically for teachers and students? If you have not seen it yet, then take a look at Edmodo. In essence similar to Twitter, but with some functionality to support classroom activities. If you sign up as a Teacher, then you can create groups that students can join, then messages, files, links, and even assignments can be sent to the whole group. Students on the other hand can belong to multiple groups. Even better, assignments can be set with hand-in dates due dates, have attachments, uploaded or simply replied to. Having received the assignment, as a teacher you can then provide scoring and feedback. There is even a built-in calendar that shows students their assignment date and grading.

Will this just get filtered also, I guess as it’s a private communication platform built specifically for teachers and students, then maybe not. As you now have what is effectively a significantly enhanced micrblogging facility, removed from the otherwise normal level of noise of other social networks, then it should remain fully accessible, at least that’s the argument I shall be using.
If you would like to know more about Edmodo then I recommend you take a look at their blog, and of course please feel free to reply to this posting if you have any views or experience of what looks could become a very useful and popular product.

Google Wave today, Moodle Wave Tomorrow?

2009-11-26T14:51:00.002Z

I am just about to dive into Google Wave (just could not resist the association here). From what I have read and seen so far this seems to be a really fascinating concept and from the hype anyway, what would appear to be a one size fits all for many applications, in a way I hope that it is when you consider features like

a replacement for those WiKi’s, great as they can be, and I have used the Moodle version for some time now, it does present some degree of challenge to my students.
Just like the view in demand services that are appearing for TV and Radio, we will have the Wave playback facility, wow.
How about the ability to have concurrent editing of group owned documents, wow again
Simultaneous private as well a public communications
The ability to publish to a website, Face Book and soon I hear even Blogger.

If you are yet to get your head around Google Wave, and I anticipate that being a learning curve in itself, there are some really good video’s out there that I have been taking the time to look at. You may like to start with this two minute plus quickie, and then go on to the one hour twenty minute coverage preview, both are worth the time to sit and watch. For sure there is going to be a lot of new stuff here, not to mention the terminology like waves, wavelets, blips etc.
Well to help with all this I came across a great free book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave actually you can buy the book but the net version of it is free and very nicely presented and readable.

I will be back in due course, to let you know how I am getting on, but if you already have any experiences of the Wave, then please feel free to post a comment.

Phased Moodle training

2009-11-16T19:01:00.003Z

If you have been following this blog, then you will have read that last year marked the start of a new rollout strategy for our Moodle vle to staff at the college. While there has always been a steady though often less than regular stream of staff attending my training sessions, the strategy this time around has been more of a drip feed approach rather than the former one of empowerment. In past years the training course has been delivered over a three-hour session that covers a whole raft of exercises accompanied by a substantial user guide. Looking at the resource take-up however proved that in the main, teachers while being prepared to utilise the system for assignment hand-ins and uploading of content for distribution, and in so doing removing much of the need for printing, little use has been made of facilities such a forums, glossaries, quizzes etc. The core of our new phased approach, has been to offer in the first instance a shorter training session covering those more popular practices, with other more ambitious uses becoming the domain of later phases. Of course we shall always need to retain an introductory course for new staff, but this will now be running in parallel with our phase 2 course.

The new course includes some features such as forums, chat and glossaries that have been removed from the introductory session, but includes new training on the setting up and use of blogs and RSS feeds. My first phase 2 training session is due to start this next coming week and it will be interesting to see if resource utilisation in the specific areas finally starts to lift off. Please stay in touch for updates on this one.

OpenSim and virtual worlds

2009-11-04T13:10:00.005Z

Apart from my work here at Bromley Colleg with Moodle and all that that involves, some time ago, I think it must be about 7 or 8 years now, I discovered 3DML and started to do some developing with buidling 3D worlds or Spots as they were called back then. Anyway I built a Spot, and trialed it with my students with really encouraging results. But then the world moved on, which is when Second Life appeared; if you look down the left side bar you will see the link or slurl to one of my sims.

If you pay a visit (teleport) over to my sim at Shimmer Island, you see that essentailly all I am trying to do here explore and develop Second Life as an extension to any other learning technology. Anyway more to the point, the other day I came across an interesting video on Second Life ‘surviving the hype curve’; if you are not familiar with these things heres a link you should find useful. Its certainly true for me, at least I like to think it is, that any new technology, no matter how seductive, is going to have to survive this curve before I give it serious buy-in, otherwise it could just be just a steep time consuming learning curve that takes you effectively nowhere. I must confess actually that I have not always taken my own advice on this one, so plunging head first into Second Life was for me anyway a somewhat high risk investment back then. So if you find yourself teetering on the edge of getting onvolved with SL, this video should give you some confidence in the likely persistent nature of the product.

For us here at Bromley College and for me in particualar, the use of virtual worlds is starting to play a regular part in course delivery, two projects last year 08/09 and more planned for this year 09/10. One issue that your institute may face however is in access to the resource, SL requires a number of ports to be open that your network admin people may respond to by simply shaking their collective heads in disbelief. But again be reassured, we have been running SL in one lab for around 18 months now and no problems.

Of course there other likely obstacles, such as the cost of Second Life, particlularly in the endless cash strapped world of FE. So we started work on OpenSim, or at least my collegeue Clive Gould did and we now have two regions running, one as a test and the other which will become live. Apart from the obvious fact that OpenSim is free, its other benefit is in only requiring one extra port to be open, 9000. If you would like more information on setting up OpenSim then please feel free drop an email or alternatively Clive runs a blog that holds all his install notes.

Writing on the wall

2009-10-26T19:50:00.003Z

Since I decided to begin making use of Facebook as a means of communicating with my students out of class, the post to response time has generally dropped in some cases from hours to minutes, clearly something I should tried before. So now I start to think of ways that I can make use of the network to draw-in and engage it with college life more. I began by posting out messages of congratulations accompanied by badges for work they had completed to an exceptionally good standard for C programming exercises. Now if I had write access to their personal Wall on Facebook, then I would post there for everyone to see, if they had not given be write access, then I simply sent it via email. Was it popular, well some have replied with a thank you, but perhaps more meaningfully, those that did not grant me write access to their wall now have.

