Joseph Gliddon :: Blog

Attended the Blackboard in FE day at Aylesbury College.  Was good to see what other colleges are up to, also made a nice change from the RSC South West conferences where we are now almost the only college not using Moodle.

Not that the RSC days arnt good - they are very helpful, its just annoying to find a College that has dealt with a similar problem to one you are dealing with and then find their solution is Moodle based and you cant duplicate it :(

So a chance to compare notes etc.  It was interesting to find that for a College we are a big blackboard user, we had more courses and users than most of the other colleges (although 1 or 2 have 100% Blackboard take up with every course they offer having a Blackboard site - just a distant dream for us and even if we ignore the courses that will never need a site (Part time Flower Arranging?) we are still at about 50% takeup or less).

Was nice to also find that as regards summer course rollover plans we were very well organised (In fact I have just finished my summer rollover and it did go really smoothly) and I sent our plans for archiving and importing to another college that was interested.

So on to the main part of the conference - some presentations on current good use and a preview of Bb 8.0 and Bb NG (Next Generation).  What can I say some huge improvements - I decided to upgrade to 8.0 on the spot (fortunately my Boss agreed ).  And that upgrade also when very smoothly - just remember to upgrade to SQL2005 first!!!

 The NG will be good as they have done significant work on the user interface so Blackboard no longer looks so clunky.

So thats my upgrades and technical stuff done and dusted.  Now to look at new tools and consider the pedagogy before all the teaching staff get back in September.

A few weeks ago I attended a session on personalised learning - with me was one of my eLearning colleagues.

I picked up a number of tips to add to my lesson plans (this September I will be teaching a Maths evening class - it will be nice to do some active teaching again) and at the end of the session told my colleague "Oh that was a really good session".

To my surprise he said no, not really there wasn't much new or innovative.  At which point I considered the session from an eLearning perspective and yes he was right we didnt learn that much regarding eLearning.  It was only that I was looking for ideas for my face to face teaching that made it useful for me.  If I had attended a few weeks before when I wasn't planning on teaching next term then I probably would have come to the same conclusion as him.

So what do I learn from this?  Should it be that a lesson will only be seen a valuable to students if it meets a need that they have.

Also I now need to record sessions that I attend for CPD (Continuing Professional Development).  I was already doing this on this blog, however I might have to switch to the tool issued by the Institute for Learning as this is what teachers are required to use (and as always I should be setting an example to less eDvanced staff). 

One thing I will be interested in is how easy it is to make the blogs in the "Reflect" tool available to a wider audience.  For example this blog is pretty much public (although not read by many people ) and it appears pretty close to the top of the page when you google my name.  I really dont want to maintain 2 seperate blogs so will also be looking at the tools for RSSing one into the other.

Recently attended this conference with a couple of my colleagues.  Particularly liked Phil Bradley's opening Keynote "Dancing on Quicksand"interestingly I must have picked up this phrase from the pre-conference blurb and then forgotten because I had been using the phrase for a week or two previously.

What I found particularly useful was the idea that you don't have to know everything you just have to keep moving.  Although for my college I am at the bleeding edge of technical innovation, in the wider world there is so much happening and changing that being aware let alone adept can become a struggle (see my last post on m-learning, 2 weeks after that I went to another on m-assessment and had about 6 tools I had never heard of presented).  What is important is not that I know every elearning tool but that I have used some, if they are a dead end well the skills and experience will still be transferable - "even when I am wrong I am right" to quote Phil Bradley.

Which chimed nicely with the workshops that I went to.  There were 2 on Second Life and they had progressed from "Oh look we can build islands" to actually discussing what they were doing in there and what it can offer as opposed to real life teaching (a very good discussion on the tendency of teachers to try to recreate their classroom online, because that's where they are comfortable, and how this misses both the point and the oportunities of virtual worlds).  So my SL character has had the dust blown off him and I am back in world as even if SL vanishes I will be likely to be teaching in a virtual world at some point.  Now if only the summer upgrades hadnt eaten all my time I could have done a bit more than been a tourist.   

