http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/21/screen-resolution-and-page-layout/

Jakob Nielsen’s in his alertbox looks at the current statistics for screen resolution and recommends that designers should optimise for a 1024 screen, while still ensuring that it works at lower and higher settings. He points out that while 60% of users have a screen set at 1024, not all users (especially as the resolution gets higher), will actually use the whole screen. (He’s omitted to mention the fact that even if the browser is maximised, many will have a side bar of some sort open; nor has he really mentioned the needs of very small screens - such as those on PDAs etc.)

Jakob recommends that a fluid design should be used, to ensure that all screens work.  Jakob himself is using a 2048×1536 display!

Via Stephen D.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/21/open-source-in-he/

Catherine Howell looks at a report by OSS watch into the use of Open Source Software by UK FE/HE institutions. The report itself was looking at all OS use, though Catherine has concentrated on the CMS/VLE/LMS aspects of the report. Institutional Policies and actual practice do vary, according to Policies, 7% of FE establishments make Open Source their preferred option - as opposed to 0% of HE, though 41% require it to be considered. (Interestingly in 2003, 6% of HE establishments said that Open Source was their preferred option.) Most (70% FE/ 52% HE don’t mention it in the official policy/strategy)

In practice, however, about 77% of institutions consider Open Source solutions, with most preferring a combination of OS & proprietary.

The report looks, as well as end user software, at server software (in which HE seems to make more use of OS solutions), and learning Enviroments, where Moodle is very heavily use in FE (56%) of institutions, as opposed to only 9% of HE.

Reasons for not using OS, are those that might well be expected - training needs for staff etc.,

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/21/blogs-and-community/

Nancy White has a wonderful set of 5 posts (linked from this last one) discussing the ideas of blogs and community.

She’s divided blogs into 3 main types; Blog Centric; Topic Centric and Community Centric.

A Blog Centric blog is essentially what this is, I’ve started it, I contribute, and on the odd occasion someone comments - not quite as many as she envisages in her diagrams! It’s very much what my students have as well.

Topic Centric blogs are what I suspect I am kidding myself we have with the students blogs - though clearly they do fall under the heading that they’re all sharing the same common topic (whether they are passionate about it is another matter…)

A community centric blog is where the community is central; it’s all about who’s commenting on whose blog. I suppose this is also the sort of thing that Barbara Ganley discussed at Blog.ac.uk 2006 - having a “mother blog”, which was updated through the updates posted by students to their personal blogs.

From Nancy’s posts there are some useful links to those who’ve commented on her post(s). It’s also worth looking at the discussion arising from the panel she contributed to at Blogher 06

Finally, I like the way she’s used her Powerpoint slides to illustrate her posts. While Powerpoint slides can be uploaded, they don’t always make a lot of sense without the lecture; and podcasts aren’t ideal (for me at any rate) to skim read. Nice idea, Nancy. (Much better than HTMLing Powerpoint with notes)

David Wilcox blogged about Nancy’s ideas at the time, and has since posted a follow up looking at Robin Hamman’s post on the death of online community as we know it. David discusses Kim’s book “Community Building on the web“. While it seems to have excellent reviews, I think that at £100 for a second hand copy, I’m not going to see if it forms a good alternative to Preece’s “Online Communities” Wicox’s book recommendations aside, his post is worth reading, as it raises interesting pointers for the future. How will we be getting students to form online learning communities in 2/5/10 years time?

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/21/pew-internet-report-bloggers/

Pew / Internet published a report looking into aspects of blogging. It is a US centred report, though it is likely that the UK would produce similar results. The data was gathered via telephone interviews, of those who had identified themselves as keeping a blog.

Of the data of interest, some 37% said that they were blogging about “life and experiences” - i.e. the diary type blog. Education was only mentioned by a few people - though I suppose that some educational bloggers would have fallen into the 5% who had business focussed blogs. US bloggers, at least, are generally younger than the online community as a whole (more than half the bloggers are under 30 as compared to 20% under 30 in the online community)

Some 52% are blogging primarily for themselves, as opposed to the 32% who blog mainly for their audience. Some 87% allow comments, though only 18% (knowingly) offer an RSS feed. The survey didn’t show if the number of comments (and commenters) was impacted by the presence or absence of an RSS feed, though clearly that would be useful information if we are looking at blogs as a means of community development.

While some 56% of bloggers said that they “Often/Sometimes” spend extra time trying to verify facts and about the same % include links to the original source material, given that many of this group of bloggers were personal, rather than work related bloggers, I’d like to think that students who blog - or rather “Edu-blog” would be more likely to verify facts and link to sources, in the same way as they should for other assessed work.

If anyone knows of similar surveys that have been done in the UK, it would be useful.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/dopa/

The US based Deleting Online Predators Act 2006 (don’t you just love the name … can you really *delete* a predator?!) lead to a lot of discussion when it was first discussed in May. It was passed in July, though that seems to have attracted rather less attention (possibly because of the problems in the Educational Technology world with the Blackboard patent situation.)

danah boyd briefly posts about it, though she does link to many other threads discussing it more fully. From UK perspective, Josie has made several comments. The BBC also had a report (between DOPA being introduced & passed) about over regulation of school internet:

internet was over-regulated by teachers, with an emphasis on prohibition rather than encouragement.