Giving Facebook a try

2009-10-18T12:00:00.003+01:00

The other day I had an email from our network manager with a link to a BBC news item promoting the use of social networking in colleges using Facebook; strange that I often go to some lengths in separating social from computer networking during conversations, still. The article suggests that using Facebook, improves both engagement and retention, mmm. I have for some reason, that right now I am not completely sure why, avoided using Facebook with my classes. I think I had probably formed the view, that we are likely to be about as welcome as educators in using the network for college matters, as turning up at a rave and handing out course notes, but I am happy to be proved wrong on that one. Anyway it was a Saturday night and I thought give it a try; yes that is when I received the email. My experience with contacting students using their college emails has I must say not proven very successful as I am likely to get no more than one read confirmation within 24 hours. So I started by not using college email, but first went to the vle, Moodle, to see what their preferred emails are, surprise surprise, just about all of them were of the form Jbloggs@anyserver.com! So I used the vle contacts and sent out my Facebook invitations, within a couple of hours 8 out of twenty had replied, so perhaps this may not be such a bad idea after all. I have opened up the question on how they would like the network to be used, but for my own part right now I am not going to abuse with nagging messages about course work, what is clearly a window into some interesting, unexpected and intriguing views on student life.

Note taking any where

2009-10-13T15:11:00.002+01:00

I was talking to one of my colleagues recently who, with some enthusiasm has embraced the idea of eLearning to such an extent that all of his students now arrive at class not with a notebook and pen, but a wireless enabled laptop! Now not withstanding the problems that you may or may not experience with wireless technologies, one of the issues that soon make itself apparent is the activity of note taking in an electronic environment. Let’s face it, the combination of mono-purpose scripting tools and double sided optical paper have a bit going for them still, i.e. you can change to any writing to drawing mode in an instant, annotate at any time and of course providing you resist the temptation to rip out, materials can been retrieved from their storage medium with ease. If you are using say Word or equivalent package, of course you have access to drawing tools of sorts, though they tend to be a bit clunky, alternatively you can always task switch to drawing package and import the images, fiddly though. So what is this all leading up to, go back to pen and paper, no. The other day I discovered OneNote, which comes with Microsoft Office 2007. If you look at the Microsoft site for this then OneNote is described as an ‘easy-to-use note-taking and information-management program where you can capture ideas and information in electronic form. Insert files or Web content in full-color, searchable format or as icons that you can click to access'. Add to this the fact that you can use freeform drawing tools and OneNote starts to look as if it could be a really useful package. If you would like a preview then take a look at this video, and please feel free to drop a reply to this blog with your own experiences.

Chatting Software Design

2009-10-09T19:30:00.000+01:00

Today I met with a group of my new Foundation Degree students who are just starting out in learning Software Design using C, not the best of places to be I must admit. We met today not because we had a class, but because they wanted advice in how to establish a self-group, brilliant I thought. Apart from the advice on content, I started out by setting up a new forum for them in Moodle, which they liked the idea of, and I asked if they had any preferences for a name, they came up with Cmaritans, good one. Anyway, then I remembered a web app that I have been very keen to get the chance to tryout when the opportunity arose called Tinychat. Basically this is a free (up to 12 simultaneous users) chat facility with live web cams, a suggestion that definitely received the thumbs up, and naturally I am looking forward to reviewing their use and views. If you are interested in knowing how they get on, then be sure to revisit this blog, as I will be making future postings for sure.

Role playing font styles

2009-10-07T15:20:00.002+01:00

I recently posted a blog on some thoughts that I was having on the subject of fonts, which you may have read. Anyway on lighter note, today I found this amusing video on characterising fonts, amusement value good, follow this link and enjoy.

Free hand written font generator

2009-10-01T11:23:00.003+01:00

Producing materials that will be distributed through either a vle or similar e-learning delivery platform, immediately draws the question, should these be the same as documents I would hand out in class, well maybe, but maybe not. For a start, handouts in class tend to be black and white, fundamentally because of the printing costs, so there’s the first difference that’s up for easy change. Now not withstanding all the widgets and gadgets that you can incorporate into almost anything that’s electronic, how much consideration do we actually give to fonts? In a class situation you are there to present and guide students through the material, but distributed materials will not have that accompanying hook; fonts, typography, can play a part here. You may like to watch this little video on the rise of Comic Sans. Just recently I took a move away from the usual font list options in my word processor package and began to think more about fonts that would look more natural than the standard Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Calibri set that I tended to gravitate toward. And I started to look at possibilities of handwritten font styles. But that costs, and has copyright issues right, well not if you create your own using the free MyFont tool from Microsoft, follow this link for a short tutorial and feel free to get back and post a comment.

BarryS

Blog worth a visit for the eLearner in you

2009-09-25T12:41:00.002+01:00

To quote from the site

Learning Learning is a collection of blog posts and articles all around eLearning. It uses the Browse My Stuff technology to create this topic hub. Topic Hubs are sites that aggregates content from a variety of sources, organizes that content around keywords in the topic domain, and supports both manual and social curation of that content. There are a variety of ways you can Participate in the eLearning Learning community.

looks like a good project, pay a visit by following this link

Teaching and learning C online

2009-09-23T19:02:00.003+01:00

This year in both our FE and HE programmes in Software Development, I am using C as the principle language. I feel that C as a structured introduction to programming has a lot to offer students new to the subject area. One of the many issues that arise when you teach any programming language I have found is going to be that of a compiler. If the institute make use of a licensed product, as we do, then students either have to purchase it, or make use of a freeware or trial version. Having students using different products can cause a few difficulties, certainly in the early stages of the course, and so finding a solution to this has not been immediately obvious. This year I have decided however to begin by making exclusive use of the DJGPP online cross compiler. The advantage being that everyone gets to use the same product, all you need is an Internet connection to get compiling and the interface is about as simple as it gets, this last point does have advantages when you look at some of the complex semi professional inetegrated development environments that often ship with the newer visual compilers. The only disadvantage really is that it will only compile a maximum of 1000 bytes of source code, but for our early examples in the coming weeks that should be fine. Of course I have naturally placed the link to the facility in a Moodle block. The image that you can see accompanying this posting has actually been taken from my Learning Space in Second Life where students can visit alone or in groups to try out the examples, and the compiler, as part of a Web 3D learning experience, which you are also more than welcome to tryout.

Feedback welcome Barrys

Computing in the cloud

2009-09-20T10:16:00.003+01:00

Having problems with reliable services, or platforms where you are right now? Then why not give Cloud Computing a try, so what is cloud computing?

