Down to work......

My first full day in the office. We started with a meeting to discuss type of projects we could proceed with over the next two weeks with ideas about peer supported lifelong learning – will have planning meeting tomorrow.

I was asked to take part in the weekly e-learning seminar. Atis then said would I mind presenting. Then could it be 45 mins to an hour. The seminar was at 5pm and included Liepaja University by video conference. I began by presenting a Swansea University shield and bottle of Scotch Whisky. Not knocking the shield but the whisky appeared to be the more popular! I talked about our experiences of e-learning/TEL at Swansea and there was a lot of discussion, which finally finished at 7pm.

I strolled into Old Town to get something to eat and hardly anyone there. I was the only person in the restaurant. At least the British larger idiots have gone.

It's the weekend!

My first weekend in Riga and a chance to explore the Old Town. In the morning I met my new flat mates – 3 Spanish Erasmus students. Seemed very nice.

On Saturday I had a general stroll around the Old Town and visited the Occupation Museum and the War Museum and saw the Old Soviets celebration of end of war at riflemen memorial. They celebrate a day early for some reason.

Some time after I returned my new flat mates went out at for the evening at 1am They returned at 7.30! Spanish people are nocturnal?

On Sunday morning I went to what I thought was a Lutheran Church. However, there seemed to be rather a lot of crossing and sung responses – not very Lutheran at all. It turned out, of course, that I'd gone into one of the few Catholic churches in Riga. Very welcoming though, although they thought I was German :-)

Off my trolley?

In the coffee break before the final session, I was chatting with a delegate from Estonia about her bother, who is a footballer in England. I didn't realise at the time but her brother is actually Mart Poom the former Derby and Arsenal goalkeeper, who has played over 100 times for his country.

The conference closed with the normal thanking everybody etc. I know it needs to be done but.... Next years conference is in Paris - could be worth a paper?

We were driven back to Riga via Livani and Cesis, both of which were very interesting. I arrived back in Riga at about 11pm and fulfilled a life ambition (well kind of) by travelling on a trolley bus, which seems to be the main form of public transport in Riga.

Dancing Latgalian style

Day three of the conference and there was a very interesting presentation in the e-learning strand by Peter Purg. He talked about time as a resource ans students perception of the workload being dependant on how engaged they were. More to come on this. There was also an interesting presentation by Janis Kaperniks on 'just in time' learning using mobile phones.

The evening meal was very pleasant and then we were told we would be enjoying something typically Latgalian. Largale is a distinct region of Latvia which has had different influences over the years and has quite a distinct local dialect. We were encouraged to move to the next room where a band was set up to play. We were then lined up and spent the rest of the evening doing increasingly complicated Latgalian folk dances. The more complicated they were, the faster the band seemed to play and the more mistakes we made but that was all part of the fun - I think.

E-learning by the people, for the people, of the people

Today was the reason I was at the conference, to present as part of the e-learning strand. E-learning was new to the conference this year and had two sessions with eight paper presented. My topic was "E-learning by the people, for the people, of the people" about developing an e-learning community of practice. There was a fair bit of discussion afterwards and I was surprised that by presenting I had become a member of the Baltic and Black Sea Circle Consortium and formally given my membership card.

The musical entertainment in the evening this time was a very good solo violinist. However, after the meal the Estonian group sang some impromptu Estonian folk songs, which sparked off a number of other groups so we had Finish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Hungarian folk singing. No British signing obviously!

I was invited back to the cabin in the woods again. This time we got completely lost heading straight for those boarder guards. Worryingly, I was the only one who had any idea where to go and was thus made the guide!!

Still alive!

I'm still here - I survived my experience on the Lativian roads. A bit rough in places and a few hairy moments but it was OK. We arrived at the conference just as the keynote was starting. Atis said he'd planned it to avoid wasting time :-) The Conference is a little out my my normal area but as the keynotes progressed I realised that a lot of what we are trying to do at Swansea in building a community of practice and the follow up from the benchmarking, fit well with the concept of making things sustainable - in all senses of the word.

After the keynotes we had dinner followed by a recital by a local opera singer, who also sang some very impressive jazz.

Although I had booked into the conference hotel my colleagues from Riga Technical University told me that they had decided to rent a small house by a lake. The invited me to spend the evening there with them. What they had actually rented was a house in a former complex for Latvia Communist party apparatchiks deep in the woods near the Belarus boarder. Before we left Atis said I should take my passport with me as one wrong turn in the woods and we would come up against Belarusian border guards and that would be something we didn't want to do.
They complex was actually very nice, as you would expect for party bosses although the two rows of fencing each with an imposing set of gates was a little unnerving.

