Fortnightly Mailing

Reading on screen - classy and thoughtful resources from the University of York

York University has set up Reading on screen, a pleasing web site to help students (mainly but not only) read on screen to better effect.

The site is the work of Matt Cornock from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, and Blayn Parkinson of York University's Elearning Development Team.

Here is the text from the site's about page:

We’re really pleased to launch this site available in direct response to student feedback at the University of York.

More than ever before, students have such a vast amount of digital literature available to them via the University Library and resources their teaching staff have posted on the Yorkshare VLE to support their studies.

We find that the techniques used for paper-based study are different from those required to engage with digital resources. What we have found from discussions with students is that these techniques are not taught, and are often unknown. Annotation, as one example, is a different process using digital devices than with pen and paper. At first, digital annotation may seem laborious, but, as with all things, practising the skill makes it easier. Similarly, the way documents are presented on screen can be improved with a few simple tricks such as using full-screen view or reading views built into software.

Our aim is to help students discover these tricks, tell us which ones work, and encourage comments and contributions with your suggestions and approaches to reading on screen.

 

MOOCs - achieving high quality at scale: nice quote from David Wiley

Getting on for 15 years ago I put an "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course in which I played a role. I'd read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist or possibly in a digital version of Time Magazine. The Open Content licence was the precursor of Creative Commons, and Wiley  is still very active and justifiably influential in this field. This post [via Stephen Downes] has an incisive observation in it about personalisation:

"There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs [link added by Seb] permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

I agree instinctively with the emphasised section, though:

• it maybe too focused on content and not enough on the process of learning;
• there is also a role for software-driven personalisation of various kinds, including a role for software (in a centralised rather than decentralised way) doing background organisation of things like peer-assessment or ranking and filtering of user-contributions.

Some also argue that there is great scope (I'm less confident about this) for software successfully to shape adaptively which content and which learning activities are presented to which learners, when, taking account of their past performance, in a way that gives learners to feel that their learning has been personalised.

[Links to previous posts touching on personalisation.]

 

Online courses in community colleges - important research resources

The Community College Research Center is based at Columbia University. It describes itself as the US's "leading independent authority on the nation’s nearly 1200 two-year colleges".

Since 2009 CCRC has been doing (amongst other things) a range of interesting and important qualitative and quantitative research about online courses in community colleges (which sit somewhere between FE and HE in a UK context, overlapping with both), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and led by Shanna Smith Jaggars.

This page has links to abstracts and presentations, which highlight general and specific disparities in outcomes between face-to-face and online provision, and which point to action that can be taken to deal with these problems. (Instructor presence seems to be key.....)

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology Conference Listing, June to December 2013

Clayton Wright - source

The 29th Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [1.1 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note (which I've taken the liberty of reproducing in full, with one small change at the end in the attribution of an article by Clayton that appeared in the Association for Learning Technology's Newsletter in 2011).

Conferences that May Be Worth Your Time

Frequently, I receive requests from those new to the field of educational technology to suggest conferences that would be worthwhile to attend. It can be a difficult request to fulfill as the response: