Technology

Virtual Pompeii

Julian Beckton Second Life, Technology , ,

I’ve just been reading about the Sydenham Crystal Palace project, a JISC funded project to recreate the Pompeii Court in Second Life. Now it’s been a while since I looked at Second Life, having decided that the requirements for high spec graphics cards, the requirement for users to learn to operate in the world and the (let’s face it) naff quality of the animation made it pretty much a non starter for educational purposes.  It’s quite telling that the project page tells potential users to access the world through a non standard Second Life viewer.

Still, things move on, and I was interested  to see that JISC thought this project worth funding.  Here’s what the project team say they’re trying to do:

The aim of our project has to build a digitised collection of the material that was in the Pompeii Court and to create an interactive online space to house it. Visitors will be able to tour the Court and interact with us, other visitors and the objects on display. In the upcoming phases of the project, we want to compare further how the social and educational experiences offered by our Model compare with the successes and failures of the original Court, which itself was a Victorian experiment in education and reconstruction.

Well, I can see the rationale behind that. The original was a reconstruction, so it makes a sort of sense to reconstruct it again to see if the digital world can offer the same experience. But I don’t see how it can be the same. Virtual Worlds aren’t really 3D experiences, but 2D representations of a 3D world.

What is more problematic though is the experience of being a student. If you accept Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework model, there needs to be an opportunity set out your own conceptions first,  to interact with your teachers so that you can modify your conceptions and then to restate them. Laurillard also points out, rightly I think that academic knowledge is second order, that is, it consists of knowledge of others’ descriptions of the world, rather than of the world itself. A reconstruction tries for first order knowledge – that is to allow students to perceive the world. But actually it’s all based on others’ precepts.

For those reasons, I ‘m not sure that the project will be all that helpful in teaching students about classical civilisation. I do realise that this isn’t exactly what the project is about. There’s quite a lot about art, perception and philosophy built into it, and that’s important, but I’m interested in the pedagogical value of the project, so I am going to talk about that aspect anyway. I’ve never done any formal learning about Roman civilisation myself, (other than  school Latin) but a visit I made  to the real Herculaneum  some years ago did really change my conception of what a Roman town might have been like. I remember being very surprised to discover the atmosphere and the architecture put me much more in mind of a Middle Eastern village, than the classical structures we generally associate with Rome.  Equally, reading Mary Beard’s Pompeii (Which, incidentally is the best non fiction book I’ve read in some time.) made me see Roman life in a different way.  Of course had I been able to visit Herculaneum and Pompeii in, say, AD 78 I would probably have a different set of conceptions again.

My point is that I think claims for the kind of environment that the project is trying to claim are a little overblown. Second Life is not immersive, in the way that a visit to a site, or even reading a book is. Certainly students could be asked to discuss the value of this kind of representation before visiting the simulation, and again after a visit. Expert avatars could be provided at regular times to talk to visitors about these cities, or about the other aspects of the project.  I do wonder about the accessibility issues though – there’s quite a lot of evidence in the literature of students who are using technological applications focusing on operational issues, how to work the thing and so on, rather than learning the content. And how users with disabilities will cope remains to be seen.

Still, I look forward to seeing the evaluation report. Should make for interesting reading.

Blackboard Midlands User Group meet. Part 3: Community reports

Julian Beckton Blackboard

Or, what everyone else is doing with Blackboard.  As I said in part 1 of this post, the biggest issue for many of our local Bb users is whether or not to upgrade to version 9. Northampton had done so, albeit on hosted servers, rather than attempting to install it locally, whereas Leicester had tried to and abandoned the project because of what seemed to be a relatively trivial issue about font recognition. Of course it turned out not to be trivial!

There was a bit of a debate about how long sites should be “kept” for, largely because a delegate asked whether you could transfer archived sites across versions. A delegate from De Montfort said that they had tested it and yes you could, although the question wasn’t so much about learning materials, where it seemed that many institutions had found that colleagues were quite happy to copy sites from one year to the next. The issue was one of student submissions, and how long they should be kept for. Only one institution follows our model of keeping the last two years, and deep-archiving older sites (I think it was DMU again – it’s hard to keep track of who says what in a discussion that takes place in a lecture theatre). The question at issue was the maintenance of electronic “quality boxes”. Yes, of course you could download selections of submissions and keep them separately but some delegates felt that Blackboard should be able to offer some sort of feature like this. Afterwards it occurred to me that you could probably manage this by using the content store if you really wanted to.

