Protecting your computer – web 2.0 style.

Julian Beckton Technology ,

Just spent all afternoon fiddling about with anti-virus software. I’ve been using Norton Internet Security for some years now, and never had a problem with it, but their latest update seemed to have a bug in it. At least it kept telling my that I didn’t have a DLL file I needed and that I didn’t have any anti virus protection. After running through several of their suggested fixes, none of which worked, I gave up and decided to uninstall and the whole package and download and install it again from scratch. Which did work.

I don’t normally plug commercial companies here, and I only mention this as they seem to have produced an interesting plug in for browsers – essentially, if you do a google search you get a little icon against each result which tells you whether it’s safe to click on it or not. Increasingly web sites can hold malicious code which can infect your computer if you do nothing more than visit them, so this seems like a good idea. But the real point of this post is that while they appear to be using their anti-virus software to check out the sites, they’ve also set up a community, where users can review and report any site that is dodgy. Or in one of the cases I looked at, the users had found a site that certainly contained potentially malicious software, but was very explicit about the fact that it was there to test vulnerabilities. Well, so they said. I didn’t check it out by visiting it myself. I do find it interesting that a major software company is trying to take on some of the ideas from Web 2.0 and the Open Source community.

Strictly speaking it’s not really a web 2.0 application as Norton are a commercial operation and while the plug-in is free you have to have Norton’s Internet Security installed first  but like social bookmarking which it rather resembles, it seems to be a very useful tool. No doubt someone in the Open Source community will come up with something very similar. If they haven’t already.

Second Life Workshop, Nottingham

Julian Beckton Second Life, Technology ,

I’ve been interested in the potential that Virtual Worlds offer for education for some time, so a workshop organised by ALT on Second Life, (one of quite a large number of virtual worlds that are available these days) seemed quite an interesting prospect. I went along with a colleague from Forensic Science who has also been quite interested in Second Life, probably spending more time in there than I do. (Actually, I’ve made myself dip out of it, while I focus on finishing my doctoral thesis, so I haven’t been in for quite a while.  

In the event much of the activity was focussed on really quite basic stuff – moving around, talking to people, personalising your avatar, which we both thought might have been better dealt with in an orientation session in Second Life itself – that kind of finding your feet is probably best done in the virtual world, rather than in a formal classroom event, although of course, as anyone who has ever delivered any form of IT training knows, you can not make assumptions about the level of knowledge that members of a group will have, and it’s always safer to start with the lowest common denominator.  There again, in the afternoon, we did start building (and managed to build an Art Gallery by the end of the day) and I found myself struggling to keep up.

There wasn’t a great deal of time for discussion of the educational potential of Second Life which was a pity – we started by going round the table and asking what people were hoping to do with it, which was a promising start. Among the interesting ideas that people wanted to do were role-playing (might be less nerve-wracking in a virtual world), building simulations (One lady from the Royal Veterinary College wanted to build a simulation of the rear end of a cow!), dealing with questions of identity, (we all had to change the appearance of our avatars – I ended up wearing a very fetching Raspberry dress – in-world, I hasten to add!) supporting language learning, or simply providing a different environment for distance learners to interact, the production of assessment artefacts, and many others. There’s certainly a lot of potential, but we all identified quite a lot of downsides too. – It’s a strange world, which can be lonely and a bit scary when you first enter it, and a few of those present noted that it is more popular with older people than with the traditional 18-21 year age groups. (The average age of a Second Life user is 33). My view is that you do need to develop quite high levels of tolerance for oddity if you’re going to use Second Life, because people are playing with identity, and behaving in ways they probably wouldn’t in real life. Anecdotally, it seems that a lot of 18-21 year olds seem very nervous about interacting with people they meet in Second Life. There again, you might argue that the 18-21 year old isn’t really the typical student these days.

There are also fairly serious issues around accessibility. You need a powerful graphics card, a fast Broadband connection and lots of time to make the best use of it. In a classroom situation there will be real issues about setting up students with accounts, getting them to choose names for their avatars, let alone personalising the appearance of those avatars. SL is also a seductive environment (in the nicest possible way of course). What I mean by that is that it is easy to get drawn in, and forget that other people have different preferences. We were told one cautionary tale of an American lecturer who was running all his classes in Second Life, and when the evaluation sheets came in, was horrified to discover that his students hated it! 

