Lots more to read!

Julian Beckton Blogging

Yeah right! Don’t all rush at once.

Anyway the point is I’ve managed to incorporate my three existing blogs into this one, so I guess I’ve now got the biggest blog in the Learning Lab! (As well as work stuff, it now includes entries from my public research diary and my private one  but those posts, which largely describe my field visits are only visible to me and supervisors.)

Actually i’m very impressed with how easy it is to export material from one WordPress blog and import it into another. Anyway, better do some proper work…

Early findings?

Julian Beckton Research

Possibly. I’m in the second phase of data analysis at the moment, by which I’ve mean I’ve coded the data into large themes and I’m now trying to break those down into smaller themes. By far the biggest of the “big” themes was to do with technology, and attempts to promote “technologically enhanced learning” (A much more accurate phrase than e-learning, I think, and while we’re on the subject of accuracy I think I’m going to start using the phrase “digital technologies” rather than “new technology, or ICT”)

Anyhow. I’ll be frank here and admit that I do find this a very tedious process. I much prefer to be writing, but I can see that it is necessary to sift through all the data, even though I’ll only end up using a small fraction of it.  I suppose it’s bit like prospecting for gold, because ideas do pop up during the process. One of the things I think I might want to pursue is the idea that the different models of the University, for example, functional models (the research university, the teaching university) and structural models (the bureaucratic organisation, the collegial model) do not so much guide the work of Educational Development Units, as they frame resistance to the sort of innovation that EDUs are trying to build in. I’ve gone through the data several times now, and I really haven’t found much evidence of a committment to one model or another, but I have found quite strong evidence of pragmatism. There is awareness of resistance to innovation, but virtually everyone I have spoken to so far seems very optimistic that they have ways around it, and that their chosen approaches are working.  There again, in an interview with someone from another university, they’re not necessarily going to talk about failures.  I think the thing to do is to try and identify what is going on when they do talk about resistance.

Of course, I haven’t really started on the documentary evidence I collected yet – That I think might well show a leaning to some model of what the university is because of course that’s the public face of the unit.

Degrees in Second Life

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology , ,

http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1117-Getting-Your-Degree-in-Second-Life.html

Well, I guess it had to happen. A college in Texas is offering what it believes to be the first degree offered via Second Life. I haven’t had a good look around  (the web site mentioned in the blog entry I linked to above is down) yet but I can think of all sorts of reasons why this might be problematic. Before I go into that, I do want to make it clear that I do think that Virtual Worlds like SL do have a lot of potential for educators (Yes, I do have an avatar in Second Life – Feather Congrejo, although I’m a fairly rare visitor these days)

So what are my reservations. Firstly, Second Life gives me a headache if I use it for any length of time. (Must be my aging eyes, but a colleague who attended a 6 hour conference in SL reported the same phenomenon!) Secondly, it needs quite powerful graphics cards, a requirement which seems to increase with every upgrade they produce, and I think that is a big accessibility issue. Thirdly, SL is a public site, and has, inevitably, some less than salubrious areas. (Quite a lot actually!)  OK, I suspect this is actually quite a small proportion of SL’s total facilities, and students in HE are adults and we can’t hold their hands all the time, but I can’t see any HEI relishing the prospects of misinformed local media announcing that it is directing students into what might be described as “adult” web services. I suppose you could get round that by using something like Open Sim http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page for a stand alone environment but you’d lose a lot of connectivity in doing so.

It also requires quite a lot of skill in building a properly immersive environment. It can be done, but it takes time and skill, and teaching in SL seems to require that quite a lot of time is devoted to orientation. (I suppose that’s a one off cost with each cohort of students though) The other issue is about how to devote sufficient time to each student, while continuing with Real World work.  I’ve always thought that one great advantage of technology enhanced learning is that it does allow the “quieter” students a chance to get involved. But there’s no getting away from the fact that it does take more time to deal with 30 problems or questions than it does to deal with the 5 or so assertive students in any class.

