Skills for Life CPD :: Blog

As i'm trying to maintain 2 other blogs, time is getting a little precious at the moment. I'm going to carry on posting within:-

http://newman.elggspaces.com/elearning/weblog/

and

http://newman.elggspaces.com/SAND03/weblog

but I am not going to be able to carry on with this one for a while (until things have calmed down a bit at work with the changeover to Moodle). I would imagine that I will find time to post an update here in October.

Well, we have finally finished the student interviews and i'm now writing up the first draft of the research paper which I am aiming to get done by the start of June. We will then have a couple of weeks to go through this draft and iron out any issues before submission on June 15th.

I've also been looking at the possibilities of implementing Elgg on our own server and have a development version of this up and running at:

http://elgg.m00dle.info

I have also managed to get this working with the Moodle e-Portfolio plug in using my development version of moodle (http://www.moodle.info/moodle).

We are now in the process of trying to get a live version up and running on a server within the JANET network.

Not posted for a while due to quite a few things going on at Newman College that have been taking up most of my time.

Move from WebCT to Moodle
An institutional decision has been made to move from WebCT 4.1 to Moodle. We have the option to upgrade to the new version of WebCT, but a number of factors have made us move to the open source side of things:

• No licence fee and we have the opportunity of using the facility with external partners without worrying about the licencing restrictions.
• Training staff to move up to the new version of WebCT would have probably given us a training exercise of the same magnitude as changing to something else. This would have needed to be done again when the amalgamated "BlackCT" offering comes along in the next 3 years or so.
• Many of our students have work destinations in FE, where they would be using the moodle platform
• The VLE seems to be much better (many plugins/add-ons which takes he functionality past what WebCT can offer) and supports a more social constructivists approach to creating courses.

Elggspaces
A few more groups within the college are now active within the platform. The library department have started blogging (without too much encouragment from us) in order to delivery key library information to students. You can see this by going to:

http://newman.elggspaces.com/library/weblog/

A new set of students taking IT will be starting to use the blog in relation to one of their modules:

http://newman.elggspaces.com/it421/weblog/

One of our school office administrators has started to blog about her experiences in learning how to use WebCT.

http://newman.elggspaces.com/ward01/weblog/

A number of other accounts (and a community) have been created for a student associate scheme... this should become actively used in the coming term.

------

Considering that this resource has not been actively pushed throughout the college, I believe that on the whole, activity within here shows it has been well recieved as a useful tool for our institution.

It will be interesting to look at the possibilities of integrating Elgg with our Moodle installation, but things are going have to put on hold with this, until we have had time to move all of our current WebCT courses to moodle and provided the neccessary support.

EBL Research Paper

In conjunction with one of the tutors who has been using this with his students, we are not in the process of preparing a paper for submission at the next e-Portfolio conference in Maastricht. Interviews with students are currently underway.

AimHigher CD Online

I am currently involved with putting the AimHigher CD that I created in an online environment. At the moment, it exists online in it's original CD format with some alterations:

http://www.richard-pascale.co.uk/aimhigher/splash.htm

Disability Equality Scheme

As a member of the disability equality scheme, we have been completing impact assessments on policies within admissions. The e-Learning department is going to have to go through the same process with it's policy documents.

Benchmarking Project

We are now also gearing up for our involvment within the JISC benchmarking project...we are all a little worried on how this is going to fit in with the rest of our work, as it is difficult to quantify how much time it will take.

Lots to do!

 

so you may be a bit confused about what teachers in the post compulsory sector will require from september, and people thinking of going into teaching in the sector may not know how to go ahead - here's a short quiz to help

http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/quizview.php?id=633

Not speaking English is the single biggest barrier to successful integration - Darra Singh

http://www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/news/Not_speaking_english_is_the__single_biggest_barrier_to_successful_Integration.aspx

Migrants - the English challenge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6383221.stm

 

So does this mean we need a much greater emphasis on the support and training of Esol teach

good practice in the teaching and learning of adult literacy, numeracy, and ESOL

http://www.nrdc.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=1101

Not speaking English is the single biggest barrier to successful integration - Darra Singh

http://www.integrationandcohesion.org.uk/news/Not_speaking_english_is_the__single_biggest_barrier_to_successful_Integration.aspx

Migrants - the English challenge

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6383221.stm

 

So does this mean we need a much greater emphasis on the support and training of Esol teach

good practice in the teaching and learning of adult literacy, numeracy, and ESOL

http://www.nrdc.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=1101

As I am a bit of a computer nerd, I have been into gaming for quite some time now...I was reading a retro gaming magazine and there was an article on Raff Cecco of 8 bit Cybernoid and Exolon fame. If you are not sure who I am talking about, he's got a biography on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffaele_Cecco

Apparently, he is taking a new direction in web programming and is involved with constructing a new online application @ http://www.mypinboard.com/. At the moment all you can see is a holding page from register.com.