According the the definition in Wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

"Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet". If you would like to know more, take a look at the video under the heading 'Web 2 on the tube' in the right sidebar of this blog. Comments welcome.

e-Learning tools list

2009-09-16T23:23:00.004+01:00

If you are looking for some ideas regarding tools for e-Learning, then follow the link to this list, thoughtfully divided into the free and not so free it seems, though I have not actually carriedout a full review by any means

good searching

Starting to use LAMS

2009-09-16T12:34:00.002+01:00

We now have LAMS installed and integrated with Moodle here at Bromley College, and I have started to use the system with my year 2 BTEC National students. One of my objectives for 09/10 is to begin moving away from the usual assessment method involving fairly prescriptive coursework toward a more open ended and self directed type of assignment; this will of course require a change of approach in more than one area, not least the requirement of tutorial type support on my part. The first LAMS sequence involves just a Noteboard and combined Resources / Forum to provide the scenario, scaffolding and communication, in what will essentailly be a practice paper. The students will access the LAMS sequence outside of class time, which I am hoping will introduce them to the potential of indepent learning, through online collaboration and perhaps the emegence of an online indentity. Following the completion of the exercise the students will then take an assessment in class based around the LAMS experience. If you would like to know how I get on, then please stay in touch with this blog and feel free to post your own comments.

Moodle the Internet and learning

2009-07-20T18:56:00.003+01:00

If like myself you are very much a VLE'er in you course delivery then you will also know the many advantages and to some extent the issues that can become apparent and very real when you encourage students to connect to all those digital resources out there on the Internet. If this is in anyway reminiscent of your experiences, then you may like to have a listen to Radio 4'S Beyond Belief where Ernie Rea and his guests discuss whether the Internet is a gift to humanity or a threat to civilized values.

Mahara first time user

2009-07-20T10:25:00.003+01:00

If you have read the previous blog posting, then you will have seen that in the session for Moodle training we had one of our members of staff, who is a Moodle user keen to tryout the Mahara ePortfolio for the first time. While we now have Mahara integrated and ready for the new academic year, I currently have no training notes ready to go for our staff; that’s one of my jobs for this summer, so it was a case of, here’s a link to the online user guide material at WiKi Mahara material see how you get on. All in all, the outcome was very good, some small glitches with sharing resources, but that was down to our understanding of the system and not Mahara. One of the real acid tests for any new applications that you would like to roll-out to staff is always going to be the ease of use; something like the 20/10 rule; 20 minutes getting into it yourself then 10 minutes to feel you could get something out there seems to be a reasonable touch. From this first user experience I think Mahara is going to fit the bill, of course there also the consideration that other ePortfolio systems that I have seen appear to have some considerable overhead with financial charges!

If you are intersed in looking at some tutrials for Mahara then try the Wiki of there is a nice 2007 PDF here alternatively there are soem nice movies at YouTube.com

Mahara Moodle

2009-07-13T09:08:00.000+01:00

The rollout of our Moodle VLE has continued at a reasonable pace this year with the agenda of having as many staff as possible able to use the system to deploy a single course. Now that we have reached the end of term some extra sessions are being arranged for me to run and I am pleased to see that a request from one member of staff for Mahara has arrived. We now have the ePortolio running in Moodle and it will be of some value to get the impressions of use from a first timer, so stay tuned for updates on this

Trying out Lams

2009-05-05T15:18:00.002+01:00

I have started the first real use of LAMS as a means of extended learning for my group working on the Designing Computer Games module. The idea was for them to see this as an out of class exercise that utilised both forums and chat sessions. As this was a first, I did only get partial success and today we got together in class and carried out exercise in a more formal environment. Though I have made use of LAMS in the past, it has only been as a means of scheduling work, and not really as an online reflective learning tool. Upon my own reflection, I think it will be more appropriate to introduce the environment as class based exercise in the first instance.

LAMS Activity Planner

2009-04-15T09:40:00.003+01:00

LAMS Activity Planner beta The LAMS Activity Planner is a new layer on top of LAMS that provides pre-built templates to help teachers rapidly build quality e-learning activities. It provides advice on choosing effective approaches, as well as sample sequences and advice on editing individual tasks. Teachers can use the LAMS Activity Planner to easily adopt and customise powerful teaching strategies in less than 10 minutes.The LAMS Activity Planner is now ready for beta testing - that is, the system still has some bugs and rough edges, but is ready for exploration by those who'd like to try out an early version and provide feedback. For more information and a screencast with voiceover, see

http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner/

This is well worth a look and I feel will be just the type of thing that will encourage a broader spectrum of users to have a try. Feedback welcome

e-Book offer

2009-04-14T19:52:00.004+01:00

We now have our new Moodle instance up and running ready for the start of our Quality Improvement Project and integrated into this we also have an instance of LAMS running. One of the aspects of the whole project however is of course content, and that's were I am going to be trying out eBooks, 1: because I have yet to make serious use of them as part of course delivery and 2 because I have been offered free access in retrnn for a case study; an offer well worth taking advantage of.

Social networking survey

2009-03-19T10:45:00.003Z

If like many of us you are intrigued by the uptake and attitudes toward social networking then you may well find this latest set of survey results from Masie worth looking at. From my initial scan it seems that some applications and approaches are bucking the popularist trend. Comments welcome.

Quality Improvement Project

2009-03-16T13:02:00.003Z

The Quality Improvement Project, is a new college initiative at raising attainment. A small group has been formed of which I am a member, looking into new approaches for teaching and learning. One of my insites of recent times has been the realisation, mainly from Moodle logs, that students do not seem to be engaging beyond college as much as they could. With this in mind one of my principle targets will be to utilise LAMS as a means of presenting graded exercises beyond the class room. Exactly what form the exercises will take and the value of the grading with regard to the standard Pass, Merit, Distinction criteria remains a question in point, as my experience so far with these trials points to the need for a systemic rather than component change in strategy, that covers both the delivery and the assessment, not to mention content; interesting times ahead!

New Virtual Learning Environments

2009-01-14T20:31:00.005Z

Well this week I moved away from Moodle as my sole platform for delivering collaborative e-learningand started to make use of SL as part of my course delivery. We get around the college proxy and closed port issues by have a parallel network on a Linux subnet and dual boot PC facility in one of our workshops. The task that I had set my students, there are around 20 in all, was to create a wind turbine in SL, whose blades would turn in the wind. To keep the project easy I did not use a physical object but demonstrated how the value for wind speed could be found and then fed into llTargetOmega(). For the majority of the students this was their first time in SL. I sent them all a slurl address, which they loaded into their browsers. It did soon became clear to me that bringing anyone into such a rich, immersive and social environment is going to be a pretty overwhelming experiences for the senses, and so after a basic lightning tutorial I simply let them go and explore the facility and have fun for about a hour, which represented the first half of our double period.

