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

final keynote: one laptop per child

this was fab, and dispelled all my fears about pointless repetitive keynotes. even if the same talk does appear on another programme, i'm fairly certain i'd sit through it again.

it was a presentation by david cavallo of the one laptop per child (olpc) foundation. i've heard a lot about the olpc before, and was (am?) somewhat sceptical about their rather wooly sounding mission which is "...to stimulate local grassroots initiative designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.". he's such an inspiring speaker though - genuine, engaging and down to earth, while obviously being very very clever at the same time - that i immediately started to feel guilty about feeling sceptical.

there were lots of gems in what he was saying that i think are relevant for a lot of the work we're doing. issues such as focussing on teaching that will make a real difference in context, including helping people with skills that will benefit the community short- and long-term; and demonstrating that you value students by trusting them with something (in this case, a laptop, obviously...but we've had many a similar discussion about 'you can't put expensive kit in there/loan things to students, they'll get ruined') - and the effect that that has on their perception of themselves, their attitudes, and their sense of responsibility. so students who have previously felt marginalised start to see themselves as people who can accomplish things. he stated a few times that fears of theft in poor communities hadn't been borne out in practice - while recognising that the distinctive design made it easily recognisable and therefore less appealing to thieves (the thinking being that it was easy to spot who was using one, and identify whether they were legitimate users).

there was something else that struck home about having things to explore that weren't necessarily part of the intended learning, but that might help spark curiosity. in this case, there was a 'view source' button available within the software on the laptops, the thought being that it wouldn't appeal to all, but that some children may pick up on this, explore it and start to develop an understanding. again (and predictably) thinking back to space design, having elements to break spaces up and giving people areas to explore is part of a range of ideas to help stimulate interest and engagement. any other examples of this?

anyway, enough rambling - but it was one of those rare joys, an engaging keynote :)

what shall we do with web2.0?

this was the final presentation in the set of 4, and it took most of the 15 minutes allocated to read the full title: "what shall we do with web 2.0? does a digital divide between the intention of creators and the practice of users, promote creativity in learning and teaching?"

the remainder of the session was actually quite thought provoking and looked at the hefce funded kubis project at kingston. kubispace is apparently a "web 2.0 social networking learning environment...built as an alternative to more traditional vles". there were some very odd statements made during the presentation, and the quite hackneyed "vles=bad, web-2.0=saviour of the universe" comparison - so, for example, there was the assertion that vles meant that all academics really had to attend training to understand vles, and had to go through a technologist gatekeeper to create and upload materials (erm...) whereas web 2.0 applications were intuitive and *everyone* could use them (except during the training for using kubispace, not everyone managed to do complicated things like set up wikis...). so they didn't need training, but they gave them training anyway. and then realised that not everyone knew how to do everything, but it's still intuitive, right?.

it seemed as though it was more of a critique of the training model (ie, enrol a peer group onto the platform, and let them explore and learn from each other with guidance, and without students being present, as opposed to attending a 2-hour training session) rather than the platform itself? there was quite an entertaining moment when someone in the audience mentioned they'd struggled with staff confidence, and were there any tips for overcoming this? the presenter asked "have you tried letting staff explore without students in there, to make it less threatenting?". when the response was "yes", she then quickly said "well, you should get the students in there". well, good then.

but on to the thought provoking parts, a few issues that i'd be interested in your views on:

• are you a different person in social networking sites to who you are f2f or in online discussions?
• would you adopt a different persona as a tutor in a web 2.0 environment to the persona you'd adopt in a more traditional vle?
• if web 2.0 environments do reconstitute what it means to be a tutor, what does this mean for the traditional boundaries of the university?

answers on a postcard...

pedagogy or technology: e-study guides

the third presentation in the "pedagogy or technology" set looked at the use of e-study guides at peninsula medical school. a curriculum review recommended the use of online study guides for 3 reasons:

• integration of 'science' learning with individual disciplines, pbl, and clinical skills;
• strengthening of independent learning - helping students prepare better for f2f;
• reduction of repetitive training - often, they found lecturers delivering identical sessions up to 12 times - and improvement in consistency of delivery across the medical school's many sites.

the research they did sounded promising...but the stats presented were too generalised without much unpicking of what they really meant practice. one logistical problem raised was that of the developers getting the content from academics - students said they found the early study guides with links and activities really useful, but this tailed off after the early weeks of teaching as academics became too busy to pass on activities to be included in the materials, so the guides became very passive.