I have found a few web sites referring to this...: 

"Create animated web content, using a revolutionary online web page editor. Freeform; upload photos; create photo cut-outs; apply dynamic effects & animation. Easy to use; stunning results; "

It sounds interesting and I was wondering if anyone knows anything about it?

When I try to syndicate the tag "comment added" I get an "Feed subscription failed: feed appears to be invalid. Please check your link or try later." error msg..

Here is the feed I used

http://elgg.net/search/rss.php?tag=comment+added

Well, we have finished getting the History student group up and running...you are able to view this by going to:

http://newman.elggspaces.com/hs406/weblog

Things have changed slightly since the last posting. Originally, we were told to expect a group of 30 students and on the day, this has turned into 10. Basically, the History subject area had made the use of this area optional hence the reduced numbers.

Rather than split an already small group into assessment groups/communities, it was decided that these students would all be kept in one group.

Not really too sure how much usage of the system will occur for it's intended purpose and this is due to a couple of reasons:

- The tutor using this system is very new to the technology and is not that confident in using it. As a result, I am guessing that use will not be encouraged during the delivery of the module.

- Not enough of the class is engaged with the functionality for the intended assessment purpose. The chances are that if someone does want to use it, the rest of their assessment group will not, as they have excluded themselves from engaging.

Obviously, this type of situation may change when tutors feel more confident in it's use.

Another way of potentially helping to negate problems decribed above, could be achiveing some sort of critical mass within the system (see previous post for initial thoughts on this).

In a situation like this, even though the tutor is not fully engaged, there is more chance that the rest of the community would interact with the students and they are more likely to notice other students using the system in an academic way.

One thought has been to establish accounts for every student within the system and providing an induction on how to use it for PDP (Personal Development Portfolio) purposes.

This would establish a purpose for use right from the start and would make it more likely that students would use this to support their studies when it could be of use in producing assessed work.

If anyone else has used elgg for PDP, I would love to hear from you!

 

Just thought it would be giood to write a quick update on what has been going on recently within the Newman Elggspaces system.

• Name Change
  We are now calling it "Newman Blogs" instead of "Newman Elgg". Obviously this name does not accurately decribe the extent of the functionality within the system, but we feel that this is a name that staff/students can understand more easily.
  
  If we called it an ePortfolio or "Personal Learning Landscape", I feel that people may lose interest in the facility even before they have started looking at it as they will think it is more complicated to use than it actually is.
  
  A blog is now a common enough term for people to understand and is quite a simple concept. When a user has an account, we are hoping that knowledge of how the rest of the system will work will grow organically from use.
  
• Single File Upload Limit?
  Not sure if anyone else has experienced this when using elggspaces, but there seems to be a 15MB limit on files you can upload. If you go over this, the system does not upload the file.
  
  This has only really been an issue for students wanting to upload video files into the system, so we can deal with it in one of 2 ways. Firstly, we can try to make sure that students are optimising their files for the web before uploading to the system. If this does not get the file size down small enough, we can host the video file on one of our own servers.
  
• Staff Community Blogs
  We are trying to encourage staff to establish community blogs within our elggspaces to add more value for users.
  
  The e-Learning blog that we had within blogger has now been established within elggspaces. One of my colleagues has also established an area for the library to publish a newsletter.
  
  The e-Learning blog is linked to within a weekly newsletter that goes out by email to our tutors.
  
• Functionality Changes
  We have identified a few functionality changes that we would like to make within the system. Some of these changes may be addressed within the next update that is released, but we are sort of forming the opinion that we will not be able to implement many of these until we have an elgg implementation hosted internally.
  
  The types of changes we are looking at are:
  - terminology changes for functionality
  - customising file storage areas for certain subject areas in order to relate to assessed work that students may need to carry out.
  - exclude functionality that we do not expect our students to want to use in the near future. For example, we do not expect any serious dashboard use within the system initially, and we would like to exclude this from the top menu. We would then potentially re-introduce this at a later date. Doing this with other parts of the functionality as well will allow us to have a simple version of the system to make it easier for people to understand (makes it more likely for more content to be generated).
  
• Critical Mass
  Currently, we have just been including small groups of students and only have just over 100 student accounts.
  Use of the system by the students has been encouraging and one tutor has specifically said that he has learnt more about his current students in one term than he has ever done on any previous courses throughout the entire duration.
  
  However, I feel that the full benefit of the system has not really been totally realised yet. When a critical mass of users from the college are active within the system, this will encourage greater cross communication between differing sets of students. At the moment, I believe that this is not happening as thier is not a critical mass of postings/tags that are of interest to the users to get them networking.