Elaine Swift :: Blog

It was inevitable really, and just a matter of time before somebody tried this. Mashable reports on CourseFeeds, a Facebook application that connects to your Blackboard course with your Facebook profile

This is, of course, in part to Facebook's decision to open the development of applications and allowing integrations to other web apps.

Of course, this sent me off digging to see what else I could find regarding Facebook apps linked to Education Technology. A quick scout of the main VLE vendors and other educational technology didn't yield any results but then at present some view Facebook as the cafe/bar on the campus where all the informal learning and chit chat takes place.

I do, however, think this could be an interesting development. It would be worth watching the take up of the CourseFeeds app. Do students want to engage with their learning and teaching in this way? Will this initiate a trend in using the likes of Facebook as a PLE (which some students may be doing anyway)? With Facebook's present take-up and Blackboard's large presence, particularly in the US, whatever your personal views on these particular applications, the connection between the two could provide some interesting data.

It's been a while since I've posted but, thanks to David Davies, I came across this YouTube video which pretty much summed up my first experiences of SL.

I came across this article about praising children via the e-learningpost. I'm glad I took the time to read it as not only did it present studies with young children and their approach to learning depending on the type of praise they received but there were also some studies conducted with students at college and high school.

On a personal level it's given me some food for thought about how I parise my own child (though at only 19 months I think I have some time to adapt my approach to praise before I/they too become a praise junkie) but the studies certainly give me some food for thought about how to approach feedback to students. 

For those days when it seems nobody understands you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU

I saw a couple of posts about this YouTube video which meant that I had to go and have a peek.

You'll need to pay attention but I think it encapsulates the development of the web up to web2.0 very succinctly.

Thanks to the e-learning post and Joho the blog for pointing it out. 

If you or your institution are considering open source software in any form you might like to cast your eyes over this academic study commisioned by the European Commision to look into the economic/innovative impacts of free/libre/open software (link via Slashdot). Be aware that's it's a hefty report and may need several eyes to go over it . (1.8 MB pdf)

There is an executive summary which I'll summarise in another post. 

However, some kindly slashdotters have pulled out some of the conclusions (from page 283) and other parts of the document are also discussed further down on the link given.

I've been taking a quick opportunity to go back and check up on some projects that are of general interest to me in e-learning.

The first of these is Plex. Plex is being developed by CETIS as part of their PLE project funded by JISC.

You can find an interesting podcast by Derek Morrison about PLEs at Auricle. And Mark van Harmelen's guest post on Seb Schmollers blog has a good summary of the issues in the area of PLEs.

I've recently taken a quick look at Plex and here are some initial finding. It's based on the Eclipse environment (don't go there unless you're a software developer) and while the installation went smoothly the first problem I had was with getting the help to display.

I'd come across this problem with eclipse as well but the solution is not one everyone may feel comfortable sorting out. There's an issue with the eclipse framework displaying the help html files in a window due to it's use of the the localhost to serve the page. When a proxy is set up for your browser you need to ensure that requests to either localhost or 127.0.0.1 (localhost IP address) are ignored by the proxy.

In Plex this meant enabling the option to display the help in an external browser (Firefox) where I'd set this up as the help wouldn't display properly in a pop-up window generated by Plex. Alas, after sorting this out, it was a bit of a waste of time as there's presently no help files. I'm sure the project team will get round to this. Help does tend to be something that get done at the end of a project. 

And of course, being an open-source project there's nothing to say that the help files couldn't be generated by the community. 

It's not pretty and I need to tidy up the CSS but I've added a meebo widget to my theme.

An article by Michael Fieldstein  on benchmarking e-learning caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, my boss, Derek Morrison is currently seconded to the He Academy to work on the HEA's benchmarking exercise. So I was interested Michael's perspective on the matter. 

Secondly, the mention of the UKeU in the first paragraph caught my attention to see if Michael had any insights from across the pond on that particular episode in the UK's e-learning history. (Coincidently (?) Derek was also seconded to work at the UKeU. You can find some of his postings on the matter at the University of Bath's Auricle Blog).

And finally, as I read through the article his thoughts on metrics in organisations struck a chord with me as recently we've been asked to provide some quite, detailed, statistics for a survey (external not internal). In trying to answer the survey's questions we have found ourselves wanting to put a lot of caveats around our answers but alas there's very little option for doing that and hence one wonders what meaningful conclusions could be drawn from the survey... I'd be interested to find out.

The producers of this wonderful looking kit should be quite proud of their achievements.

High praise indeed coming from Joel Spolksy. 

Though with a starting price of £780 I'm going to have to be really, really, really good between now and Christmas.....