I’m in the paper!

Julian Beckton Technology ,

Although, in truth I doubt being  misquoted in the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph is likely to be the first step on a glittering media career!

http://www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk/news/Netbook-project-given-thumbs-parents/article-1191920-detail/article.html

What I actually said was that a research project conducted by one of our doctoral students some years ago  on a pilot project in one  school in Cambridgeshire found that the school abandoned the idea because the children found the laptops too heavy. Which isn’t quite the impression the article gives. I suspect “schools in Cambridge” would be quite surprised to find that they had distributed laptops to their students.  And I dont’ remember saying that the presence of a VLE meant that students would get instant feedback on their marks. They can access the marks instantly once tutors have marked their work, but I think we’re some way from instant marking of written work. (On-line multiple choice tests  are a different matter of course, but we didn’t talk about them.)

I don’t really mind – the concern about overloading school children with extra equipment remains valid and the substance of the article is quite interesting. As an educational technologist, I think the project described sounds very promising and is worth watching. My reason for posting about this is to contribute to the debate about the accuracy and quality of material on the Internet as opposed to print media. Of course I could have made all this up.  I didn’t though.  A copy of the doctoral thesis I referred to is in the University library although the name of the author temporarily escapes me. But I guess the newspaper didn’t check it’s facts either.  You’d hardly expect that in a local paper filler piece of course, but the moral of the story is when you’re faced with a piece of information, wherever you read it,  don’t believe a word of it until you can back it up with some evidence.

Now comes the acid test!

Julian Beckton career, E-portfolios , , , , ,

I’ve been banging on about the virtues of e-portfolios for some time, and now I find myself in a situation where I might need them because all of a sudden I am under threat of redundancy. That is a little bit scary, as realistically I’m not the sort of age where a new job is going to be easy to find. But there is little value in panicking. While I might hope for the best, I shall certainly prepare for the worst and that’s where the e-portfolio comes in. I’ve been reviewing the three e-portfolios I’ve been using, Pebble Pad, Mahara and Linkedin and trying to make the decision as to which would be the best to help in my present situation. They all have their virtues. Pebble Pad is great at linking claims to evidence, and producing nicely printable CVs (Some employers, amazingly enough still want those!) Mahara is nice, user friendly and free, but I do think it needs a bit of development work yet. Linked in is good because of the social network it offers, and actually the public profile is rather good. (Don’t like the adverts when you’re editing it though! Perhaps I should shell out for an upgrade!) You can see my public Mahara profile by clicking the green icon in the “Web 2.0 portfolio” on the left. The Linkedin profile is here: –


View Julian Beckton's profile on LinkedIn

In a way the portfolios are working as a sort of comfort blanket, because faced with a job application, it’s relatively easy to mine the portfolio for data to fill in the application. Of course you still have to tailor your application to the post being advertised, but I think the e-portfolio does take out some of the grunt work of applications. Well, as I say in the header, now is when the theory gets put to the test! I shall keep you posted.

The other side of preparing for the worst is of course working out what you can cut from the household budget. Now that really is a depressing exercise!

Effective practice in a digital age

Julian Beckton Assessment, Technology, Web 2.0 , , ,

Just finished reading the eponymous JISC report above, and didn’t want to let it go without making a few reflective notes.

I think what stands out for me is just how much technology is going to change HE over the next few years. It’s not exactly news that the old transmission model of learning has been on the ropes for a few years now (although I wonder how far that perception has spread outside educational circles.) The case studies featured in the report show how the influence of what I am calling “reputational assessment” (but only because I can’t think of a better phrase) is growing. I don’t think it’ll be enough to have a 2:1 or even a first in a few years time. Students will have to expose themselves (so to speak) on the web – I think they’ll be expected to do something like I’ve done with the lifestream and web 2.0 portfolio on this blog, but on a much bigger scale. If employers are already Googling potential candidates to assess their suitability for employment, then a surely a degree classification will have rather less predictive value than the student’s public portfolio.

That means that educational providers are really going to have to get their heads around the implications of providing resources, managing this kind of activity across diverse hardware platforms (There’s an interesting aside on p.43 of the report about the importance of choice of mobile phone ownership and tarriff is to students self perceptions.)