A few institutions were working with web 2.0 and other add ons. Staffordshire were putting out tenders for proposals by teaching staff for innovative use of web 2.0 tools (A similar model to our FED projects, I guess, and they’re supporting that with a technology enhanced learning conference each June. (Think we could squeeze yet another conference in?) In a similar vein the University of Worcester were doing a lot of work with tools like, their learning object repository, Wimba and the Adobe e-learning suite, although they didn’t demonstrate any of this. They’re also creating a virtual streaming server to enable staff to upload audio and video, again, much as we plan to do.  This kind of third party approach to modifying Blackboard was also in evidence in the presentation from University College Birmingham where they’re making use of Articulate to increase the level of student interactivity.

The last category of activity was around the way Blackboard is managed, and there were some interesting comparisons, although unfortunately not enough time to discuss them. Aston for example manage their entire support with a team of three, two full time staff and one placement student who changes each year, and Staffordshire are talking about “farming their course management” out to the faculties. If that means having “super users” in each faculty, I can see that might be a productive approach, but as ever there wasn’t time to follow this up in any detail. On a more technical note, I was interested to see Derby’s approach which used multiple log in pages for different types of student. It wasn’t easy to get a view of what this looked like for students, because Sandra, their sys admin, showed us her page which contained tabs for each of them. I’m assuming that they’re using branding to manage this.

So, all in all a useful, if rushed, day. I do think we need to do a bit more investigation around the third party tools that others are using and see if we can get any benefit from them ourselves. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to follow up some of the contacts at the national user group meeting in Durham next January.

Blackboard Midlands User Group meet. Part 2: The assessment handler.

Julian Beckton Assessment, Blackboard , ,

As I mentioned in the previous post, Blackboard have developed a plug in to handle assessments based on institutional procedures for managing assessments, as opposed to a system that handles assessments the way Blackboard thinks they should be handled. It was designed in conjunction with Sheffield Hallam University, partly in response to the NSS findings about student dissatisfaction with the rate at which they received feedback on their assessments. The tool is an “add on” to versions 7, 8 and 9 so we could use it, were we prepared to pay for it.

The procedure for creating the assessment is much the same as it is now, except that there is another option in the drop down list on the action bar – in the demo version this was called SHU assessment, although if we were to use it we could call it what we liked. “Lincoln Assessment would seem favourite!  (This was in version 8 which we use – they didn’t show it in the new interface for version 9). Once  you have clicked the go button, you add the title, brief and attach any files much as you do now, but there are some additional features. You can describe the assignment as a “group” or an “individual” assignment, although I didn’t see that this gave any additional functionality beyond a description (Could be that they didn’t demo it). You also have the opportunity to designate a physical hand in point, so the tool can be used to record and publicise assignments, but you don’t have to submit them on-line. Quite why you couldn’t just write that in the description field wasn’t made clear. The really interesting bit was in a feature called the “file rename pattern”. Essentially this allows you to change the way the grade centre records the submissions. Most obviously it facilitates anonymous marking because you are asked if you want to alter the students name to say, an enrolment number. Of course anonymity here does depend rather on the institutional definition of anonymity, and there is an option to generate a random string of numbers. I asked if you could turn anonymity on and off at will, which would be a rather obvious weakness, but I have to say that my question was deflected (OK, they didn’t answer) and I didn’t get chance to pursue it as there were many other questions.  That’s an important issue though. The Turnitin Grademark feature offers a similar level of anonymity, but if an instructor attempts to turn it off, it does allow it, but they have to enter a reason why they’re turning it off, and they can’t then turn it back on again.

An additional feature, although one I didn’t quite see the point of was that you could set limits to the number of files that a student uploaded to any assessment, and you could also set a maximum disk size for assessments. I suppose that it would be useful if you’re trying to teach students to manage file sized properly (Which would be no bad thing, come to think of it), but I couldn’t help thinking you’d be making a bit of a rod for your own back if you have plenty of space.

