TILT2008

UCL Teaching and Learning Conference TILT 2008

Friendly enough bunch, though, but, you know. Some of the presentations are a little along the me-too type. The remit is wider than technology though, which might explain the relative lack of innovation. I guess I expect to be constantly amazed at events like this.

Some personal highlights:

• Was gladdened to hear that podcasting at UCL seems to be just round the corner. Jeremy's got a stack of shiny servers and software (e.g. like Anystream's Apreso, as used by Winyard et al) that do all the mashing and mixing of sources. The talks at this very conference for example. Woo, at long last. Let's hope the efforts don't get mired in endless fretting about IP. UPDATE: the server workflow has eaten its own fingers, so the podcasts are borked, for now. UPDATE UPDATE: they fixed it. Grab them while they are hot.
  
• Had fun with the personal response systems. Who wants to be a millionaire poor academic? Let's ask the audience.
• Felt sorry for those locked into WTS, who can't even get audio on their machines, let alone all this fancy stuff.

• Looked forward to effectively outsourcing online reading lists, c/w hyperlinks and scanned bits, to the Library where it belongs. Hope they don't make it a wobbly heap of complexity like the exam papers (couldn't that be made look like a plain list, hmm?)
  
• Resolved yet again to try and introduce CBM into teaching, probably Project Management to start with.
  
• Got the urge to incorporate more Objects, either QT-VR blobs of space hardware from photos (we've got lots of good stuff, but it's all in Holmbury) into teaching, or even art objects (via the print collection? They've obviously got lots of good stuff).

• Found myself ranting about the empty phrase "the video was good quality". What?? I thought we were supposedly learned grown-ups. There's No Such Thing as "good quality", unless it's understood what the use might be. Puh-leaze read Garvin, or anything about Requirements and then come back and say something meaningful. You are permitted to say "the video was good enough to do X, but not Y". I reckon folk see the moving flashes and are hypnotised into bliss, hence the nonsensical utterances. Take the podcasts of these talks. Yes I can see the head, and the lips moving around a bit, and the big text, but not the little bits, or the texture in the image. I can see how many hands the presenter is holding up, but not whether she's sweating slightly. It's not the same as being in the room. If I'm bovvered, I'll do a dummies guide to video quality, and a checklist of AV qualities, note the plural, that might be relevant to teaching. It'll have to distinguish Functions from Features, and cover image, text, sound, colour and search. It might use metaphors in music performance or some other thing, like the concept of computer-mediated sex, to bang home the point. /rant

• Followed many course developments elsewhere - especially those of Peacock (converting a course to online mode), Dunsmuir (collaborating to produce an accredited course) and Federighi (developing a course where curriculum drives teaching, not vice versa). I'll 'ave summa that.
  

• Watched the Big Fight : some real challenges to the implied build-it and they will come approach to some of UCL's recent branding/mission/strategies. "Global Citizenship" for example. Tom Gretton was the cheerful lad who in this case pointed to the emperor's allegedly draughty arse (Citizen = defined polity, rights etc . Global = nothing of the sort). I much prefer the concept of the metaphoric city (a place of meetings), which being virtual, could be global. UCL as a city of learning that's open to, and for, the world. Hard to fit that in two words though. Maybe that's the point. More on the blog it is officially hoped. Though I doubt it : blogging hasn't really caught fire at UCL. CASA (undescribable, go and look) and John Wells (the non-department of Phonetics) are about the only decent UCL blogs I know of (tell me another, please).
  

Onwards.

e-learning briefing at MSSL

Several staff at MSSL took time to hear me speak about my experiences with Moodle and e-learning generally, and also to re-introduce services provided by Information Systems. I think we made some headway into the general problem of best to use technology to support learning. Most undergraduate and Masters students are usually a long way away from where most of the teaching staff are, so it makes sense for us to be on top of the technology. As well as that, we (MSSL) are generally technically adept. However, beacuse of our remote location, we may forget about or never hear of activities and services at the centre. I'm hoping this will change. I also think our main challenges are not technological but to do with the culture of learning in physics classrooms.

Nice little definition of constructivism

Nice summary here about the contrast between traditional and constructivist approaches to learning/teaching by Ken Carroll at Praxis (a.k.a. Chinesepod):

Is knowledge delivered or constructed?

2007 - the year of Moodle?

It's everywhere. Even my next door neighbour has heard of Moodle (he works in a sixth-form college)! Here in UCL, it has been adopted as an official VLE, having been a pilot service for a year or two.

With colleagues, I have been putting together simple course structures and courses for a variety of levels (undergrad/postgrad modules and executive training). Point Click, prod, poke, bosh. Sorted. Not much real need to read the manual. So far so very easy. Compared with WebCT, the process of course creation is much speedier. The interfaces are generally much less clunky and the metaphors are straightforward enough that even a particularly notoriously un-techy teacher doesn't constantly crash things.

