Inter campus travel

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

Slight departure from my usual posts, as I’ve got a little bit of time to fill before delivering a training session on Blackboard’s gradebook at our Holbeach campus. I’ve always driven down here before, which takes about an hour, on not very pleasant roads. Today, I thought I’d try public transport and, I have to say I’m quite impressed. (But probably shouldn’t be saying that until I get home!).

Perhaps I was lucky. The journey involves a train (about an hour) and a bus (25 minutes) and everything was on time. (Also, and very unusually for rural Lincolnshire the train appeared to be brand new – you could almost smell the polythene on the seats – and was very comfortable. Usually it’s not much more than one of those handcarts you used to see in old movies!)  And the cost to the university was about a third of what it would have been if I’d driven. (of course that’s only true if you’re travelling alone.)

It did take half an hour longer, yes, but I was able to do some preparation and reading on the train. But my real point is this. Isn’t it interesting that Holbeach, easily the university’s most remote campus is the only one where public transport is a realistic option for inter-campus travel. Riseholme, which is only a few miles out of Lincoln doesn’t have any sort of service at all, and getting to Hull involves a monumental detour to avoid the Humber estuary and so takes about three times longer than it does to drive.

Postgraduate Research Conference, Lincoln 5th June 2009

Julian Beckton Research

I agreed to give a presentation about my doctoral research to the Lincoln Postgraduate Research Conference on Friday and it seemed to go quite well. I argued, as my findings seem to be indicating, that there has been a definite shift away from the instrumental agendas in which I think EDUs had their origin to a much more pragmatic, collegial way of working – whether that is because the original instrumental ideas   e.g “You WILL introduce PDP into your curriculum, you WILL follow the practices of constructive alignment in your teaching, You will use Blackboard (or whatever) ” were always unrealistic. I don’t mean that these are not good things to do,  but that you can’t realistically expect academics who work in a variety of disciplines to turn round and say “Are they? Oh all right then, I’ll stop doing what I have done for years and do something else that you suggest instead”

Instead those working in EDUs have moved towards a sort of pragmatic collegiality. Pragmatic, because the organisational and political agendas are still with us, so they have to play the game of corporate survival, but collegial because the only way to do that is to have conversations with academic staff on their terms and work to a longer term change agenda. Doing that seems to have created a sense of optimism among those I spoke to and a sense that they were valued.  (But you’ll have to read the thesis for the evidence of that.)

The presentation seemed to be well recieved and I had some very useful feedback from more experienced researchers who were present, which brings me to the point of this post (at last!) If you are doing doctoral, or masters research and you get an opportunity to present at this kind of event, then take it. All the other presentations were themelves fascinating even if not directly related to my work and really opened up my eyes to the fact that I’m part of a much bigger research community. The icing on the cake was that we had a guest speaker, Malcolm Tight, from the University of Lancaster who held a discussion with us about getting work published, and he helped me start to think quite hard about where I might begin to mine my own thesis for a few journal articles.

More on e-portfolios

Julian Beckton Personal Development Planning, Uncategorized , ,

I’m currently evaluating e-portfolio tools and today’s quick review was about uploading folders and adding them to my e-portfolio. I’ve only had an hour or so today, so I’ve looked at Mahara and Pebble Pad, and I’m not greatly impressed with the capacity of either of them to handle folders. Mahara doesn’t seem to allow uploading of anything other than single files. Pebble Pad does offer the option of zipping a folder. (I suppose you could upload a zip file to Mahara – I’ll have to try that later ) But when you do upload the zip file, Pebble Pad unpacks it and treats each file as a single asset. It would be nice to have the option of adding the folder and its contents as a single asset,

Of course, in Pebble Pad you can recreate the folder as a webfolio page and link to each assets, thus creating a de facto folder (Which could, with a bit of design work look quite nice). In Mahara you just have to create a new folder and upload everything into it. On the other hand you can display it as a folder in a view.

But really, what an e-portfolio needs is a way to put things in the right place quickly. Many resources these days do consist of multiple files, so I think this would be a useful functionality. (I suppose, in the interests of full coverage I ought to have a look at how Blackboard’s E-portfolio tool manages this.)

What is educational development, exactly?

Julian Beckton EDUs, Research, Technology ,

Well, I don’t know, exactly. But recently, I have been doing a lot of research into models of educational development units and I have come to the conclusion that slightly different perceptions are held by those who work in them, by those who pay for them, and by those who use their services.  This is actually a massive oversimiplification but essentially the first group see themselves as working collegially with academics to enhance the quality of learning and teaching, the second see the units as a mean to achieve specific objectives, (e.g. getting more students into university and keeping them there, or making more use of the technologies that institutions have spent a lot of money on) and the third see them as a sort of support service, especially with regard to using technology.  That isn’t a negative critique – there are valid reasons why they might hold such positions, but they do lead to misconceptions.