Completing (i.e. submitting) the assignment is much as it is now, except that students now get a digital receipt for their submission via e-mail, which provoked a debate among delegates about how worthwhile this is. My own view is that it’s fine, provided students have the option to turn it off if they don’t want it.  There are a few extra tools for grading the assignment now. An instructor has the option to select files and download them into a zip file which also includes a spreadsheet with all the students’s details. Once the work has been marked the instructor can zip them back up, along with the spreadsheet, (into which marks have been entered) and re-upload them into the gradebook.  This sounds pretty much like what our computing department have been asking for for a while, so it may be worth investigating this tool further. (I wouldn’t put too much trust in a demonstration).

Blackboard Midlands User Group meet. Part 1:Version 9 or not?

Julian Beckton Blackboard

Every so often Blackboard users from around the region meet up at one of the hosting institutions. This time I had a long journey to Birmingham University Medical School. (Only fair that I should travel though as Lincoln hosted the last one!). The format of these events is that each attending institution gives a brief update of what they’re doing, and then there’s usually a presentation from Blackboard about what they plan to do. Rather than give a chronological account, I thought I’d treat you to a few blog posts on the main issues. First up is the upgrade to Version 9, or rather the debate about whether we should go for it.

In summary I’d say the jury was still out, but appears to be moving to a majority verdict in favour. The most convincing arguments came from Northampton who admitted to some pain, but identified more positives, which were that their focus groups liked the version 9 interface, and they were getting positive feedback from their early adopters. Certainly, the presentation from Blackboard themselves on the Next Generation did give the impression that in the next release Blackboard would begin to look a bit more like a 21st Century e-learning product. I’ll discuss that shortly, but before I do I should run through some of the negatives. Northampton did admit that they had had as much as 7 hours downtime since the upgrade, but they have a hosted service (rather than running their own servers) and a lot of this had to do with a move of the data centre they were using. They also admitted that their Blackboard contact was very familiar with their server configuration, and this proved a great help. There were some reports from other institutions (albeit not represented at the meeting) that they had needed to updgrade their server confiiguration very rapidly in order to cope with version 9.

Leicester University also reported a problem with the upgrade to version 9 that proved a show stopper for them. Essentially it was that the wysiwyg editor didn’t respect font choices. This might sound relatively trivial, except that they had a number of departments who needed to use mathematical notation, but found themselves unable to use the symbol for pi. In contrast Dudley College, said that they had decided to abandon Blackboard and  switch to Moodle, but after testing the latter were planning to launch Blackboard 9 to all students at Easter.  Each organisation only had 5 minutes to talk so I never found out what the problem was with Moodle.  Interestingly, given the discussions we’ve been having at Lincoln Birmingham University is thinking about using version 9 as a student portal, but from the discussion it seems they’re not much further along that road than we are at Lincoln.

So what does Version 9 have to offer? Well the afternoon was taken up with a presentation from Blackboard staff in the USA (Birmingham has quite an impressive videoconferencing set up.) They were actually describing what Blackboard is calling the Next Generation. Of course, one has to be cautious about this kind of thing. Blackboard presentations always begin with a slide that has a lot in common with those voice overs on the Simpsons when they’re spoofing adverts. “Caution. Any images or promises in this presentation do not imply any connection with reality!” I’m exaggerating of course although not by much.

But, bearing that in mind, this is what they had to offer. The phrase they used was that these features are “targeted” at release 9.1 (not scheduled for it)