E-portfolio as the next Killer app?

Julian Beckton Personal Development Planning ,

A recent post from David Warlick got me thinking a bit about where we should be going with e-portfolios. He lists some of the ideal features of an e-portfolio and I’ve abstracted some of them here (for the full list visit his post):-

  • It will have elements of social networking, featuring personal profiles and a variety of communication devices, such as blogging, micro-blogging, discussion forums, and commenting.
  • It will easily and invitingly accept multimedia products.
  • All products will be critiqueable with commenting or threaded discussion, by educators, fellow students, and the verifiable community.
  • It will also have components of a course management system. There will be curriculum structures within the platform so that work can be aligned, at least implicitly, with instructional objectives.
  • There will be a facility to critique work based beyond mere foundational standards. Work will also be judged on inventiveness, collaboration, quality of communication, compellingness, value to an authentic audience.
  • “Standards” will play a minimal role in this product.
  • It will facilitate portability, so that students can carry their portfolios with them to the next grade and/or as a standalone product on CD or other networked platform.
  • It will not merely be classroom-friendly. It will be user-friendly, regardless of the location of the learning.
  • Students will have a strong voice and hand in what it looks like and how it operates.
  • Students will be able to enter products that are not necessarily curriculum related, such as personal video and machinima creations, art work, game scores, business ventures, and products of personal and passionate interest.
  • Students, teachers, and parents will participate in selecting the work that is assessed.
  • It will preferably be open source, but not necessarily so.
  • The social aspects will be reasonably open. Students (and teachers) will be able to collaborate across classroom and school (and even national) boundaries.
  • All learning products will include an element of reflection by its producer.

It’s interesting that Mahara and Pebble Pad both tick some of these boxes, but neither tick all of them. Blackboard’s e-portfolio system (at least in versions 7 and 8 – I haven’t seen 9 yet) trails some way behind in virtually all these respects, except of course it does contain elements of a course management system, which neither Mahara or Pebble Pad do. (Well, they could do, but they’d need a lot of tweaking by teaching staff who in the past generally haven’t had the time.)

David asked for more suggestions for features. I’d add the ability to make artefacts out of the assets already existing in the portfolio. (A bit like Pebble Pad’s CV builder and webfolio tools, which I think are very useful features).  I also think that in the current climate, open source is essential. This is partly to do with economics and partly to do with philosophy. The economic reason is that any tool that is paid for by an insitution might be cut leaving students high and dry, and the philosophical reason is that I think for an e-portfolio tool to be useful it is best if it is as open as possible. (Of course there’s always a need for privacy, and it has to be able to cope with that too, but I’ve recently been impressed by Stephen Downes arguments about the virtues of open assessment)

A nice walk

Julian Beckton Leisure , , , ,

I’ve just noticed that this is my 100th blog post (Do I get a WordPress hat or something?). So by way of celebration, I thought I’d blog about something other than educational technology, e-portfolios and all that malarkey. One of the things I’ve been very conscious of is that the job of an educational technologist tends to be rather sedentary, and I’ve got into the habit of trying to walk for at least an hour, usually at lunch time every day to try and relieve the pressure on my waistband. Unfortunately it’s not always possible, as work tends to intervene more often than I would like. But, what I have done is devise a number of routes around the city of Lincoln. Each of them takes about an hour, if you walk briskly, something you need to do, if walking is to have much health benefit. Most of them can easily be shortened if it gets to be too much though.

I have been meaning to share them so others can work a bit of exercise into their daily routine, which brings me to the point of this post. I’ve added a “Walks” page to the blog. Each walk will (eventually) contain a map, photographs, a brief description littered with all the irreverent commentary that I can muster, and where the walk isn’t actually located in the city, any transport information you might need.

As it happens, today is the first time I’ve had the time to write one up, and in fact the one I chose to do isn’t actually one of the city routes, but I’m including because it happens to be one of my favourite short walks in the area and there’s a very interesting stately home, with farm shop and cafe at the end of it. (Not that the health conscious will be indulging in cake, I trust!) Anyway – enjoy.

