Stan Stanier :: Blog

.... or lack of.

Having just aquired probably the coolest laptop on the planet (Macbook Pro), complete with built-in iSight camera and lovely tools for taking pics of yourself, I decided last night to try to update my elgg icon.

An hour later and no matter what stunning effects I applied, I decided close-ups of my nose just wouldn't work, so given all our photo's are now happily stored in iPhoto, decided to select from there.

It's at moments like these that the realisation that you'll never be photogenic really hits home - even with the awsome power of Photoshop there to prettify things.

Added to this is, as I'm the main photographer, most of our photos don't include me, I was left with a choice of around 20 - most of which consisted of me holding fish and, to be fair to the fish, they're the lookers in most of them!!! 

So, I revert to the time-honoured tactic of public humiliation and yet another hat - which is odd as I never wear hats.

Still an interesting exercise in the "revealing yourself to the public" side of social technologies and more reinforcement for the work we have planned to provide a variety of avitars for students to use should they be less inclined to grin at the camera for Elgg and everyone!

Stan 

What about my boy's metacarpal? Having just spent much of the day in various queues awaiting a diagnosis of my boys suspected broken finger I can conclude:

1. Football is dangerous
2. The male pain threshold is significantly lower than that of women
3. A bruised rather than broken finger has no street cred whatsoever (it doesn't even warrant a bandage from the nurse)
4. He's now got a bruised ego as well as finger
5. Yet the intensity of the playground tackle apparently left him surrounded by  concerned girls so he thinks he's got a result overall

Boys eh?
 

What happened to embedded images? I'm sure they used to appear embedded within the text whereas they now appear all linked? Please bring back embedded images otherwise it makes my little rants around diagrams pointless!!! :-)

I've been thinking.... yes I know that's dangerous but:

This diagram is an attempt at me getting my head round how Elgg will fit into the University of Brighton's current student learning experience. Our existing MLE (studentcentral) uses Blackboard and, with over 23000 users and 3,500 course areas, it's pretty well established. However, Blackboard don't seem hugely keen on any radical movement away from the propriatory ring-fenced model and the concept of data flows between it and the growing wealth of web 2.0 technologies out there still seems rather remote. Certainlly, just adding RSS feeds doesn't even appear to be a huge priority. So, currently, the centre of our student online universe (for learning at least) is surrounded by a great wall with all this other stuff wanting to get in. When I try to put Elgg into the picture, it doesn't matter how I draw the diagram, Elgg always appears to occupy the centre ground alongside Blackboard and the whole thing seems to scream out for better integration and ease of movement between systems.

It's interesting that the thinking here is that there would be very little reason to move away from Blackboard (and the serious pain that would incur) unless something radically better appears. Good thinking, and I've always assumed we meant a radically better VLE but, as I look at this diagram, I do wonder whether it's not a VLE but something radically different and perhaps a gradual slide towards the radically different rather than one huge jump. So, in that context perhaps the diagram shows a plan for the future and the start of the slide?

 

Whatever, we've got lots of people with some great plans for Elgg here including:

• PDP and tutor mentoring
• Design project collaboration
• Research communities
• Shared creative writing
• Shared audio production and podcasting
• Delivery of materials via mobiles
• Placement support

I think the one area of the diagram that I'm unclear about (because I'm still getting to grips with all this so am kind of having to admit ignorance which hurts) is tags and whether these are interchangeable - do tags in del.icio.us, Elgg & Flickr match in any way? Do tag aggregators exist? I guess they do or I've got the wrong end of the stick so someone please put me out of my misery!

I guess I posted this partly to try to put my thoughts together but also for anyone who wants to put me right, suggest alternatives or add to stuff as it all helps the students (I hope).

 

Stan 

Finally got round to downloading the photos from new year!

16 of us on a welsh mountain in a Youth Hostel (Rowen) with only some slightly nervous sheep and 4 iPods to keep us company. Arrived after dark in the middle of a snow storm to descover none of the cars could actually make it up the road to the hostel and so ended up carting all our gear up nearly a mile of mountain - 4 times!

Still it was worth it and I can't think of a better place to see in the new year.

From a techy perspective it was very interesting to note the iPod wars that dominated the new year's eve music - 4 iPods amd two speaker docs made for some interesting DJ battles and I got the distinct impression the sheep were glad to see the back of us.

Some thoughts on what else might be needed

- Shared bookmarks (8.3 on the roadmap?)
- A mimimalist (title only?) view for My resources
- A configurable home page for each user?
- commentary/ratings on resources
- a clearer understanding of what to do - at the moment I don't think the real power of Elgg is immediately obvious or the kinds of rules about appropriateness or where to post etc - e.g. should this have been posted to the elgg features community?