I raise this because this quote, taken from Jim Groom’s admirable bavatuesdays blog made me think a little bit more about how these different perceptions affect the technology aspect of our work. 

“For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology. We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities. Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff. But it doesn’t foreground teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.”

Just as “information technology” is not “instructional technology”, “educational development is not staff development”.  Yes, of course they have things in common, possibly even a shared foundation, which is why I’m not entirely sure about the image of “driving a wedge” between them. But we still have work to do in getting the fact that they are growing apart (quite rapidly) to our colleagues.

Repository Services?

Julian Beckton Repositories , , , ,

Got to musing about this having read the report on the JISC funded White Rose project which had some interesting things to say about repository services.  Bit of a rushed post I’m afraid, but I thought it worth recording my notes

Clearly any services have to be derived from an understanding of the requirements of users. Why would they want to use a repository at all? How can the capture of research outputs contribute to a personal or institutional research profile?  How can it help grant holders fulfil grant related open access obligations. Of course the more services we can offer the more visible the repository becomes. 

Ideas included import of Refworks/Endnote databases or come to that bulk import of full text which would be useful because researchers are understandably reluctant to duplicate effort in creating metadata.  It would also be useful to share repository metadata with other internal and external systems. 

Some things we might want to consider that White Rose did – Researcher behaviour – investigate researcher awareness, motivation and workflow though a survey of  their existing archiving activity. 

Interoperability with other univ. systems (such as the library catalogue, Blackboard Content Store and so on) 

Advocacy at a departmental level, which might include production of regular statistical reports of downloads thus emphasising the benefits of using the repository. 

Offering a copyright checking service. (Well we do, sort of.) 

And to finish on a bigger question. Should the repository be a high profile service or should it be, in effect, invisible? I think the answer to that is that it starts high profile and then gets embedded. But how?

Repositories Meeting – reflections

Julian Beckton Repositories ,

I thought it might be useful to try and pick out a few themes from last weeks JISC repositories programme meeting and have a little think about what the programme has achieved, and what implications it might have for the use of the repository at Lincoln.

First there is little doubt that the programme succeeded in creating lots of new repositories of which ours is one. It also brought together a lot of people with a technical background, a lot of people with library backgrounds and even the odd educational developer. (That would be me I suppose!)   But a new phenomenon comes with a new set of problems and the most urgent one facing the meeting was the question of converting the repository from a “project” into a “service.”  From our perspective the question is how do we change the Lincoln Repository (Not its formal name – we’re still working on that at the time of writing) from something that is the concern of a few people meeting together in a room to something that impinges on the institutional consciousness on a scale that, say, Blackboard, does.  How do we ensure that researchers have the confidence to use it. How, for that matter, do we define what research is? 

One potential solution, broadening its constituency to include learning objects was discussed at the meeting,  although not without any conclusion. I have slightly mixed feelings about this, and did raise the question of quality of the learning objects that might be included. Although I know not everyone agrees with me I am not sure that the repository is the appropriate place for a short lived set of Powerpoint slides. The more of this kind of stuff is in the repository, the more “poor results” are going to be turned up by searchers and that might have consequenses for the reputation of the repository. On the other hand, who is going to make decisions about what is of suitable quality? We don’t want to discourage people from using the repository, and if storing a handout or two in it encourages people to deposit their research alongside their teaching materials I can live with it. I’m also sceptical of having multiple collections. When I worked in libraries I could never see the point of having “special collections” separate from the main sequence of books.  All it meant was that things got shelved in the wrong place and nobody could find them.  Anyway  the discussion at the meeting didn’t really resolve the issue, possibly because it isn’t resolvable in a way that will satisfy everyone.  Perhaps the answer lies in the way we manage metadata. Maybe we could hide LOs from Google, limiting them to user only access.

Secondly, and just focussing on research there is the issue of discipline based versus institutional repositories. We had a very interesting presentation on a crystallography repository at Southampton. One of the ways that this had promoted interest among users was by offering subject specific metadata that addressed particular needs within the crystallography community. That of course raises the rather obvious question of why a Southampton based crystallographer would want to use Southampton’s Institutional repository rather than the subject one and I suppose the answer is that the Institutional repository should offer services that the subject one doesn’t. 

That raises the third point – what exactly are the services that an institutional repository can or should offer to its clients. Among the suggestions were easy deposit of material, simple metadata creation, statistical and analytic services, rss and other feeds  – for example, information about who looks at the material in your repository. Of course we already offer some of these and any other ideas would be very welcome!  But really there is another client that we should not ignore, and that is the institution itself. Why should an institution bother with a repository? The real challenge is to produce legible products and evidenced outcomes from the whole programme that sell the idea of the repository to the senior management of the institution. There’s an inevitable chicken and egg air to this though because the repository won’t achieve any tangible outcomes until it gets a critical mass of content. But it won’t get that without a reason for people to use it. So if there’s any lesson to take from the two days it that’s we have (as a community) done a tremendous amount of hard work, and achieved a great deal. Only thing is…

… the REALLY hard work begins now.

