One thing that occurred to me during the day was how much I learnt from the presentations I saw. It was really useful to have academics from across the university giving their views on different projects we have undertaken. What I think is an interesting and crucial challenge for us is to capture and disseminate this good practice and innovative approaches throughout the university. Given the fact I work in the e-learning team and I didn’t know about a number of the projects presented on, I wonder how those out in the schools and services have any idea what is happening in other schools.

In the recently released JISC Portfolio for Senior Managers one of the key ways noted for enhancing the student and staff experience was ‘Ensure that best practice and innovation is being shared across your institution rather than being confined to pockets of excellence’. I think this is going to be an interesting, but crucial challenge for us.

Further analysis of the results is being undertaken at the moment, but some brief highlights are as below.

• Approximately 75% of all staff surveyed use UEL Plus in their current work.
• Of the different technologies we requested information, the highest used for work within UEL were Wikis, Blog, Podcasts and Video/Audio Conferencing. Each technology had between 10-15% of people stating ‘I have used/use this technology within my work at UEL’.
• Of all of the learning technologies mentioned, over 90% of people had heard of the majority of technologies, even if they had never used them. The technology most people had never heard of was Social Bookmarking e.g. Del.icio.us (with 31% having never heard of the tool).
• When asked to state their level of enthusiasm on the use of learning technologies, 78% stated their enthusiasm was 7 or over (on a scale of 1-10) however only 52% believed UEL Plus to be rated 7 or over for their overall opinion of the tool.
• Of the current e-learning support mechanisms used, the most common form of support staff draw upon is the help of colleagues (26%) within their schools or services.
• When asked for preferred methods of short term/immediate support Over 90% stated they would go to a colleague frequently or occasionally. This was closely followed by online FAQs (88%) and support from LTAs (83%).
• When asked for support methods for learning a new tool / substantial information, hands on workshops (92%) and support from colleagues (92%) were the most likely to be used. Of the least preferred methods support from students (66%) and video recordings of previous sessions (51%) were highlighted as methods staff would never use.
• With regards to style of workshop delivery, 62% of people would prefer a face to face session, 7% would prefer an online session and 31% would have no specific preference.

This staff development survey highlights some interesting results, which will feed into the redevelopment of the provision. Trials in virtual classroom tools are currently being undertaken along with a much needed review of the support documentation we have for UEL Plus.

Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute argued the case for two end states – 3D video conferencing or computer generated virtual worlds on the one hand and virtual reality environments on the other. (Or something to that effect – refer to one of his many publications for the definitive version.) John Kirriemuir of Virtual World Watch summarised his latest snapshot survey of Virtual World activity in HE & FE. Daniel Livingstone brought us up to date with Sloodle and then went on to predict how technologies might converge in the future.

Martin Oliver of London Knowledge Lab (LKL) challenged the use of the term ‘affordance’ in virtual world research. Diane Carr also of LKL gave us the deaf person’s perspective on communications in Second Life – voice was not a welcome addition for this community.

Others wrote about the event at the time – see Daniel Livingstone and Heather Williamson (JISC). Most of the presentations are available on the site above.

Several weeks on I am reflecting a bit further ….

A room full of enthusiasts tends to be quite optimistic about the future of virtual worlds, even if the organisers Eduserv have come to the end of their funding stream for new developments, but for me ‘the elephant in the room’ is ongoing lack of uptake by the mainstream.

In the school of Health & Bioscience at UEL we are using SL in a very specific way for simulation and problem based learning in healthcare settings. Elsewhere in UEL, very few are using it. The only other educational use I am aware of is a limited pilot in the school of Psychology offering tutorials and the possibility of a virtual conference later in the year.

In a post in January 2010 Stephen Downes, in reference to another post by Alja Sulčič, described SL as ‘not dead but niche’. I tend to concur, whilst acknowledging that the same could be said about quite a few technologies e.g. Twitter. On the other hand, I also feel that if those institutions already active in SL can find ways to share their developments and resources beyond their own institutions in the form of OERs or their VW equivalent (e.g. Leicester have recently made a deposit in Open Jorum ), there is a possibility of wider use. A welcome aspect of any open offerings would be more end user tools, such as UEL’s embryonic web-based case editor, that enables academics to manipulate Second Life objects without any technical knowhow. Only a small minority will ever rise to the challenge of building letalone scripting in SL. Many, in fact, still struggle with the most basic aspects of more common place technologies such as the VLE.

Where next? My crystal ball points towards increased activity in simulation for health education and other subjects and for problem based learning generally but without a more open approach and user friendly development interface this type of growth will be limited. And one other thing – Second Life’s dominance of Virtual Worlds may recede as OpenSim and the like come of age.

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

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.

Given this time, we now have the opportunity to look more closely at the mode we deliver content, the breadth of sessions available and the provision if content in other means. Our first step with be a university wide survey, asking staff what technologies they use at the moment, what support mechanisms they use and importantly what they want for the future.

A couple potential avenues we are considering are:

• Providing online ‘at your desk’ sessions for staff. Using a virtual presentation / classroom tool (e.g. Elluminate) to deliver synchronous sessions that staff can access from wherever they are. These would need to be shorter and more focussed that the sessions we currently deliver and we would need to consider the technical skills of our staff and the technical capabilities of our institutional network.
• Providing online reference / self paced content for staff on the use of UEL Plus and other emerging technologies. We have a lot of resources / guides / handouts / screen captures but could develop more for staff who are happy to explore tools on their own.

Bearing this in mind, an interesting challenge will be fulfilling what the staff surveyed need. If a recent school based survey is anything to go by, people want individualised face to face support at times suitable for them. Not sure we’ll ever be able to provide that, but more online sessions might be a step forward in the right direction.

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.

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

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/