The Edgeless University

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology, Web 2.0

…is the title of a new report from Demos, (A UK “think tank”) which deals with how higher education is (or isn’t) responding to the growth of technological tools. Personally, I found it a little disappointing, in that much of it simply rehearses debates that the educational technology community has been having for some time. (I laughed out loud when I read the hackneyed phrase about “guide on the side, not sage on the stage” presented as a new idea – It must have been around for at least 25 years)

But, and it’s a big but,  it is good that somebody outside that community has noticed that there are examples of extremely good practice within the sector, and is drawing attention to them. I’d also agree with the report’s argument that simply imposing a technology on a current practice is unlikely to make much difference, and I was pleased to see the benefits of Open Access being so well supported in the report.

Where I’m less convinced by is the continuing discussion of research and teaching as though these were separate activities. While it is true that “research” is currently seen as a more productive career path for academic staff, I’m coming round to the view that teaching should be “research engaged”, that students learn as they work with their teachers in the discovery of knowledge. That (admittedly quite old) idea has all sorts of implications for curriculum delivery, assessment, quality assurance and enhancement, and yes, the use of technology. All of these things will need to be radically rethought, if Higher Education Institutions are to become genuinely edgeless.

I’m really at the beginning of my thoughts about this, so the report was a useful prod in the right direction.

E-portfolios, Mahara

Julian Beckton Personal Development Planning , ,

Did a ten minute presentation on e-portfolios at our “Improving the Learning Experience event”, and promised to upload the slides to various e-portfolio tools so those who wanted to could follow up by looking at a shared view of my Portfolio. (University of Lincoln staff should just log into dev.lincoln.ac.uk and send me a friend request) I hadn’t really noticed this before, but when you upload a file to Mahara, there’s no real option to write a reflective statement linked to it as there is in Pebble Pad. That’s something I’d suggest including for the next upgrade, as the ability to include something about why an artefact has been included in a portfolio does seem quite important. Unless I’ve missed something.

Henry VIII

Julian Beckton General Interest , , , , ,

What, you might ask has he got to do with e-learning, web 2.0, or the sort of stuff I usually blog about. Well, nothing, but bear with me a  bit. On Saturday, acting on an impulse I decided to go to London and see the British Library’s  current exhibition on the old devil.

HenryVIII
HenryVIII

 

If you haven’t seen it and have any interest at all in British or European History, I suggest you go at once. Apart from making me realise just how important the events of Henry’s reign were for the future of Europe there really is something quite strange in looking at a document bearing the handwriting of Henry himself. Makes him real in a way that no amount of pictures, or written history can do. Probably the eeriest document was a page of Thomas Cromwell’s “Remembraunces” (What we would call a to do list!) which listed “Discover his (i.e. Henry’s) pleasure regarding Sir Thomas More” as one of the little jobs for a day in the spring of 1536. Not, a matter that I would have thought something Cromwell would have been likely to forget about as More was executed in July of that year.  I was also struck by a contemporary illustration of a man writing in his study by on open window, with his dog curled up at his feet. It was a completely familiar scene, and yet it’s age gave it a weirdly alien feel. Reminded me a bit of Douglas Adams’s crack: “The past is a foreign country, they do things exactly the same there!”

Aside from the history there was some interest from an e-learning perspective. Firstly they include an audio guide in the price of admission. (Which, might I add here, I thought steep at £9.00) Mine was faulty and seemed to deliver incomprehensible gibberish after about the first three sections. You got a few words, then a long silence, followed by a few more words. I guess the recording had been interfered with somehow. I find these things distract me from looking at the exhibits anyway so I was more than happy to turn it off. (Would have been nice to have a choice about paying for it though!)  But it did set me wondering about whether such a thing could actually form a useful part of an exhibition by making them interact with the artefacts on display somehow. They’d have to be a bit more reliable though. Secondly there were also some quite nice flash based interactive exhibits of the actual documents, where you could look in detail at Henry’s annotations, usually where he was trying to find support for his case in his “Great Matter” (Getting his divorce from Katherine of Aragon).  Some of them have been posted on the web at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/henryviii/interactive/index.html . There was a bit of local interest too in that some of the books he needed for evidence came from St Katherine’s priory in Lincoln. (I wonder where that was). I must confess I hadn’t realised he himself was so deeply involved in making his case.