I attended a conference on mlearning.  It was a nice change to see that the day was organized in lesson form, so we spent time listening and time doing various activities on mobile devices.

For once, we didn't have to listen to a new government initiative telling us why and how they were setup and instead we could get on with learning what we came there for.

One activity, I found particularly interesting was the summarizing of some Shakespeare, but reduced to the number of characters that are in the text message.  The summaries were then texted to the tutor.

Another thing that was covered was twitter. I have never really got the point of twitter before however, I now see that it could be useful for the regular exchange of ideas that just come to you. Or so he storing quick first reactions to things you come across such as the software I'm using to write this which is the dragon you talk it types software. Which is another thing, I am beginning to see advantages to [however. One hour ago, I was cursing it - and it still makes a number of mistakes]

Its conference season again - been too busy to attend any so far this year but went to this one to look at the Moodle Individual Learning Plan.

I was the only Blackboard college there (all the rest are Moodle) so I was popular .

When we went round the room discusing what we had been up to in the last few months a few interesting (for me anyway) points came up. 

• The nearest college to mine has just appointed 2 new staff as content creators - their main job is to get material online for staff (be that as just improved notes all the way up to interactive elearning objects) not surprisingly it is a service that is proving very popular with lecturing staff.
• 3 of the Colleges present were planning a new installation of moodle that applicants and potential students could register themselves onto.  Giving the students a taste of what they can expect when they join.
• Similar to this one college has started setting up "courses" for the business support areas to hold documents communicate etc (this is something we do to a limited extent - I have to be careful about treading on toes due to our staff extranet).
• Finally there were the colleges that reported Inspectors are now expecting real eLearning (ie staff have to have activitys, differentiation etc all the things you would see in a classroom, online) rather than being satisfied with a big online fileing cabinet.

Right next post will cover the speakers at the conference

One course = many online courses.

At my college we are getting requests to communicate/provide materials to the students at many levels.  First we have the college level (which to be fair is already well catered for with website/intranet etc).

At the other end we have the "Class" of students where a teacher wants to provide stuff to their class.

What I am seeing is both a build up and a trickle down from both sides.  Taking the class - some teachers teach the same course to more than 1 class and want an area all of their students can see, some teachers want to collaborate with their colleagues and so have an area that all the staff and students for a particular course (or even group of closely related courses) can access.  Some take this further and have an "Subject Area" that covers all students on all courses related to that subject.

Trickling down - some Faculties want to communicate to all their staff and students (rather than the whole college) (as an aside there has been requests for communication to staff and not students at the faculty level).  Each Faculty is made up of several Schools and some of these have started making noises about having somewhere for just the school.

So conceptually I am dividing them out into 3 levels

High level Mass communication - The College/Faculty/School level (these will be Organisations to use the Bb terminology) These will be a bit of a hodge podge used to do all the things that the group that asked for it wants to do.

Subject/Course Materials - these will hold all the material that a student taking a course would need.  Will consist of all students that ever take that course.

Communication/Collaboration - this will be a specific class and will last as long as the class does.  Will be used for coms and test and survays as well a group work and class projects.  The students grades for a course should be stored here.

Well thats a start...

Been feeling guilty that its so long since last blogged (and I am meant to set an example ) so here is a thought for today.

Just received a phone call from one of our college students, she was concerned that she couldnt see her course online.  I did a bit of digging and found that the course wasnt "Live" (we only make our courses live when a staff member says that they wish to have an online course).

Having spoken to to the student I found that the lecturer hadnt said that they would be using Bb in class or that there were materials online.  However the student had done a different course with us last year which did have online materials - so she assumed that her course this year would have online materials.

So 4 years ago having a online course with good material might have been a "Wow" factor, now it is becoming expected.

