by

We have lift off

I have whittled the course down to 4 weeks covering a few different technologies  – the main ones first (blogging, facebook and twitter) and then a few minor ones after that, so if anyone drops out after the first couple of weeks then they have had a taster for the main ones.

I sent out my email to staff and students last night and I am happy to say I already have over 10 students wanting to do the course!  This is completely unexpected because I thought I would have to drag a few of the ‘usual suspects’ kicking and screaming to do it with me  🙂  At this rate, I may have to put a limit on the number I can do.

The course is all designed and ready to post so now I can just concentrate on the feedback for the next few weeks.  Before I start I will ask them to let me know how confident they are with social media and will ask them again at the end.  The learning outcome will be as a colleague suggested – to improve their online confidence/skills.

I am absolutely chuffed to bits about this now and am really looking forward to the e-tutoring itself.  When the site goes live I will post a link so anyone who is interested can see how its going.  😀

by

Finally got my act together

At last I have put together my short course and sent out the email to all Barnsley students and academic staff.  Hopefully out of all of these I will find a handful of people that are interested in the course.  If not I will have to call in the big guns and beg a few people to give it a go.

I am rather worried about the timing of this course I am putting on.  The run up to Easter is historically a very stressful time for our students and they may think (quite rightly if I’m honest!) that they have enough on their plate without adding this to their woes.  And the fact that it goes over Easter into the beginning of the final term isn’t ideal either because most of them will be studying for their year-end exams.  So this is arguably the worst time I could have picked!  Ah well it can’t be helped.  It took me alot longer to put this together than I expected it to and if I wait until after the exam period then my module will be finished.  Hence the invitation has also gone out to our academic staff, if I’m lucky some of them may be interested too – after all they are probably doing some form of studying themselves aren’t they?

So the email has gone out, the course is all prepared.  All I have to do now is wait for some ‘guinea pigs’ to come along and I can get cracking.

If only it wasn’t such a bad time for everyone …

by

Here we go again …

For my e-tutoring ‘experience’ I have decided to do something along the lines of the last module’s e-portfolio activity.  Although it will not embrace quite as many different technologies and I anticipate will only be used by a small number of students.

The reason why I have chosen this is partly because I really enjoyed trying all the different technologies and blogging about them and partly because I would like to offer something similar to our students as a pre-induction “How the Internet can help your studies” type course.  Because the run-up to the start of term can be a little (ahem!) hectic, I don’t want anything that is going to be too onorous  on myself or the new intake of students.  We certainly don’t want to put them off before they even start their studies!  But I hope that the course will encourage them to investigate technology and how it can be used to help them with their studies.

So.  How am I going to structure this course?  Here goes:

The title would be “How to use the Internet to help with your studies”.  I will email students to see if anybody would be interested (I should get one or two takers!).  Then an email would go to these students each week for 4-5 weeks asking them to complete a task (I have no Unilearn module or other means of contact).

Weekly tasks:

·         Week 1 – Blog: Start off with  “Hello world”  who you are and what you want to take away from this (establish relationship with me and peers).  Email me the blog address and I will link them all through mine.  Then ask students to blog about the various ones they try – what they like/don’t like/found difficult/easy

·         Week 2 – Twitter / Facebook: compare and contrast.  Follow UCBLIB, UCBForum

·         Week 3 – You Tube / Flickr: blog about which would they find most useful and what do they like about it

·         Week 4 – Unimail: to share documents with peers.  Upload a test document to Skydrive and share it with me.  I will make a comment, ask them to do something else within the document.

·         Week 5 – Discussion Groups – Post a message to the UCB Discussion Forum, reply to someone else’s post

–          Library Game – Get enrolled, withdraw books, review a book

I would send out an email with instructions each Monday asking the students to perform particular tasks e.g. set up twitter account and tweet their blog, find a video on YouTube and post the link in the blog etc.  I would also offer a face to face session for those that need help getting started with the different technologies.

Feedback and relationship with the student would be created through interaction with Blog, emails, twitter, unimail, discussion group.

So this is my plan of action.  I just need to get it put together now and find a couple of students to use as guinea pigs.

by

Raindrops on roses …

Blooming kids!  I was just about to sit down and start my blog when one of the boys decided that I had to sew buttons and badges onto his uniform – NOW!  Typical.

Anyway, … these are a few of my favourite things.  Does Julie Andrews sing about blogs? Err – maybe not.  I have spent a bit of time over the last couple of days trying to think of a really original Web 2 ‘thing’ to impress everyone with but when it comes down to it my favourite has to be the good old blog.

