eRambler

#altc2011 Day 3

2011-09-08T15:09:00Z

And so ALT-C 2011 draws to a close. I followed online last year and the year before, but it’s been my first chance to attend in person, which has been a great experience. I’ve met lots of people who I’ve been following online for some time, and plenty more who are completely new to me. I also seem to have come up with a new job title and a bit of a mission, on which more at some future time. For now, here are my first thoughts on this final day of the conference.

Project results

I was up bright and early again, this time to hear some of the results from three small learning technology projects.

Lyn Greaves (UWL) and Claire Bradley (London Met) told us about their development of open educational resources to support students’ digital literacy and general academic practice.

Cheryl Middleton and Steve Brierley (Sheffield Hallam) presented their experiences in using enquiry-based learning methods instead of conventional lectures to deliver a course to their Information Systems undergraduates. They were inspired by Donald Clark’s keynote at last year’s ALT-C, and it’s great to see lecturers attending the conference and sharing their own practice from the front lines.

Finally, Vicki McGarvey and Anna Armstrong (Nottingham Trent University) shared with us their project to encourage lecturers to share their learning objects with each other.

Great work all three groups!

Making the case

My next session of the morning was run by freelancer Sarah Chesney, who recently carried out research commissioned by PebblePad to find how individuals and small teams were convincing senior management to roll out successfully concluded small-scale projects on a wider basis.

Sarah did a good job of getting us talking together over a couple of example scenarios, and gave us some useful pointers. For example, she pointed us towards the Sloan-C Quality Framework as a useful tool to help structure thinking around the quality of a initiative.

I think my main takeaway from this session will be to always be paying attention to data on costs of particular ways of doing things, especially for the period before and after making a change. Gathering data to convince management is not always at the front of your mind when you’re not sure yourself whether a particular change will work.

The elusive technological future

Invited speaker John Naughton closed the conference with a thought-provoking talk on the impossibility of predicting the pace and direction of technological change. This is another talk that I doubt I can do justice with a summary, so I encourage you to take a look at the online recording when it becomes available on the ALT YouTube channel.

One aspect which caused a bit of a stir, on Twitter at least, was Naughton’s presentation style: just him, a microphone and a script on his iPad. It sounds like a recipe for all that is bad about the lecture as a format, but in fact it was riveting.

There was a certain amount of frustration that he wouldn’t be drawn on what the implications were for education, but my own feeling is that he was quite sensibly avoiding speaking about something when he didn’t feel qualified to do so — the whole gist of his argument was that it is futile to try and predict what technology will do to our society in the future.

Anyway, I hope you’ve found my small slice of ALT-C useful and interesting. I certainly enjoyed it! It’s sparked off a few different trains of thought which may well develop into blog posts in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!

#altc2011 Day 2

2011-09-07T16:54:03Z

Continuing with the task I began yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on today’s talks and workshops at ALT-C 2011.

I began the day with Anne-Marie Cunningham’s talk on professional identity in the context of medical education. Anne-Marie herself has a complex identity, as practitioner, educator, researcher and student, and when she began blogging and tweeting in order to combat the isolation she sometimes felt as a GP she found that identity challenged in some interesting ways.

Following Anne-Marie’s talk was a poorly disguised sales pitch from some guy who works for Blackboard — the least said about that the better, I think.

Led by the “Knows”

Next up, Doug Belshaw and John Traxler gave me a refreshing change: a workshop which was actually a workshop. They’d chosen a couple of collections of elearning-related case-studies, and split us into groups to critically analyse the case-studies therein. We got a really good debate going, trying to decide what the purpose of a case study should be and what it should contain to be valid/useful.

For my part, I think that a lot of the weaknesses we identified could be mitigated by the inclusion of references to the sources of the data quoted, so that if you choose you can verify the conclusions for yourself.

I did like John Traxler’s comment that we need to be wary of policy-based evidence replacing evidence-based policy.

Are we in Open Country?

The last session before lunch was a bit of fun, but with a serious message too. Amber Thomas, David White, David Kernohan and Helen Beetham got dressed up as characters from the Wild West to talk about issues related to OER. There was even bonus banjo music from Dave Kernohan!

Some of the most interesting points for me came up in the extended discussion that followed their introductory presentation. In particular, it’s very important when thinking about OER to not get sidetracked by the content. Making content open has some value, but it does not democratise access to education per se; in some ways it can have the opposite effect. It’s important to be able to associate the pedagogical context with a given open resource. Similar arguments seem to apply to other forms of openness as well.

Transforming American Education

After lunch we had a keynote speech from Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She told us a bit about the Obama government’s plans for educational technology, which does indeed sound quite impressive!

She described technology as a “force multiplier” — not a replacement for teachers but a way of making teachers more effective, which I think is the only attitude that can work in the long term. As part of that, they’re making an effort to make educational research more transparent and accessible to educators so that they have more opportunities to learn about evidence-supported good practice.

She also talked about making learning more like a game, something which I’m currently a bit sceptical about. I can see the advantages, but there’s always the danger that as you incentivise one group you end up disincentivising or even alienating another. It has to be implemented in a sufficiently fool-proof way to avoid that situation occurring.

Effective web conferencing

My final session of the day was a workshop on web conferencing with a guy from collaborATE, who provide support for Adobe Connect in the UK. I’ll admit, I was a bit wary of this after the earlier Blackboard sales pitch, but actually the presenter did a great job of providing us with some useful tips for running a successful webcast.