Lets assume that OFSTEAD and other monitoring bodies lag a year or so behind students, that gives teaching staff a year or so to get online - or explain to an inspector why they think it benefits their students not having online materials/support/communiction/collaboration.

Hmm - should I anticipate a stampede of Dinosaurs in the near future?

Attended a conference/training session on this yesterday run by JISC

The main idea behind the day was that the management of eLearning for an organisation can be treated as a project and so you should use the standard project methodolgies.

Obviously as eLearning is an ongoing thing this is a project that will go through many iterations and a good default length for an interation would be one accademic year.

Using the standard 4 stages of Analysis, Planning, Implementation and review - we started with review as all of the delegates had at least taken some steps in e-learning so we should start at that point.

However as I was not in post when the decision to implement a VLE was made I will need to ask colleages about why we got one and what were the expected benefits.

One area in review that I found useful was the "Training Needs" section - we currently hit most of the groups identified but not Managers and specifically the Senior Management Team.  It is a common complaint that those in senior posts often dont understand what you do - however with eLearning it is a wide ranging and swiftly moving field, it is not SMTs job to keep up to speed with the latest developments, it is my job to make them aware of them.

With this in mind I think its time to start thinking about a swift training session called "What your staff could be doing".

The idea behind the training would be not to train SMT to do things but to be aware of what could be done and how.

Also on the day was a bit on the design of learning spaces which should again come in quite useful as we are in the planning stage of building a big new site and as of yet the IT Department hasnt been heavily consulted.

On monday met someone from USA - Blackboard who was telling us about Scholar (thats me and the VLE Managers from the other 2 Bristol educational establishments).

What is it?  Well its a social bookmarking site that is free but limited to Blackboard Users - like "delicious".  Where it differs is in that it allows you to link the bookmarks (and searches of others bookmarks) into the courses that you are teaching on Blackboard.  Also it would tend to be an educationally based set of bookmarks rather than a general one like delicous (I have already divided them in my mind into fun-delicious and work-Scholar).

So one question I have for myself is, is it going to be a case of Delicious Vs Scholar OR Delicious & Scholar.  And if the second would a meta bookmarking site that allowed you to search all the various bookmarking sites you have signed up for be a good idea (like Excite did for social networking sites).

Moving onto the Pedagogy how can this be used by my colleages?  Well hopefully they will come up with loads of ideas themselves but lets start with the simple ones

• Timesaver -Adding in standard websites (any single website that they find through Scholar) these have been added by a human and so should have a fighting chance of being a) educational and b) relevant.  At a minimum it should reduce time spent looking at irrelevant websites.
• Adding a search - by adding a search to a course (that returns say 10 results) you are starting your students off on their research in the right direction without totally specifying what they see (as you specify what the search terms are but not what is returned by the search).
• Learner activity - bookmark and tag resources on X.  This works in several ways, learners have practice in finding a resource, they learn how to tag properly (hmm is there a defined "properly" would a better word be "well").  And when they have finished the teacher has a bunch of resources that then can search for an imbed in a future version of the course.

Looking at the inhouse blog we have at work I noticed it has no tagging and in Blog search, you can search for people but not topic  (the system search will allow you to look for words in Blogs as well as words in content but it is not easily located in the same area!).  It does allow you to see those in your class which may provide an imediate audience - and possibly a compulsory audience of one, does the teacher have a responsability to read their students Blogs?

I was commenting on a post by John Pallister recently on how to generate an audience and I mentioned tags.  If our system doesnt do this should we move to one that does?

Alternatively should we encourage our students to move?  The in-college blogging system providing a paddling pool to let them get started before swimming off onto the web (obviously leaving a feed in the old blog to the new one in case they had developed a following?).

And what do we tell those who dont get read?  Without Tags to show common interests  will students probably only search for students they know?  How important is it to warn students about the fact that they are unlikely to generate an audience and they may likely be their only visitor.  Will some need a shoulder to cry on?