Christmas already?

Five months since I made my last posting - doesn't that speak volumes about blogs? Since the last post I haven't been entirely lazy, I have been busy putting some of the new tools into practice so may be now is a good time to take stock. Second Life Still think this is a very powerful educational tool and delighted to see that it is catching on across the University to the point of having our own BNU island. Whilst the minor deity that is JL is busy building a replica of BNU, I have got down to the more seasonal application of building Christmas presents! Not terribly useful but at least they'll be in my inventory for next year. Tried to build instinctively at first (see Exhibit A the snowman). Rather more helpful are the SL tutorials you can find on You Tube (see Exhibit B the gift wrapped box) - some of which are linked below. The current plan is to task Ads & Proms students to run their ad campaigns in SL. The opportunities are endless for Events and Sports courses, but the island needs a little more development first.

What firewall?

Last posting to this blog today. Having played with many of the Web 2.0 technologies this last semester, here are some ways to integrate the fun into the learning process - so long as time, space, and access allow! 1) Public Relations Induction I have set up a Public Relations Group on blackboard for all my PR students (a very small course)with the intention that they use it as a course meeting point. The aim is that the L3 students "buddy up" with the L1 students and provide a mentoring service via posting content, use of discussion board or simply making announcements about topics of interest. Their space - will they use it? Level 1 - Personal Development The e-aim here is to introduce the first years to the delights of blogs and wikis. Throughout their first year programme they have to complete a number of group written assignments. Some time needs to be invested in the PC room introducing them to wikis as group authoring software. If access permits they are then able to co-construct group essays from home - regardless of where home is. The last assignment in PD has traditionally been their Skills Portfolio - an on-going reflection of their progress throughout the year. The typical student produces this in the last 3 days before submission following a massive paper-chase to collect all the missing evidence. It might be that blogs captivate their interest sufficiently to actually produce an on-going reflection journal from Day 1. Again this will need time and access to set up effectively. L1 - Customers and Markets A number of intiatives could be taken here with this course of 100 plus first years. 1) I can continue with a webquest to set them up for their first tca. (Done this for years without knowing it was called a webquest) 2) encourage them to use wikis for any group reports 3) develop Photo Story 3 clips to illustrate the Events theme running through the year 4) attempt to set up small discussion groups to encourage collaborative working outside the class L2 - Consumer Buyer Behaviour Already well ahead with this one - an assignment to research and profile users of Social Networking Sites such as My Space, Facebook and Second Life. Courageous students with access (destroy the firewall) will be able to use the SNS themselves to undertake marketing research. Fancy doing a virtual f2f interview in SL? Use groups within Facebook to cascade questionnaires. The world is your oyster! L2 - Marketing Communications These students are going to be required to research the re-branding process of the new bcuc. It may be possible to carry out research with both current students and alumni using Facebook and My Space L3 - PR Work Placement Module This is a WP module NOT a WP year so the students will still be attending clases throughout the week. That said they might benefit from 1) a PR WP Group on Bb to discuss their placement issues, 2) use of a blog to record their experiences and 3) regular email contact with their lecturer Dissertation Three areas to consider here: 1) the use of a blog to assimilate, record and structure raw data during the research process - saves space in bedrooms and carrying heavy ring binders 2) possible dissertation topic - e-marketing research particularly using Social Networking Sites 3) possible dissertation topic - a critial analysis of using Second Life for Corporate Advertising Foundation Route B - Understanding Customers This is the only work-based learning programme that I teach on. It is also delivered by a number of associated colleges, hence the need for effective communication. Extensive use of blackboard is required here to keep in touch with both students and partner college staff. There will be a need to build content within Bb away from just posting lecture handouts, and to encourage full use of discussion board.