this session was actually quite engaging and well presented...but there was nothing that new in it to report. the role of academic as content provider vs. learning technologist as the person who uploads content and makes it work was picked up in the final presentation of the session.

pedagogy or technology: the digital divide

hmmmm. having convinced myself that i'd try to be ever so slightly less predictably cynical/grumpy than usual, today didn't get off to the best start. well, actually, the start was ok - there was no-one at the registration desk so i helped myself to a name tag, ticked off my name, took some pencils, and went for a stroll around the near deserted exhibition hall (more pens, pencils and danish pastries, and an interesting chat with someone from intute). i then waved at stuart, had a quick chat with helen lyons and, with a spring in my step, set off for a 'pedagogy or technology' strand session with 4 presentations, the first 2 of which were about the digital divide.
the first one was intriguingly entitled "the digital divide: is it in the hyphen?". imagine my delight when it started off by offering some definitions of e-learning. they'd done some research (as part of their benchmarking efforts, though the presenter was keen to point out that they'd received no funding for this activity; the joys of the funded pathfinder project were to be revealed in the next presentation) into barriers of engagement. apparently, some people see e-learning as:

e-learning

where as some people see it as:

e-learning.

do you see what they did there? in case you missed the subtlety, some people focus on the technology, some people focus on the learning. among the revelations that the presenter went on to share were the following: "we think the 'e' should stand for 'effective' or 'enhanced'" and "we had an e-learning strategy - i wrote one because hefce had one, so i thought we'd better - but no-one ever read it. so we scrapped it and included it in the learning and teaching strategy". one of the attendees nodded vigorously and agreed that all institutions should have a learning strategy.

at this point, the woman sat next to me threw her cup of water all over me and the floor. [yes, yes, i know, retribution for the infamous chocolate milk incident of 2006.] the water flinging signalled the start of the next session, which reported on the funded pathfinder project.

this session focussed on whether there was such a thing as subject-specific staff development. admittedly, i got a bit lost with the point that was being made - they took some existing staff development materials, and re-branded them as subject-specific/tailored, then interviewed 6 members of staff who had been through the "subject-specific" development to see whether it had been effective or not. in some ways it had been effective - but in others it hadn't, and the presenter made the bold statement that "different subjects want technology for different things". erm...

things did start to look up slightly in the final 2 presentations, though...

unlearning spaces and other photos

one of the things i really enjoyed about my morning at alt was the excellent design of the lecture theatres:


the little doors on the end of each row must have seemed like a great idea at the time ("i know, to save students disturbing the lecture by walking across the front, let's put doors on the end of each row"). except, of course, the person who walks through the end of row door sits right next to it. so when someone else wants to get in, you start playing some bizarre, twisted game of musical chairs where everyone has to shuffle across. and really, the doors are designed so that anyone over 6 stone in weight and carrying something larger than an envelope is almost guaranteed to get stuck in them. so instead of having people quietly sneaking in, you get 15 individual doors banging, 15 sets of whispering, and 15 games of musical chairs going on. wait 5 minutes, and repeat. genius! possibly *the* most counter-intuitive design i've seen.

on the subject of lecture theatres, this is for anyone who thinks students writing notes = concentrating on lecture, and that students having internet access = not concentrating on lecture:

(also, i'm fairly certain that making your own sudoku grids is cheating?)

this one is for smodge (check the last comment):

this one is a candid moment in the promo for next year's conference, for brian [i know you said it had to be a salmon, but...]:

and then after the keynote (which was great, btw) and the questions, and the questions from the people via elluminate, and the thanks for the people in the auditorium, and the thanks to the people who joined via elluminate, and the plug for next year's conference, and the thanks to the people who gave the plug for next years conference, and the thanks to the university of leeds...we were then shown photos of the lovely people at alt who we had to thank too:

Itiel Dror - keynote and cognitive psycholigist - Learning technology - what is it all about?