Granted, the BBC article was looking at the views of learners, rather than teachers/ researchers.  Many children (and adults!), if they know something is banned, will want to go there… either to prove that they can, or to find out why someone didn’t want them to go there.  What’s really needed is to educate students to use the web intelligently, rather than just block things.

However, will teachers that aren’t so familiar with the whole process of, and opportunties offered by, blogging, may see it as a thing that teenagers do … and think that DOPA is a Good Thing. I hope not.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/edufilter/

David Tosh, who developed Elgg, has set up Edufilter.

a space dedicated to reviewing educational projects, software and research

It was only launched in August, but already has several useful looking posts … I’ve just been off investigating EdTechTalk - and from there found some more interesting posts.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/elgg-social-network-software-for-education/

Steve O’Hear has posted two linked articles, the first looking at Web technologies and education in general, the second concentrating on Elgg. Having looked at different tools, I’m keen to start to use Elgg with the MSc eLearning students, rather than Blogspot. We had hoped to set up our own server, though that might not happen, however, I’m coming round to the idea that the main Elgg site might actually be better, as it will allow the students to interact with far more people than just their peers. Elgg Spaces looks promising, though I’m not quite sure how it will work.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/research-on-social-network-sites/

danah boyd has posted a great list of research into Social Network sites. She claims it’s a “start”, but it’s a pretty good start, and more than enough to keep me going for a while!

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/how-things-change/

Joyce Valenza’s has summarised all the aspects that teaching, learning and research has changed as she sees it from the point of view of a librarian - who graduated in 1976 - and her predictions for the future. One to hang onto …

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/hitchhikr/

HitchHikr I’ve only just found this, but it seems to be a list of relevant conferences - and links to their sites/ blogs / etc.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/progressive-discourse/

Konrad Glogowski has written a pair of posts about how his relationship changed with his class through blogging. His class is a Grade 8 class, so about 14 years old. He notes, in his first post, that his class moved to a position where rather than him being seen peddling content, he was part of the community. He describes the way the students developed, to a point at which they

…became involved in what Carl Bereiter has termed “progressive discourse” (1994). Sharing, questioning, and revising of opinions helped students develop a strong understanding of the given topic. They were engaged in “intentional learning” (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1994), an active, purposeful search for meaning. Consequently, the network of entries and ideas that emerged from this sense of engagement is based exclusively on socially constructed meaning

In the second post, Glogowski has had further thoughts and he tries to understand what was happening:

This proved to be very difficult because I did not want my students to know that I also had gaps in my knowledge and that, as an individual, I also wanted to spend some time reading and writing about topics that we were exploring - that I didn’t have all the answers.

It was difficult not because of my students (who, by the way, thought it was the most natural thing to do) but because I kept thinking that by engaging myself in the process of learning I was neglecting the class. I thought that it was irresponsible to read and post about the Potsdam Conference, for example, while my students worked (seemingly) unsupervised.

Most of the teaching that I do is final year undergraduate and Postgraduate, but there still seems to be the expectation that Glogowski alludes to at the start - that I have the content, and will deliver. So far we’ve really only had the MSc students blogging (and they tend to be more pro-active learners anyway) - but I’m hoping to start with the BSc students next semester.

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/top-web-apps-in/

Richard McManus on the Read/Write web has looked so far at the top web apps in China,Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia and Spain. I’m not sure where he’s planning on covering next, nor quite what his criteria are. Certainly, for the UK offerings, other than the Newspaper sites, I’d not heard of most of the rest.

The Observer recently produced a list of the 15 most influential websites in the World, with a slight UK focus - and I *had* heard of all of them!

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/internet-safety-videos/

Based on real life stories, these would make good discussion points for students as well as pupils. They’ll be useful resources for EdCOM - though I have to remember all these new resources I’ve found recently!

http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/duke-wie/blog/2006/08/24/a-classroom-blogging/

The tools is the first post (apart from the Introduction) of a planned series of posts about getting a group of students to blog over this semester.

Jenn is going to get her students to use Flock, either from a Flash Drive, or, if they have them, laptops. Dave (who writes Academhack) lists the advantages of Flock - he’s getting me sold on it, though I wasn’t that keen the first time that I tried it. It was quite some time ago, and it seems to have improved since then.

They have decided to have WordPress based blogs, though whether they’ll go with it being hosted via WordPress or the EduBlogs hosting, they’ve not yet decided. I’m not sure if they’ve seen Elgg, or if they’ve rejected it. However, as one reason for using Flock is the ability to pick up WordPress, perhaps it was a technical reason, rather than a pedagogic one. It was a definite choice though for them to avoid the “blogs” that WebCT etc. offer …

I’ve had a look at the course requirements … it’s a writing course, so writing clearly is key, but, I see that students are only allowed to miss 4 sessions - and that includes illness etc., after that they start to get points deducted. I somehow can’t see that getting past people here!