The 5-Stage Model

Got to do it at some point I guess - play around with a bit of theory, drop a few names, (I met that Gilly Salmon once), use a few four-syllable words..... But first - my own version of the 5 Stage Model (Second Life style) And there you have it! A five step model built out of 5 prims courtesy of Education UK free sandbox. What is so skillful here is the camera angle - the way I have managed to edit out all the fantastic creations that were being erected alongside me! If you know Salmon's 5 Stage Model of Online Learning you will know already that Step 2 is about socialising on-line. No surprises then that my Step 2 is a lot bigger than all the other steps. Not sure I have actually got past Step 2 yet? (Not actually sure why my second step is bigger than the others but I couldn't alter it. Probably relates to why I teach marketing and not a design/art subject.)

Whoopppeee! Photo Story 3!

Just playing around with Photo Story 3 to make bite sized videos for Events students. The Tour de France

Virtually a student

So 6 months in to BCUC's Postgraduate Certificate in e-Learning it is time to reflect on being on the "receiving end". What do I know now? 1. I can't learn how to use new technology without being shown (thanks Justin) 2. Once shown it is a doddle and unlike 1980s technology doesn't fall over! 3. I don't need to be in a physical classroom to learn new theories and, actually, would prefer to be allowed to get on with just reading about them 4. I don't get much value out of discussion board (more later) 5. I am still hesitant to post comments "publicly" (despite evidence to the contrary) 6. I think the most relevant theoretical idea we have discussed was Maurice's Theory of Sensed Risk - Go Maurice! 7. I really look forward to going to class for the social side of learning. I believe I would have lost interest without it. 8. I love the potential for using wikis but don't yet feel confident to do so for real 9. Second Life rocks! Why discussion board sucks?

1. It is an added layer of communication that isn't necessary and isn't handy. Who is going to shut down email to ask a question through the discussion board? 2. It isn't user-friendly - either to post or to respond to other posts and especially not in back tracking over a conversation 3. It takes too long to get a response from anyone 4. The process of posting is encouraged through artificial tasks and therefore doesn't generate a long term behaviour That said the Virtual? Classroom which offers instant messenging may get around these issues and my own students found discussion board a very useful tool in completing a group assg over the Easter break.So, I guess, I need to find a real task to sell it to my own students.

Learning Spaces Without Walls

So the technology of wi-fi, wikis and the web potentially frees us from the physical classroom. Learning spaces can be designed to enhance the pleasure and effectiveness of learning and teaching. We know that the only time students are really learning is when they are active on an assignment. Regardless of the length of the lecture, the use of images in the powerpoint slide show, or the recommended reading list, they only really engage with the material at the point of researching and writing up the report. So why do we insist on talking AT them? Long and Ehrmann 2005 "Where does academic learning really take place? We focus .. on the rooms where instructors and students interact- because these facilities are expensive to create, renovate, and maintain and because they shape the daily schedule of most academic institutions. But of course much, perhaps most, learning currently occurs outside these rooms". Brown & Lippincott (2003) "with an increased emphasis on collaboration and group projects, students are learning in small groups outside of the classroom as they accomplish work related to their course". At Chalfont that typically means working in the LRC. Long lines of computers against a blank wall. Students work in "lines" crowded around one computer with no space to lay out their notes and resources. Does this really support group-working? The middle of the LRC is necessarily full of individual desks ready for the next round of exams in six months time (?) How good would it be to rip out all the exam desks and replace with huge sofas, floor cushions, low, round tables and coffee machines? How great if it were wi-fi enabled so that the students could sit around in groups and actually make eye contact with one another whilst they work? Long and Ehrmann conclude that we need to change our views of the classroom from 1. focusing on formal education to emphasising learning in both formal and non-formal settings 2. from seeing collegel level learning as being primarily about listening, reading and taking notes to seeing learning as being about situated action, collaboration, coaching and reflection It will be interesting to see how these changes in approach have been reflected in the new build at HW.