I loved this. He's a great presenter. Very calm and quietly amusing.
Cognitive Psychology interests me, especially in relation to how we might learn with digital audio - but I've not done much about investigating this beyond some cursor reading around modality. So I had my fingers crossed.
I liked his analaogy of "You can bring a child to the table, but you can't make them eat" - (though Kay told me on the way out that this just was not the way to go!). Having said that, I can't remember WTH the point was, so i think she was right! So much for cognitive psychology!
Quotable bits: "It's not what you teach, it's what they learn that counts." (Though what am I meant to do with this?) "Knowledge retention is a waste of time" (not sure if that is a direct quote, but it was close and so right (until you speak to a medic).
One of several presenters BTW that have used video in their presentations to good effect - as high impact punctation to underline key ideas. Classic media interventions. He had quite a lot to say about video design and how users of video can be guided in their use of it recognising the need to avoid cognitively overloading students.
I'll be checking out some of his papers at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/id/

Gilly Salmon and Clive Shepherd - invited speakers

This is retrospective hence brief. Lasting impressions? - It's good to be encouraged (even if I don't see myself as a Learning Technologist - how things have changed) to change the world. This was part of Gilly Salmon's message, encouraging the audience to make an impact in their work on education and so thye world. They half an new beast in the Zoo: CALF - concerned with Creating Academic Learning Futures (http://www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/calf/).
Clive Shepherd looked backwards, in contrast to GS, at the different eras of learning technology since the 1960s. His background is training, not education. I didn't find the points he was making particularly transferable, though it is always amusing (and scary - when you think about the energy we have expended over the years)to reflect on how we were. I am so glad I am not in training. They are so focussed on the development of content. He recognised that the opportunity existed to promote and depend upon, to some extent, user-generated content.
(Will I ever look back and ask: why was I so driven by what I was doing then? OMG. I hope not)

Exploration of the student experience of e-learning: beginning to bridge

...the learning divide
Lynne Jump, Malcolm Ryan, Rita Headington, Mandy Atkinson, University of Greenwich
I think this is the Pathfinder project (ELISIG?).
(The room for this was so far across campus I could smell the curry houses of Bradford).
The symposium was a useful format to discuss the questions:
1. What is effective learning within a context of digital technology? 2. What are the myths and truths about the identity of today's learners? 3. What practical changes need to happen in order to see real change?
Some of the outputs of the discussion:
Q1: Learner autonomy; meaningful activity; clear navigation of content, module and experience; activity; involvement; strong sense of ownership. Quite a lot of consensus around these responses but noting the huge divide between such beliefs and the practice that exists and the tools institutions provide. There are some useful survey results from this work that I think will be useful in informing some of our work. It is worth trying to find this, tho I expect Helen and Liz are already up to speed on this.
Q2: Discussions resulted in plenty of myths that needed to be busted. I challenged the basis of the discussion that suggested institutions needed to decide how they were going to meet the needs of the Google Gen by going with either institutionally provided tools, user selected tools, or a mix. I think what we really need to do here is learn about how students want to engage with the people around them by observing their behaviour - not the specific tools they use to support their behaviour. Tools come and go, but behaviour is longer lasting. Everyone seemed to agree that the Digital Native ideas had been useful, but to a point and that it was now time to be more sophisticated in responding to the diversity of our students, including that not insignificant section of the population that still have no access at all to digital technology.
Q3: Responses included: flexible institutional approach to technology provision; promoting horizontal learning - the expectation to learn from and with peers; EBL, PBL; informal learning spaces; IPR! [note I don't necessarily agree with all this!]

Jane Hart - 25 tools

Jane Hart was an invited speaker and I can reveal is one of my major sources of cutting edge info in terms of Web 2.0 applications. So it was really good to see her in person as she has been this mysterious person who seems to generate the best quality information continuously through her RSS feed, focussing on emerging tools and technologies - as they appear.
In this session she reported on the poll of educators who provided her with their top ten choices of Web apps. As a consequence my usual web pic appeared on a montage slide of the many who contributed, as did a screen grab that featured me on her twitter feed - which is kind of weird. Enough vanity. Anyway she talked through the top 25 tools, and there were one or two that I haven't used. But actually I think it might have been more interesting to focus the session on the tools that came in at 26-100. You can see and explore the list here: http://c4lpt.co.uk/25Tools/index.html
Are your favourite tools there?
Get voting as this is a continuous poll, but she insists that you explain your selection, which is not only useful to others but thought provoking for yourself. Good to see her get some recognition.

I can now reveal…

… I am known by a variety of different names. Rather, that I was commended in this year’s Learning Technology of the Year competition. I received my award at last night’s dinner in front of a rather dug up cricket field at Headingly. It has been quite difficult keeping it secret (not least when Demetra Katsifli almost let knowledge of my application out at BbWorld Europe in Manchester) but that was ALT’s rules not mine (though I think being invited to the interview as Stephen and being called to receive by prize by David Cavallo as Simon was part of this covert operation). My application focussed on the Assignment Handler project along with my overall contribution to supporting the use of learning technology. See http://www.alt.ac.uk/docs/learning_technologist_of_the_year_award_2008.pdf.