So the exhibition format may have some value as a learning tool. Of course as I was already interested in the first place, I can’t read too much into that, but given what I’ve been thinking about e-portfolios, there might be some value in concentrating a little more on the presentation side of e-portfolios.

Lincoln Teaching and Learning Symposium

Julian Beckton Higher Education, learning, Personal Development Planning

I attended (and presented at)  the University of Lincoln’s Sixth Teaching and Learning Symposium today. As always it was quite an intense day, but lots of good ideas got an airing. It’s a bit different from the traditional model of conference in that there are no keynote speakers, and most of the day is taken up with what we call “dialogues”. Basically everyone breaks up into groups and each group discusses a theme, suggested by the organisers. Then there’s a morming plenary, in which the discussions are condensed into action points for further discussion in the afternoon.  Before and after lunch there are elective presentations which people can choose to go to. (of which mine was one – you can see the slides here – http://www.slideshare.net/jbeckton/the-iportfolio)  I was slightly disappointed that there were only four people there, but on the plus side that’s four people who know more then they did before. And one or two others told me they had wanted to come, but it clashed with other electives they wished to attend. After the electives, delegates go back into their dialogue groups, and ultimately feed back to a plenary. The ideas are all fed onto an “ideas wall” (Really that’s  just a lot of flipchart sheets stuck together!) , which is used to compile a report for circulation to all delegates, and which also contains ideas for taking the dialogue forwards. Which is really the point of the exercise!

Anyway the dialogue theme I chose was on “student expectations”, and as I suspected there was some dissatisfaction among the group with the notion of students as “customers”.  The problem is of course that our capitalist economy tends to socialise everybody into thinking of themselves as customers in all sorts of contexts, and there are some aspects of university provision where that is not inappropriate. Students clearly do have cause for grievance if lecturers don’t turn up, the library isn’t open at reasonable hours. But if a student doesn’t make the effort to understand a discipline, can’t be bothered to learn how to use a library, then the idea that the “customer is always right” becomes rather less credible.

That raises further issues though. Is it reasonable for a student to expect that they be given a reading list?  The view was expressed at one point that we shouldn’t do that, or post digitised readings on Blackboard, because that limits students’ exploration. (Why explore and criticise if they’ve been told that this is the “good stuff”?)  But not to do so is to take a risk that students will complain, and in a customer oriented culture, the act of complaining itself  acquires a spurious validity, which, in the current economic climate can prove a threat to an academic’s position. At best, it certainly adds to their workloads!  This issue arose in the other elective (the one that I didn’t present) which was about enterprise in learning. Clearly, enterprise involves risk taking, but who is going to take risks when the stakes are high?

There was so much more to report on, but as I’ve said before brevity is the soul of blogging, and it is a pretty tiring format, so I’ll sign off for now

WordPress as a Personal Learning Environment

Julian Beckton Personal Development Planning, Technology, Web 2.0 ,

A personal learning environment or PLE is a collection of tools that a learner can bring together in one place to suppor their learning. The point is that if you’re the learner, you choose which tools you prefer to use, rather than have them chosen for you by an institutional Virtual Learning Environment.

In so far as they are collections of tools PLEs have something in common with e-portfolios which I have blogged about before, although it’s probably more correct to see a portfolio as being part of a PLE.  Anyway, I’ve found the Social Homes plug-in for WordPress which is rather cool. I’ve added my to-do list, Google Calendar, my Delicious bookmarks and a public view of my Mahara portfolio to it, and am wondering how best to add a link to a personal content store of the documents I’m working on, and a Refworks bibliography.

Social Homes links to services, rather than documents, which means that you can make bits of your PLE public if the service offers public views (e.g. the Mahara Portfolio). Of course you can always protect private information behind the service password, so if you really feel you must write your doctoral thesis using Facebook apps, you probably could.  From a learning perspective though, what would be really cool would be if authorised users of your blog could be passed through to the bits of the services you wanted them to see.  (e.g. specified portfolio views in Mahara)

I’ll probably come back to this topic later, when I’ve had a look at incorporating some kind of lifestreaming software into the blog.