Bearing that in mind though there are also some interesting developments in functionality – “New” content types  – you can “add a page” and “add a file”. Essentially this seems to be a modification of the add item feature – a page can contain thumbnails of files, which can be stored either with the site or in the content store. If the file is a PDF it can be set to open on the same page.  Essentially it’s a wysiswyg editor, as now, but on a larger scale.
It shows a list of files associated with the site, which you can see as thumbnails, or in a traditional list view. Still needs the content system for full functionality.
The Edit view seems (on some pages) to have been replaced with a “build content” button which seems more intuitive.
A lot of the control panel functionality seems to have shifted to the side bar – you still have a control panel, but the links now open as sub menus (Not unlike the Windows file Explorer) The site map too opens in the side bar.
Each link in the site has a sub menu for things like adaptive release – in fact they  seemed to be roll-over menus. Rather than the four buttons we know each item has a set of sub menus
There’s an assign text book feature, which looks very like the old Amazon plug in
Learning module feature. Offers ability to organise information in a logical manner and then present that to studentes. Again, it’s basically a display of folders
Lesson plan feature. Certain parts of the lesson plan can be explained to the student, who sees information about the lesson, instructor objectives, content and practice questions. Instructors get lots of opportunity to identify (and add) metadata – again from a sub menu. Basically it seems to create a template for your own plans. Second part is allowing you to insert curriculum resources (e.g. learning materials, subject content etc.
Mash up. (Not really a mash-up) But they’re adding a feature by which you can easily import Flickr, Slideshare and Youtube data into Bb. You simply search (e.g.) You tube, preview, select it and then embed it. In the presentation this all seemed to work fairly simply.
There is also an add interactive/tool menu button. Seems that BB have now produced their own wiki tool Very detailed wiki stats are available – even to the level of detail of how many words have been modified on any given page by any given students. They’ve also added some grading functionality to the wiki. You can grade the wiki from within the wiki. True of blogs and journals as well.
Changes to grade center. Again accessible from control panel which is a sub menu on side bar. Can also search grade centre for different types of view. (e.g. Assignments, blogs, tests)
New feature will be the ability to grade anonymously. Also they’ve introduced the ability to grade by individual questions, rather than by students. (although if you do choose this latter option then you can still anonymise the students)
Question types chosen from within the questions (as opposed to selection the question type before you create a question) Again there seems to be a much nicer interface. BB weren’t able to say which

Bearing that in mind though there are also some interesting developments in functionality –There are  “New” content types. I’m not sure they’re all that new actually. For example they showed us that you can “add a page” and “add a file”. Essentially this seems to be a modification of the add item feature – a page can contain thumbnails of files, which can be stored either with the site or in the content store. If the file is a PDF it can be set to open on the same page. Admittedly it’s difficult to get an impression from a presentation but it seemed to me that they were basically offering a wysiswyg editor, as they are now, but with a rather better interface and the opportunity to separate files from items.

One feature I liked was that you can now see a list of files associated with the site, which you can see as thumbnails, or in a traditional list view. They said that this still needs the content system for full functionality, although in response to a question afterwards said it didn’t. It was getting late so I didn’t pursue that.

Another interesting development is that the Edit View hyperlink seems (on some pages) to have been replaced with a “build content” button which seems more intuitive. On other pages it had been replaced with an Edit button. I thought that a bit confusing but on reflection I suppose if you’ve started to build something, it is logical to go back and “edit” it

Much of the control panel functionality seems to have shifted to the side bar – you still have a control panel, but the links now open as sub menus (Not unlike the Windows file Explorer) The site map too opens in the side bar, again something that is long overdue. I did wonder about accessibility as inevitably the font size is rather small.

Each link in the site has a sub menu for things like adaptive release – in fact they  seemed to be roll-over menus which expanded. Rather than the four buttons we know each item has a set of sub menus so rather than go to an adaptive release page, you’d roll over the link and various aspects of adaptive release are displayed – time constraints, user visibility conditions and so forth. A lot of this approach had been taken to the learning module feature, which had been given something of a makeover, in that it had a much more logical structure.

There’s an assign text book feature, which looks very like the old Amazon plug in

They’ve also added a “Lesson plan” feature. Certain parts of the lesson plan can be explained to the student, who sees information about the lesson, instructor objectives, content and practice questions. Instructors get lots of opportunity to identify (and add) metadata – again from a sub menu. Basically it seems to create a template for your own plans. There’s a second part to it which allows instructors  insert curriculum resources (e.g. learning materials, subject content etc. making it quite hard to distinguish from a learning module.

Of course, few corporations can see a bandwagon without wanting to jump aboard, so we now have Blackboard “Mash-ups” Actually they’re not really mash-ups except in so far as they show data from other sources. Instructors can easily import Flickr, Slideshare and Youtube data into Bb. You simply search (e.g.) You tube, preview, select it and then embed it. In the presentation this all seemed to work fairly simply.

There is also an add interactive/tool menu button. It seems that BB have now produced their own wiki tool. It looks different from the learning objects wikis but they seemed most anxious to show us the eye boggling level of detail including how many words have been modified on any given page by any given students. They’ve also added some grading functionality to the wiki. You can grade the wiki from within the wiki. True of blogs and journals as well.