I must admit I think I am a real convert.  I have really enjoyed blogging about what I have done and might even carry on when this project is over – I just need to find something to blog about!  I find that I need to have a purpose to get me to do things like this – I couldn’t just sit down and think ‘Right, what’ve I done that’s worth blogging about?’ because really I don’t think there is much all that interesting to other people about the stuff I do.

During assignments in the past I have struggled with the reflection part of the work.  Having a focus each time I come onto the computer has helped me to reflect at the time of the task at hand instead of in the last couple of days before my assignment is due.  And in doing this I have thought more about what I have been doing, why and which theory it represents which has resulted in a feeling of increased learning.  Instead of just reading an article and forgetting about it, seeing my colleagues repeatedly referring to the article has reinforced the message into my brain.  See?  I would never have thought of all this stuff if I wasn’t sat here thinking what to tell you guys.  There is actually stuff rattling around in my head that I don’t realize or think about, but putting it down on ‘paper’ is helping to draw it out.  I finally get reflection!

So what theories does this cover?  I don’t know – its too late, I have a cat trying to sit on my laptop, a son trying to delete my first paragraph and another son making disparaging remarks about my blog.  I will think about that tomorrow.

See you all tomorrow  😀

by

Twitter-ific!!

A few ideas here on how to use Twitter in the classroom …

I have been trying for the last year or so to get more into Twitter.  I tend to keep Facebook for my personal life and Twitter is more based around my professional life.  Now I think that could be my problem with Twitter.  Not many of my friends are on Twitter, whereas I have quite a lot on Facebook so when I have a spare minute I will check on Facebook to see what my friends are doing.  I don’t get that same enticement with Twitter.

So what do I like about it?  I like that I can follow anybody and it is completely up to me who I follow.  Twitter keeps me up to date with what is going on in my areas of interest.   So who do I follow?  A few friends, celebrities, colleagues and fellow students for my personal life and a few tutors, fellow students, IT and e-learning professionals and companies for my professional life, plus a few news sites etc for general information.

I thought I would ask my followers what they like about Twitter to show you how interactive, responsive and useful a tool it can be …

https://twitter.com/Jubaru/status/134013127732899840

Unfortunately I only got 2 answers  …

https://twitter.com/josieharvey02/statuses/134027264739377152

https://twitter.com/SueFolley/status/134030663606214657

But this was a quiet evening – I don’t know why but nobody seems to be online tonight.  Usually I would have expected a few more responses than this.  But answers to your questions can be immediate.  Students in a classroom can tweet an answer/comment/question to their tutor which can be shown on a screen for the class to see/discuss.  Students outside a classroom can tweet for help, suggestions, links, videos … whatever they find.

Twitter is a fantastic resource that is constantly changing – to me this is the sort of interactive dynamism that Sabry and Barker must have been referring to in their article – you just need to make sure you follow the right people.

by

Yoo-hoo Tube

I agree with Wesch, it is both ridiculously easy and yet ridiculously hard – easy to think of the technologies and put them into practice, but hard to make them successful “to really connect and collaborate with these people”.  (appx 15.5 mins into video)  But then everything that is worthwhile is hard, isn’t it?

 

Part of the problem is that these things have been done – they captured people’s imagination.  Once.  We can’t do the same things again and have the same effect.  It just doesn’t work that way.  People think ‘been there, done that’ give me something NEW.  Look at the wedding party that danced down the aisle; everyone loved that and loads of people copied them, but it just isn’t the same second, third, fourth time around.  We are increasingly demanding in that everything needs to be original to get our attention.  That is the beauty of sites like YouTube but at some stage will we run out of originality?  Maybe, but hopefully by then we will have another technology to replace YouTube that is equally exciting and innovative.

Or will it keep growing?  Chris Anderson talks about “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” and shows 6 year old kids break dancing round the living room – all learnt via YouTube.  One person performs an act, another watches it and builds on it.  Will that kind of thing ever become boring?  Maybe not – look at the Olympics.  People for millennia have been trying to break Olympic records; we are only doing the same but it has now been speeded up through the use of technology.

Going back to Wesch, “Knowledgeability is a practice”, again Wesch is right – he is going back to Feuerstein theory that we need to teach people how to learn; how to become “Knowledge-able” (I like that).  I think that this is exactly what we need to do – give our students the tools and show them how to use them, to be able to learn for themselves.  If we are successful in doing this, then it doesn’t really matter what the next big thing will be – we will have given them the tools and knowledgability to be able to connect, communicate, innovate etc for themselves.

by

Feuerstein – Genius in the making

Reuven Feuerstein

Reuven Feuerstein

I love Feuerstein’s way of thinking.  He has broken down the very basics of how we think and gone through a step by step process to demonstrate to others how they too can think for themselves.  Brilliant!