Thomas Jepson (of Wimba fame) called me over (as Andrew) to his stand this morning to congratulate me. I don’t know whether anyone has looked at the Pronto tool (part of the Wimba suite), but I was quite impressed with its instant messaging and chat capabilities – both within and across courses. (Kings College and Robert Gordon use it in the UK, along with 2,000 institutions in the UK). Or being overly impressed could be the result of my online chat with David Wild (Director of Assessment at Wimba) who now wants to set something up more formal to explore with me how the Wimba voice tools can be better integrated within Blackboard/the Grade Centre to support formative assessment and feedback.

Pick 'n' mix

I have just attended what was described as a ‘mixed’ session on all things of interest to me – pre-induction, electronic exams and feedback. Yay!

The first paper was by Jo Axe (Royal Roads Univ., Canada) on the development of online learning communities in advance of face-to-face (an ‘online bridge’ to building communities). I was expecting a flurry of ideas for supporting pre-induction, but the research focused on issues of clashes between different backgrounds and cultures and how she had tried to address this by getting the students to submit a non-graded individual reflection on what makes a learning community.

The second paper was by Nora Mogey (Edinburgh) on the pilot of 70 Divinity students having an optional mock exam that they could type or handwrite. This was so far the most interesting paper I had attended. Prior to this student views were sought on typed exams the majority were in favour, though there were reservations about typing skills, integrity of technology and interruptions to the thought process. They used Exam4 software (www.extegrity.com), rather than Word to avoid any inadvertent assessment of word processing skills). Students taking the mock exam were still presented with their questions on paper, but installed the software on their own or borrowed laptop. Prior to the exam, the course team applies settings such as spell checking, where to save work to, and whether to lock down the laptop (no browser, homespace etc), and the student can set font size and set a timer. Throughout the exam encrypted snapshots are taken which the admin team decrypt and there is a choice of printing or marking the work electronically. In the pilot it was found that longer scripts were typed, no correlation between typing speed and word count, no difference in quality between handwritten and typed, and no concept in what 3 pages of A4 look like typed, but the biggest worry was consistency of marking between markers regardless of format. Students have said that typing exams is no less fair than written exams, and they should be offered the choice. They appreciate being able to restructure work and feel that they are being more analytical and critical, and see written exams as a ‘brain dump’. Keyboard noise did not cause concerns. One exam hall at Edinburgh has since been redeveloped with powered floors with sockets and network points.

The final paper was titled Formative audio feedback: is FAF a faff? (Robin Johnson, Manc. Met). He spoke of a HEPI report on Academic experience of students in English Universities (2007) which reports on student progress and feedback - http://www.hepi.ac.uk/pubdetail.asp?ID=240&DOC=reports. (I will read this later). After which he stood with his hands in his pockets reading his slides – audio feedback is easy to do, saves time and provide more details, need clear structure and control emotions. He then spoke of research into 70 students who submitted a draft dissertation; the students on placement received audio feedback and those not on placement received written feedback. All students were asked to complete a questionnaire asking whether their feedback (audio or written) had helped them improve their work etc. Those receiving audio feedback found it helpful; and a poor return from those receiving written feedback meant he couldn’t compare.

The value of synchronous multi-media communication systems to

Sandra Fitton-Wilde, Mr. Adam Bailey, Uni of Derby
"This short paper promotes debate concerning how synchronous multimedia communication systems (SMMCS) technology mitigates the barriers between the remote student and the learning experience."
About Virt classrooms, webinars, etc (Helen R!). Action reseaerch project and soc const epistimology.
Found many students encountered significant tech difficulties in using such tex and this required a lot more support than expected.
Not a substitute for f2f tho beneficial for DL studs.
Not a vehicle for for didactic delivery (they podcasts may be a better vehicle!!! Audacity. Huh! ;-) )

Sounded good, but was it? Review of Sounds Good

Bob Rotheram, Leeds Mer
Bob has been running a project about audio feedback for a while - one of the JISC Emerge projects so I am familiar with this, but the review will be interesting. We've discussed working together and as our presentations are back to back it will be a good opportunity to reflect on what we might do.

