http://bavatuesdays.com/create-your-own-libguides-with-wordpress/ Should be of particular interest to our library colleagues I think. Have to confess I hadn’t heard of libguides before.
Enjoy.
Academic identity and e-learning.
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”…)
What counts as public these days?
One of the mailing lists I subscribe to burst into life this afternoon with many posters taking umbrage that an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement had apparently taken a discussion and (more or less) republished it as an article. The list in question was not really a private list, although it had certainly been created for and aimed at the academic community and some participants may have regarded it as private. Many of the contributors were complaining that their moral rights as authors had been impugned. I’m not really bothered about the rights and wrongs of this particular issue (at least not as bothered as some of the posters seemed to be) and I don’t want to get sidetracked, so I’m not giving details but I think the debate raises some interesting issues.
Firstly there is the matter of what we do on the Internet. I think it’s probably naive to expect journalists to ignore a public source in the search for an interesting story, and if you really don’t want your words re-used you shouldn’t post them on a public forum. (That said, I’d much rather journalists went out and found real stories rather than sat at their desk rehashing press releases and Internet debates. It would make newspapers much more interesting!)
Secondly this brings up the issue of open access/open source again. I don’t think there is likely to be much commercial value in a post on a discussion forum, or for that matter a blog post, so I’d argue for a default Creative Commons licence for all such forums. Currently the default position is that the person who creates something automatically holds the copyright in it, but the copyright owner can give it away, sell it, or more commonly license it to be used in certain conditions. So I hold the copyright in this blog, but I license it so that anyone can reuse it without cost, and with minimum formality. I do ask that if it is re-used, then my work is attributed to me, and that any amendments are released under the same share alike conditions. I think the same should apply to public, or semi public discussion fora, and that posters should be asked to opt out of a Creative Commons license. After all, the original issue probably got much wider coverage from the THES than it would have done had it stayed in the discussion group.
Predictions from the past.
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.
Repositories and Research Management Systems
Now there’s a title that grabs the attention!
I thought it might be useful to briefly mention a JISC report on embedding repositories into institutional research management systems, because it seems to be a way of promoting the use of the repository. We all know repositories are basically a “good thing” but I still think that we’re some way from achieving anything like the level of integration into institutional practice that they need if we’re to realise the benefits from the investment of time and effort we’ve made so far.
Research Management Systems (for those readers who don’t follow these matters closely) are ways in which universities manage their research. Sometimes sophisticated software packages are used, sometimes it’s done through a rather haphazard collection of spreadsheets and databases.
Now you might say there are two things here. Managers are interested in the latter – knowing how many things the university has published, and where, and less interested in reading the outputs of the research. Academic colleagues are probably more likely to be interested in the outputs. That’s probably true, but there are many benefits to integrating the two.
Benefits at institutional level in the longer term include
- Preparedness for REF (and its successors), better-populated IRs and better self-service for people interested in contacting/working with the HEI.
- Speedier processing of grant applications and easier progress tracking during application stages and lower costs of maintaining quality.
- The spreadsheet-anddatabase systems approach has a number of obvious vulnerabilities.
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Realising the benefits depends on increasing the number of well-populated IRs and linking or merging IRs and publications database.
It would promote compliance with OA mandates
The adoption of a common standard for information will further help
interoperability. There is something called CERIF (Common European Research Information Framework) and this is standard does appear to have made some progress towards wider acceptance.
However it does need senior management commitment. Start-up costs are likely to be high, and there will be ongoing personnel costs required to maintain both quality and quality of information.
The resources to manage and maintain IR and RMS are specialist rather than generic, and if there is an increased take-up of the integrated approach it is possible that demand could exceed supply. Which, in these straitened times should be an encouragement for all “repository rats” (A term I’ve stolen from Dorothea Salo) to start thinking hard about these issues
Natives, immigrants, visitors or residents?
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
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.
Open Street Map
I’ve been interested in this project for a while now, and today, after weeks of faffing about with USB to Serial connectors and drivers etc. I finally got my PC to talk to my GPS. Anyway, the point is I’ve finally added a few streets to the Open Street Map project. The idea is that there will be a free open access map of the whole country available, eventually. How this works is you take your GPS unit out, walk down some streets, and it logs a “trace” of where you’ve walked. You then download a bit of software which converts this trace to what’s called a GPX file, which you can then add to the map. (You can’t use existing maps because they’re all copyright.)