There have also been some changes to grade center. Again accessible from control panel which is a sub menu on side bar. Can also search the grade centre for different types of assessements  (e.g. Assignments, blogs, tests). Another new feature is the ability to grade anonymously. Also they’ve introduced the ability to grade by individual questions, rather than by students. (although if you do choose this latter option then you can still anonymise the students). Question types  are now chosen from within the questions (as opposed to having to select the question type before you created it)

That’s a bit of a gallop through their presentation and I may not have done it full justice. But there’s a lot else to go through, and I’ve already broken my rule about 100o words per post. Future posts on this topic (In the next day or so if I get time) will look at the “assessment handler” a new plug in for managing assessments that is configurable to reflect an institutions procedures, and a second post about some of the issues that were raised in the discussion.

Prettifying the reading list.

Julian Beckton Blackboard , , ,

I am indebted to my colleague Paul Stainthorp for this ingenious mash up of Refworks and Amazon to create something that almost (but not exactly) resembles the old Amazon reading list plug in we used for Blackboard. The plug in used to show bibliographic details and an image of the book cover making reading lists a bit more interesting. The user could click on the image and buy the book from Amazon, or follow a link to the library catalogue (assuming the site owner had put one in). Unfortunately when we upgraded to Bb version 8 the plug in stopped working as the developers hadn’t offered an upgrade

Well the mash up goes one better in that the book title is linked to the library catalogue, and it also offers links to a Refworks folder, Librarything, Google Books and Amazon (but of course!) I should say here  it’s not simple to do – and the method described here is local to the University of Lincoln.  But in the interests of remembering how to do it, I thought I’d set out the method here. Couple of things to remember before you start. You will need a Yahoo Pipes account, and you will need to know your way around Refworks. You also need to have instructor or Teaching Assistant rights on Blackboard.

1) Go to your Blackboard site and click the Refworks Bridge tool (You’ll find it under the Site Tools menu)

2) Create a Refworks account linked to Blackboard (N.B. This will not be synchronised with your main Refworks account) (Need to put instructions about this here) (You only have to do this once – that is not for every site in which you are an instructor. If you’ve already done this ignore this step)

3) Set up a shared folder in the BB refworks account.

4) Add the books to the shared folder. You could use the Refworks Ref-grab-it tool to get the data from Amazon to do this. In fact it is a good idea to do so because the pipe will be calling the ISBN from Amazon in order to display the image.

5) Share your Refworks folder. Ensure that the show RSS feeds check box is ticked and select “50 Most Recently Added References” from the create RSS feeds drop-down box.

6)DO NOT forget to give your folder a Title.

7) Click the URL in the shared folder display, and right click the RSS feed icon. Select “copy shortcut” from the sub menu. (if you’re using IE7 – if you’re using Google Chrome it will say “Copy Link Address”

7 Leave this window open, open a new one and go to Yahoo Pipes

6) If you haven’t already got one create an account for yourself on Yahoo Pipes. If you have, log in to it

7) Search Pipes for “pstainthorp”

8.) select “University of Lincoln Library Booklist”

9) Paste the URL of your shared folder into the Refworks RSS feed and click the “Run Pipe” button

10) Your reading list will be displayed. But you haven’t finished yet. Oh no.

11) Right click the Get as RSS Icon and select “copy shortcut” from the sub menu.

12) Go to the content area of your Blackboard site where you want the reading list to be displayed.

13 Go to Edit View and add external link. Paste the RSS feed you’ve just copied into the URL box.

14) Give the external link a title, and add any comments.

15) Click Submit.

And that is it!

Academic identity and e-learning.

Julian Beckton EDUs, Technology , ,

Being at a bit of a loose end this morning, I wandered into the University Library and picked up the Times Higher Education Supplement. (No, I don’t have a life!) Anyway. There was an interesting article describing a paper about academics’ reluctance to engage with e-learning, something that most of us working in educational development units can tell one or two stories about, and does get the odd mention in the thesis I’m working on. I am not saying that all academics are completely technophobic. Far from it. In my experience most are not, and I don’t think the author of the paper is saying that either.