Breaking out of the classroom

I think this is going to be a rant! Why are we still teaching in classrooms? Seriously why? Why do we sit young people down in straight rows facing a million powerpoint presentations of what's in the text book? And why do we do this in 3 hour blocks? I get the impression that most of them find this pretty boring and go to great lengths to avoid class at all cost. My most effective course for years took place largely in the canteen. (Granted that the small numbers on the course allowed this and the usual timetabling problems encouraged it.) As a group we dropped the terms class, classroom, lecture (particularly powerpoint) and essays, replacing such a traditional approach with business meetings, agendas, action points and budgets. Never mind what they learned - I learned stacks! Funny though the average for the module was 64%! So something must have worked. Right, when was the last time you were "in class"? How much did you learn? Okay - put another way - what percentage of time were you really taking in and understanding new material? How much of the class was covering what you should know by now, what was in the reading you should have done, and some sort of introduction to what is coming next and what tasks you should be doing next? Go back to VARK - how does a 3 hour class, delivered mostly from the board, appeal to any given learning style? The Visuals start looking out of the window, the Kinasthetics start texting or talking, the Aurals turn to their i-pods and the Read/Writes reach for their newspapers! Where do you learn best? In meetings? In a quiet room with a vast desk covered in books, journals and other research sources? Or, like me, by a PC, in an empty house, with the Kaiser Chiefs blaring out at a million decibels? Why do we expect students to be any different? (I just had terrible trouble embedding this video - thanks go to all the very helpful people on the blogger help discussion sites that I got there in the end.) So where is this rant going? Well to another posting concerning learning spaces and social/community learning.

SNS - Second Life

Second Life Refused to try it for weeks through fear of what kind of people might be in there. Then each and every delegate at the Stoke Conference on e-Learning was talking about it and its educational benefits. (Question: SL ? Second Life or Senior Lecturer?) And now I'm totally addicted! The obvious benefits are being chatted up on a regular basis, being able to change your image without resort to expensive cosmetic surgery, and the ability to return to nightclubs for the first time since the kids were born! Oh and apparently there are educational benefits too! Further reading of Tim Guest's Second Lives reveals a world of hairless wedding guests, SL mafia, people making real money dealing real estate, and a group of wonderful people behind Wilde Cunningham. If it is good enough for big companies to use for commerce surely it has educational potential regardless of the criticism it receives. Companies are using SL to recruit IT staff, to concept-test new products, to sell or take orders for new products, and to stream their internet presence. Reuters have their own resident reporter and web presence where they report the daily exchange rate of Linden dollars for US dollars. Second Life growth slows Fri May 11, 2007 8:05am PDT By Adam Reuters (Source: Reuters/Second Life) Electric Sheep’s Giff Constable (Forseti Svarog in Second Life) has a breakdown of the April statistics released on Thursday by numbers maven Meta Linden. The numbers show that growth in unique Second Life users has been steadily slowing since a peak of nearly 50 percent per month in October, 2006. So maybe the sign up rate is slowing, and maybe there are hundreds of thousands of lapsed users but there are millions of people still "in the game" from all walks of life. The educational uses are endless from straight forward market research (surveys and focus groups - although etiquette requires you to ask Linden Labs first) all the way through to full simulation of real life scenarios. Guest says that the US Army use it to train soldiers how to react in case of terrorist attack. On a slightly less alarming basis it could be used to simulate crowd safety management at Events. Various stadia already exist in SL including the Ajax Stadium. Indeed, The Guardian in association with Intel, just sponsored Second Fest - an SL Glastonbury without the mud and the "not quite up to the job" toilets!

