Hurrah, I've now got access to post to the blog. Bit late for all the fun and games, but hey...

Arriving at ALT-C after nearly a month away from work was slightly surreal, but somehow the synapses sparked up and generated familiar, and even convincing contributions to discussions. Manged to take on board a few new concepts too.

I liked:

• Itiel Dror's comparison of student learning habits to toddler's eating habits.
• Scott Wilson and Andy Powell at F-ALT acknowledging (and celebrating) the usability limitations of the UK-LEAP and IMS Content Packaging Standards.
• The recognition that students in creative areas value originality in ePortfolio formats, but may accept that ePortfolios have a role as 'virtualized' portfolios.
• A 2nd Life discussion with some delegates from Glasgow Cal, who have found the strongest uptake for SL in the Nursing and Midwifery subject areas - they use it for teaching communication skills.
• Research skills ARG (poster) for History Studies students at U Leicester which includes clear assessment criteria for participation in discussion forums as part of the game, and has improved students' assessed skills.
• JISC's new eportfolios infoKit: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/e-portfolios
• Magic Whiteboards: http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/ 20 times more reusable than a flipchart. And made from the best recycleable plastic. Worth a try?

Unimpressed by:

• The session called 'Turning edcuational content into open content' was too broad for its title. It included everything about transforming paper-based content to e-content, aimed at producing sanitised, chunked, learning materials, and relied on learning technologists to achieve the process. Urk. However, it is based on the experience of OpenLearn, and the OU, is, afterall, a leader in distance learning. We may want to go there.
• 'The space between the institituion and the learner' - enjoyable participant roleplays led by Helen Beetham but they were predictably pulled towards a VLE v Facebook standoff. Few surprises there except a reminder to use what we do have imaginatively and to support active and proactive learners.
• Easimap - a way of mapping student marks and PDP to the professional spec for Engineering - useful for curriculum design as well as for students, but best reserved for subject areas with a high degree of conformity.
• Compendle from myknowledgemap - a bizzare little app. that shows the potential for drag'n'drop, almost works as as student portfolio, but ultimately doesn't fit our setup. Shame. Storywriter (from the same company) holds a lot of promise.

Summary: Not as exciting as the 3 packed days the previous year, but still plenty of food for thought for one day away, and an excellent way to return to work.

Session 3 - Reflection

My session was the first one here, and it seemed pretty good. Was happy we got 37 given it was the last session before the conf. dinner and Gilly Salmon was speaking at the same time as us (I think she is a keynote next year). We discussed the use of private blogs for encouraging reflection. Seemed well-received (no one left for instance), but hard to tell as most people trapped in awkward lecture theaters anyway.

Second session - University of Hertfordshire - STRIDE - Something abouT Riting In your Dissertation, Eh? (Ok, that was not the real acronym, but good enough). It was all about some videos they created where tutors and past students discuss what it's like to create a dissertation, and different strategies to take when you are stuck/scared. Session started off well with a bit of interactivity even, but went downhill towards the end when we had to watch about 7 minutes worth of video of the students and lecturers talking. I think this is a classic mistake people make when discussing video projects - showing too much of the video. It is much better to just show a little bit so we get the idea than show an entire video of something the viewers are not interested in. In general the students liked having the videos, though they wanted it inside the VLE or on demand. Someone in the audience suggested having audio instead as all the video was just talking heads. Seemed like a good idea to me. Other criticism was that it was too descriptive - not prompting reflection in the students but just helping them deal with tough emotions.

Third session (bit of an exodus before this one) - Open University - This was the closest I have seen anyone come to putting enquiry-based learning into an automated format. Nursing students are given a case study (lady with an infected leg), and have to make a decision about one of three treatment options. They are given the patient's lab results, information about each of the treatments, past patient history, etc. The choice they make leads to something happening and then another set of choices, lab results, etc. There are five levels of choices in the maze, and eventually one of three outcomes happens (the worst being the lady being checked into hospital - not her leg getting amputated or something). The students were given a second chance if they wanted to, and are given a score sheet at the end and a summary of reflections they have to provide at each choice about why they made it. Students who did a second time - 70% improved their score. The tool seemed helpful enough for this sort of thing, but my fears were the amount of time taken to create the materials (they managed one case study in a year) would be the slow part (which they confirmed). The software is connected to OpenMark, the Open University's marking system and is not available for anyone else to use. In fact when the OU goes to Moodle soon they are not sure the case study will work for awhile until it gets converted. So not very good in terms of reusability for anyone else...

