Fortnightly Mailing

The Rave Wireless blog - pleasantly un-corporate in tone

Mobile Campus Life is the corporate blog of Rave Wireless Inc., a US company that provides mobile applications and managed mobile phone services to US HE institutions. There is enough of interest on this blog, and it is sufficiently "un-corporate" in tone, to warrant including it as a resource here.

The learner experience of e-learning - 4 new, useful, brief guides from JISC

Last November I gave a plug for some JISC "Learner Experience of E-learning" (LEX) reports, by Linda Creanor and Kathryn Trinder from Glasgow Caledonian University, and Doug Gowan and Carol Howells from the Open Learning Partnership.

JISC has now published 4 useful short guides, each consisting of a 3 or 4 page ~100 kB PDF file, deriving from these LEX reports as well as from some other practical research funded by JISC under the same programme. They deserve to be widely read and used; and thanks to Ellen Lessner for tipping me off about them.

• Methods for evaluating the learner experience of e-learning;
• IT support and provision for learners;
• Designing courses and activities for e-learners;
• Recommendations for post-16 institutions on enhancing the learner experience of e-learning.

Personalisation and innovation in education

Plan of the Media Zoo

Links fixed 15 August 2012.

On 22/3/2007 I took part (in my ALT role) in a "round table" organised in Birmingham by Desire2Learn entitled "personalisation and innovation in education". Participants came from across the spectrum of English public sector education, including primary schools, secondary schools, technology colleges, city academies, universities. There was no hard sell from Desire2Learn: indeed, no sell of any kind.

We started off with a funny opening presentation by Gilly Salmon, who talked us through efforts being made, successfully it seems, to sharply increase the use of learning technology in course provision at Leicester University, where Gilly is Professor of e-Learning and Learning Technologies. Leicester's Media Zoo, and the projects that it leads to, with its chunky, almost charming, animation-laden interface, is worth examining in detail, along with the animal-acronym projects and services that Leicester has established. (Impala, for example, has plenty of useful stuff about podcasting.)

By far the most impressive part of the session was the time given over to reports from Balsall Common Primary School in Coventry, Longfield School in Darlington, King John School in Essex (web site built using Drupal), Walsall Academy in West Bromwich, Djanogly City Academy in Nottingham, about what they are doing to use learning technology to support the curriculum. Correction: about what they are doing to change the curriculum to make it learner-centred, and the role (sometimes only a small role) in this of learning technology.

For example:

• at Balsall Common Primary, children of 4 are acquiring a sophisticated vocabulary and framework for understanding their own learning, and leave the school fluent in the use of a wide range of digital technologies;
• Longfield, a secondary school, has over a two or three year period, moved from a "technology free" standing start to using ICT throughout the curriculum;
• at Djanogly City Academy (which has the freedom to largely ignore the National Curriculum, and which has an utterly non-standard building design), Year 7 pupils learn in large groups, continuously supported by 4 teachers with no set subjects, intensive and extensive use of the Web as a learning resource, and no disruptive moves between  classrooms. (Typically learners in a National Curriculum face 14 different teachers per week, having arrived from primary school where they'll have been taught by one or at the most two teachers.) 

Three things came across to me from the discussion. Firstly, that a far better term to use than "personalised" is "learner-centred": the learning is effective because learners, whatever their age, are committed, challenged, and given control (for more on this see Itiel Dror's 3 C's of Learning). Secondly, that whilst the National Curriculum exists as it is, and whilst schools are constrained by Government testing and reporting requirements, the push for personalisation (a.k.a. learner-centred provision) will come to very little. Finally, that learning technologists (for that is what all of us at the round table are), have a great deal in common, irrespective of whether we work in industry, adult learning, schools, colleges, or universities. Getting transfer of good practice between us is a worthwhile endeavour.

Doodle - multilingual meeting scheduler along similar lines to Meetomatic

Using a third party remotely hosted system for setting up meetings has risks, partly because of the data that is involved (you need to trust the service provider), and partly because if the services fails mid way through fixing a date you get egg on your face.

