Looking for more good education blogs

You can peer at random people's subscriptions on their blogs, but I need to do some actual work before Christmas. So, what's a bigger shovel?

• Educational bloggers on Flickr – pond a bit small, fish are self selecting
• Bloglines subscriptions of famous people, like "dnorman" – D'Arcy Norman presumably – enormous pile, lots of good quality
• Edublog awards nominees
• The map of edubloggers (self-selection again) powered by Frappr! and Google Maps
  

• any more ??
  

Naked education

Right! I'm going to get naked in front of the students more often.

(from Presentation Zen)

elgg Learning Landscape

I'm intrigued by elgg and its Learning Landscape. I discovered it by following, through the flocking mechanism of delicious, who else had linked to a particular post on the corporatisation of universities (this is the little flock) following their adoption of electronic media (itself an ironic current).

Which goes to demonstrate that sometimes this social stuff actually works.

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.

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.

Blackboard buys WebCT

I heard today that Blackboard is set to buy out WebCT.

Random selection of links to merger commentary by independent observers:

• Auricle Bath
• John Dale Warwick
• D'arcy Norman Calgary
• More roundup Stephen Downdes
  

There's a great discusssion on Slashdot where, guess what, both products get slagged off.
This being Slashdot, by people who claim to know a thing or two.  Admins and students are the
majority of the audience, but there's a few "professors" in there too. It's worth a giggle, if you
can stave off the feeling of here-we-go-again depresion.
I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used
both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was
advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We
wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure
whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the
time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my
colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about,
and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with
disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by
folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I
was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use
ClassWeb [ucla.edu], an open source alternative to such tools. My
experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it
fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for
students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so
when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and
they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the
superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the
price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain
about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on
classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at
will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table
(particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie....

Another cycle

Having spent quite a bit of effort getting the e-learning horses into their harnesses last year and wondering whether all the trouble was worth it, this year could be the one where some furrows are usefully ploughed with less sweat on my part.

It has certainly been very liberating to simply direct students to the virtual store cupboard, without having to fill each of their baskets. Today's course material distribution takes ten seconds.

Me: "Log on to webCT, you'll see my course there, grab what you need"
Them: "er... great!"

Increasingly, students will expect more and more direct provision of on-line information. Here's a trendspotting survey in the Grauniad (spotted in Cutting Through). The conclusions talk about media buying habits of the youth, but these are trends that will probably affect student expectations in universities too. In not too many years' time, it has to be stressed. Next year's first tutorial could go like:

Them: "Hey grandad, I've looked for your RSS feed and course documents last week, where are they? I want my money back. I'm off."
Me: "er... wait!"

New UCL blog spotted - any more?

Peter at the Management Studies Centre has started a team blog like this one, called Thriving on Chaos. Know any more bloggers in UCL?

The idea of aggregating abundances of blogs is dealt with by James Farmer in BlogSavvy, which seems to be a spinoff from his existing Incorporated Subversion.

UK Education resources : changes afoot

Attentive readers will note that this is cross-post from Double Loop.

My usual mode of operation in the edu-game revolves around the annual round of production and feedback linked to the academic year. I'm looking ahead to future concepts right now, and it's around this time that I start trawling around the national resources. I've just spotted that the entity formerly known as LSTN has mutated into the UK Higher Education Academy.

The reason I'm looking here is to get a sense of what practitioners are doing with learning technology around the country. I'm suspicious that what I'm seeing is not representative of the best. Certainly sites the the UK HEA don't fit the zeitgeist of now, and more importantly my working practices. No attribution (Who are you guys?), no contribution (no comments boxes!), no RSS (what, none at all?). Too many empty strategy papers (aarrgh PDF!! arrgh dead URLs in the PDFs!!!) and out of date case studies.

An example, I came across an LSTN-branded working paper, in the Physical sciences subsite (why?), entitled Virtual Learning Environments stating that

The most basic form of asynchronous communication with computer technology is the use of email, where a message is sent and the reply is sent later i.e. asynchronously. So, all VLEs should provide at least basic email facilities.

What, university students don't have email they can use? Why are these dated papers still being circulated? Hasn't the community moved on in the last two years?

I suspect the valuable practical lessons are out there somewhere not being reported, at least not here. Back to the blogfields.

I'm ramping up my orbits around blogdom looking for inspiration. A very small sample can be seen in the sidebar of this blog. I'm getting a consistent impression that the best learning technology practitioners, at least the ones who blog, are seriously struggling against two things.

1. Managerialism and corporate approaches to learning technology implementations. Example: teachers being required by directive or circumstance to use a particular VLE tool.

2. Directed experiences of the learner, i.e. prior programming of a student's responses at course-design time.

To some extent these two aspects support each other. Heavy tooling up leads to industrialisation of production, whereas the opposite models are also mutually supportive. Many commentators are advocating a pick and mix (a.k.a. the filling station model) toward both provider technology (blog, wiki, podcast, webpage, VLE if you must) and learner acitivity (browsing, using Google, emailing each other, discovery).

Edublogger awards

... representing some of the best in Educational Blogging in the past year or so.
Expect to see more of some of these in the sidebar soon.

From Incorporated Subversion.

UCL Teaching and Learning Strategy 2005

It's good to see the buzz-alphabetti of ICT and VLE mentioned, among other things, in the UCL Teaching and Learning Strategy that was announced recently - here (restricted to UCL staff). It looks as though some key viewpoints made at earlier consultative workshops were incorporated. Now, how can we turn this into implementable plans at Departmental level next session?

Interactive whiteboards

I gave a demonstration of how to use an "interactive whiteboard" to a group of lecturers yesterday, and it's fair to say they were very impressed. They were lucky, actually, because they'd inherited a teaching room left behind by the Ergonomics department, and so coincidentally they inherited a large and perfectly-configured interactive whiteboard.

These things are really good to use. They're one of the few things in the area of "learning technology" which is genuinely quite intuitive to use. Simply use it like an ordinary projector screen, but when you want to scrawl a note on top of one of your slides, or use the mouse to perform some action, you simply touch the screen with your finger!

This model comes with some very handy extras, such as character recognition (it will turn your scrawled markings into neatly-formatted computer text), different colours of "pen" to write with, etc. Try one out, if you ever get a chance...