First Day at work!

First day of work. Met some of the team and was given a guided tour of the Distance Education Study Centre. Down in the basement is a recording studio, complete with Cubase, a hardware controller, a Roland piano and some very nice Latvian made valve mics. I wonder if I'll get a chance to have a play? I have a lovely view from where I'm typing this in as in Soviet times there were weapons in the room, so they needed a clear shot.

Travelling to Daugavpils this afternoon for the Conference. According to the Rough Guide, the death toll on Latvian roads is terrible. Will I get to post again?

Hello! This is Riga calling. Here are the votes of the latvian jury....

Arrived after a good flight, came out of departures and looked for Atis, who was meeting me. Hmm... no Atis and I only have his Skype and email but no mobile. OK I'll wait for a bit no panic. 20 minutes later – no Atis. Later still and all the other passengers have now left the building – no Atis. OK what am I going to do. I'll wait another 30 minutes, then catch the bus to the city centre and try and try and find where I'm going to be staying. Success 15 minutes later Atis arrives. Latvia is now part of the Schengen agreement and Atis was waiting at the main terminal. Only visitors from 'dubious' countries get sent to the terminal I was at. As we drove the short drive to the city centre I had very similar feelings to those I had arriving in Warsaw for the first time 10 years ago. There are clearly many differences between Latvia and Poland, not least the language, but the Soviets certainly left a mark on the architecture.

The room is OK basic but OK and about a quarter of the price of the hotel over the road.

It's also very close to the Distance Education Study Centre and a large supermarket.

Got some strange looks as I zigzagged around the supermarket trying to work out what things were. I can't remember any of the Latvian I tried to learn. All that comes into my head is Polish and that's not much help in Riga. It might be more useful in Daugavpils, where there is a sizeable Polish speaking minority. A bit like Slough then :-)

ALT-C 2007: Beyond Control

I found ALT-C 2006 to be a massively inspiring event, which ultimately led to the start of the Learning Lab, a number of project bids and greater collaboration on e-learning within some areas of the University. So, how did ALT-C 2007 match up?

Bit of a curate’s egg actually. Some good discussions, interesting sessions and some of the most boring presentations I’ve even seen.

I did come to one overwhelming conclusion with a few colleagues but more of that later.

Presentations

My typing is very slow, my laptop is very heavy, I can’t do shorthand and I didn’t get on very well with making notes on my PDA. Handily, just before the conference a colleague lent me an ACECAD Digimemo http://www.acecad.com.tw/products.html You write on paper using a special pen, upload your notes to a PC and convert them into word. It’s a good idea. However, it was only a partial success mainly due to the fact that I wrote too neatly when training the system. There’s quite a difference from my ‘training’ writing and the near illegible scrawl I used during the conference. I’ll have to retrain the machine.

I took notes during all the sessions I attended but only a few really caught my attention.

Dragon Slaying?

By far the most interesting session I went to was David White http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/whited/ on the rather impressively titled ‘Cultural capital and community development in the pursuit of dragon slaying (Massively Multiplayer guild culture as a model for e-learning)’.

In World of Warcraft (WoW) http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml users gather together in guilds of around 25 people to complete tasks. These tasks are impossible to do alone so a guild must be formed in order to complete the tasks, which become progressively more difficult as the game goes on. During each task the guild members work together, each member with a specific role, and there is constant communication between the guild members. He argued that whilst he wasn’t advocating the use of WoW for learning, what was happening in the game were the kinds of things we wanted to encourage in e-learning.

Some of themes he touched on were -

Nexus of Multi-membership – we are all members of more than one community – school, work, football team….

No community exists in a single tool – in WoW the guilds organized themselves with website outside the game, used chat etc

He introduced the concept of Rhizomes vs Scaffolds? http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/whited/weblog/598.html

He suggested that Multiple User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), such as Second Life http://secondlife.com , take some elements of WoW and can be used as a blank canvas.

He introduced his 10 musings on Second Life 10 Musings

The university campus already supports informal learning with bars, common rooms, clubs and societies etc

Some people are not interested in the social aspects and can work quite well without it. Although I think this raises the question of whether while the individual may be OK, the community is poorer without their involvement.