At the start of the second session, I demonstrated building and showed them how to access my in-world video tutorials. In the first they simply used a note-card giver that provided them a wind strength script, that they placed into a simple block prim, every time they touch the prim, the chat channel display wind speed. This was followed by a tutorial on creating the turbine blades and the script needed to rotate them. Finally they all got to texturise their creations and take copies back into Inventories.

I must say that the end result with so many of the devices running, though granted not yet generating power did impress me.

The project will continue over the next couple of weeks so if you would like to teleport over to take a look then please do at : -
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Maritime%20Greenwich/109/9/21 .

One aspect of the exercise that did surprise me was the way in which different personalities conduct themselves in an VR like SL but more of this in the evaluation phase.

Bye for now Skipper Abel

Motivating Learners with web 2

2008-11-03T20:01:00.003Z

On Monday I went along to the Ramada Hotel in the Bayswater Rd for an event that was titled “Motivating Learners using Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts”. The day was organised by Dice UK and the presenter was Adrian Jarratt. The sessions were organised to achieve a nice balance between Adrians presentations, which were very informative and supplemented with notable comments and idea’s from Adrian; I found myself scribbling away a fair amount, and practical hands-on exercises. In fact the hands-on bit was a particularly nice touch as it featured the use of handheld Internet PC’s for both morning and afternoon sessions. There was ample opportunity to take part in open discussion and exchange of experiences, which carried on over a very civilised lunch break, where of all things the subject of Key Skills featured, very illuminating that was! Anyway I came away with enough links and ideas to keep me busy and thinking for a while, so all in all this turned out to be a day well spent.

Captivating Moodle Scorm

2008-10-21T14:28:00.003+01:00

Should you be a regular reader of this blog, then you will no doubt have picked up that we have experienced a number of aspiring highs and avalanching lows in our attempts to deploy Scorm materials. Well here comes a new high, because we just tried out Captivate, which Adobe describe as software that enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, scenario-based training, and robust quizzes without programming knowledge or multimedia skills. In short it tracked attempts, timing and produced the correct score for a quiz. The down side of course is that being a licensed product captivate will cost you money, the upside being, it actually works.!!! If you have any experiences of Scorm or Captivate then please feel free to reply with a comment on this posting.

FOTE at Imperial College

2008-10-04T12:14:00.005+01:00

I went along to the FOTE event yesterday. FOTE is a one-day conference aimed at looking into the technologies, trends and core drivers that will impact the academic sector over the next 18 months to 3 years. The agenda was really good inckluding presentations fro the commercial and education sectors that covered and broad range issues like Cloud Computing, Social Media in education, Shared Services, Internet Video, 21st century skills & learners.

So here are the sessions that I found of particular interest. Well naturally I found the work being conducted in Second Life by Pauline Randall of Virtual-E particularly interesting and there were some innovative approaches coming through you like to take a look at their website. Google were represented by Sam Peters who explained the search engines vision for Cloud Computing, using their growing array of on-line applications, which will certainly find a place in many sectors of education, least not those were there is a need for low spec mobile cloud type devices. Though I am not an Apple user, my only experience seems to be centered on the act of closing down i-Tunes from the family PC once the kids have finished their Homework! I was impressed by John Hickey from Apple, when he presented the coming I-Tunes U, which it seems is going to be a free resource rich repository of links and content, look forward to that one.

The last presenter of the day was Alistair Mitchell from Huddle.net. If you have yet to hear of Huddle and it was new to me, then its basically a web based application that provides a collaborative file sharing workspace that encourages us to make use of the best of the and new application. On their website they do say that its free to get started so I guess must be worth giving it at try.

And last though by no means least Tom Abbott from the University of Warwick demonstrated a really impressive in-house live capture blog

The event was hosted at Imperial College, and needless to say it was a very nice and enjoyable day.

New Rollout

2008-07-10T11:56:00.001+01:00

We are about to embark on a new Moodle roll-out for staff in September 08 with three phase programme spread over as many years that will in the first year simply require everyone to utilise the system as repository for lessons plans schemes of work and handouts. One of the principle incentives for this will be 1 the running don and removal of the competing Intranet drive and the e-Maturity drive from Becta. While it has always been a contention from me that we must avoid at all costs the possibility of allowing the VLE to slip into the role of document dump, the reality remains that popularity and acceptance will only really emerge with use. For my own part I will see my current role as administrator and course creator being disseminated, so leaving me with the time and space to develop a training programme for content production and strategies more consistent with using Moodle as a VLE.

Books and eBooks

2008-05-15T15:35:00.000+01:00

I was invited to present at an ‘e-Book and Content’ event the other day, which unlike so many of the venues I had been invited to before, was attended predominantly by non-academic staff. In the main the audience was made up from by library / information professionals, administrators and publishers. Much of the theme for the event naturally centred on the subject of e-Books, which many appeared to agree, was the next natural stage in publication and distribution for learning materials. The reason for my inclusion of this event in a blog on Moodle, is that if like myself you have come to feel that to become a vle, certainly in my own understanding of the term, requires more than just the copious posting of course notes onto the system, but the development of materials more consistent with an eLearning delivery platform than a class handout. Certainly there does seem to be a case for the production of content that departs from our more traditional model of chapters and indexes following a comment from a delegate who reported the difficulties that one cohort of students had identified, that certain sections of books ’do not seem to read very well’; the section in question turned out to be the index!
A general consensus expressed on behalf of library professionals seemed to center on the burden of cost exacted on them by publisher bundles, which it seems often contain publications with a very low reader frequency. I wonder if we could learn something here from the music industries experience with i-Tunes. In this age of digitised music, the needs of the market seem to being served by the granulation of the traditional album into tracks from which personalised albums can be constructed, can we not think about doing the same with chapters! If you have any views or experiences then please feel free to reply to this posting.