The Power of the Web

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

Here’s something to think about. I use Google Alerts to notify me about news stories, blog entries and web sites that I might be interested in, and one of those is of course “University of Lincoln”. One of our students suffers from cataplexy, a condition that apparently causes muscle weakness under stress, and in this unfortunate woman’s case, it’s so severe that laughing can cause her to collapse.

But that’s not really the point of this entry. What has struck me is how quickly it’s gone round the World. I’ve seen stories about it from such exotic publications as the “National Ledger” which is a newspaper in somewhere called Apache Junction in Arizona, and other assorted local newspapers from around the world. Now I might mutter darkly about newspapers being too mean to employ journalists to actually go out and report on stories these days, preferring to employ interns to sit at computers all day, but what I’m getting at is that think it very odd, (and encouraging) that I found a story about my own institution from so far away. (In fairness, the local paper here, the Lincolnshire Echo did pick it up quite early on, but then, I wonder where they got it from!) Of course, it’s an unusual, human interest story, which might make it more prone to wider circulation – but it does illustrate how the alerts can help keep one informed.

Oh, and here’s the story if you’re interested. (From the BBC’s local news site, so they got it too.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lincolnshire/7543327.stm

PDP and academic literacy

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Personal Development Planning, Technology , , ,

Looks like PDP is back on the agenda. Not that it ever really went away of course, but it did rather get overwhelmed by Blackboard. (For the uninitiated PDP stands for Personal Development Planning and is about getting students to take a more rigorous and reflective approach to their learning. If I’m honest, I don’t think we’ve yet had much success with rolling out PDP across the university, though it’s not for a lack of effort or investment.  I’ve certainly done numerous training courses, and we’ve invested in Pebble Pad, which I think is probably the best tool on the market for supporting PDP. Here’s a useful little PowerPoint video explaining PDP (annoyingly though it cuts off a few seconds before the narrator ends. And between you and me I think it could have done with a professional voice actor too. )

http://www.pebblepad.co.uk/pp_website_resources/pp_overview.ppt

The thing is PebblePad is quite an expensive product and we do need to justify continuing spending money on it.  I don’t think the problem is with the technology though. (We can also use the Blackboard Portfolios for PDP although they’re not as good) I think it lies with the fact that there is very little interest in study skills. I’ve been starting to argue for a reconceptualisation of study skills as “academic literacy” I’ve taught on skills programmes in the past, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the high level of skills that most students actually do have. Of course there are some students who do need a lot of help with what might be termed basic skills, but not that many.  Where many students are weak is in what might be termed disciplinary and some generic HE skills (Historical writing, writing up experiments, referencing, assessing the quality of information, reflection.)  I like the concept of academic literacy because it doesn’t start by telling the students they’re generically weak, rather it emphasises what you need to do to become a good physicist, lawyer or whatever.

My problem though, which I’m going to have to think hard about is how to present Pebble Pad in this light. I think it could be done through the use of the proformas – through working with colleagues in the disciplines we can get students to self assess in relevant areas, build action plans and thus get them into the habit of using Pebble Pad for some aspects of their future work, especially around CVs and Webfolios. (Shame about PP’s blogging tool though – it’s not a patch on WordPress!)
Never mind. I think I feel a project coming on!

Starting to write.

Julian Beckton Research

Well, not actually starting. I’ve been doing it for some time, but I am finding it very difficult to come up with a conceptual framework which I can hang the analysis on. I’ve done four of my interviews, and I think I only need another two. (I must chase up access to the pre-1992 universities I’ve already contacted. And perhaps find some others if I can’t get participation)  And the fact that my book chapter is now officially “In press” might help with getting further participants. But I’ve got quite a lot to be going on with so I can at least start writing.