One thing I particularly like is that any item (file, activity, quiz) has a static URL [1] that can be used anywhere else. An obscure URL, but a URL nonetheless. This makes integration with other sites and blogs possible. Another thing : the feeds and email hooks mean that Moodle courses aren't forgotten, allowing integration the other way. WebCT, as I recall, was a black hole, almost nothing went across its event horizon.

We are still learning the ins and outs (there are a few bugs, which Julie knows all about), and we have yet to receive proper student feedback.

I'm looking forward to rolling out programme-wide Moodles for at least a couple of MSc's later this year. I'm also looking forward to the software itself stabilising. The sunny uplands of Version 3. UCL has 1.6 right now, and 1.8, 1.9 are out there in development-land.

[1] It still mentions a script called view.php, so, according to the ultra-pure W3C, can't be considered "cool". Unlike Sir Tim.

Independent learning

Chinesepod, one of the podcasts I regularly listen to, has recently done a version-up. Among other things, they have ditched the idea of a series of podcasts, while keeping up the daily deliveries. No longer are they numbered Intermediate 97, 98, 99 and so on. Instead, they are giving prominence to the theme of each program, the un-numbered title.

This seems to promote a bit more user independence, and encourages, gives permission to perhaps, the idea of dipping in to the stream ad hoc. Ken's pretty keen on user-centered learning, look, he's referencing Blackboard whitepapers about it.

On the website end, they have enabled users (paying ones anyway) to develop a calendar of learning. So you can be browsing the stock of podcasts, and you see a lesson on Tai Chi. Cool! So you bookmark that one, and that's remembered for you. You look at your calendar, and decide that next Monday lunchtime might be a good time to listen through and look at. From your bookmarks, you drag the lesson title to the Sunday. That's when the relevant audio file and PDF transcript will be delivered to your iTunes. After breakfast on Monday, you sync the pod and you can't wait till lunchtime.

I just now grokked all this, having been confused for the last 5 weeks.

Permanent Markerus Erasius

This isn't e-learning, but chemical-based learning. We never called it c-learning, did we?

You know, last time I was in a lecture room and accidentally wrote with permanent marker on the white board, I shrank by a foot, apologised, threw the marker in the bin, and tried to carry on around the fresh graffiti. I needn't have been so upset, here's a wonderful undo spell:

Lifehacker : erase permanent marker

Becta on Web 2.0

Here's a nice report on trends in T+L using new generations of web tools:

They've called it Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Hello?! The tech has long since emerged. The users and managers now need to emerge after it.

TLN : Podcasting

Just back from the TLN talk/discussion on Podcasting at UCL. About time too! There has been some traffic on the insanely great Mac list about this recently. You know, the usual worries: what mic and recorder to use, where to put the file, with what compression, and how to wrap it all up in a xml file. And does my bum look big in this. As usual, have been meaning to develop something podcastish for ages, but haven't got to it yet. I did the round trip thing a couple of years ago, and the 23-second "hello world" is still there on a server someplace.

So, after a fairly routine (though very slick) couple of presentations for the noobs about what a podcast is, or was last year, and what a feed is, we got to the discussion business. I was almost expecting about half a dozen UCL people to reveal their wonderful podcast seminars series, and for the web services boys and girls to say "Here we are with another big webserver that's got the nuts to host it all, and here's a nice form-n-script that you can use to upload and cook your XML for you, and here's a mic (that we've found works well) for you to borrow till you get your own, and oh by the way we've sorted things with iTunes podcast directory so your busy students can't forget where you put it."

I said almost. Back in the world again, my fat mouth got its usual run.

Questions, questions:

Why are people obsessed with "putting lectures on the web". It's like 1999 all over again, only with bad audio instead of over-long web pages. What's so fantastic about a lecture that it has to be badly reproduced in an unsuitable medium?

Why is everybody afraid of polluting the Brand? A big part of our brand should be "does stuff".

Why does the harmful meme "what is the best way of doing this" have such a hold? There is no best way.

Matt's way:

Get on with it. Let flowers bloom, and prune and arrange later.

Experience. Listen to Chinesepod, watch youtube, and work out how bite-sized media work.

Keep it short. Don't for heaven's sake consider putting 40 minute lectures through someone's headphones. Keep boring meta stuff out, such as where the departmental coffee machine is. Ums and ahhs are tolerable in RL, nice even, but are leaden milliseconds when recorded. Love the Wayne's World model, also the BBC model. We are not the BBC, however.

Use face time (lectures) for the exchange of human emotions about the topics. Put the reference works into print, web, video or audio as appropriate. The lecturer's job is a DJ's, to showcase other people's tunes, pointing out the interesting bits, filling the gaps, and keeping them dancing.

