Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Choosing a forum

There must be hundreds of collaboration platforms available to me in principle, but I'm usually tempting to pick low-hanging fruit. Following a well-established pattern, I need to taste the fruit before responding to advice.

I've just this week re-opened a Blogger blog, Questions of Project Management, for some of my students, in preference to instituting a WebCT course that 180 of them would have to register for and then maybe not use. I don't care if search engines find out what we talk about, but I do anonymise enquiries (which I still field by email).

In Systems Engineering Management (MSc with predominantly industrial delegates) we will shortly go the WebCT route, simply to provide a secure forum and minimal course information. Whether this will expand toward content delivery is unresolved.

Yesterday I became aware of Courseforum and Projectforum, which looks like wiki, but tidied up and given dancing shoes. It's got RSS integration (both in and out) and tells you about changes by email – wha-hey! This could be a solution to my lightweight VLE and forum needs, but like anything in this second wave of development, they want money. We use a phpWiki in the MSSL TMG for internal chatter, but it hasn't caught fire as yet (only ~6 users!).

I'm going to be more scientific about observing what happens with all these fora, so in the mode of a paper, here would be the abstract:
We describe how and why we used the blog-publishing web service Blogger to provide students with supplementary information relevant to an assignment in an otherwise conventionally-taught UCL course. We explore how Blogger’s characteristics fitted the demands of this publication task, and compare its facilities with other forum tools. A specific comparison is made with Discussions feature of WebCT, where we look at other courses involving the same tutors. The effect of the features of each setting on the nature of the interaction with students is explored. Both tools are compared to the use of e-mail to achieve the same ends. A sample of Students’ own response to these methods is shown, and some conclusions are drawn.
I plan to present this at UCL's next Teaching and Learning Event.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Natural Podcast

Wow, even Nature's got a podcast.



They join NASA, Stanford, New Scientist, the BBC and everybody else in the race to your brain. Earholes are the new eyeballs.

What's on my ipod? Mark Kermode's film reviews make me laugh out loud on the train (during half-term I got a few who's that scary man, mummy? looks from six year olds). And "我学习普通话" with Chinesepod.com.

I use ipodder and itunes.

In 2015, those six year olds will wonder why I bothered writing this.