UELconnect Blog

Wow it has been a an entire since the birth of UELconnect, time does indeed fly. So to celebrate this milestone we hosted an event over in Knowledge Dock to present what we had been up and also a have a series station dotted about the room. The presentations were all very informative and it is certainly useful to hear the academic viewpoints. Use of facebook in AVA, ConnectingUEL in Law and so forth. My main duty of the day as it were was to present on the Panopto Lecture Capture system. Below is the presentation that I gave with Mat Tinker (Mat did most of the presentation), I just added the badly spelt parts!

Further to the post below all presentations from the day can be found at:

https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/cu/items/6f764898-b2e6-2323-d34f-b2e4c43c9f6f/1/MoodleOpenForum.zip/MoodleOpenForum.html

Lots of useful anecdotal presentations with regard to the joys of Moodle from various Universities (e.g. LSE, ULCC, Porto, Coventry of course). Everyone seemed happy with Moodle and rather disasppointed with Blackboard, particularly in terms of support. High cost little support seemed to be a fairly standard theme. Manchester waved the Blackboard flag a bit but that did feel a bit forced. No surprised for me personally with regard to how Moodle is being used at various institutions but it was still useful. I do feel slightly guilty for making our LTT past in plain text in to our Moodle install when there is a HTML cleanup button however (you learn something new everyday). Apparently this bit of functionality is a bit patchy, ahem moving on.

The staff development strand was a nice chance to see what was happening at other Universities, although did stray off the Moodle topic somewhat. The lady leading the session from Coventry, Anne Dickinson, gave a very nice presentation beforehand with regard to staff dev using Prezi.

My overwhelming impression of the staff dev strand was the amount of time and effort required in order to bring staff up to speed. The emphasis did seem to  be initially on skill and drill style session with pedagogy coming after the initial training session. Makes sense to me in my techy mind as where is the value in pedagogy if basic navigation and functionality is not understand. Perhaps somewhere in the middle is where we should aim to be.

The Moodle-do poster was arguably a bit twee but a very useful resource for raising awareness to change. Nice video for supporting users though in basica functionality.

Another example of a nice piece of documentation produced at Coventry was that ‘flipping book’. Basically Coventry produced some student documentation with regard to Moold and Blackboard. One side being Moodle and the other being Blackboard based, hence the flipping reference. Nice idea and not overly expensive. It also appears to completly replace student inductions which can be quite time consuming.

City Universitys’ idea of calling there Moodle installation a ‘Strategic Learning Environment’ perhaps has merit as it does imply buy in at high level. Rather than the grass roots approach that appears fairly common when attempting to kick start Moodle migration. If interested there is more info on the City website with regard to their SLE

http://www.city.ac.uk/ldc/Projects/VLEEvaluation.html (Careful the videos killed my browser)

All in all a useful day and definitely came away with a few new ideas.

Interesting morning listening to a fairly diverse set of speakers at the Tuesday session of handheld learning. None of the keynotes actually addressed handheld learning as such instead they addressed more general issues around education and cultural systems.

Dodgey iphone photo of the porter tun room

Particularly enjoyed Malcolm McLaren’s rant about society in general. Excellent anecodote about his days as  a wine taster. Who would have guessed. Not sure I completely agree that we are culturaly restricted as he made about but perhaps he had a point. He did mention that ‘Holywood consider stupid cool’ personally I think it is going the other way these days. One example that springs to mind is Juno where the protaganist is anything but stupid.  Anyway, to cut a long story short the first three keynotes set a nice tone for the conference with  a mixture of entertainment and optimisim.

Lots of resources available on the handheld learning website, including footage of last years confernce proceedings. Worth a look if you have the time.

by James Paull Gee

After reading his book ‘What Video games have to teach us about language and literacy’ it was fair to say that I was looking forward to this one. Of course not just because of my love of video games…. well maybe that was a big part of it.

I must admit it did feel like an abridged version of the first chapter of his book but that it by no means a negative statement. Very interesting stuff that introduced the key concepts around his work e.g. the creation of affinity groups around game based technology, situated learning, semiotic domains (which I am pretty sure I completely misinterpreted) etc.

Particularly liked his comparison of Yu-gi-oh with PHD level work. Admitedly this was slightly tongue in cheek methinks. This was a comparison in terms of the language and level of comprehension required to access the content of the game. For anyone who has not seen this game it is indeed completely baffling.