But she does pick on something I found in my own research – that e-learning (and indeed wider attempts at “educational development”) can be seen as undermining academic identity. I think it was Ray Land who first described educational development as a “modernist project” which of course carries with it modernist notions of “improvement” and doing things “better” which implies that things are currently not being done very well. It’s hardly surprising then that it isn’t welcomed with open arms. The problem is that technology isn’t going to go away, and I think, “academic identities” are inevitably going to change. I don’t see how it can be otherwise. It’s easy to be sniffy about students doing Google searches instead of “proper” research but the fact is that, like it or not, the Internet contains more facts and arguments about them than we can carry in our crania no matter how exalted they may be. (and, yes, I know there’s more to the Internet than a Google search, and I also know that there’s as much crap out there as there is good stuff!)

I’m not saying academic identities will disappear, just that they’ll change. I think we’ll see much more openness in terms of learning resources being made available, but the most radical change may well come in assessment. I think, as I’ve probably blogged about before (and Stephen Downes certainly has), that the degree classification will in a few years be seen as much less important than the students’ blog, e-portfolio, and publicly available work. The challenge for academic staff will be ensuring that the student’s public persona is critically and disciplinary sound.

(Mind you I suspect that if and when that happens employers will start to complain that they have too much information, and wouldn’t it be better if universities summarised a student’s achievement, by oh I don’t know, describing an excellent student as “first class” and, shall we say, a less (but still very good ) student as “upper second class” student, a reasonably competent one as “lower second”…)

Predictions from the past.

Julian Beckton Technology , ,

The other night I found a slim volume dating from 1998, which I had quite forgotten about. Now, I’m always finding old books, but I mention this one because it was one of a series of books which attempted to predict what would happen over the next 10 years in a variety of fields, and given what I usually blog about, it seemed quite relevant. If you’re taking notes, it was entitled “Media” by Patrick Barwise and Kathy Hammond, and published by Phoenix Books, and dealt with what was likely to happen in the field of digital technology. (Full bibliographic details at http://openlibrary.org/b/OL10316007M/Media-(Predictions)

Well, the ten years have passed, and it was interesting to see what the authors had got right. Quite a lot as it turns out, although inevitably some of their forecasts do look a bit strange to our eyes. I’m not going to rehearse all that here. In the first place, they were the ones who stuck their necks out to make the predictions, and I’m writing with the luxury of hindsight so it would be churlish to point out what they got wrong, and in the second place if you care that much, you can always find the book through the library service, or one of the online booksellers and read it yourself. (It’s not available in e-book format, as far as I can see. There again, they did predict that books would still be around in 2010.)

What I did want to comment on though were some of the social implications. They did suggest that new technologies would increase communication between people, while implying that the quality of that communication may fall. I think they were right about that. Facebook and Twitter are no substitute for real human interaction. In a poignant coda to their section on work for example they describe “teleworking” as approaching the “grim type of life experienced by outworkers in the clothing trade (the PC taking on the role of sewing machine, with payment based on the number of enquiries handled). It could represent a backward shift in employee conditions: no office or canteen socialization, less chance of training, promotion or even “sick pay” (p42) Call centres anyone?

Secondly, although they don’t dwell on this they do identify the potential of digital technologies for increasing inequality. If you can’t access the technology, whether for economic, social or health reasons, and it’s the only way to get information, you are bound to be be disadvantaged. Barwise and Hammond thought you’d have to pay more to get your information in an alternative format if you fell into one of these categories. In practice, I suspect that even that might not be possible. In many cases alternatives do not exist. The problem is not the technology, but the value market capitalism places on human interaction. Not much, unless it can be monetized, it would seem.

It would be very interesting to see some of the other volumes in this series. Unfortunately the publisher’s web site doesn’t list them. I suppose they’re long out of print now.

Natives, immigrants, visitors or residents?

Julian Beckton Technology

Digital, I mean.

I found a very interesting and thought provoking blog post from Dave White at Oxford today about the digital immigrants debate we hear so much of. I won’t rehash his post, which you can read here, but I thought there was much to be said for the distinction he makes. I have one further refinement to suggest though, because I don’t believe we can classify people so easily. I would argue that when I’m at work, I’m much closer to a resident in his terms because I spend most of my time on-line and do much of my job on the web. But at home, I’m much closer to a “visitor” (although I do “resident-like” things, such as booking holidays, on-line shopping and a little Internet banking from home.)