I think it comes down to the fact that if you have a teaching and learning problem that Second Life can help with then it’s worth experimenting.  But don’t just go in for the sake of it because it’s an interesting bit of new technology.

Struggle!

Julian Beckton Research

Writing the thesis seems uncommonly hard work tonight, so I thought I’d indulge in a little bit of stream of consciousness writing, trying to theorise about the educational development unit.  This entry probably won’t make much sense to anyone reading. But comments would be most welcome.  

When I think about the educational development unit I see a small unit that sits at the centre of a large organisation – yet, that is probably the way I see it because of the undeniable fact that we are all at the centre of every life experience we ever have. We see everything from our own perspective because we don’t have another. None of us can actually BE somebody else. Following that logic, everyone else sees their own experience as being central to their world, because it is. But we can’t all actually be at the centre. So we have to try and have an “out of body” experience as it were and see the EDU as others see it.

And yet… I do think the EDU is often caught between extremes and so it is central in that sense. It’s just not central to everything.  For example, there is the need to deliver a teaching and learning strategy without necessarily getting involved in the thinking that informs teaching in different disciplines. There is the need to deliver national initiatives, (PDP, some of the work that is being done in the CETLs around the “skills” agenda, managing the NSS,  or at least managing the responses to it). There’s an issue around technology where at one extreme there is pressure to ensure that colleagues have a basic level of competence to deliver the curriculum to students via say a VLE, and at the other to push the boundaries by doing things like creating open access repositories, building islands in second life and so on).  There’s pressure to bid for funding for projects, and then of course to deliver those projects, while still maintaining the unit’s own workload.  There’s also pressure to develop an academic portfolio, both delivering courses, often a PGCE, but quite commonly Masters courses, and occasionally doctoral level courses. There’s also a tension between what you might call learning development theory and the political and environmental realities that we all work within. You can bang on all you like about student centred learning, but there are still very few classrooms where the student is actually at the centre of the action. 

But, then I suppose what all those tensions do is create fairly pragmatic staff, who tend to have a holistic view of the organisation. – Well, more holistic than most colleagues who are based in faculties I suspect. But one of the big drawbacks for many educational development units is that they tend not to work with students very much, and this is something that tends to take them away from the centre, because there is another tension, this time between student expectations and learning theories. I don’t want to sound cynical here, but it is a perfectly rational strategy for a student to work out a way of getting the highest number of marks for the least possible effort. So, students might reasonably resist our efforts to involve them in activities, saying “We’re paying fees – it’s your job to teach us”. And they do have a point. All of which makes our work as educational developers more difficult because we are saying to academic staff – well, to make your students learn more effectively, you need to make them work harder. Persuading others to work harder is hard work in itself – another source of tension.

So, where does all this leave me? Well, I think we, as educational developers do need to work with as many colleague as possible, which I think may well involve us getting out of our comfort zone, and teaching ourselves. The problem is what do we teach? Or more accurately, how much do we teach?  I don’t think the odd lecture on PDP or study skills cuts it, because those are ongoing activities. But neither can we become physicists, sociologists, historians or whatever, because if we did we wouldn’t be educational developers any more. I’m coming round to the idea of academic literacies again -I think we might have something to contribute on how to be a sociologist, a linguist, or a dramatist in HE.  Perhaps the Educational Development Unit should be seen as a sort of cell, surrounded by some sort of permeable membrane which ideas can and do pass through in both directions.

There’s also the vexed question of technology. What approaches should we take to the development of colleagues. Supportive? Didactic? Challenging? Actually that last one isn’t as aggressive as it sounds. I’m thinking of the example of Turnitin, where I do think we should be challenging people to stop seeing it as something that catches people out, but to use it in a much more positive way as a teaching aid. There again there’s the challenge of getting people to stop using PowerPoint (at least in the thoughtless way that it is often used.) There’s another issue, which is that EDUs are using technology to help colleagues to do things that they would rather not be doing. A VLE for example can faciliate the teaching of much larger numbers of students than a technology free environment – but is that a good thing? “Teaching” here might mean exactly the delivery of “learning materials” to students. But are we losing that middle of the class type student who could, with a little individual attention develop his or her talents. I don’t know, of course but it does seem a possibility that they would simply collect their electronic resources, digest and reproduce them and go away with a mediocre degree.