The audience don't mind if the records are a bit scratchy, but they must not be bored. Don't confuse pace and style (which are mandatory) with production gloss (which isn't).

People laughing about a point is a great way to teach. Get down the pub with Audacity and a pair of mikes, and talk about the subject, preferably one that's been described elsewhere. "You've read the notes on the theory of price elasticity, now Peter from Freakonomics is going to tell me about Barca's moves in the transfer market. Now Peter, 20 million is a lot for a defender, what are the forces here, are the TV networks dominating the demand side of the equation? ..." Remember, 10 minutes max. Your punter is a busy person.

Now, about copyright and the creative commons in audio content ... Sorry time's up.

The New Web for Dummies

... or something like that. You know when you go "e-learning yada wiki yada blog yada" and people stare at you (thinking WTF are you on about why aren't you writing out OHPs or sharpening your chalk) and you want to stuff something like Web 2.0 (as applied to Education) for Dummies into their open mouths?

Well, here it is.

Using Blogger for teaching - slides

It's a bit rough and ready, but my slides are here and here. 2.6 MB Powerpoint.

Bit of blog intro-theory, a few screen shots from VLEs and forums, lots of wild speculation.

Report from T+L 2006 (3)

17:20 Martin Reid & June Hedges (UCL Library Service): Coping with copyright and content.

Fairly routine introduction to what this bit of the library does for us. Phew! June mentions Creative Commons right at the end!

Report from T+L 2006 (2)

16:20 Using wikis to support collaborative exploration of anthropological issues.

Wikis incorporated into teaching. Looking forward to this one. Two presenters: Rodney Reynolds, Nicolette Makovicky. Material Culture. First year. I think I saw this on our Moodle (Phil Riding is a co-author).

Lots of ideas, new to the learners, flying about. Tutorials too didactic? ("Are you going to be like a normal teacher and give us the answer?"). Wiki an obvious (to me) a ripe medium for engaging with such ideas. How did it work?

Wikis seeded with opening text(1 sentence) by tutors.

Reluctance ... students concerned about "giving ideas away" ?
Confusion ... with summative/evaluative contributions in other courses
Is it competitive (in either a good or bad sense?)
Are traditional roles asserting themselves?

Can it be assessed?
Can participation be enforced?

Hugely interesting. Comparisons with Wikipedia's Discussion pages? Role of editors to provide structure? Assessment of all this?

16:58 Wiki technology in Dutch Dept and Virtual Dept of Dutch. Ulrich Tiedau, Kathryn Ronnau-Bradbeer.

Because Dutch departments round the country are small, they collaborate a lot. Bunch of stuff about their inter-uni study packs, use of WebCT, videoconference blah blah. What about the wiki? Motivation came from non-existence of WebCT collaborative ability. The speaker is Dutch and he says "vicky" now and again.

Each student given overall responsibility for one page, but encouraged to the others. Critical mass issues, need group of certain size (they had groups of ~4 and ~30), and for a certain time. Assessment needs to be integrated. S's would like to use this tool as part of assessment, but wisely decide to concentrate on what can be assessed.

Extremely interesting, look forward to discussing at the T+L club!

Report from T+L 2006

This morning: busy cobbling together my presentation. I've left it rolling in the exhibtion stands area.

15:59 First chance to to sit down and blog in the conference. Several expressions of interest as to what a blog is, why would I use one in teaching.

The HoD popped in too to talk strategy.

Lots of other interesting stories around the conference. Smart (i.e. experienced) learners: Sophie Martin; Smart boards: Frederick Simons; big WebCT courses: Andrea Sella; multimedia plugins and HTMLW : an "academic markup language:" : Andrew Martin; Extending the cultural scope of foundation science courses: Chris Fenwick.

There's wifi in the room, so I can report that right now I'm listening to Sue Lightman talk about Interactive Voting systems in clinical teaching. Three students per handset seems to be right number to cluster around a single handset, based on the amount of noise that comes off the room.

16:10 Key Skills Agenda ... hmm pretty uninspiring. Something about wikis next, so I'll sit through this one. Ah there's a colleague, I wonder if she's noticed me?

Tilting at windmills?

OK, cardboard armor on, chaaaaarge!

I shall be talking to anyone who wants to listen about using Blogger as a lightweight collaboration tool for education. I've had a few months now of using a blog for a course which has had hundreds of users pass through it, and I'll be going on about how wonderful (or not) that was in the 2006 UCL Teaching and Learning Conference.

One of the dragons I see through the heat haze is the dreadful clunkiness of WebCT forums. What's that, Sancho? It's really the friendly windmill of Moodle?

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....