Well compared to the blogging tools I've used in the past Elgg is:

* Better at managing files
* Appears better atthe whole accessibility thing
* Not great so far (still haven't read the documentation) at text formatting or presentation of postings
* Great for building communities of learners

Things I would like (maybe there but not found yet)@

* Categories for postings or some other way of structuring stuff
* mobile/email posting
* More people to interact with

Well, the profile says quite a bit, but to put it in more flowery terms:

I'm Stan

I manage the Learning Technologies Group at the University of Brighton

One of our key functions is delivering the university's Managed Learning Environment called studentcentral (http://studentcentral.brighton.ac.uk). Something we're really proud of because:

* less than 4 years we've got 90% of all university modules actively using the system
* Over 23,000 users
* Average more than 500 concurrent users at any one time
* Have great feedback from staff and students on how helpful it is in their learning/teaching

I'm equally proud of my team cause they're completely cool, funky and gorgeous and every single one of them wants to help our staff and students and improve learning - which is nice.

What am I doing here? Well, this year we released a new set of tools on studentcentral that broadly used blogging-type technologies. Unfortunately, because these are plugins to a commercial VLE system, they've very limited in functionality. The shared course journal and wiki tools have gone down a treat and we've seen lots of innovative ideas for their use. The blogs for each student have also been very well used but they don't have RSS, no external access beyond studentcentral and no tagging etc. So, inspired by Josie Frasers presentations, lots of reading and an intuitive sense that these technologies have huge potential for learning, I've embarked on a mission to find out more and try to understand where it may fit into the bigger picture. I have to say it's not easy when you're 40-something and stuff like this begins to make you realise your once top-of-the-tree techno guru status actually died many moons ago and you've been living on reputation rather than sound expertise for months (if not years), so a lot of blogging terminology is still new to me and I'm still struggling to understand how anyone deals with the information overload issue but still, I'm trying and enjoying it.

Whilst much of my blog at present is a mishmash of stuff just posted to test Elgg vs our current blog software, I should mention I wouldn't have found out about it so quickly had it not been for Josie Frazer's excellent sessions at the recent Edublogs conference - nice one Josie and inspired me and my team into lots of thinking and exploring.

Stan

I'm here at the Edublog conference in London and,as I forgot to bring a pen,I thought I'd use my blog to make notes:

Social software - phrase used to refer to blogs,wikis,IRC, shared resources

Shared resources - interesting - sharing bookmarks,commenting on resources and information - probably similar to Jon Dron's idea of communal comment/ranking of resources

Educause community blogging tools look cool

http://www.frappr.com/edubloggers - community blog for educational bloggers and linked to maps to show where users are etc - similar to Mark Eisentstat's jabber ICM client that came out of the OU a couple of years ago but now driven by blog rather than chat software.

Interestingly this conference is in a very nice computer room and the first thing they've done is point everyone at a chat break-out room. As the air conditioning is so noisy, it's really hard to hear what's going on and half the room appears to be using the chat area just to pass the time. This is interesting as many students these days appear to be able to multitask with chat permanently on, mobiles always in hand and apparently still able to pay attention to what's going on around them in the real world. As a man, I'm biologically incapable of multitasking anyway but there's no way I can concentrate on all this stuff at once!!!

Trackback - a means of displaying where postings from different blogs are referred to in other blogs etc - therefore a useful feature for interelating blog postings/distributed conversations.

Web 2 - term now used for the social/contributive developments of the web - user-centred web

eLearning 2- similar,communitites,semantic web, points of presence, Folksonomy, influence of consumer electronics - Stephen Downes (key author in edublogs) http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm

Been there, done it, don't need the buzz words man

Social tools - the idea of education and social spheres merging (nothing new there then)

Control vs innovation - what an interesting concept :-)



Josie Fraser (one of the speakers) has a useful blog: http://fraser.typepad.com/edublogs/

Josie's excellent presentation can be found at http://fraser.typepad.com/edublogs/files/edublogging.ppt

Technorati - best blog search tool at present although Google have just jumped on the band wagon

Anne Davies - school teacher using blogs with her students - http://anne.teachesme.com/

http://www.edublogs.org/ - community blogs and free blogs for educational technologists and tutors

Scott Wilson - Future VLE diagram and cool thoughts about all this stuff http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott -TOP SITE

20six - http://www.20six.co.uk

ACLblogs - http://www.aclblogs.net

Elgg - http://elgg.net - learning network - this looks pretty good - LDAP single sign-on plugin, multiblog etc. Might be an alternative to this Learning Objects stuff that doesn't support all the current funky technologies or even the basic stuff like proper RSS yet!!!!!