Design principles and learner empowerment in the exploration of the

Helen Keegan, University of Salford
Web 2.0 for student autonomy.
Moving from instructivist approaches. Obviously need for them to 'professionalise themselves' - 'impression management.'
Professional AV media production course.
Students came adept at producing and consuming media - but a disconnect between these.
Blogs to produce CVs - and reflect upon them.
Techies: 'how do we write?' Answer: 'Find your voice'.
She used a personal '20 minute rule' in her delivery to keep it 'mashed up' and appreciating how these students. Alot of time she passed control to students to talk through blogs/resources they were finding using lab software.
Authentic positive approach taken to creating a professional online identity that will hold them in good stead.
Question about vulnerability of students learning in the unsecure real world using external servers - answer: this is about learning to be professional (the risks of authencity).
Weaker students vulnerable? - yes a risk, but students were given the choice to go public.

Reflective practice and blogs: developing a new model for assessment

Rosanne Birney, Waterford Institute of Technology
Addressing problem of academic workload involved in giving feedback.
Automated analysis of blog posts is a challenge - semantic analysis tools can be good for subject specific discussion, but not so useful for reflective writing.
Used a Delphi method to find consensus amongst experts in the field of reflection of criteria they value in identifying critical reflection. Used Analytic Hierarchy Process to unravel all this!
Assessment of reflection might enable tutors to give feedback where there is a scalability barrier.

Understanding skills: individual and institutional perspectives

John Davies presenting on a JISC Eemerge project.
This about tag clouds and reflection on skills. Both tutors do little more than tick the boxes when i comes to skills (generic, literacy... DF?).
Tags to identify key terms and offer navigation. Inst generated clouds with input from student data.
Card sorting technique where studs clustered and ranked statements.
SkillClouds tool: from basic intro to transferable skills thru to cloud interface that takes students to info about skills. Much lighter touch than KSOL!
Approach seems to support studs whatever stage they're at in understanding and applying skills. Quite a personalised approach thru the cloud. www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds
Discussion:
Tags not user-created!
They're going to encourage academics to describe teaching, content, etc with tags so they're integrated thru out curriculum...
They want to embed this within their PDP approaches.

Failure...

On my part I am failing with the challenges but will flourish following my sesh this morning... perhaps.
Most popular/overused Word? - podcasting (of course, assuming the word 'lecture' has won continually as most over-used word and is disqualified from being eligible ever again). OK 'lecture' 'Web 2.0' is a close contender.

1st day at ALT-C

Day 1 at ALT-C by Stuart

Having no battery power and lack of available power sockets at the ‘largest growing’ university in the UK, I am consolidating today’s (not too exciting) events into a single summary.

Hans Rosling (Prof. International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) started off the proceedings with his keynote which was effectively an advert for Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) developed by his family, excitingly demonstrating lots of interactive graphs on demographics. Not much more to say other than rather than use an infra-red pointer he choose to teeter precariously on the top of an 8-foot step ladder waving a 10-foot pole around the whiteboard. A fan of PowerPoint too – we don’t use enough of its power, apparently.

I went along to a parallel session on alternate reality games (each of 15mins, including 5mins for questions). So the first one, ARG for inclusive induction, the presenter (Nicola Wilson, Manc. Met.) decided to turn up rather late. Oops! No time to present other than to say her paper would be on a JISC project using ARG to induct students into the city of Manchester, meeting people and information skills. Shame really because it might have contained useful ideas for the Applicant Portal/pre-enrolment support work. Nicola had her 5mins of questions in which I found out that they developed the software in-house linking with Facebook and Blogger, and that they will be developing a framework that other HEIs can use as part of their funding outputs.

The second ARG paper was on Innerstate (Mark Johnson and Peter Lager, Bolton), a project to develop game style software in which users can visualise the complexity of their environment (be it work, social, health service), and use the software to experiment with different strategies for coping with their environment, and to provide a common ground for communicating with others. Then they spent 10mins demonstrating Pam’s diner using conveyor belts as a metaphor for managing one’s environment (http://innerstate.lagers.org.uk/), but didn’t really get much from this.

The final paper was An alternative reality for HE? (Alex Moseley, Leicester), which started off as a 5mins literature review on ARGs which he presented while the delegates were hunting under tables among all the discarded chewing gum to retrieve business cards containing Perplex City quotes. (Apparently that’s Perplex City – multitasking). Alex then presented on his year-long research project in Perplex City in which he concluded that the key features of ARGs for education are: problem-solving, progress and rewards, narrative devices, influence on outcomes, regular delivery of new problems, potential for large and active community, and are based on simple existing technologies.

Hunting for any papers on using learning technologies to support assessment, I did find a session titled ‘Forcing feedback’. Only to find that it was the more or less same paper that I had attended 10 days previously at the EARLI conference – different title, different presenter. It was on the development of the OU’s Open Comment/Open Mark assessment system (which is incorporated with Moodle) to ask questions requiring free-text answers which can be assessed automatically.