But such services are a big, time-saving improvement on email.

I make a lot of use and highly rate Meetomatic. Via Wayne Hodgins I came across a service with similar features called Doodle, by Michael Näf. It has a less "retro" design than Meetomatic, and allows you to specific discrete time slots for potential meetings; and unlike Meetomatic, Doodle publishes all users' availability as this information becomes available, so using it feels like more of a collective process than with Meetomatic, where only the organiser of the meeting sees participants' availability.

Doodle is also available in French, German, and Rumanian, as well as English, and, unlike Meetomatic, it carries no advertising.

For the moment I will stick with Meetomatic, but Doodle is the first alternative that comes close.

Using journalists' pocket recorders to create podcasts

Earlier this month I wrote a post picking up on John Mayer's work on the (beneficial) impact of podcasting in US legal education. Here is a link to the relevant FAQ page on the CALI web site, which covers a lot of the practicalities. Some of it is very specific to the CALI set-up. Some of it much less so.

Striking new look to Keith Burnett ’s blog about Maths teaching and ILT

In 2006 Keith Burnett did a well read Guest Contribution about using Blogger to get teachers started with e-learning. His Bodmas blog has a striking new look and feel. I like the way all four columns have their widths set relatively, so that you can see them all however wide you browser is set.

Sloan-C Wiki - examples of student-generated content, including one from the University of Reading.

The dependable Sloan Consortium has just published a new area of its Effective Practives wiki that showcases specific examples of how student-generated content can be used effectively in online education. So far there are seven examples, including one each from Japan and from the UK. There is also a link to a short essay about student-generated content.

Computer assisted legal education - report from talk by John Mayer

Comprehensive report by David Weinberger from 13 March lunch-time talk by John Mayer at the Berkman Centre at Harvard about the work of CALI (Centre for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction). The section on podcasting caught my eye, and reminded me of some things that Jim Farmer mentioned during a face-to-face discussion we had a few days ago. In summary:

• Podcasting lectures does not result in law students skipping lectures.
• Students who attend lectures listen to podcasts of the lectures they've been to.
• Lecturers listen to their own and each others' podcasts.
• Students listen to the podcasts of lecturers who are not teaching them, to get a different angle.
• A cheap and cheerful reporter's recording device - with a cheap lapel microphone and good data-compression, "tuned" to capture speech - is the best way to record, rather than using the microphone at the lectern.

16 bits per second - the bandwidth of consciousness

Nørretranders caption: Küpfmuller's diagram of the information flow through a human being: from the senses through the brain (and consciousness) to the motor apparatus. The thick line shows how many million bits from the senses are sent via nerve connections to the brain, which has a very high bandwidth. From the brain the information is sent to the body, which manages about the same amount of information as the senses receive. The thin line shows how the consciousness processes a very little proportion of this information.

I've written previously about  The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders. The diagrams and captions above and below are taken from the book's sixth chapter "The Bandwidth of Consciousness", and for me they and the evidence that Nørretranders presents are a revelation, in that they emphasise how little we can consciously take in at a time; and hence how designers of e-learning materials need to avoid creating cognitive overload.

25 November 2012 note. Today this 5.5 year old post was linked to from Ycombinator, causing a large spike in traffic. You may want to read and possibly contribute to the discussion that has developed there.

Nørretranders caption: An overview of the information flow through a human being, drawn by up by the Erlangen School (Frank, Lehrl, er al.). A so-called organogram. Just as Küpfmuller's diagram it shows that more information goes in and out of humans than consciousness perceives.

Database of web based office tools and applications

This page of around 250 web based office tools and applications (a.k.a. "Office 2.0 Database") - via Scott Wilson's work blog. You will be amazed at how many there are and the range of functions that they cover.  14.3.2007. Thanks to Ismael Ghalimi of IT|Redux for pointing out that there is a new version of the Office 2.0 Database at http://o20db.com/, with over 450 tools and applications.