Moodle Cute Repository

2008-04-29T13:41:00.001+01:00

I received an email recently describing a new content repository from the Worcester College of technology, its called MrCute and is intended to be an optional add-on to the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. More specifically, it extends the functionality of the IMS Repository system originally developed by Alton College, UK. From their website a repository is a storage area where materials – in this case elearning materials – can be held and from where they can easily be accessed by teachers and learners. IMS (Instructional Management Standards) Global Learning Consortium is an international body which aims to set standards for interoperability between learning systems. The specific standards involved in this case are the IMS Content Packaging Standards.
MrCute will be compatible with Moodle 1.8.2 but not with earlier 1.8 versions. You may like to give this site a visit and see what you think and please remeber to get back and post your views, but it certainly sounds worth while.

Open Source Mahara and Moodle

2008-04-15T17:35:00.001+01:00

I was wondering if anyone out there in Moodle land has thought of trying out the e-portfilio and social networking tool Mahara yet. Mahara has been designed as a means of storing evidence of lifelong learning in digital format called artifacts, a Mahara concept. An advantage to this approach is that students can display their artifacts in views depending on the intended audience; seems good in itself. In relation to Moodle, its appears that 1.9 and Mahara v0.9 support a transparent Single Sign On, all well worth a look. Please feel free to reply to this blog of you have any thoughts.

Death of the Podcast

2008-04-11T19:30:00.001+01:00

As a supplement to my lectures and notes for 2006-7, I decided to begin making some specific MP3 recordings at certain strategic points during the delivery, which resulted in about four or five recordings with each lasting somewhere between 3 to 4 minutes per session. While I used the MP3’s in audio form, I also decided to tryout driving an avatar with the audio and so give them all something to look at while listening, basically duplicating the material. All these recordings I then posted onto Moodle. At the time my students thought this was a bit of a novelty, and by tracking their activity I found they seemed to be making good use of them, very encouraging for me. At the start of this academic year, I simply restored my course and released the MP3 and Video casts, great for me, and I thought my students, however tracking has revealed an unexpected trend for the first semester. Below I have listed the students access, from a group of 20+ on a topic basis for the material

MP3 11,6,6,0,1
Video 9,4,3,0,4

As an experiment I have not installed the Podcasts for the second semester, and I have to say so far have received no requests for them! Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? Was the podcast just a blip? Or is this a reflection of my present cohort?

The rise of the networker

2007-10-14T13:55:00.001+01:00

What is that can make one years group of students so different from another, you have no doubt asked yourself this question and so do I, and this year is no exception. If you have been following this blog, then you will have picked up on the Social Networking exercise I devised for my 06/07 group as an icebreaker, that would eventually serve as a means of comparing final outcome. Well I ran the same exercise this year 07/08 and have finally got around to looking at the figures for September; this is the month on which outcomes will be compared. To my amazement the number of Forum postings has increased nine fold on the previous year! That’s right 900%. I have no explanation for such an unprecedented increase, the opportunity was presented to them in exactly the same way, no mention made on likely impact for outcome. Can it simply be an early indicator of the growing perception and influence that Social Networking is having on our expectations for life style, as we come to increasingly live in an online world? Comments welcome.

Social Networking outcomes

2007-08-12T09:47:00.001+01:00

If you had read my previous bog to this, where I presented two Social Networking diagrams, produced from the Sociomatrix data processed by Agna, then you will no doubt have been having some thoughts about the likely final outcome for the two groups. If you recall group ‘A’ displayed a very low level of social activity and group ‘B’ a far more impressive set of connections. Well here are the results.

Of course it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions from a single trial, more are needed and more will now take place, but certainly the outcome even to a casual observer produces a clear enough impression. The less well-connected group ‘A’, have between them achieved results that are skewed toward Pass and Merit, while the more active network of group ‘B’ displays a skew toward Merit and Distinction. I must say that I was more than pleased with this outcome, as it does at least on the surface appear to support the case for a more socially oriented model of learning.

One more small and possibly insignificant point is that group ‘A’ would seem to have double the amount of late assignment submissions.

You will no doubt have guessed that I have been keenly showing these results to just about anyone that will listen, and the response I must say has been very positive. Apart that is from one senior manager, who will of course remain nameless. But who pointed out somewhat reasonably, that had the outcomes for the two groups been reversed, then we might have been able to build a case for blocking access to all these Social Networking sites! And what if any are the intrinsic suggestions here I wonder, that entertainment wins out against education, perish the though.

Thoughts on Social Networking

2007-08-05T09:51:00.000+01:00

Going on as I do these days with regard to the value of social networking tools practices and the implications for collaboration in learning, which you may well have picked this up from a number of posts in this blog. As its summer now and there are no classes, its given me time to start thinking about trying to see if I can extract anything at all meaningful from the exercise that I encouraged my year 1 level 3 students to carry out at the start of their course in September 06. In fact I did a couple of blogs on this which you can still get to from here and to save repeating myself they are:-

Tell And Post, Thursday, September 14, 2006

Social Networking So Far, Sunday, September 24, 2006

Essentially the idea was to start them off by using Moodle as a social tool and see if this had any impact of the likely emergence of online groups and ultimately outcomes. Just recently, during the summer, I have been dipping into SNA (Social Network Analysis) this is a methodology for mapping and measuring relationships and flows in a system; this can be human or even data itself. Now being a software person, my first reaction was to go looking for some tools, free ones anyway and I found Agna, a superb little piece of Java freeware. I used Moodle reports to produce a student-by-student activity for the Social forums throughout September 06. Then using their names, though for this exercise I have replaced these with numbers, as the node values in the Sociomatrix; see below.

For this simple Binary exercise I simply recorded a 1 at the intersection of contact between two students.

I carried out the exercise for two groups, who I shall simply refer to as A and B

My next stage was to use the Agna Network Viewer to produce charts.

I shall let you make up you own mind on the level of social networking taking place here, but just establish for you that the arrows indicate the direction of communication.
Well what do you think? Is any of this likely to influence outcomes for later on the course? I will reveal all a week today, on Sunday 12th August.