Oh, and as a mildly amusing aside did you know that there is actually a Repository Road in London SE18. Apparently it leads to HaHa road. Not sure what to make of that!  (I’m not making this up – check out David Flander’s blog for proof!)

Plugged into the mains again!

Julian Beckton Repositories , , , , ,

My laptop, that is, not me! Just had three very interesting sessions about working with the repository community, working with repository developers and working with repository stakeholders, followed by two very interesting round table discussions about a) the role of learning objects repositories and b) longer term sustainability of repositories. Fortunately for me, everyone has been gaily twittering away, all afternoon, so if you want to get a picture of the event search twitter for the #rpmeet tag. And I don’t have to write it all up from memory. Isn’t Twitter a wonderful thing?

Liveblogging from the final JISC repositories meeting!

Julian Beckton Repositories

Finally made it to Birmingham after a somewhat tortous trek across the East Midlands (Is there any group of people more addicted to pointless burbling than British”train managers”? – If so I do not wish to meet them!) Anyway, the JISC repositories and preservation programme has come to an end and this final meeting is designed to provide an opportunity to celebrate the work we’ve done and to network with a view to building on the work of the programme.

Started with a summary of the programme – It started as a rather single focussed programme trying to build up traditional text repositories  but has grown to include all sorts of e-learning activities, and mesh with other JISC programmes. Repositories are now central to the improvement of both learning’n’teaching and research. (Hmm, we’ll see!) 

We’re being told what the objectives of the meeting are. Day 1(Today) will principally be an ooportunity for project staff to network, share knowledge and experiences. Tomorrow we’ll focus on the impact and value that  repositories and preservation work can yield to institutions and the wider community. 

Meeting should provide a dedicated chance to focus on what has been achieved during the programme, but there are to be forums (fora?) where topics of interest will be discussed, and an “ideas room – where will repository bein5 years time, how can we increase content, what’s our killer content and so on.

Kevin Ashley – plenary

 

What JISC asked us all to do, isn’t necessarily identical with what people actually do. Inevitably we don’t all end up achieving exactly what we set out to achieve. And where has that left us. Well JISC wanted more repositories, and to enhance those that repositories,there need to be services to support repositories. There were also some projects fpcussed on exploiting repository content. JISC wanted to get to a position  where there was no excuse not to deposit in a repository – every institution should have one, or at least have access to a consortium. 

Then went through a list of all the enhancement  projects and what JISC thought they were doing,inviting us to squawk (out loud, not Twitter angrily) if they were wrong. What is noticeable is the wide variety of aims. Alot were about improved ingest, but many were also about influencing decision makers, controlled languages, blogging and twittering your deposits, registries of metadata schemas, text mining, using robots to managing deposit, developing application profiles, looking at significant properties . (Quite scary how many projects I wasn’t familiar with, having been involved this programme for 2 years!) 

There were also some “mad ideas” – Rapid Innovation was born this way. Take a little bit of money out of the budget, and pay for a very short project – one person, not much project management.Took two days to be agreed – and is now on a much bigger scale (As we know!) – Mr Cute, SNEEP and Fedorazon were all #jiscri projects. 

So what did we get. Certainly got lots of repositories, and services for doing stuff with them. They’re being used for more than research papers, and we’re building links with e-research, institutional admin, teaching and e-learning. There are also far more tools around metadata and preservation.  But we also have more research, better research, which has more impact. There is better teaching and learning, because it is much easier to find, and deploy usable content.  There are cheaper and better administrative processes, and there is much more linking to global services and networks (Open Access anyone?), and of course we are innovating. 

But here’s a thought. Most people visit about 6 websites a day. If somebody recommends a destination site then they’re saying it’s as least as good as Facebook, You Tube or whatever. But is Blackboard really that good. If they go there (they might have to to get a PowerPoint of a lecture) are they going to stay? How do we make our repository a place where people want to stay? That’s perhaps the next challenge  for us.

 

Battery fading! Back when I find a power socket!

30 years of e-journals.

Julian Beckton Uncategorized , ,

Well not exactly. But last night I was using British Education Index, and noticed that it was a Dialog product. It took me right back to a room at what was then Manchester Polytechnic in, oh, it must have been 1981 when we were shown a dial-up version of a Dialog database of bibliographic references on a green screen computer. (Actually, I think the on-screen text was orange, but you get the point.) It hadn’t really occured to me until today that these things have been around for nearly three decades. And yet you still occasionally hear of academics who ban their students from using the Internet!