The trouble is of course, ordering my writing. My first idea was to use Nvivo to code all my notes that I’d taken from the literature, which did generate a set of concepts, and in that sense that has been quite valuable. But I think I may have fallen into the trap of stopping generating codes and tried to force things into nodes where they don’t belong.  I will probably have to unpack each of the 35 nodes I’ve already created and re code them. Actually, I doubt I’ll have to unpack all 35 of them – one or two of them only have a few references so I’ll have to think hard about whether I want to continue with them.  I’ve also melded the interview data in with the literature review, which might also have been a mistake, because I am going to want to highlight the differences between that data and the literature review. Still, they do appear separately in each node, so they shouldn’t be too hard to unpack.  I’ll be a bit more careful when I start on the documentary and photographic data which is next.

The other thing I’ve begun to do is a much cruder analysis technique, but I think it may have some potential. Essentially I’ve just created a document for each interview question, and am importing the respondent’s answers into those. Because the questions themselves were generated from the literature review they should reflect large themes which might contribute to a conceptual framework. On the bright side I have some holidays from work coming up, so I plan to use the first week or so of it to really crack on with it. And I shouldn’t get too frustrated. I just attended one of our regular study schools and in one of the sessions on “How to write the perfect thesis” I was relieved to be told that very few doctoral students know what they are doing when they start out.  – The trick is to make the thesis look like you did!

Adobe Connect and Course Genie

Julian Beckton Higher Education, Technology , , ,

I’ve been doing some research into the way Educational Development Units (or Academic Development Units, for the benefit of the search engines!) interact with their university. The actual research is discussed in a separate blog listed in the blogroll, but a couple of technology applications have cropped up in discussions with participants that might be worth a look. They are Adobe Connect and Course Genie.

I’m struggling to find a way of summarising Adobe Connect in a simple sentence. It’s a sort of desktop videoconferencing system, mashed up with a virtual whiteboard and meeting system. But it seems to be a bit more than the sum of its parts. The trouble is when I say “videoconferencing” people say “oh we’ve got that…” Well, we are about to sign up to the Access Grid, that’s true. But that’s limited to one room. This appears to be desktop based so you can have meetings from your own computer. I haven’t had time to look much beyond the demos on the web site. But if you’re interested have a look at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/  

The other product was Course Genie, and I have to say this made me smile. Essentially it’s a way of producing web documents from Word using Word styles. Old Teknical Virtual Campus lags like me, will of course remember the Teknical Converter, which performed much the same function. (Although, in my view output much nicer pages than Course Genie did) The first problem was that very few colleagues understood the concept of styles in Word so it never really took off. And secondly, when those who did use it produced some (I thought) useful material, students all complained that they had to print out multiple pages, so we had to provide links back to the original word document. Ho hum. Looking at the Course Genie demonstration, they don’t seem to have addressed this at all. Course Genie is now part of the Wimba suite and has been renamed Wimba Create, (Wimba is something else I’ll have a look at when I have time) – But you can see the demo here http://www.wimba.com/demos/wimbacreate.php

Pipes and Mashups

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

I’ve been experimenting with Yahoo Pipes – a sort of web mashup application which I need to spend a great deal more time with. Here’s an example of what it can do. This is just a search for the term “e-portfolio” condensed into a blog post. It’s all very well, but I’m struggling to think of many more practical applications in our context, but then I suppose I haven’t really looked in detail at what it can do. So many things, so few hours!

{“pipe_id”:”mnvrhEBa3RGjIZHVX0sBXw”,”_btype”:”list”}

Teaching as stand-up comedy?

Julian Beckton Higher Education , , ,

I saw this in the Guardian last Monday, and I think there are a few lessons in it that we might take on board.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/jul/21/comedy

Now, I have some reservations about turning everyone into stand up comedians, but I did like that last line about “I will never resort to PowerPoint in a lecture again”. It is important to interact with the audience, and I think we do often hide behind our visual aids. Anyway I’m always open to learning from strange new sources. But I’ll stop blethering on, and let you read and judge for yourselves.