It’s not brilliant, because the GPS isn’t absolutely 100% accurate, and it’s quite hard to get all the twists and turns of a street absolutely right, because there a multiple waypoints recorded in the GPS trace and you’ve got to remember the exact configuration of the streets. The ones I walked down all had sort of a T configuration at the end, and even though I walked round this, it’s still quite hard to see the exact layout of the map. Still I think it’s a worthwhile little project, although given that its not all that easy for a novice computer user to get into, I think it might be some time before the whole country gets covered.
All the waypoints are superimposed on the map, and you then have to draw lines (which become the streets on the map) over your waypoints, classify the type of street it is, and then enter its name into the database. You can then add features like pubs and so on. (Which I did of course!). Anyway you can see my endeavours, (so far) by clicking on http://www.openstreetmap.org and searching for Skellingthorpe. Click on the village name in the list that appears and zoom in.
I’m afraid though I’ve quite a lot more streets to do! Gets me out of the house though, I suppose!
Portfolios.lincoln: Blogging
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.
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.
[nggallery id=blogblox]
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.
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.
Portfolios.lincoln Views 3. Adding artefacts.
Up to now, most of these posts have concentrated on building a portfolio for employability. That’s fine, and a very good reason in itself to build an e-portfolio, but by adding some of the work you’ve done to your portfolio you can do much more.
First, from an employability point of view, you can provide evidence to back up any claims you’re making in your CV. You can also make your CV that much more interesting by including links to the things you’ve done that you’re most proud of. Secondly, though, a portfolio doesn’t have to be used solely for the purpose of getting a job. They are sometimes used for educational assessment, or they can be used as a sort of self advertisement. Like it or not it’s quite common to “Google” new acquaintances these days, so you might want to show the best of yourself on the Internet and an e-portfolio is a good way to do that.
So, what artefacts can you add to Portfolios.lincoln? The simplest, and in many ways the most useful is the “Text box” as this can be used to describe any other artefact or group of artefacts, and of course, can become an artefact in itself.
Text box
You find the text box by clicking on the “General” tab in the view editor.
Adding files to a view.
Remember the post on uploading files? Well, here’s how to put your files into a view. You have a choice. You can add either a whole folder, or a single file. You can also add images and HTML files into your portfolio. [nggallery id=”Add_file_blocks”]
Drag the relevant icons into the appropriate place in view. Each icon gives you a range of choices.
Dragging the A folder icon into your view will, as you might expect, ask you to select one of the folders you have created. Note that you can only select one folder at a time. If you want to show multiple folders in your view, then just drag the folder icon into your view again, and select a different one. Note, that if your folder contains images, the view will display a list of thumbnails (very small versions of your images) along with the file names.
Dragging thefiles to download icon into your view gives you a list of all the files you have uploaded. You can select as many of these from the list as you like. The user will be presented with the option to download the files you have chosen to their own computers.
Dragging the An image icon into your view offers, as you might expect a list of all the images you have uploaded. However, it’s important to note here that images are not automatically resized. You have to choose the width in pixels when you upload the image. (The picture will be scaled according to the width you enter)
1 column = 800 pixels
2 column = 400 pixels
3 column = 250 pixels
4 column = 200 pixels
5 column = 150 pixels
Note that these are only guidelines, and are based on symmetrical layouts. If you have chosen an asymmetrical layout you may need to experiment further with width.
You can give each image a title, and you also have the option to show the description of the image you entered when you uploaded the file.
If you write web pages, you can save HTML files to Portfolios.lincoln and you can include these in your portfolio by dragging the Some HTML icon into your view. Again, you’ll get a list of files to choose from.
The last type of file that you can embed is a media file. There are two options here. You can upload your own media (video or audio podcasts) or you can embed files from video sharing sites. Currently you can use You tube, Google Video, Teacher Tube and Scivee.tv.
If you want to embed one of your own files, then drag the embedded media icon into your view. 
One of the drawbacks with embedding your own media files is that video files do tend to use a lot of space. Portfolios.lincoln gives you 50mb of disk space by default, but if you have a lot of video clips, you may prefer to share them on YouTube, or a similar site.
If you do you can embed them into your portfolio by dragging the external video block into your view.
In the next post, I’ll look at how you can set up a blog in Portfolios.lincoln, and how you can add it to your views. If you are already blogging, using a different platform such as WordPress or Blogger, I’ll illustrate how you can add that to your portfolio,
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