True, I had had a couple of glasses of Rioja but this news video brought a tear to my eye. What’s that all about then?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468832.stm

Last Tuesday I went to the latest event in the excellent Talking about Teaching series put on by SDDU at the University of Leeds - Challenging or conforming: the art of blended learning presented by Allison Littlejohn, Chair of Learning Technology at Glasgow Caledonian University. I found this extremely useful and got a number of ideas to follow up in my own teaching and to develop further in discussion with colleagues. The presentation and supporting materials are all available on-line now and the session was videoed but I’m not sure if or when that will be available.

A particularly useful aspect of the 3 hour session was the way it alternated between presentation to introduce both the more conceptual and pedagogical aspects of blended e-learning and concrete examples of blended learning activities. This included an introduction to a number of tools for designing and planning activities, from a simple proforma to specify the problem the proposed activity will address, a brief and general description of the solution, i.e. the activity itself, and the aims and objectives, to much more detailed and concrete specification of the activity - its timings, specification of tutor and student activity, the activities themselves and assessment. We then had an opportunity to work in pairs to propose problems in our own teaching and activities that could provide solutions and begin to construct the more detailed designs. The sharing of these problems and the discussion of the activities suggested was very interesting - from dentistry, the Business School and others.  Allison also pointed us to a number of repositories of blended learning designs and activities that have been constructed in such a way that they can conveniently be repurposed for a variety of different subject areas.

A few points came out of the afternoon that I found particularly thought provoking. Allison is involved in researching and advising on e-learning for large corporations including Shell. Self-paced, self-initiated and self motivated continuous professional learning is becoming a common requirement of employees in the corporate world that many of our graduates will be joining. Employers now claim that it takes approximately 5 years in the job for new graduate employees to bridge the skills deficit for operating in this way and that this deficit is growing. It has also been observed that the massification of HE has led to less student learner independence and self direction than was previously the case. What is required was described as helping the students develop their ’social capital’, in the sense of developing the networks of resources and people that will provide them with the social learning contexts that underpin much personal and professional development and becoming an expert life-long learner. The recommendation is that we look hard and critically at and learn from the parallel developments in e-learning in the corporate sector.

The opportunities to address these general problems by exploiting blended e-learning are compromised by a lack of understanding of the affordances and possibilities the new technology has by staff and by the difficulty of motivating students to work in this way. This suggests students need to be much better informed of why this is important and why it is to their advantage. This is not the first time I have heard a presenter point to the paradox that students are often very familiar with some of the e-tools and aspects of social networking and often operate in vicarious virtual learning processes without being able to consciously bring that knowledge and facility to the more formal learning arena. I think there are a number of interesting questions raised here about students’ prior experience of formal education and the expectations they come to us with. This ties in with the very revealing account about contemporary secondary education given to us by a ’super head’ at last January’s L&T Conference. On the issue of motivating and engaging students in blended e-learning activities, Allison said the chief driver of student learning behaviour is still assessment and changing assessment tasks and strategies will be key to our success. Although this is probably true it is a little dispiriting, that we will need to manipulate students’ satisficing tendencies to make progress. This is not quite what I would like to see - students and staff working together in a community and culture of enquiry and knowledge construction in a spirit of collaboration and sharing. But then I am a child of the sixties!

I was surprised how useful the chat window was for sharing ideas, making comments and asking questions. There was some real brainstorming going on. It contributed significantly to the value of the presentations and is an aspect of on-line conference sessions that would be difficulty to replicate in a ‘real’ conference (unless everyone had a laptop and used a web service like Cover It Live - now there’s a thought). The chat really enhanced the sessions, made it easy for the presenter to see what was interesting the audience and helped give a focus to the audio and text discussion at the end and the summing up. It also was very sociable and entertaining! At times it was a bit like a group of naughty school kids chattering, swapping jokes, and winding up each other and the presenter. Personally I felt the sense of community grow throughout the 3 days and felt this made a significant contribution to ambience of the serious discussion too.

I felt pretty comfortable in the environment quite quickly once I got the hang of all the bells and whistles and there was quite a lot of spontaneous mutual support and advice as the community sorted itself out. One of the ‘old hands’ at this sort of thing remarked how better we had become operating in this sort of environment, not just the techical issues of knowing how the functions and tools work but how to make effective use of them in the presentations and the peripheral activities around them. I guess we will all be experts at this in a few years time, and hopefully our students will learn good and effective practice in these environments while they are with us.

I am attending the Next Generation Environments JISC conference next week as a member of a discussion panel but this is a normal face-to-face conference. Several people who were ‘at’ the Emerge on-line conference will be there and I am looking forward to comparing notes. I think on-line conferences will never replace f2f for many reasons but as additional and in-between events I think they are enormously valuable and effective. There can be more of them, they can be highly focussed (mini-conferences) with more targetted agendas, they are cheap (often free) and do not require travel and accommodation. And of course, the 2 modes can be merged when f2f conferences also run Elluminate (or another suitable system) and provide wikis, social networking and blogging. This opens up conferences to individuals who cannot other wise make it. And often the sessions can be recorded.