I took a lot of notes from this session, so I’ll probably save them for another post, perhaps when I’ve had chance to try them out. The key message, though, was this: preparation, preparation, preparation. Like all forms of communication, webcasting works best when you’re confident, well practiced and in control of your environment.

In a little bit it will be time to relax a bit and have a good old chinwag with some old and new friends at the gala buffet, so I’ll wrap it up for now.

PS. If you’re wondering where all my tweets about the conference have gone, I’m experimenting with a separate conference account, @jezconf to avoid spamming my regular followers with lots of ALT-C tweets. If you’re interested, please follow that account, or you can just follow the conference hashtag, #altc2011.

#altc2011 Day 1

2011-09-06T22:35:10Z

Plan Ceibal

After a short introduction from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, conference chair John Cook handed over to Miguel Brechner from Uruguay to talk about the inspiring Plan Ceibal.

This project started in 2006 and tapped into the One Laptop Per Child programme to provide every schoolchild in Uruguay with a laptop and Internet access. I can’t really do it justice here, but I encourage you to watch the recording of his talk and the questions afterwards.

By focusing on users and usability, rather than on the technology, and not just letting vendors taking the lead, Plan Ceibal has made a reall cultural and social difference in Uruguay. Kids are now eager to get to school, parents are getting online with the help of their children.

It raises serious questions about how we do technology in our schools. I don’t have the statistics to hand, but it sounds rather like a developing country has more schoolchildren with Internet access than we do, which is worrying. If they can teach programming and robotics in primary school, why are we still having computer classes (and qualifications, such as ECDL) that focus on word processing and spreadsheets?

Cloud Learning with Google Apps

My first parallel session was about Google Apps in education. I had high hopes of this, but to be honest, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from it.

The guy from Google did wave a Chromebook around, which looks like a very useful device, but possibly a bit hamstrung without a network connection until HTML5 offline web apps become a bit more commonplace. There were also rumours of being able to run virtualised desktop apps in the browser thanks to a partnership with Citrix, but no demonstration of how at might work.

The one thing that did show some promise was the brief mention of Manish Malik’s work to use Google App Engine to start building a VLE integrated with Google Apps, which he calls a Cloud Learning Environment. I’ll be looking into that in a bit more detail when I get a chance.

Collaborative technology

After lunch it was three short papers on the general theme of collaboration with technology. Jill Fresen of the University of Oxford gave a nice overview of the mobile interface, Mobile Oxford, to their Sakai-based VLE, WebLearn. They’ve done some really interesting work with it, especially integrating with the Sakai Polls tool to make a cheap, mobile audience response system.

Jak Radice and Maureen Readle had some interesting stories to tell about digital story telling. They’ve done some really interesting work (with their colleague at the University of Bradford, Caroline Plews) bringing the stories of real health service users into the classroom. If you’re interested in learning more about that, take a look at their fictional town of Bradton.

Finally, Chris Turnock talked about his work with Erik Bohemia at Northumbria University setting up tools to help students collaborate with each other and with external partners. I really like they way they focused on open source solutions and managed to ensure they were as integrated as possible into the university systems.

Pecha Kucha!

Next up, I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as much attention as it was my turn to speak. You can see my poster and slides about our Virtual Research Environment in my earlier post, and if I get round to it I’ll add some words to the slideshare presentation so you can all understand what it was all about!

Also in the same session, Alan Cann from the University of Leicester asked some interesting questions about reading lists for students, which came out of his attempts to get his own students reading around the subject more.

Finally, Philip Wane from Nottingham Trent University had some useful thoughts on his experiments providing feedback to his students via video. Not only did most students watch their own feedback, they also watched each others, and watching the videos made them much more likely to collect the paper versions of their assignments from the office and read the feedback in the margins too. Great work!

Dinner!

I suppose I should mention that the dinner tonight was pretty impressive. I’m sure James Clay will have tweeted photos of it, but it’s a bit late at night to go searching for the link now so I’ll leave it there.

Looking forward to tomorrows session, especially Anne-Marie Cunningham’s invited talk on professional identity and some intriguing-sounding banjo playing from Dave Kernohan in “Are we in open country?”. Bye for now…

What I want from #altc2011

2011-09-05T13:30:00Z

I’ve been looking over the programme for ALT-C to try and decide which bits I want to attend, so I thought I’d write a short post about what I want to get from the conference.

I’m currently interested in the following:

Research student development;
Virtual Research Environments;
Open scholarship;
Digital literacy;
Cloud computing;
Generally any overlap between teaching and research, especially in STEM subjects.

As well as attending plenty of interesting talks, I’m also looking forward to meeting lots of new people too! Feel free to come and say hi if you see me — you can see what I look like from the photo on my work homepage.

As an aside, this is also the first test of my mobile posting process for the new site…

Slides for ALT-C 2011

2011-08-29T21:03:52Z

Next week I’ll be presenting an ePoster and short presentation at ALT-C 2011. I’ve intentionally made the slides with very few words so without any video they’re just a tantalising hint, but here they are, along with the poster.

I’m planning to follow the Chris Sexton model of blogging as I go along at the conference — I guess we’ll see how that works out next week!

Slides

Presentation: Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development

View more presentations from Jez Cope.

Poster

Virtual Research Environments: Supporting research and researcher development

You can follow my posts about ALT-C 2011 using this dedicated feed.