So perhaps the distinction isn’t that clear cut. I think most of our on-line activity is situated, that is determined by what we want or need to do, more so than by our personal preferences. (That’s probably true of most activity, come to think of it.) The implications for educational development are that we should perhaps think more about the learning situations we’re placing our learners in, rather than the affordances provided by technology. And, importantly we shouldn’t make assumptions about what “students” want.

The single document format debate

Julian Beckton Assessment, E-portfolios, Higher Education, Tech Tips, Technology, Virtual Learning Environments , , ,

Last year, we introduced Blackboard at Lincoln, and, whatever your views on the merits, or otherwise of virtual learning environments, the functionality it is providing is definitely leading to an increase in interest in on-line submission of assessment. This is also an issue for exportability in e-portfolio development. (Just so I can keep the blog on theme!) If you want to make sure documents can be easily exported from one e-portfolio system to another, then I think it’s sensible to try and standardise your document formats. (Of course, this all depends on the type of documents you want to store in your portfolio)

But the submission of assignments issue presents a problem. Students don’t all use Microsoft Word 2003, which is still the University’s preferred word processing platform. So they’re submitting in Word 2007 (and a variety of other exotica that lurk out there on the net.). The result is of course that tutors can’t read these strange files when they download the files to mark them.

So, one suggestion, is that the university should move to insisting on submission in PDF format. Broadly, I think that’s a sensible approach, (although it’s not a solution). For all the talk we hear of digital natives, students aren’t all as tech savvy as they’re sometimes portrayed. And unless you’re on campus, or willing to pay for a PDF converter for your personal PC, it’s not so easy to do.

Anyway, my point is, if you want to convert documents to PDF, I’ve just discovered some useful (and free!) tools to do it. Here’s the link.

Portfolios.lincoln: Blogging

Julian Beckton E-portfolios, Portfolios.lincoln, Tech Tips , , ,

Portfolios.lincoln offers users the facility to write your own blog. In fact, you can have as many blogs as you like. The reason for this is to provide users with a learning journal, or journals.

Learning journals (which can take the form of a blog) are a common feature of portfolios, as they are an excellent way of recording day to day events that you might want to return to later. Entries in such a journal can also provide reflective statements about your learning or work in themselves. Portfolios.lincoln also allows you to tag blog entries, so you can easily search for all your entries on a topic. You can also attach files to provide evidence of the claims you are making.

To set up a blog, click the “My Portfolio” button and click “My Blogs”. This will open a form for you to create a blog.

The new blog form
The new blog form

Give your blog a title and a description and add any tags that you think are appropriate. (Remember you’re setting up the blog here, not making an entry in it, so you should describe the purpose of the blog.). Click “create blog”. This will take you to the “My blogs”, page which, as the name suggests, contains a list of all your blogs, including the one you have just created. To add a post click the “Add post” button next to the blog you want to update.

Viewing Blogs.

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If you are using the Portfolios.lincoln blogging tool you can add your blog, a list of the ten most recent posts, or a single post from your blog into any of your views. Simply drag the relevant block into the appropriate column in your view. The single post feature is particularly useful if you want to include a statement about some form of achievement in a view. If you want to publish your blog on the internet, simply create a single column view, set access to “public” and drag the “blog” block (centre) into it.

External Blogs.

Many bloggers are already using external blogging services, such as WordPress, or Blogger. While you can’t easily display a single post from these services in Portfolios.lincoln, it is possible to use an RSS feed reader to display recent links from your blog.

Rss Block feed
Rss Block feed
. Before you do this, visit your blog and look for an RSS icon (which will look like the orange icon illustrated in the block, or alternatively there may be a link that says RSS”). Right click this and select “Copy shortcut” from the sub menu. Then return to your view, and drag the RSS feed block into your view. Where it asks for a URL paste the address of your feed into the form. You can decide whether you want your portfolio to show the full entries, or just the titles (readers will be able to click on these to visit your blog).
Don’t forget to give your block a title. Press Save. And that’s it.

That’s it for now. When more people are using Portfolios.lincoln, I’ll post something about using the groups tool as social networking is an important part of portfolio building. If you want to look through these posts, simply click the “Portfolios.lincoln” category in the category list on the right.

If you have any feedback on this, or any other comments on portfolio building or personal development planning, please do let me know by using the comment feature.