So long Intranet welcome DSpace

2007-08-03T20:45:00.000+01:00

This week thanks to some major groundbreaking efforts from my fellow Moodle VLE administrator Clive, we now have our DSpace content repository accessible through common authentication with Windows Active Directory via Free Radius server. If you have been following this blog then you may recall the posting
DSpace Content Repository - Tuesday, April 12, 2005, where I reported that the system was now fully installed and rolled out for user access. Well to be honest, that turned out to be somewhat optimistic, because apart from myself, Clive and couple of other brave souls, not very much has been happening. But now that can all change, because through Clive's efforts this week not only can we offer users a common Windows Network, Moodle, DSpace login; you may like to keep up with his blog on all this. DSpace will now only allow authenticated users to access the actual content, in other words, the Meta Data is visible and will continue to be Harvested by OAIster, but only Bromley College staff and or Students can access the content. This of course overcomes one of the major concerns from staff, that their material will be open to all, regardless of Copyright or IPR. Naturally the next big bonus is that DSpace resource are now available from within Moodle; you just have to login in once at the start of your session. So goodbye to dupliacted Moodle resources, network drives, incomprehensible folder structures and ground fills of orphaned documents, from now on may DSpace and Meta Data rule.

Handouts to videos

2007-07-24T19:59:00.001+01:00

Well its that time of year again when following the upgrade of Moodle to our test server and tried out all the features that I need to star thinking about updating the Moodle course notes for the new version. This usually means I check each page of the notes with the new version and apply changes as they occur. This year however I have decided to reduce the actual Moodle training notes in their printed form and deliver the rest as a series of short video clips that can be run on demand by users as and when they need them. The impact of this will be to reduce the time needed for initial training, while at the same time ensuring that during the training, which does tend to be a bit hectic, given I only get 2 hours, I can spend more time looking at specific curricula issues rather than Moodle features that I have come to realise many will not come to use. So how do I intend to breakdown the content into printed and video formats?

Printed format

System settings and administration
Labels and headings
Editing facilities
Managing files and folders
Linking to resources
Moodle Assignments
Course presentation

Video Format

Using Forums
Using Chat
Creating Glossaries in Moodle
Managing the calendar events

Once I have these completed these I will make them available through this blog, so feel free to give them a test-drive and get back to me with any comments.

One more for the constructivist

2007-06-23T16:09:00.000+01:00

For those of you who have been following this blog, you will recall that last academic year 05/06 I ran a trial with my HND Computer Systems Engineering students where I used the VLE to investigate the delivery of about 20% of the course material based around the Social Constructivist model. The particular framework that I chose for this was the ‘Community of Enquiry’ from Garrison, Anderson and Archer. Well as I said then, results looked promising but it needed more data and so here are the results from this years trail 06/07 for both percentages and grades as measured against 2002-2005. I think you will agree that it does look more than encouraging and I shall be featuring these outcomes in my Camel presentation at the college on the 2nd of July this year.

Self Evaluation

2007-06-20T12:23:00.001+01:00

If like myself you are deploying much of your full time course delivery over Moodle , then you will no doubt also be realising that while there are many advantages to this for everyone regarding administration, are there any similar enhancement to outcomes? Well I have to say probably not, after all, good teaching, good notes and resources are exactly that whatever the medium you deliver them by. If you have been reading this blog then you will know that I have been trialing methodologoes such a 'Communities of Enquiry', with some success. Even so I still find myself trawling round for some realistic model for self evaluation, and thats when I came across this article that I find myself getting somewaht enthusiastic about. Of course the test is going to be can I implement this through Moodle in some way, well stay tuned for that one.

Video formats and storage

2007-06-18T13:43:00.001+01:00

I received a request recently from a client to produce my Moodle training resources as a set of video files, which does make a lot of sense; I have also been using more video this year on the VLE. If you are finding this emerging trend, then you may like to have a look at a couple of resources for video conversion and storage. At the Yasasoft website you can download a limited free version, it will convert just about all format up to five minutes and its a really nice and easy to use piece of desktop software. I also came across a reasonable online media converter the other day at vixy.net, which seems to be worth having a look at. Of course with video comes the need for storage, and if yours I limited, then why not try storing it with blip.tv, they seem to be making an open invitation.

Thinking about your VLE

2007-05-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

If like us here at Bromley College you have been deploying a VLE, then like me you may be wondering after having structured courses with all kinds of content from Word files to podcasts, where the technology is moving and what the outcomes have been. If you are thinking along these lines, then you will be interested in the findings of the JISC funded projects that are about to enter their second phase, you can find the site here. I read a summary in the May 2007 edition of Cilip Update, which seemed to promote the conclusion of student preference for social networking over pure VLE, with the suggestion that educators are becoming concerned about the future of the traditional VLE. For my part I have no real evidence that this is the case, have you, please feel free to post.

VLE's and poor attendance

2007-03-22T19:22:00.000Z

I was surprised by the concerns expressed in the recent HE Forum about VLE’s leading to reduced attendance. And so an emailed was circulated to a national list, not by myself I must add, to see if this is generally seen as a problem. The responses indicate the opposite. You will find a link here to some of the responses that you may find useful. The question posted was:- Using a VLE might lead to a reduction in attendance. Does anybody on the list have to deal with this worry? Is it true? How do you counter it? Please feel free to inform us of your own views on this subject by replying to this post.

Project LEON

2007-03-08T12:40:00.000Z

Starting Monday 12th March ULCC are running London's first Online Conference looking at Web2 Technologies supporting 'personalisation' called LEON (London e-Learning Online Network). There are a number of strands to this project,and my own here at Bromley is looking to the potential of Second Life, where students can share a 3D space and presence in real time. The current project features a library with access for individual or group study, links to web sites, pod casts, movies, documents and virtual page turning books. Presentations and lectures can be delivered to groups or individuals using white boards, media players all delivered by the lecturer. The potential improvements for social engagement above that offered by the more usual first world experience of synchronous, asynchronous chat and forum seem boundless. If you are interested in joining us the go to the website and contact Philip Butler for enrollment details.

VLE project 2 completed

2007-03-03T14:59:00.000Z

Going by the transactions from the latest learning trial using Moodle, here at Bromley I feel certain that I will be looking at another successful outcome. There were 23 students taking part of which only 16 eventually completed the project and between them accounted for over 12,000 transactions in four weeks. For all those who did manage to stay the course, I presented feedback assessment for collaboration, and there is without doubt overwhelming support from them as well as a sense of achievement. However for students who’s engagement / attendance proved patchy before the project, the new approach seemed to be of little positive influence.

Learning in a Virtual World

2007-01-30T23:09:00.000Z

Just lately a lot of my time has been taken up with Second Life, if you have yet to try virtual worlds then let me recommend the experience. My principle reason for the whole venture is to see how this new semi-immersed virtual reality can be utilised for teaching and learning, even as an extension to our continuing work with Moodle. On Saturday 17th of Feb at 5pm I will begin hosting some presentation trials that will be looking at the Linden Script, that’s the language in SL, and comparing it with other main stream computer languages. So if you are free around that time and would like to come over for a short and small class and supply us with some feedback in another reality just click here and I will look forward to seeing you.