Blackboard Conference Barcelona, April 2009

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology ,

 

Having been packed off to Barcelona for the annual Blackboard conference I thought it useful to provide a brief report. I do have much more extensive notes if anyone wants them, but I have come to the conclusion that brevity is the soul of blogging so I am going to try and keep this down to no more than 1000 words. If you want more leave your e-mail address and your question as a comment!

 

Having had a few days to reflect I think I identified four themes to the discussions which were

 

1) National and international attitudes to education.

2) Content.

3) Community

4) Not Blackboard.

 

Firstly there was a remarkable degree of optimism from the keynote speakers, about the value that national governments were placing on higher education.  A very interesting statistic about the benefits of investment in education came from Dirk van Damme from the OECD who drew our attention to the fact that in the 1950s South Korea and Ghana were at the same level of economic development, which is patently not the case any more. Of course there may be more factors than simply investing in education at play here but the point is that it is possible for countries to change their prospects. He also pointed out that we in the west were nowhere near the participation levels of some countries which had managed to get 80% of their population into HE. What the consequences of this might be were still unforeseen. We don’t know what effect the tripling of the number of graduates might have on social indicators such as crime, health, and welfare.

 

He also suggested that the main threat to universities was not private providers, along the lines of Microsoft’s Hamburger University, but the direct assessment of skills by employers. How long would it be before they realised they did not need a separate institution to certify their abilities – which of course rather undermined his last point about the social implications of expanding the numbers of graduates.  For those who would like more information about this and about what the OECD are doing about it. have a look at http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri

 

The second theme of the conference was what I have called Content – by which I mean new features of Blackboard, or interesting plug -ins. The first of these was something called Waypoint, which is a plug in for managing assessment and more accurately feedback. It is being used at Bournemouth University who had a policy on a 3 week turnaround for assignments (just like us!) Waypoint can either manage the

whole assessment process online or be adapted to work with paper submissions. Essentially academics create an online block of assessment criteria, sample comments etc that go to form the feedback. (sounds a bit like Turnitin’s Grademark feature to me). These criteria are then grouped together into assignments and can be shared between academics. However individual comments may be added to provide feedback

and it does allow double and blind marking. While it sounds impressive, it does require a bit of effort to learn the software, and it does cost $9000 p.a.

 

Waypoint is a plug in provided by a separate company, but Blackboard themselves have a few new products on the point of release. There is a communication system called “ConnectED” which will enable Blackboard users to send text messages to students, as well as offering a choice of other communication methods, although there are some regulatory hurdles to be overcome before they can release it in Europe. They’ve also entered into a strategic relationship with Wimba to make Wimba Pronto (an instant messaging service) available for free. I thought the most interesting announcement though was that they are planning to open up the content store so that users can make their content available to users in other institutions. Michael Chasen, Blackboard’s CEO claimed that Blackboard stored more content than Facebook, and that this was rather a waste of resources. (If true, I’m inclined to agree!) There is no suggestion of going “open access” rather that there will be an extra level to the content store which will be accessible by any Blackboard users, although of course the content creator would still need to have given permission for such access.

 

That of course leads us into the third theme – community. Blackboard see themselves very much as a community of users and spent a lot of time plugging the developer and “Behind the Blackboard” Communities. They’ve also developed an API for Blackboard 9 which allows other LMSs to be incorporated – e.g. Links to Moodle, Sakai etc. Directly from course list on BB home page. They are also thinking about pushing content out of Bb e,g to Facebook. (BB9 has an interface already.) The point is that the authentication problems go away because the Facebook user is told that there is a new item in their Blackboard course, but they still have to log into to find out what it is. Iphone and Ipod touch fans may also be interested to know that there is now a BB app available for these gadgets.

 

Finally I was struck in the various paper presentations that I attended by the number of presenters who were talking about things they were doing with social networks such as Elgg, and Ning (But not Facebook, Heaven Forfend!) rather than Blackboard per se. There was quite an encouraging “edupunk” feel to some of these papers, that is that there was very much a DIY attitude to educational technology.  As one presenter put it, we want to get away from the traditional lecture model, but that doesn’t mean we just give lectures in the pub. In other words we don’t just move over to Facebook, because the students don’t want us there, just as they don’t want us in the pub. But we do create useful spaces, and there was a very encouraging use of tools such as Ning and Elgg, to encourage students to contribute work in different formats and to collaborate with each other.

 

Clearly 1000 words isn’t enough to do full justice to the conference so I may return with posts on more specific topics at a later date.

 

Note: For some reason this post has attracted a torrent of automated spam. I’ve therefore turned commenting on te post off. Sorry about that, although in reality, I doubt any genuine commenter will want to say anything 3 years after the event.