Dec 18
I have spent a huge amount of time and effort on Second Life developments in the last twelve months or so. Only time will tell whether it’s been worth it or not.
See post on the HaB blog.
I think we need to let it bed down, gradually introduce more students, talk to more academics inside and outside the institution and most importantly evaluate the learner experience. Plans for a formal evaluation of the physiotherapy virtual patient are a step in the right direction. Let’s hope we get the necessary funding for this.
At the recent JISC online conference Second Life and VWs got an extensive airing attracting the full gamut of opinion. I am puzzled as to why things seem to get so polarised when VWs are discussed. There’s a lot of uninformed opinion in there of course but amongst some opponents it goes deeper. People seem less content to keep an open mind than they might with other technologies.
Most of the academics and students I’m working with seem oblivious to the mood out there contenting themselves with exploring the potential of Second Life in their context. And for now, that’s good enough for me – while they’re interested so am I.
Dec 18
Had an interesting day at FOTE09 last Friday as much because of the people there as the speakers. Generous breaks and a very convivial drinks reception at the end made for some useful conversation. The morning sessions on the Cloud were dominated by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Huddle and didn’t go down terribly well with the twittering masses in the audience, though one relatively high spot was hearing about Leeds Met experience of providing google apps for all students.
The afternoon was much more relevant to the educationally inclined with presentations from a wide range of people and organisations (possibly too many), new faces for me including Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes who gave a very stimulating (and worrying) view of our networked, constantly changing future and School of everything co-founder Dougald Hine who not surprisingly threw out a few challenges to the qualification bound culture of HE. Others included the ubiquitous James Clay of Gloucestershire College, Nick Shelton of Bristol, Peter Robinson of Oxford university on their experience of iTunes U , Lindsay Jordan (Bath/University of the Arts) on the need for a social dimension to any learning experience and Shirley Williams of Reading on the thisisme digial identity project that some of us first heard about at the Plymouth conference earlier this year.
The final session was an extremely polarised debate on Second Life which served little purpose other than to suggest a better way of doing this in future would be to find a different panel. Two SL consultants on the pro side, and one very negatively inclined academic and someone from RSC playing devil’s advocate on the other didn’t really cut it. One highlight though was the sucessful streaming of the whole day’s proceedings in Second Life.
Others have blogged in more detail about the event already so I’ll be lazy and link you to a couple, both of which were written as the event proceeded – quite an impressive form of blogging if you can do it:
LSE http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/?s=fote09
Goldsmith’s http://celtrecord.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/jots-from-the-future-of-technology-in-education-2009-p-m/
Presentations will be available in a week or so from FOTE09
Dec 18
When do we make time for blogging – really need to get some posts up?
All previous posts were imported from an earlier attempt to create a blog for HaB on posterous. Posts themselves came across OK but not the tags. See them in original form here http://habitat.posterous.com/
Dec 18
We had a productive meeting with all concerned (or nearly all) yesterday to review progress on UEL HABitat and agree timescales for the completion of phase 2.
The physiotherapy and herbal medicine patient cases are developing well and should be ready on schedule for testing with students in semester A.
The back end editor looks very straightforward for the amateur user without being overly simplistic in results.
Here are a few pictures of the polyclinic as of 5th August 09. Many things will change but this gives rough idea of layout.
See and download the full gallery on posterous
Posted via email from HABitat’s posterous
Dec 17
Like at the ALT-C conference there was also a Fringe at the Handheld Learning Conference. I enjoyed the Pecha Kucha session, especially the 6 minutes/20 slides presented by Tony Vincent “Doing it without software: web applications”.
It was mostly about his favourites apps, which included some tried and tested (like prezi) but also had some plain silly/ fun presentation. I liked Pixton – so easy to create, it’s ridiculous. Check it out here. Not easy to embed the flash widget into WordPress though 
In the end it had to be made into a jpg.
- Example of a pixton cartoon
If you’d like to check out some of the videos and podcasts from the conference, they can be accessed on Handheld Learning TV. Which is just vids and pods on a blip account. But the name is impressive.
Dec 17
Like at the ALT-C conference there was also a Fringe at the Handheld Learning Conference. I enjoyed the Pecha Kucha session, especially the 6 minutes/20 slides presented by Tony Vincent “Doing it without software: web applications”.
It was mostly about his favourites apps, which included some tried and tested (like prezi) but also had some plain silly/ fun presentation. I liked Pixton – so easy to create, it’s ridiculous. Check it out here. Not easy to embed the flash widget into WordPress though In the end it had to be made into a jpg.
Example of a pixton cartoon
If you’d like to check out some of the videos and podcasts from the conference, they can be accessed on Handheld Learning TV. Which is just vids and pods on a blip account. But the name is impressive.
Dec 17
Interesting session led by Barry Sampson from Onlighnment I did feel however it was a tad lacking in the strategic sense though. One nice touch was setting the expectations in terms of the education side of things I.e how this related to performance rather than learning. Personally I took this to mean that we were look at social media in terms of what was easily measurable, or at least easier to measure. He also made the distinction between social media and social networking, by contending that social media is based round the content and social networking is people centric. Hard to agruge with but I’m not sure that it is that easy in practice to seperate these things out. Interestingly enough he judged Linked in to be one of true networking sites due to it’s focus on the individual rather than on related content.