Video beats the audio star

2007-01-11T23:11:00.000Z

At the start of this term decided to try using my PDA to record parts of my lectures, and these recording are in range of 3 to 4 minutes. The particular course that I selected for this is my High Level Programming for level 4 students, and to date I have made about 40 recordings. But I thought I would tryout something of an experiment by making these recording available in two forms, one being a straightforward mp3, while the other would feature a speaking CrazyTalk avatar. Although the speech content of the two media are identical, the CrazyTalk avatar version has attracted almost twice the number of viewings!

Using Moodle to deliver self financing courses

2006-12-04T22:33:00.000Z

I am hopeful that Moodle here at bromley College will begin to fulfil a commercial role following an enquiry the other day from company who required a course in Website Design for one of their employees. I have been running a very successful self financing course “HTML and JavaScript for Website Designers” for some time now, however it does require a minimum of 12 students to be viable, with the next one likely to start in January. This timescale was however too long, and I was asked if it could be run as a distance learning package, well maybe if I ran it through Moodle. As this will effectively be a trial, I have given the course for free in return for a comprehensive feedback and review. In fact when the boss came along to lookover the set-up, he signed himself up as well. The course can now run at the pace of the students, they will provide me feedback via the Journal, have access to resources using Block Folders, submit completed exercises as Assignments and keep in touch using Forums and Chat. Hey I may even be able to use Second-Life!!! I’ll let you know how it goes.

Podcast or videocast, which do you prefer?

2006-11-25T19:49:00.000Z

Do you podcast you lectures? . I have started this in a small way but from the system logs the results were not encouraging. Anyway I started to give the whole idea some serious thought recently. From my own perspective, if am driving or travelling on public transport, then yes I would listen to a podcast, however if was sat in front of a computer, then I would appreciate something more visual. The feasibility of videoing and editing a whole lecture on a regular basis would for me be unrealistic. But do you really need the whole lecture, well no, and all I record usually are selected parts in audio using my PDA. Anyway I decided to pop one of my audio tracks into one of CrazyTalks avatars, the result, good, judging from the Moodle logs, the media is definitely getting a better response. If you would like to take a look just click here. Please feel free to feedback on your own experiences by posting to this blog.

Free learning resources from the OU via Moodle

2006-11-22T13:04:00.000Z

free and open educational resources
If like myself you are always on the lookout for some quality e-Learning materials, then you simply have to take a look at the Open Universities Moodle site OpenLearn. The resources here are free to use and are of an excellent quality, well done OU.

Time for a Second Life

2006-11-19T13:28:00.000Z

Just recently I decided that the time had come to put my money where my enthusiasm was, so I upgraded my membership in Second Life and bought some land and see how it could be used in conjunction with my work on Moodle. In fact I bought a small island from diddster.com, these are really nice properties and the company extremely helpful. In fact the whole experience was a bit surreal, as I had to leave my wife cruising around Diddsters Daydream island complex, made more stressful for her as she had not used Second life before, looking for a vacant plot and making the purchase. While all this was happening I was watching through a colleague’s avatar at work (Whoops), keep that bit to yourself. Anyway Jinxster of Diddster turned up and gave some very timely advice and we all had an extremely useful three way conversation. I have since acquired a building for my island (Shimmer Island) and begun accumulating some tools; whiteboard and media player, both of which were actually free. If you click on my island thumb nail at the top of this post, you will get a bigger picture.
Anyway I am off to my alternative reality now, but do stay tuned to see how things go.

Value Added Moodle?

2006-11-15T13:42:00.000Z

Keen as I always am to make use of our vle for course delivery, I am also very keen to find evidence on its effectiveness with regard to student outcomes. One of the courses that see particularly heavy use of the vle here at Bromley is my BTEC National Software Development. Just the other day I am informed that it has attracted highest Value Added in the country for this course, wow. How much of that is due to the vle, difficult to say, but I was asked to put my views in writing; 50 words! Anyway here is my response. We have an experienced subject specialist team delivering a wide range of software technologies that include VBA, VB6, C, Java, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and SQL, and find attracts motivated students with an ambition for Software Development.
Our adoption and increasing use of the Moodle vle has further allowed us to explore a variety of teaching methods, that facilitate our students the opportunity for personalisation, to extend their learning beyond the traditional physical boundaries and time constraints of class based lectures.A bit Just a tad more that 50.

Second Life from Dartmouth

2006-10-23T21:14:00.000+01:00

I have just looged out of the first Second Life conference for teachers, I think. I got into the conference from a French restaurant in Dartmouth via rather a weak wifi signal, in fact I am Blogging from here still. There were plenty of people and some interesting proposals for future projects, its all looking extremely promising, all in all a great show. Well done Optimus Paul.

Google for Educators

2006-10-14T12:55:00.000+01:00

This week, I guess with no great surprise, I find that those people at Google, who no doubt have been keeping a watchful eye on our surfing habits, have made an encouraging response by launching Google for Educators. My first impression is that this has the makings of a powerful and valuable resource that already features a growing repository of materials, tools, ideas and stories. I was particularly taken by the invitation that we can upload video clips, a timely offer, given that I have spoken to a few people recently who are showing some concern as to where they can place such materials given the limits that seem to exist for storage in some institutes.

Social networking so far

2006-09-24T19:55:00.000+01:00

I have some satisfaction and surprises reviewing the way in which my plans for introducing a social networking forum are working out with the courses this year. I have given the rounded figures in the table.

A couple of points come to mind for me: 1 by far the most active group is the BTEC National General, but this is a year 2 group, so they already know each other well by now. 2 Though the HND group seem to have shown more activity than the BTEC National Software, in fact less then half, 9/23, of the HND have yet to actually post their own details, does age make you more cautious in these forums?