I definitely think his work is worth reading. If you want to read more about his work take a look at his profile page on the GLS site.  Take a look at this youtube video which explains what he does a lot clearer than my babble.

Nabeel Ahmed IBM Learning Technologist

I thought I would pop along and take in the presentation by Nabeel Ahmed a Learning Technologist from IBM. Mainly it was out of curiosity to observe the differences between the education sector Learning Technologists and the corporate versions. Terminology was the first thing I noticed the presentation was peperred with the language of the Blue Chip corporation. ‘Low hanging fruit’ and ‘growth sector’ sector. Hey I’m not judging! Let’s face it education terminology is equally vague at times.

So the theme for the afternoon was transformation but in my mind I always translate this to ‘change’. Basically the chap gave a brief overview of what IBM were up to in terms of usage of mobile tech internally (and what they expect to be doing). The abridged version of this was:

• Network learning and attempting to harness the weak ties (2nd and 3rd level level connections)
• IBM Blue pages now accessible through mobile devices (Blue pages being their internal directory)
• Performance support for selllers i.e. delivering just in time information to people out in the field.
• Just in time learning rather than porting courseware to mobile platforms (courseware being the generic term for e-learning courses) * I thought this was interesting shift in attitude incidentally.
• SMS messages pushed at new joiners e.g. ‘have you completed your compliance training?’

I think it is fair to say that none of that was particularly cutting edge but it was all good common sense stuff. Also some of which we already do as a Univeristy, txtools alerts for instance. Probably the one thing no University has however is the level of funding that IBM command. Apparently £60 million is being invested over five years.  Not surprisingly the Blackberry was the officially supported smartphone within IBM (I’d assume due to security being stronger). However he did say that there was going to be a shift toward opening things up to a users’ personal devices.

One nice quote that he referred to from the Wall Street Journal (although I can not source it) by Sam Palmisano CEO of IBM was ‘the PC is the past, now it all goes on the mobile phone’. Not sure I completly agree but how do you define a Personal Computer these days?

This was one that I thought would be interesting and it did not dissapoint. Unfortunately I have completly forgotten the name of the other chap who co-presented this session. It started with an interesting lead in statistic that the world needs another 18 million teachers to bring education to rural areas.

The basic premise of this presentation was a programme (English in action) run by the Open University to teach English teachers in Bangladesh. The ultimat outcome being that this trickles down in to the primary and secondary schools. English in Bangladesh being a government priority (they are supporting this project for a fairly epic nine years) in terms of engaging with the global economy. Interesting to note that India is beginning to outsource to it’s neighbours in terms of the language support facilities it offers multinationals i.e. call centres and such.

This project is currently in the pilot phase with 400 teachers across 200 schools (2 teachers per school). The teachers receive an ipod loaded with content but an interesting approach was to limit the ipods to one per school. Essentially coercing (and I do not mean that in a bad way) the two teachers to collaborate with each other. Nice idea methinks. There are 12 modules of teaching which are tought through a ‘communicative language approach’ and there is an emphasis on scenario based learning. All of the content is in English and Bangla. The OU also showed a quick demo of some of the content and it basically uses real teachers in Bangladesh as subjects of good practice. Again nice touch. The English was also Bangla English rather than using the rather dry received pronunication which I was expecting. The content is also contextualised for the local culture as well. Engagement with the wider community across schools was facilitated by Twitter and Facebook (the usual suspects in the social media category). The schools also come together once a month in batches of 10 for a facilitated face to face.

The challenges that the technology represented were interesting to note:

• teachers’ time
• stakeholders’ attitude
• electricity (approximately only 45% of homes have electricity)
• mobile coverage
• 52% of the population is illeterate
• digital literacy
• climate robustness of the technology (oooops ipods seem to be getting a bad rep on this point)

The first two challenges are certainly problem in any country in terms of adoption for new methods of delivering education. The others just make me realise all of the things we constantly take for granted in our day to day lives.

This is obviously a very worthy project focussing more on the pedagogy than the technology. They basically said that the delivery method (the iPod) would probably change but I did get the sense that this would not cause major problems to the actual delivery. I also think that ther e will certainly be outcomes of this project that can be adopted by other Universities in terms of creating more flexible deliveries of our education offerrings to students. One to watch.

More info: http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/news/learning-and-teaching/ou-english-action-eia-secures-%C2%A32m-funding

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.

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.

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.