There is a growing understanding of the main differences and the main pros and cons of each conference mode. One disadvantage of the on-line mode is that I had to buy my own beer. On the otherhand I didn’t make a fool of myself at the disco. Actually the Emerge conference did have a very successful social event in Second Life with a DJ and fashion show. Sadly I couldn’t make it because I found my home PC was under spec for the new SL client and it wouldn’t install.

I overheard on the radio this morning, while scraping the toast, some mention of twitter and the fact that some person in Downing St. is twitting (tweeting?) regularly about what’s going on there. I made a mental note to look it up on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme listen again. Partly because I usually mislay mental notes and partly because my small group of twitter mates might be interested I posted a tweet (twit?) mentioning it. Within a short time someone posted a reply giving me the URL to the programme and how far to fast forward to find the relevant bit (14 mins 30 secs) and telling me that the Today programme  runs a twitter channel itself. Looking at this I see that most, perhaps all, BBC Regional news services have twitter channels too. A little later my original tweet got another reply with a link to the Downing St. twitter channel and to Bill Thompson who was being interviewed on the Today programme, from where I found the interviewer, Rory Cellan-Jones. This in turn led me to another tweet with links to a Guardian article about the Downing St. twitter-er.

I must say I find the twitter phenomenon fascinating. It is ripe for sociological analysis and I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing it. It exemplifies so many aspects of on-line social networking  - networks within networks, the power the ‘friends of a friend’ connections, the importance of reputation and status, the collective and collaborative evaluation and dissemination of information and resources, and much more. Who would have thought that a stream of short messages (max 14o characters), often about where people are, what they are eating, watching on TV, what mood they are in, what the weather is like where they are, that they are in a traffic jam eating chocolate, and so on could also be such a powerful research tool. And the seemingly trivial nature of many posts is not trivial at all in the context of groups of twitter-ers and the nature of their identities and relationships and the reality of their virtual community. I’m getting close to abandoning the notion of 'virtual' in these contexts. It just obscures more of the nature of these sorts of communities and their relations than it illuminates. The experience is real, the information is real, the people are real, their activities are real and, dare I say it, the feeling of attachment and even to some extent obligation are real. Or at least as real as in some networks and communities I am involved with off-line.

Thanks to my Twitter friends and FOATF I have discovered DimDim. These are a few notes on my first experiment. DimDim is a (still beta) free web conferencing system that can be used by signing up for the hosted service or the OS code can be downloaded and installed locally. To host a meeting the host’s computer needs a small browser plugin installed but attendees do not need this. Everyone needs the Flash plugin, version 9 or above.

Once you have registered with DimDim any number of meetings can be scheduled in advance or one can be started immediately on an ad hoc basis. Invitations are sent out by email. The email provides a link to the meeting and details of the agenda, scheduled time and so on. However, the email does not provide logging in details and any one who obtains the link to the meeting would be able to attend. When an invited attendee clicks on the link it takes them to a joining page that has already filled in their email and the name of the meeting. They just need to enter a screen name to enter. Any email address can be entered here so the meeting url can be sent to any one or made into a link on a web page or in a blog post.

Before letting you in DimDIm does a check of your browser and version of Flash. If it not 9 or above you can install at this point.

Once in there you can see a list of attendees. The main area can be used for viewing the host’s desktop and any applications being run, a Powerpoint or PDF file, or a Whiteboard. This is controlled by the host. There is an option to chat with all - opens chat area - or initiate private chats with any of the attendees. Chat and audio can be disabled for individuals by the host.

If the full screen option is chosen this makes the maximum space available for viewing an application or presentation but some scrolling is required by the viewer to see the whole of the application window unless the host has sized and positioned it on their desktop to fit what area the viewer can see. In effect this puts some contol of the scrolling that is necessary in the hands of the host. If the viewer needs to scroll this can be guided by the host via audio or text communication. The system provides audio and video communication. To share an application the host has to minimse the DimDim meeting window so is not able to see what viewers can see. Control of applications or slides cannot be handed to viewers but they can collaboratively use the whiteboard and annotate slides. Switching between these desktop, slides and the whitebaord is a single click. The screen refresh on viewers’ screens is not bad but there is an inevitable lag.

It looks like a maximum of 20 attendees are possible and only 3 of these can share the microphone (i.e. use the audio channel).

I have tried DimDim this by running my PC as host and a laptop logged in as an attendee. I couldn’t use sound as the feedback nearly brought the plaster of the ceiling!

One possible use of this is as an alternative to Skype meetings. Skype allows multiple users to talk, text and video but all participants need to be registered Skype users and have Skype installed on their PCs. With DimDIm only the meeting’s host PC needs an installed client. In addition there is the facility to share documents and applications.