Feuerstein’s model is a very internal way of learning – Laurillard’s ‘conversation’ or Yacci’s ‘interactivity’ in the learning here is mainly done within the student himself.  There is also feedback from the class and tutor, but the most important work here is done internally within the student i.e. reviewing and learning.

Muirhead and Juwah say “However, to support authentic learning as well as enhance the learner’s educational experience in distance and online courses, it is imperative to provide adequate scaffolding.”  The scaffolding that they discuss contains conceptual, procedural, strategic and metacognitive learning.  So according to M&J, metacognition is only part of the scaffolding whereas Feuerstein believes that metacognition is the most important part of the learning.  They are both right. Metacognition is a huge part of learning; until you know how to learn, it is pretty pointless learning anything at all!

So how would I apply what I have learnt tonight?  We have a lot of mature students at UCB who lack confidence using computers in general.  As I was reading Feuerstein I could immediately see how I could help them to be able to use software more effectively.  I can create a step-by-step guide for them, telling them to slow down and look at the application that they are using, think about how the tabs are arranged and how the name of the tab will give a clue as to its purpose, then open a tab and explore it, and so on …  I think I would do this as a face-to-face session initially but may try to find a way to put it online.

That’s it for one day – gonna watch the Steve Jobs program on C4 now.  Blog ya later!  🙂

 

by

FLICKR – Fun, Learning, Images, Community, (can’t think of anything for K and R)

Unbelievable – twice in one day I have written a long blog and lost it! I clicked save draft and it disappeared 😦 So here goes again …
I have had a play with Flickr and I can see that it will be very useful to many educators – particularly those in the areas of art/design/photography etc. I think it is great that you can upload an image to your group of students and ask them to comment, make suggestions, reflect etc on that image. The images posted by Cheryl are great for showing people how to do things and I use this a lot for my staff/students. If there is a new method of doing something (like printing) then this kind of step-by-step screenshot is very useful to reassure the student that they are doing the right thing and if their screen doesn’t look like yours, they know they have done something wrong and to start again. A perfect example of ‘do it once and only once’ feedback that is relevant to everybody completing the task.

So will I use it in my setting? No. I like the idea for tutors, but it’s not right for IT support. People don’t want to have to log into Flickr to find out how to do their printing etc. It is hard enough to ask them to read an email I sent them giving them the instructions, or look at the pretty pictures next to the printer – they still come to ask me how to do it!

Will Flickr encourage online interaction and community? I think it depends how it is used (as always). If an art tutor shares an image with his student group and asks them why this is a good painting etc, then this could create a good discussion between the students and enhance the feeling of a community. If an IT person shares a set of images showing how to use a printer then it will be dead in the water.

Now I’m going to go away and read Feuerstein. I’ll blog again later …

by

Creative Commons

First of all, can I just say that I am absolutely AMAZED that I haven’t heard of this before now.  I have heard of copyright and copyleft but CC has completely passed me by despite spending hours every day on the internet for various reasons.  Can I also take this opportunity to thank Andy Raistrick for his excellent post on CC.  I read this before I looked anywhere else and I don’t think I have found a better description of it anywhere on the Internet.  Thanks Andy 🙂

Everyone has heard of copyright so I won’t go into any details about it here.  My encounters with copyleft has been through computing software specifically the GNU General Public License and Free Software Foundation which was created by Richard Stallman.  People that haven’t heard of these things will be familiar with some of the (open source) software that has been created under these terms such as the Linux operating system and Firefox browser.  These have been built on the principles that good ideas should be shared so that they can be added to and built on by others.  What this has meant for open source software is that bugs can be fixed very quickly because you get lots of people working on a problem which in turn results in very robust and reliable software.  Everybody wins!

This is also the basic idea behind Creative Commons – just as long as you credit the originator with their idea/work/whatever.  You may have noticed that I have committed the ultimate academic sin (again!) and put a link through to (the unmentionable) Wikipedia for more information on copyleft.  Hopefully, I am not committing academic suicide here but I have done it for a very good reason – honest!  Wikipedia itself is a perfect example of Creative Commons.  Go to the very bottom of this page on Creative Commons and you will see what I mean …

This page was last modified on 29 October 2011 at 19:19.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

So I have put a Creative Commons license on my blog which allows others to:

  • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to Remix — to adapt the work

Because I am a great believer in sharing with as many people as possible – not because I think that what I write is any good; more because I am hoping that someone will come along and make it worth reading …