Blogging has become a luxury of late – I meant to do ALT-C 2011 but never did. (Videos are now available by the way.) So, I have decided to blog ECEL more or less immediately while it’s still fresh and because I know some of this is relevant to colleagues. Of necessity, it will be rough around the edges but hopefully of some use. To speed the process I will make use of my tweets and the ecel2011 hashtag.

I enjoyed the conference this year because it seemed to hit a few more spots than in previous years. It also helped that my session was fairly well attended despite being scheduled in a track (Games) that I would not have chosen, being the last one of the final day and following an empty slot (presenter took ill). Note to sceptics – Second Life is still alive and well on the conference circuit.

Now to the practicalities. Donald Clark keynoted first and more or less repeated his ‘Do not lecture me’ lecture from ALT-C a year or so ago. He has some good things to say but a lot of it is negated by the hectoring style and apparent failure to recognise that the practices he is so determined to denigrate are probably not as prevalent as he thinks – at least not amongst the delegates at an elearning conference. For those unfamiliar with Donald, see his ALT-C 2010 video. See also his blog.

An early session that left an impression was on the use of wikiversity and other open channels by Estonian academic Kaido Kikkas, who according to my tweet (quoting him more or less), ‘…has a special contract with Tallin university to publish all his course resources as #oer‘. The same academic also mentioned in passing that he reads 300 blogs once a week in order to facilitate one of his open courses. When asked for an example of an English medium course (most of his are in Estonian for obvious reasons) he gave us this example Ethics and Law in New Media. Looks like a useful structure.

At the end of the first day I attended a couple of sessions on e-submission more out of duty than anything else but they proved useful not least for highlighting potential alternatives to Turnitin/Grademark  – University of West of England have developed their own system which can be used offline and which is fully integrated with the student record system – details on their website. Sheffield Hallam have something similar apparently (will check it out when I get a chance). These are for Blackboard but similar Moodle tools are out there or in the pipeline. Some very valid points were made about the limitations of Turnitin and why we do well to keep alternatives in mind.

I had a conversation on the bus with Amanda Sykes from Glasgow university who was enthusing about Peerwise a student MCQ sharing & rating system which she has used very successfully with veterinary and biology students. Unfortunately her presentation clashed with mine but the paper ‘PeerWise – The Marmite of Veterinary Student Learning’ looks well worth a read. (Abstracts and information on how to request access to papers will appear on the conference website in due course I believe.) Amanda also recommended Aropa a peer assessment tool developed at Glasgow and a potential alternative to Turnitin’s Peermark.

Grainne Conole’s keynote on the second day was a whirlwind tour of the current elearning landscape. One useful reference noted was: Educause ‘ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 Report. Another was to her blog where she has been posting draft chapters of her new book Conole, G. (forthcoming), Designing for learning in an Open World, New York: Springer.

A third keynote by Anne Boddington, Dean of Arts, University of Brighton urged us to resist the dehumanising effects of technology and value the visceral – a helpful counter balance to the technology laden programme though my experience at the breakout following which was standing room only and very cramped was possibly not the kind of visceral experience she had in mind.

A final goody that I detected via the Twitter stream after I had left the conference is this slideshare  Putting Things in Context – Designing Social Media for Education by Jon Dron, Terry Anderson and George Siemens of Athabasca. Must read the associated paper.

This highly selective account of ECEL 2011 does not do justice to the wealth of contributions and may appear very pragmatic and superficial given the research focus of the conference but I hope it gives a flavour and will be of some value to colleagues with pressing learning technology issues at the ‘coalface’.

I attended MaharaUK11 yesterday and tweeted quite prolifically so am now attempting to collate these into a blog. I am a relative newcomer to e-portfolios and have no strong commitment either way but one thing was clear yesterday -  Mahara is alive and well in a variety of educational contexts so the views of Martin Weller and Donald Taylor and others on the demise of e-portfolios are not the whole story.

Back to the tweet narrative:

The New Zealand Connection

Mahara (Maori word for thinking) originated in New Zealand and still has strong influences from there. Most of key developers, some of whom were at the conference, are from NZ. The opening keynote was by Mark Osborne  a secondary school teacher in NZ http://prezi.com/dubgzzefzioj/maharauk-open-for-learning/ who is using Mahara extensively with his students for individual and group work. He also uses it himself for CPD – something that several of the other presenters also highlighted.

Mahara and Moodle

Most schools/colleges/universities in the UK are using Mahara with Moodle though some, like us, are using a standalone version for smallscale projects. At some institutions the use of Mahara for communications and collaborative activity seems to be taking over from equivalent VLE tools. Phil Butler from ULCC (host Moodle/Mahara for many FE/HEIs) has stats to support. His presentation will appear in due course on the MaharaUK11 site.

Case studies of note

Nottingham university used Mahara with Bioscience students on summer placement. It helped coordinate communications between staff and students which has been difficult and inefficient in the past. It also helped students keep in touch with each other and provide support to those who were struggling etc. Employers also got engaged in the process.

University of Kent piloted Mahara this academic year after using Pebblepad for 3 years on limited basis. One consideration was cost. They are moving towards full implementation within Moodle from 2011/12. As well as using it with current students, they also plan to use it to develop alumni engagement.

Southampton Solent (SSU) have been using Mahara for a couple of years and are a bit of a leader in the field in my view. Media students have started using Mahara for showcasing their work – previously they had to learn Dreamweaver. We were shown some very impressive CVs by  students in journalism and other media related subjects.