I am thinking of testing it by running a session(s) for introducing LeedsBlogs, our Elgg installation, to new users to demonstrate the basics of posting, joining a community blog, uploading files, embedding files and images, what ‘friends’ are for, tagging, use of access levels, creating bespoke access lists and using them and so on. Or run LeedsBlogs help desks, or a master class, perhaps….

Chris Sessums posted two days ago on what makes his personal learning environment. Academics tend to think more in terms of research and scholarship rather than learning which is both a pity and a mistake. I have for sometime been trying to persuade academic colleagues that they, just like our students, are first and foremost learners. OK, hopefully we are pretty competent learners, even perhaps expert learners, and our students are generally still learning to be learners, sort of ‘apprentice’ learners. But I think the learning to learn business doesn’t end for any of us these days, not even academics.

Chris invited us to tell what our personal learning environments consist of. Here goes a first shot at it.

Text books, research monographs and papers, libraries, journals, newspapers, TV and radio news, RSS feeds from selected news and information sources (e.g. BBC, Earthwire, CommonDreams, Union of Concerned Scientists, RealClimate, etc…).  Google Scholar.

Novels, films, TV and radio documentaries. Biographies, autobiographies, political, economic and history books. Friends and family. Listening to my wife.

Conferences. Conference bars. Staff development events in my Uni. Email correspondence with colleagues.

LeedsBlogs (Elgg based social community). Lurking in a number of Ning communities. Eduspaces. A fairly extensive, mainly educational, blog roll.

I’m sure I can add to this with a bit more thought and imagination. Like Chris says, it’s all networks of one sort or another. Even to engage with a journal article is to enter into some sort of dialogue with the author, their status, reputation and the context in which they wrote the article. For me it is always engagement and dialogue with others, face-to-face, on-line, synchronously, asynchronously, or with the words of past generations. Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Foucault, Chomsky and Alan Bennett are all nodes in the networks that make up my personal learning environment.

This January I gave a presentation on ‘blending research and learning ecologies’ at the Leeds University 5th Learning and Teaching Conference . I only had 30 minutes and as usual tried to do way too much. The few questions I left time for were very good and, again as usual, I thought I performed better in the freestyle of Q&As than I did in the formal presentation. Trying to make sense of stuff in discussion with others seems to be more comfortable and natural somehow. Anyway, gratifyingly, the feedback collected on the session by the conference organisers turned out to be pretty good and I have been asked to write an 800 word version for the University’s Learning and Teaching Journal. Only 800 words! Clearly they don’t know me very well. I’ll do my best however. Just in case anyone is interested I’ll post it here too.

I have recently been helping some colleagues in our Life Long Learning Centre to set up a discussion board for tutors to share ideas on good teaching practice. We are using an OS product called phpBB installed and administered by our central web team. I thought the system pretty good and have now got an installation of my own to explore.

Use of discussion boards seems to be on the increase again and I wonder if this is a sort of backlash against the relative complexity and time commitment of using communications tools based on blogging functionality. As a great fan of social networking and systems like Elgg and Ning, I have spent the last few years encouraging colleagues to use these in preference to the old fashioned, heavily structured, largely text based threaded message forums. But, for some things, I have found discussion boards in our VLE and Student Portal, the Forums here in Eduspaces (once upon a time) and those available in Ning groups more effective and significantly easier to use. I am gradually forming a better idea of what systems like Elgg are good for and what is better suited to focused threaded discussion. I hope to turn this into some sort of guidelines/best practice document, probably collaboratively written in a Google doc in due course. I would be grateful for any thoughts on this and any observations on your own experience, dear Reader, of the two different systems.

Today we learnt that Eduspaces will continue to be Eduspaces (not Educator Central) and is not being taken over by TIG. No offense to TIG I hope but I must say I consider this to be very good news. I joined the TIG site and had a good look around. Good stuff and interesting but with what appeared to be quite a different constituency and ethos to that of Eduspaces.

I have decided to post to my new Wordpress blog for the moment and import into Eduspaces. There are a number of reasons for this. I have set up my own domain and installed WP myself and, much to my amazements, it all works! The much talked of WP 5 minutes install was not too wide of the mark. I want to continue to learn about WP and am now using it as as a content management system for my web site too. As it is my own installation I have a great deal of freedom over which template to use and have an opportunity to learn a bit about php, css and so on. I want to be able to install and run Elgg too in due course and I feel something like WP with its extensive documentation and relative simplicity is a good stepping stone along the way. The final consideration is the ease of exporting posts, comments, categories etc. compared with Elgg at the moment. Using WP to ‘host’ my posts and then feed them across to Eduspaces seems like the most flexible and secure option and I have noticed several  other Eduspaces’ bloggers doing this now - Josie and Graham for instance.