Web 2.0 symposium

Conducted by Peter Hartley et al with tongues in cheek to highlight many issues (policy, pedagogy, practicalities, etc). I'm not really hearing anything fresh though it's useful to see multiple perspectives (advocates and doubters) role playing.
Role play allows people to take ridiculously extreme positions. I'm left thinking I don't agree with any position! I hope it's brought together by the audience... Peolple are mostly very familiar with the questions/issues. Much more sophisticated than even a year ago when Susannah and I did something similar on ePDP and Web 2.0.
Got to dash before conclusion to set up SIG event....

DF and 3DVWs short papers

DEBUT -HEA Pathfinder (DF)
Sue Westerman, Canterbury Christchurch
Staff dev - personalised approach
Existing fragmented models of staff dev not sustainable as impact on individuals was fuzzy/lost.
DEBUT changed staff dev methods to look at developing Digital Literacy as a whole rather than specific skillls. (This connects to the paper Liz, Kay and myself did.)
Staff asked to rank themselves at the beginning and end against certain criteria (see below).
Staff asked to pick 6 tools to explore (including podcasting, Flickr, wiki, etc)
Inspired by Alan Martin - definition 4 DL - 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.
Noted rapid increase in self-assessed literacy amongst participants especially those who were relatively illiterate at the beginning.
Many were integrating new skills/confidence into practice and this was unexpected.
They liked being the people who chose the tools. Well-established with academics. They liked f2f and the opportunity 2 share practice. Participants preferred group sessions, followed by brief homework, then group reporting and sharing of experience.
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 to tools followed by mentoring (mentoring was not so useful)
No/nextw:
• annual staff dev prog.
• Embedding with current work
• extension/add-on work for the more confident
• keeping cohort 1 connected
Plenty of applications to programme join from academics
PowerPoint was most popular and Refworks (mmmm disappointing to me!)
Wikipedia wasn't of interest (it should be - surely!)

www.canterbury.ac.uk/lteu
----------------
From swords to hairstyles: bridging the divide between massively multiplayer game design and SL
Dave White -TALI, Open Habit
Compares WoW and SL
Social capital important to both - indication of player's commitment to tool.
Swords and hairstyles strong indicators!
(DW models media intervention to fill-in understanding with speech is not the best channel)
(Inverted whiteboard table appeared in video - must nick this creativity tool)
Subject groups: UGcontent (A&D - Ian Truelove, Leeds Met) or Soc presence (philosophy, Oxford)
WoW locked diown or SL editable environments
SL a blank canvas/ WoW offers a fixed narrative
ie notebook/novel
Do you need to understand about 'buttons' before you can play (with VLEs)? DW says no.
Used Open Sim (locally installed version of SL). Lack of subtle gestures that are useful for educational use - they're thinking about generating ed gestures.
How to orientate studs? - drop in deep end with people on hand with one to one support. Very few skills needed to get started.
see: http://media.conted.px.ac.uk/res02

GILES - not ALT

I've spent most of the last 24 hours (with no wifi) inventing GILES (Game-inspired learning environments0 concept) with Dave White (Oxford) and Nicola Whitton (Manc M) and realise that I can apply everything I've learned about 3dvw LEs and game-based learning at last (more later maybe...). This has already turned into a draft paper! I was invited with a handful of others to a very open-ended brainstorm by Lawrie Phipps from JISC. Exciting. Also connected with Bob Rotheram and agreed to collaborate on audio feedback somehow as we have a lot of parallel work going on. Now at ALT and connected (in all senses). Running an ARG across conf here - God knows how many are playing. Intention to promote engagement with creative applications of digital audio/media. About to run a an open house Thunderstorm session inviting spontaneous presentations from the audience in response to 'what are you doing with podcasting?'. Tomorrow a paper on creative apps for ed audio... knackered already.
Looking forward to the interesting challenges. Thanks! I hope I will be joined in this undertaking.
Note: this blog and comments are currently quite public!

Conference game?

Need ideas for a conference game. .. where is Louise when you need her?
I feel something interactive is appropriate ...
OK puppet masters, how about people back at base set challenges (reasonable challenges and no nudity) for those attending! Prize for the challenge we enjoy doing most (we vote), prize for best solution (you vote).

Hallam takes over another conference

There's a fair contingent from the SHU LTI at ALT-C this year. You can follow our exploits here.