So the EDU is a site of challenge and of struggle between ideas then? Isn’t that what is at the heart of a university?  It’s a sort of academic department with a very heavy service emphasis. Yet working in such a unit doesn’t feel like that because it has to survive in a difficult political environment, and seems to do that best by being as supportive as possible. Even if that support isn’t always aimed at the right target.

Thesis Tutorial

Julian Beckton Research

Just had a very interesting 90 minute tutorial with my two supervisors, which took the form of a very lively discussion and this entry is really just a brief note of some of the concepts that I can remember.

  1. I should use this blog to record concepts as they occur to me, even they don’t make a lot of narrative sense at this stage. It’ll be a useful mine of information for the final chapter
  2. The Educational development unit is a site where negotiations between the university and the outside world are conducted
  3. I need to have a sense of why EDUs were set up in the first place as well as where they have gone.
  4. Adding an international dimension to the literature would be valuable – the issue of nomenclature I noticed in the literature survey is an interesting example.
  5. Other issues, such as sustainability, widening participation, globalisation should be mentioned, even if I am focussing on technology.
  6. There’s a contradiction between the driving force role and the quality control
  7. EDUs hold quite a lot of power, especially where technology is concerned, but by training colleagues in that technology they risk losing it.  But they also need to be able to communicate what they are talking about to prove their value to the wider community.
  8. Support services are very important clients of EDUs.
  9. I need to make some suggestions about appropriate external examiners.

There was a great deal more than this, and I dare say it’ll come back to me later on. However, what did come out was a committment by me to have a first draft ready by the end of October (gulp!)

Learning Spaces and EDUs

Julian Beckton Research ,

I picked up quite an interesting blog post here, responding to JISC’s “Designing Spaces for Effective Learning – A guide to 21st century learning space design” and making a point I’ve been banging on about for ages which is that we still haven’t got away from the traditional paradigm of the teacher standing in front of the class. There are certainly attempts to get away from that, not least at Lincoln, but I wonder how far people are actually buying into it.  It would be interesting to evaluate how the new rooms are actually being used once people have got used to them.

I think there will be experimentation at first, but when the pressures to respond to student expectations start to bite I wonder if people will settle down into a more conventional form of delivery despite the physical environment.  Things like the NSS, and other accountability measures, do, I think have a very powerful effect on academic practice, but I think it’s too early to say what that will be yet.  What the blog post picks up on, and I confess I’m not sure about, is how far those teachers who will be using the rooms have been involved in the process of designing them.  But then, how do you involve a whole University? Now, there’s a challenge for an Educational Development Unit.

Actually, I think we can meet it. The research I’ve been doing shows that staff in EDUs do tend to hold a very collegial model of the University, even though they are at the same time under considerable pressure to deliver a very instrumental agenda. They’re quite good at picking up some aspects of each of the disciplines they’re working with. (Rather like Flann O’Brien’s atomic theory of the bicycle, they do slowly exchange characteristics with their clients,  but you’ll have to read the Third Policeman for the details of that theory!)

Required reading for repository rats.

Julian Beckton Repositories

I like the title “repository rat” Sadly I can’t claim the title as my own – it was coined by Dorothea Salo, whose blog ought to be required reading for all those involved with repositories.

Anyway a couple of useful looking posts popped up on my Google Alerts this morning. I mention them just to remind us all that having built the  Lincoln Repository our work is far from finished. The build it and they will come model doesn’t really work – we have to identify the problem that the repository can solve (and it has to be a real problem that users have, not one we think they might have. Anyway, more here and here.

Collegial or Corporate

Julian Beckton EDUs, Research , ,

Well, I’ve been going through the data again, and I think actually that EDUs try and work in a very collegial way – the more successful ones seem to listen to what their client groups want and try to meet their needs. That’s not to say they don’t challenge outdated practices where they see them. In some cases, I found they can take quite sophisticated approaches to this “challenging” -Well, they have to because laying down the law about what colleagues should and shouldn’t be doing would never work anyway. But I remain convinced that they (well, we, I suppose) have to get out into the disciplines. I like the notion of a permeable membrane through which developers and academic staff feed off each other while remaining separate. You need the separation because Educational development seems to be  becoming a discipline in its own right, and developers can’t take on every aspect of every discipline, otherwise they’d be physicists or historians or whatever, and not ed. developers.