Social Networking Sites

Oooh I like these! Facebook - a totally fun but completely inane form of communicating with old mates. Second Life (also referred to interchangeably as Single Life or Social Life) - what a fantastically creative place. The world is your oyster (or maybe your avatar is?) Facebook Statistics (courtesy of Wikipedia, July 2007) (Approximate numbers as of June 2007). * Users: Over 28 million * Monthly new user average: 4 million * Daily new user average: 150,000 * Page views: Over 40 billion per month * Searches: Over 600 million per month * Largest network: London, UK 673,900+ On March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of American youths in the United States discovered Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than males (56%). Source: Abram, Carolyn (2007-02-23). "Have a taste" - Facebook blog entry (blog). Personal Reflections 1. couldn't see the point of it - this is something students use to publish photos of drunken gatherings 2. assumed it related to the Millennial Generation's desire for celebrity 3. didn't want to publish details of my life - couldn't see that anyone would be interested 4. concerned as to misuse of the site - see newspaper reports of school students insulting their teachers Eventually joined due to ex-student pressure and, ultimately I am glad I did. Great platform for rekindling relationships with past friends. BCUC's alumni is in there - now all we have to do is to use the technology to benefit from it. Possibly a bit of data mining required. Possible Uses in HE Well as the students are clearly in there and love the technology this is a good place to meet up and to connect. Make up networks of class groups and use it for announcements. Make specific facebook pages to act as course pages. Use the networks to carry out market research for assignments. This is their favoured communication tool - for now at least!

Blogs

Don't like them! Although - to be fair - the technology is serving me very well for this on-line journal. Don't really get it! Why do people want to write a public diary? Is it the need to be published? To have 5 minutes of fame? Anne Bartlett-Bragg, from the University of Technology, Sydney, 2003 believes there are 500,000 plus blogs on the internet. There are some claims that there may be more than 2 million. Ever read any? Ever been sent a link to any? Who is publishing and what for? To be fair British newspapers use them extensively to encourage readers to comment on newsworthy stories. Presumably this gives them a channel to spawn more stories and to edit according to the views of their readers. Guardian Unlimited blogs are evidence that some people like them and have time in their busy schedules to respond with comments. Personal experience is less positive. Two attempts at blogging proved how difficult it is to use this as a two-way form of communication. Nobody writes back. How do you get momentum going so that people constantly log on and respond? Both blogs 1) for contacting old students and 2) for gathering feedback on the student newspaper both died a death within the space of a week. Couple of learning points from this exercise though: 1. If you are the author of multiple blogs your details have to be the same on each blog. Any additions/amendments to your profile copy through to all blogs. Hence my details have now overwritten the details of the PR students on the Fonts blog 2. More interestingly, the comment from an ex-student that said "we're all in Facebook" Not giving up on them though. As stated above the technology is great for an on-line journal and this may be something to trial with the students next academic year. A blog seems the perfect medium for students completing their Personal Development Skills Portfolio the core of which is a reflective narrative on their skills development. From reading Bartlett-Bragg it may be possible to encourage Level 1 Personal Development students to engage with blogs to produce an online journal. It should be possible to encourage them to get as far as Stage 3 in the process- "Reflective Monologues"

Web 2.0 experienced

Wikis, blogs, social spaces uncovered ....... Wikis The origins of wikis and some limited discussion can be found in the previous posting. The benefits are obvious, most particularly in terms of students involved in group publishing activities. The complexity of setting up a wiki and managing groups is, as yet, unknown but the benefits make it worth pursuing. Lyndsay Grant's Case Study "Using Wikis in Schools" (May 2006) provides us with an excellent example of independent learning via a school-based collaborative activity. The 11 year-old students were asked to collaborate on a history project looking at "Technological developments since 1950" using a wiki (from wikispaces) to publish their findings. Despite this being a group project the students tended to get very protective over "their" web pages and seemed to work in isolation, "very few edited material on others' pages" (Grant, 2006) On one occasion however, a child moderated the work of others as they had misread the brief. Whilst the original authors took this very badly and subsequently ignored the advice, the child-moderator would have learned a great deal. The ability to look at each others' work and to evaluate it is very beneficial to learning and the wiki technology enables this to happen very simply, in an interactive, fun way. Unfortunately the learners perceive risk in 1) posting their ideas publicly and 2) becoming a class swot "acting like teacher". The problem, then is not the technology but the group dynamic, the peer pressure that prevails. View of Self - does the learner feel confident enough in their own abilities to comment on other people's work? Relationships - will commenting (usually negatively) spoil relationships with classmates? Reputation - will the learner's reputation in the group be damaged as a result? Personal experience with group work at Level 5 (HE) would suggest that these concerns diminish the longer the group has worked together. Eight PR students (in their second year) collaborated very successfully on a student newspaper assignment using Blackboard's discussion board as the main communication tool. A wiki would have offered a much better interface for a collaborative activity of this kind. BCUC's Public Relations students excel themselves again with this excellent publication for those student living at Chalfont Campus.