Podcasting

2006-09-17T20:01:00.000+01:00

Last week I decided to start using a podcast approach as part of my regular Moodle material. I have incorporated these as part of my level 4 groups work in Object Oriented Design. The course is delivered as a series of lectures accompanied by detailed course notes and assessed using a portfolio approach of exercises. It’s the presentation in class of these exercises that I have decided to make available as mp3’s. I have installed them all into their own folder and students access them through Moodles Add a resource/Display a directory feature. I decided against the usually highly mobile podcast approach, as I know very few of the students actually own one. I shall be sure to report on their popularity and utility in due course

Tell and post

2006-09-14T20:09:00.000+01:00

I started three new level 3 groups today and as a first exercise decided they should begin to make use of Moodle by posting lifestyle styles and ambitions to a forum. Postings could include links, particularly if they had Myspace, some did. I then asked them to reply to at least 2 postings, but not if they were already friends; I encourage this in support of the need to establish a virtual presence, after all given the diminishing requirement of funding bodies, students are only actually at College 2.5 days a week, so what happens the rest of the week? Well maybe it can be virtual, lets shall see. A significant proportion of postings were as I anticipated in youth code; medium is the message! I am reassured however given recent finding by Bev Plester and Claire Wood at Coventry Uni. Its early days but be assured I shall be collecting and posting feedback from the groups on these and other online activities.

Myspace induction

2006-09-12T20:16:00.000+01:00

The HND course officially started today with an induction. I had an hour to present myself and courses to them. This year has been really different though rather than explain courses in detail with references to handouts, assignments and grading, I talked almost exclusively about the part Moodle would play as a delivery platform in support of the collaborative leaning framework and assessment strategies that proved successful in last year’s trial. Upon ending the presentation rather than give out advice on pre-start of courses reading, I asked them to get a Myspace account, fill out all the categories and be sure to post comments to at least two from others. My plans are that the Social networking aspects of Myspace will not only form the first point for an ongoing trend of collaboration but be the foundation in forming an online presence and identity.

Save-n-forget

2006-09-09T14:15:00.000+01:00

Things Moodle-wise here at Bromley are looking OK for the start of the coming academic year. The new vle is up and running and the old version for 0506 is now only available to staff. Just the other day I found that I am to be teaching on the OO Development and OO Applications courses (that’s all about objects to us programming nerds). The courses uses Java and so I decided to begin populating Moodle with some of my Java CourseGenie materials, but was unsure where they were, home, work, CD, usb? Then I remembered that I had uploaded all that stuff to our DSpace content repository, great, logged in found them straight away no problems, of courses no folders to navigate, because there are none, meta-data discovery is the way. Uploaded the content as a Moodle Scorm Activity, finished, isn’t this the way it should be though?

XBOX on the syllabus

2006-08-15T10:19:00.000+01:00

I have a sense or resurgent enthusiasm again with regard to the place of games in teaching: re my posting to this blog on 3DML and Robocode, when today I read that Microsoft are to offer XNA Game Studio Express, a free consumer version of Xbox tools that will run on a PC. In fact my interest in games has taken an upward leap after discovering the Sleeper Curve in Steven Johnson’s book ‘Everything bad is good for you’ ( I can recommend it). The suggestion is that our pop cultures game playing has contributed to our ability in managing rising complexity and cognitive demands. I wonder what impact the mention of xbox programming would have on the syllabus?

Coalescing virtually

2006-08-10T20:10:00.000+01:00

I have been working on plans to encourage students to adopt the idea of virtual learning communities for the coming academic year. But to be realistic there has to be some sense of virtual value! It occurs to me, that the usual start of course ice breakers of ‘who I am, where I’ve been, going, gone wish I hadn’t and wish I had’ , type soon forgotten presentations, are evolved out by a dynamic, sustained and even organic online presence through myspace accounts, accessed from the vle. I naturally intend being part of all this as you can see here. In developing an on-line presence, I have some confidence the social networking aspects will act as a mechanism promoting the emergence of groups to eventually coalesce into virtual communities; eventually, though according to Rena Palloff they can happen almost instantaneously. Interesting times ahead.

Interactive White Boards for Free

2006-07-27T16:36:00.000+01:00

I discovered a really promising web based application the other day that was promoted as an interactive whiteboard, not surprisingly it’s called Virtual White Board. I registered for an account and though you do not at this stage get all the fancy clipart and sound clips etc; its still in beta, I was impressed with the functionality. Here at college interactive white-boards, probably due to the cost just do not seem to have happened, though all our computing rooms do all have a master PC and projector. Using Virtual-whiteboard you can include text, images, files and notes, freehand drawing plus some symbols and clipart. Users i.e. students, can be invited in and authenticated via their email address; if they are remote, then chat is also available. Sessions can be saved, printed or exported as an image . My impressions at the moment are that Virtual White Board will be a nice compliment to the various tools that I am currently deploying through Moodle and intend trialling it in the coming academic year. If you decide to give Virtual White Board a try yourself please feel free to get back and make a comment for us all.

Elgging

2006-07-23T20:17:00.000+01:00

In the last few weeks I have been taking a close look at elgg and trying to decide whether to promote it as part of my courses in the coming year. I set-up my account and began trawling through the various options and facilities, and came to the conclusion that it will be ideal for creating a personalised learning space. While on this subject, there is a whole debate going on it seems around personalised learning at the moment, so if you are interested in getting clarification you may like to browse this standards site; complete with quotes from David Miliband who started the whole thing, well almost. I don’t know about you, but with certain people, whenever I get into discussions on this one, the whole session seems to drift into customisation, which in turn takes you up the road of accessibility, definitely not the same thing. Anyway things could get even more interesting with elgg from my perspective, because it will also facilitate my ambitions for learning communities, which brings it very much into my sights regarding the JISC bid. So with that all said elgg is on.

Nine mystery guests

2006-07-15T11:49:00.000+01:00

Well the JISC bid event with our partner colleges went really well, and now I am looking forward to seeing the whole project hopefully come to life in the New Year. The web-cast also worked and our network manager informs me that we had 10 IP addresses connected, though one of those was him, so I guess that leaves 9. Following my request for the web-cast to be set-up, a first for Bromley College I must say, it was reassuring to have evidence of it actually being used, and given the technical issues that had to be overcome, its top marks and thanks to the network team for that. While you may be thinking that this blog is likely to go quite given it’s the end of the academic year, I will now have the task of helping to write the actual bid and on a completely separate tack, preparing for a new venture as we develop our plans in forming a partnership with a commercial company in the deployment of the Moodle VLE beyond our more usual FE and HE sectors.

Change of stream

2006-07-13T10:06:00.000+01:00

Just a last minute change to our streaming of the JISC bid proposal here at Bromley College this afternoon, the address is now http://keyhole.bromley.ac.uk please feel free to drop in.