While on this theme though we had an awayday yesterday and one of our principal teaching fellows made the (I thought) quite telling observation that we, as a development unit were doing a fantastic job in helping the academic department do the things that it didn’t really want to do. That wasn’t a criticism of CERD but I think of the external pressures on the University – for instance we were doing a great job in helping them deal with large classes. But they’d rather not be teaching large classes at all. It’s a good point and something I need to work into my own research somehow. Anyway I’m breaking my own rule about not working after 9 p.m. now, so that’s enough for today.

Writing up

Julian Beckton Research

Spent 4 hours this afternoon wrestling the literature review chapter into some sort of shape – it’s still far too long, but I’ve lost about a third of it. I think it does read rather better too. One of the strange things about thesis writing though is that you can’t really do it in a linear fashion. In a funny sort of way I need to know what the data I’ve collected tells me before I can really bring the literature review chapter, or the methodology chapter in. That’s not the way you’re supposed to do it of course – the literature review is supposed to inform the methodology, and the research questions, which are then answered by the data. Of course reality isn’t exactly like that. I’m not suggesting you fit the questions to your answers – You don’t. But you do have to do something a bit like that to make the thesis read coherently.

Where I’m at now anyway, is an argument that there are quite strong structural pressures on EDUs to deliver – but that these pressures can lead to them doing the wrong thing. One thing I found interesting was that they do tend to like putting on workshops and training sessions, but that these only work if the client groups actually want them.  Seems obvious, but the pressure to be seen to “doing something” means that there’s a possible that the EDU can be hitting its performance indicators, by providing workshops that nobody goes to!  Actually, most of the interviews reveal that they actually offer quite innovative forms of support – assisting with teaching in other disciplines being one of the most striking, but also working with staff to meet student demand, or trying to see how e-learning might fit into completely new disciplines (New to the developer I mean). The problem is that these are “expensive” – they tend to be one to one,  time consuming and add greatly to the developer’s workload. But they’re exactly the sort of model that teaching and learning theorists advocate. Which does suggest that the theorists might be right! So in spite of an implication I found in the literature that educational developers don’t practice what they preach, I’ve found some evidence that they sort of do!

Chrome

Julian Beckton Blackboard, Technology ,

I’ve just downloaded Google’s new browser, (http://www.google.co.uk/chrome)   ostensibly to test Blackboard in it, (but also to have a little play). First off, it’s noticeably faster, and as usual with Google, has a nice clean interface. I’m not sure how configurable it is for a lay user like me,  (hey, I’ve only had it 5 minutes!) but as it’s open source, I guess the variety of plug-ins that Firefox users have come to know and love will soon follow. 

As far as Blackboard is concerned… Hmm, I dunno. It seems to work OK – but there’s no text editor tools visible when you upload an item – personally I rarely use those, so that’s not a problem for me (and it may be just a default setting that I haven’t worked out how to turn off as yet. I certainly uploaded an item with a file attached without any problem. 

All the features in WordPress seem to be working fine though, including the “kitchen sink” (wordpress’s own text editor), so the problem may lie within Bb.  Anyhow, I’d better get back to doing some real work…

Hah! And in doing so I caught it out. One of the alleged features of Chrome is that if a process causes a problem in one tab the others should remain unaffected. Well, I tried to download a PDF of JISC’s latest infokit on e-portfolios and guess what? Yep, the whole browser froze. Couldn’t move between tabs or open a new one.  Eventually it claimed that the Adobe plug in was unresponsive. (I could have told it that myself!).

Del.icio.us

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

No, not about food . Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can save and share your bookmarks. I’ve started to use it because I’ve been asked to conduct a survey of what people in the University are doing about Personal Development Planning, and I thought it would be useful to get an idea of what other Universities are doing. You simply save the URL, and you can write a little description and give it some tags so other people can find it.  

Currently, I’ve only got two bookmarks, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.  – Anyway it’s to be found at http://del.ic.ious.com

And you can add this post (or any other) to del.icio.us  by clicking on the del.ic.ious icon at the bottom of the post. In fact you can add it to a variety of bookmarking sites. Not that I’m trying to increase my readership, or anything like that. Heaven forfend!