Lifelong learning Don Presant who represents a Manitoban community career development network makes great use of Mahara. See link: http://careerportfolio.mb.ca for examples of use. See also a .pdf of his presentation on proceedings site http://maharauk.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=76

Don also drew attention to e-folio Minnesota http://www.efoliominnesota.com/ and Careers Wales http://www.careerswales.com/ as great examples of life long learning networks which offer the general public an e-portfolio for life (not sure what platform they’re based on). Careers Wales has 400,000 users apparently.

A range of plugins were demonstrated by Geoffrey Rowland from Yeovil College e.g. CPD to enable staff to record time spent on courses et al. FE staff are required to formally document 30 hours of CPD per year so this is very useful in that context but no doubt could apply elsewhere. He also demo’d chemistry teaching and mind mapping tools (will add links when/if I find them).

Conclusion

It was a useful day even if it poses more questions than answers for me, the most pressing being ‘Where do we go from here?’ I won’t begin to bore the blogosphere with our internal dilemmas.

Following on from Matt Lingard’s Twitter eye view of  Grainne Conole’s keynote this morning at Moodlemoot 2011, I will be entirely unoriginal and try to do an abbreviated version of  the subsequent twitterstream from a limited and highly selective perspective.

I note much excitement and interest plus a few cautionary notes  in relation to University of Kent’s WebCT/Moodle migration tool documented here I believe http://t.co/p1dkxP8 (sorry no time to check this out).

There has been interest too in MMU’s migration to Moodle with a link to their staff blogs http://lrt.mmu.ac.uk/staff-blogs/ I am still hoping for a corrected link to the LT review page – now supplied see comments on main blog

Another highlight for me (I don’t get out much) has been the link to the very useful looking  Screensteps tool for ‘Screen capture, image editing and document authoring in a single application’. Will be taking advantage of the 14day free trial.

And this post would not be complete without a reference to the  ‘squirrel of death’ – Moodle’s answer to the Blackboard ‘rabbit warren’ of nested folders.  This hitherto unknown creature first made an appearance at the M25LT group a few weeks ago but I think we haven’t seen the last of her/him/it.

That’s me for Moodlemoot 2011 today – I hope my colleagues and twitter friends will continue to keep me posted.

I am posting occasionally on a more personal blog on posterous during CCK11

I signed up for Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2011 and have had little time to spend on it but have just listened to the Elluminate session from yesterday evening. Keeping the alliteration going I think I can say I am in a state of Confusion about Connectivism but that is apparently good at this stage (or any stage) in this course or in any learning situation from here on in.

I attended FOTE (footie) again this year, having enjoyed last year’s as much for the Twitter interaction and  conversations with  other participants as the formal presentations.  This year’s was a very similar experience with record use of Twitter and presentations  ranging from Microsoft’s vision of a future world of beautiful people with technology to guide their every move,  to Matt Lingard’s very grounded look at staff take up (or not ) of technology and  Miles Metcalfe’s cynical take on our uncritical love of technology, not to mention other offerings on augmented reality, mobile learning and educational gaming. In other words, something for everyone – or the geeks anyway.

As well as the range of technology being presented there was also considerable variety in how it was broadcast and recorded. All sessions were streamed into Second Life and via livestream, tweets are archived here, and a very neat tool Visible tweets provided a visual display of  indvidual tweets as they arrived (between presentations). There’s a Flickr photostream and Chris Smith has provided an interesting video record of attending the conference remotely from Thailand http://screenr.com/E04. Video recordings of all keynotes are gradually appearing on the conference website.

The blogs below from presenters and others will give you a flavour of the actual presentations. Take a few minutes to look at the Microsoft Surface parody video in Matt Lingard’s blog – he used it to great effect even though  it froze half way through on both attempts to run it. Another notable aspect of Matt’s presentation which will become apparent from the blog is the level of audience interaction he achieved.

Matt Lingard

Ollie Bray

Brian Kelly

JISC RSC Wales

This is a good event to participate in, however you do it, and it’s free – watch out for next year’s publicity and sign up quickly.  Best quote of the day (or possibly paraphrase)  from Jeremy Speller’s presentation (see link below):  “Mobile learning is not new – books have been moving for long time”.

Some links relating to talks:

Augmented Reality
http://www.learnar.org/

Jeremy Speller’s presentation on mobile university
http://www.slideshare.net/jeremyspeller/the-mobile-university-last-years-model

Other useful stuff that came up:

JISC legal guidance on audio recordings
http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ManageContent/ViewDetail/tabid/243/ID/1608/Recording-Lectures-Legal-Considerations-28072010.aspx

Open university podcasts (more comprehensive than iTunesU)
http://podcast.open.ac.uk/

Microsoft Surface Parody (see Matt Lingard’s post)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY

Free tool for online meetings
Flash meeting

Audience polling system used very effectively by Matt Lingard – see his post above for more details.
http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Possible alternative to Prezi – an extension to PowerPoint used by speaker from Microsoft
Powerpoint plex

I have had no time for core work let alone blogging recently.  However I did rush something through on the Health & Bioscience blog after a presentation at Herts blended learning conference on 17th June.

http://blog.uelconnect.org.uk/hab/2010/06/17/virtual-patient-developments-june-2010/

I do many things apart from Second Life but you could be forgiven for thinking that’s all I do.  I will try to widen the scope of this blog one day …….

Debates about virtual worlds continue to interest some of us and Eduserv’s ‘Where next for Virtual Worlds’ on 25th January was no exception.

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.

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.

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