Web 2.0 Technologies

"Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS feeds have been dubbed "social software" because they are perceived as being especially connected, allowing users to develop Web content collaboratively and open to the public" (Alexander 2006 cited in Parker and Chao 2007) Question: Does anyone over 40 years of age (not working in IT or media) have a clue what any of those words mean? If these are just things that kids and computer programmers play with when they should be getting some fresh air - can't we just ignore it? From an academic perspective is collaboratively designed web content such a good idea? How many times have you written "don't use wikipedia" when marking a student essay? What's the real fear? Is it that we lecturers are losing control of the information flow? Or is it that we don't trust students to develop their own ideas? Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows: "Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a website that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well.(Heigl, Richard; Glaser, Markus; Ebersbach Anja (2006): Wiki: web collaboration. Springer, ISBN 3540229396) Just thinking about that grey wall .... Either way we can't ignore these technologies, we have to work out how to use them to everyone's benefit - learner and teacher. "talk to junior staff in any organisation and they'll be the ones doing this stuff. Obviously I'm not suggesting you give the office junior a fat load of bandwidth and let them play all day but consider how these digital natives are going to change the way you structure your business" (Ranger, S 2007) Enough chat - what are these tools and how can we use them in HE? Wikis Blogs Social Networking Sites ...........Facebook ...........delic.io.us ...........Second Life

Objectives

So why did I sign up for this course? I mean, it's not like I haven't got enough to do already! On reflection, I think there were 3 reasons; boredom children and work. (Thinking about it they are the three drivers for most things.) Boredom: If you read Wikipedia's definition and explanation of boredom carefully it mentions a couple of things of direct relevance. "1) Perhaps more importantly, boredom is often a symptom of deeper problems, such as depression, ineffective classroom teaching, or ineffective management in the workplace. and 2)Some people believe that boredom can be cured by activities such as exercise or social activities" So I am bored in the classroom and as a result my students are bored and need some social activity or exercise to cure the ennui. Is e-Learning the answer for all of us? Children Secondly - children! I am being left behind. What is so fascinating about The Sims anyway? What do they learn from it 18 hours a day? Have you noticed children spend more time playing with computer technology than watching the TV? Have you noticed students get bored sitting in class just listening? And what does VARK tell us about people's need to interact to learn? Perhaps e-Learning is the answer? Is it the bridge between the generations - between the teacher and the learner? And who is now the teacher and who is the learner? If new technology is transparent for kids, yet opaque for us parents - doesn't that make them the teachers? And isn't that what we are trying to encourage - independent learning? Work The last reason is clearly that of work. One or two universities are clearly ahead of the game and we need to catch up if we want to build any sort of reputation in this area. Leicester's MediaZoo demonstrates what can be done as does this clip from YouTube So, in summary, can e-Learning technologies be used to engage learners in HE?

A sort of contents page

Assuming that you read them in chronological order of course! 1. Objectives for following the pgCeL course 2. Web 2.0 technologies - the new toolkit 3. Web 2.0 experienced 4. Blogs 5. Social Networking Sites - Facebook 6. Social Networking Sites - Second Life 7. Breaking out of the classroom 8. Learning Spaces 9. Reflections on being a virtual student 10.The 5 Stage Model 11.Integrating e-Learning into current modules