Session 2 - Increasing Contribution

First up was University of Huddersfield discussing the contributing student approach and ways to do it online. Or at least, that was what it was supposed to be. The first 8 of 15 minutes were spent explaining that race is a human construct and how students react to being taught about race. The end of the session discussed that getting students to contribute online was good as students could work through materials at own pace and aggressive or emotional outbursts could be handled better (given the extra time). I had to ask in the question time what they had actually given the students online as that was not discussed. It turns out there were videos, articles and websites set up earlier for the students to explore, a shared blog to discuss reactions to them, and a private reflective blog. Lastly there was a wiki which used the jigsaw approach. In general this was not a bad session, but I feel a bit more focus on the technology and the interventions made would've been better than the length of discussion around "this is my subject explained to you"

Second session was about using wikis in group work to facilitate producing student e-resources. First half of the session was about the different staff development resources they had created - which was mostly a lot of case studies about the different ways of using Blackboard to achieve different results (an admirable goal I think). They said these resources would be helpful in getting new folks on board that didn't normally look at their resources, but I would've liked to know how those resources were going to do that. Then they went into one case study in detail, which was the main focus of the session (though only got half the time). Students had to use the wiki to create a seminar presentation on a topic, and had to include new case studies and articles the tutor had not found. Problems included students not editing each others' work, students needing support with the technology, and typical group work problems. The wikis were most popular with groups that couldn't meet often. One of the positive outcomes of using wikis was that students used the library's e-resources more. However, I asked if they thought this was more down to the task design of requiring sources the tutor had not provided or the use of wikis, and they said they thought it was mostly the task design but possibly due to the fact that they were creating something online too.

Session 3 - Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry - Very new college (2000) that did a 7-year review of their VLE use to improve it. They are very small, so they don't even have courses on Blackboard, but just use the "course" feature to categorise their resources (One is Biochemistry, another is Patient Care) - and they fill those "courses" with lots of learning materials. All students can access all the materials. I guess they don't take advantage of non-content features like grades, discussion, blogs, etc. Pretty much the opposite to the way I would want to promote Blackboard use, but seemed to work for them.

Session 4 - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - A look at online peer review. Students found giving peer feedback very useful, was more useful when tutors helped validate feedback. Used the TurnItIn peer review tool - 10 different courses examined, lots of different practice in them. In general, the results were pretty much what I expected - peer feedback = good, but teaching the students how to give useful feedback is necessary.

Session 1 - Wikis

I went on Wednesday and saw a few sessions. The first theme was wikis/distance learning (not sure these are really obvious bedfellows, as you'll see).

The first session was from UNC-CH, not far from Raleigh actually. It focused on rural high school education via distance learning for advanced placement classes. Wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be. They didn't really talk about what the online facilitator interventions they did with the experiment group were, instead focusing on the effect it had. The overall effect of having online facilitators with additional training helping with the classes was that more students stuck with the course, but a lower percentage of the students passed the exam (as a result of more of the students sticking with it). This raised the question of if it was worth keeping more students to have them just fail.

The second session was about using wikis for teaching, from Deakin and Monash Universtiies in Australia. They did a staff development programme to teach staff how to use wikis for teaching (and they did it in just a wiki). It lasted 2 weeks and had about 15 people. The end result was that most of the staff didn't edit the wiki at all during the first week and the facilitators had to really cajole people to get any sort of participation. They used the same wiki tool that operates wikipedia, but installed on their servers. They didn't have the staff members access the wikis through Blackboard as we do, because they were worried about the effect of putting what they called a learner-controlled tool inside a teacher-controlled tool (i.e. Blackboard). To me, having wikis inside Blackboard allows a challenge of the tutor-controlled idea for those already comfortable with Blackboard. Also, I find the text editor in wikipedia awful compared to most other wikis. Finally they had a strange comment that they thought there was no participation as there was no reward like accreditation for doing the course, which just highlights the need for staff development to be viewed as its own reward and a necessary part of teaching.