The session did feel as though it focussed slightly too much on the tools rather than the strategy side of things. I could have lived without the ten minute segway in to Twitter but there were certainly people there who seemed to gain benefit. One outcome of this tools focus was that he reminded me of indenti.ca the open source twitter clone. Also 5min.com as an example of how ‘learning’ or at least skill type activities are now easily accessible.
He did make an interesting point about e-learning content not really following the web paradigm of navigation and consumption. Basically consider an e-learning course (essentially corporate courseware), now think about how you navigate through these courses My experience is that the pace is normally restricted, you have to do certain things to progress (answer a question, drag something somewhere) and it quite possibly takes you an hour to get to the end. Now think of how you navigate the Web. Spot the difference? Okay so I’m not saying that there are not valid reasons for developing courses in this way but it is fair to say that the experience is not natural. At least I think this as the point he was making.
Couple of useful resources to review further and blog about:
The Nielson report 2009
barrysampson on tiwitter
theconversionprisim
ruderfin
Dec 17
I had to feel slightly sorry for Martin Belton on this one as he was dogged by laptop issues. It did make me think however how reliant presenters are on their powerpoint decks. I definitely include myself in this category being someone who takes a lot of cues off of those handy little bullet point lists. The sub heading for this session was ‘the 10 commandments’ I’m pretty sure that this was not ment to be a literal thing. So the commandments are as follows:
Definite your budget
Identify your learning outcomes
Understand your target audience
Define processes for working with SMEs
Determine the pedagogy
Identify the accessibility requirements
Specify learning paths and support materials
Define usages and flexibilty demands
Buidling tracking and reporting
Clarify what the leaners really need to know
I do not think this list is in a strict steps order and yes it’s all open for debate. I do think however that it does give some good steps and a common sense approch to generating content. Certainly in terms of people new to the field. Pedagogy but it was not really discussed in great detail, still nice to see it in there. I do wonder if that really held that much imporatance to anyone from outside of the academic sphere though. The session was a bit rushed due to the technical problems but we were promised a recorded version so it that surfaces I’ll post here.
Last but by no means least the UEL inclusion and diversity module got a mention in terms of the difficulties with regard to the target audience and the accessiblity features that were built in to it. Finally it certainly reminded me of the vastly different ways businesses use these tools compared to a University.
Link to slideshow if possible.
Dec 17
So my mean motivation for actually attending Uncovered 2009 was to get a closer look at E2Train’s new version of their proprietary Learning Management Systems (LMS) Kalidus 8. Basically I attended the following sessions:
Using Kallidus web gadgets to create a learner environment
Kalidus LMS configuration workshop
Kalidus LMS accreditation
What’s coming from Kalidus
Introduction to Kallidus 8 reporting
I’m not going to write about every detail of this sesson and if you are desperate for more detail about the features and fucntionality of Kadlidus LMS then take a look at their site. Instead I’m going to give a brief overview of my impressions.
What first struck me is yep it is an LMS. In terms of look at feel it very much sits within the pack. If you have seen SumTotla, Saba, Plateau, Clix then Kalidus will look familiar to you. The terminology changes slightly but LMS systems do sometimes feel like clones of each other. Most like because they are trying to address the same problem in terms of managing and tracking a users learning. It did not look out of place in the pack though, perhaps not qute in the same league as the big vendors but certainly competitive. Reporting looked strong although I did grown slightly when the issue of datawarehousing and cropt up, as not all of the reports are run from livedata. This can cause problems if people are not aware of this (or the data jobs fail). The administration interface seemed logical but possibly this is because I’ve spent so many years staring at these things, cerainly requires a level of training and support though. Customised reporting is also due to be built in to the next release, so that will add some flexibility. All the old favourites were there in terms of standard reports, completion, attendance and so on. The learning pathways essentially how you access learning activities (be that content or face to faces sessions) did not really float my boat. It felt slightly too much like a directory structure and was quite busy with iconography. That may be just me.
In summation I actually think this is a pretty competitive product. The upgrades from the previous version gives me more confidence in saying that and the development roadmap also gives me faith that this is not a fly by night product. Additionally the delegates at the conference, who were predominantly E2Traing cliets, were from big corporates. If there is one thing that fuels an LMS systems it is adoption by large companies at a enterprise level.
Dec 17
Skillsoft incidentally were the sponsors for the event and I have a nice shiny skillsoft conference bag to prove it! The chap who presented this session did say it was a ‘very dry topic’ I did however find the advice practical and cetainly useful from a high level perspective (arguably from a higher level than I actually need to be aware of). Essentially the presentation boiled down to ‘the six essential pracices’ in terms of business allighned learning. Yes it is management speak but take a look and see what you think
Identify the business objectives and partner with stakeholders
Understand the business need
Establish goals
Determine the performance requirements
Aligh the learning solution
Develop and execute a measurement plan
Look familiar? To me it feels very much like project management principles. If we switch out the language of business for that that of education there is cetinaly some value to following these practices. To be on safer ground I would elect for good practice rather than best practice.
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