The third session was from the Open University and was research from a PhD student on two classes using wikis with students. They were using the Moodle wiki tool, and basically it needed some rewriting to make the editor work better. Also, the students were using it for "authentic" tasks, but they were only sort of authentic. For instance, business students needed to make a management report for a project. However, they were all used to doing this as a highly-formatted Word document. They were apparently a bit miffed to have to do it as a wiki, leading to most of them cutting and pasting from Word rather than editing in the wiki. They also complained about wanting to do the task, not learn a new tool. Apparently the wiki tool wouldn't do certain things like add images that they wanted it to do. I thought when listening to the session that really they should've used something more like a Google document, if that is the format that these reports normally come into. However, they said they did it in Moodle as that is the requirement to try to standardize all courses. The main other message that came out of it was that students would benefit from a discussion space next to the wiki to discuss changes as they were not keen to modify each other's work, especially where there was some contention.

Congratulations Stuart!

From swords to hairstyles: bridging the divide between massively multiplayer game design and SL

Dave White -TALI, Open Habitat
Compares World Of Warcraft and Second Life. In both however, social capital is very important - indication of player's commitment, kudos. Swords (WoW) and hairstyles (SL) are strong indicators for reasons I won't go into.
OT:
(He uses media intervention to fill-in understanding when speech is not the best channel).
(Video shows an inverted whiteboard table in his office at Oxford! Excellent creativity tool. eg world cafe).
User generated content can be produced in SL (used in Art & Design - Ian Truelove, Leeds Met) where soc presence is the focus for Philosophy students at Oxford in the Open Habitat project. Dave Cormier at Prince Edward Island is also involved though I'm not sure in what capacity.
Comparing the 2 VWs: WoW is a locked down environment whilst SL supports editing, construction, modification, sharing, etc (SL a blank canvas) (WoW a narrative) notebook/ novel.
They used Open Sim, a locally installed version of SL. There's a lack of subtle gestures that are useful for educational use - they're thinking about generating ed gestures.
Question: How to orientate studs? - drop them in the deep end with people on hand with one to one support. Very few skills are actually needed to get started in most cases.
Find out more: http://media.conted.px.ac.uk/res02

DEBUT - HEA Pathfinder

(My creative side now returns to posting blogs from nearer the beginning of the conf when i had no wifi)

Sue Westerman, Canterbury Christchurch
The project set out to take a personalised approach to staff development.
Their existing fragmented models were not sustainable as impact on individuals was fuzzy/lost.
DEBUT changed to develop digital literacy rather than specific skills and focus on confidence rather than competence. This connects to the paper Liz, Kay and myself did.
Staff were asked to rank themselves at the beginning and end and asked to pick 6 tools to explore (including podcasting, Flickr, wiki, etc). They were inspired by Alan Martin (?) and his definition for digital literacy - not very encompassing: about tech and confidence (awareness, confident, evaluated use of tools they use, reflection, adaptability). She says being Adaptable is most important as tech moves on. They noted a rapid increase in self-assessed literacy amongst participants especially those who were relatively illiterate at the beginning. (Why do 95% of surveys tell you what you want to hear? Quants. Huh!)
Many staff reported integrating new skills/confidence into practice. They liked being the people who chose the tools. This approach is now well-established with academics. They liked f2f and the opportunity to share practice. Preferred group sessions, with small pieces of 'homework' followed by group reporting.
Issues: Mixed ability groups, how to encourage independence, time available, easy access to appropriate technologies. It worked - but labour-intensive.
At start a mass intro of tools followed by mentoring (mentoring was not so useful). Now:
Annual staff development programme
Embedding with current work
Extension work for the more confident
Keeping cohort 1 connected
They had plenty of applications from academics to join the pilot. PowerPoint was most popular, followed by Refworks. (My heart sank!).
Wikipedia wasn't of interest. (I drowned!).
susan.westerman@canterbury.ac.uk, www.canterbury.ac.uk/lteu