Whilst I found this session by a fellow ‘Emerger’ http://elgg.jiscemerge.org really interesting, I feel I must add a note of caution. Although I’m not Welsh, I did feel that, representing a Welsh University, I ought to have made some form of protest about dragon slaying being advocated at the conference J

Phoebe

http://phoebe-project.conted.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

An online lesson planning toolkit

The presenter argued that the concept of the lesson is alien to HE so used the terms learning session or learning experience.

You can use anything to plan – pen & paper, mind maps, LAMS etc

Phoebe is designed to help ‘teachers’ with designing learning sessions or learning experiences and to be able to combine it with tools with which they are already familiar.

It has been used in staff development and for initial teacher training and may have other uses.

Whose e-learning is it anyway?

Talked about a mainly F2F module with a strong Blackboard presence.

The tutor had had a good experience with discussion boards but this had now decreased.

Maybe they were all in Facebook? Yes, the students had set up a facebook group which had social activity, support across year boundaries sharing and critical debate. The students felt free in facebook and the groups became like a community of practice.

The tutor was asked to join the facebook group and acted as a broker between facebook and blackboard. She checked facebook and brought the comments into the classroom.

She persuaded students to bring facebook posting into Blackboard.

Led to some issues –

The tutor was a young ‘facebook’ like person and was invited into the group. What about other tutors?

Without coaching in facebook what are students learning?

Is facebook divisive? Only 80% of the students were there.

Facebook is not very accessible

Should we ban or control facebook?

Should we ignore it?

Should we engage with it?

Could there be a facebook/VLE mash up?

Students seem to want a separate space for formal teaching.

Keynotes

Dylan William - view keynote

By far the most interesting keynote was from Dylan William from the Institute of Education. He was both entertaining and thought provoking on the theme assessment and challenged the ‘anti-teacher’ sentiments of some of the delegates. He argued that one of the biggest influences on how well a learner does is the teacher; much more important than what school the learner attends or class size. His main point was that formative assessment is key to learning. Although I found what he had to say both interesting and informative it may be that I just liked having my own prejudices confirmed.

Peter Norvig - view keynote

Director of Research at Google, impressive CV, introduced as someone who hates boring presentations - wow, this is going to be good! Oh dear. After 5 minutes of a quite entertaining presentation, which he must have given a million times before, he drifted of into full ‘teacher from Peanuts’ mode. Either I missed the point entirely or he didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before.

Michelle Selinger - view keynote

Although Michelle Selinger was generally rather disappointing, she did make a couple of interesting points.

Employers say they want the following -

• Technical fluency 81%
• Communication skills using technology 74%
• Collaboration & teamwork 36%
• Leadership 34%
• Creativity 22%

However, she argued that those who have successful careers tend to be -

• comfortable with cultural diversity,
• High Tech/High Touch (people who have work-life balance
• Have a sense of pride - excellence

She talked about ‘pedagogical imperialism’ (the attitude that the western model of education is best), something that Hans-Peter Baumeister highlighted later in the conference

She also showed a really good South Park video about 15-20 minutes into the presentation.

BETT 2007

Just got back from BETT. The biggest learning technology show in the world apparently. It certainly felt like it walking around. Although it's mainly geared towards schools there was plenty of weird and wonderful stuff of interest to higher education. The main areas of focus this year seemed to be e-portfolios and podcasting. Futurelab had some interesting things to say about portfolios and PLEs (Personal Learning Environments) with their Learners' Charter. On the podcasting front Podium looks to simplify creating and distributing podcasts. Something completely different is Crazy Talk, which allows you to turn any photograph into an animated talking actor. Not quite sure how useful it will be at the moment but its good fun to play with.

They are just three of the hundreds of things I looked at and I'm still ploughing my way though the masses of literature and software that I picked up - training materials and resources from Microsoft, lesson planners, mind mapping software, Smartboard lessons......... I think it will keep me busy for a while.

Web 2.0: A meaningless marketing buzzword or the new conventional wisdom?

My Space, You Tube, del.icio.us, blogs, wikis, VOIP, Flikr...... you may well have heard of these on the news and in the papers over the last year. Web 2.0 seems to be everywhere but what actually is it?

There has been a great deal of argument and hot air about what Web 2.0 actually means. Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 at a conference way back in 2004 and attempts to clarify what it means here.

Wikipedia the online collaborative encyclopaedia (loved by some and hated by others) describes Web 2.0 as "a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users." Given that definition, Wikipedia itself is very much Web 2.0.

According to Webopedia, an online dictionary of technology terms (geek speak), Web 2.0 is - "the term given to describe a second generation of the World Wide Web that is focused on the ability for people to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 basically refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web that is more organized and is based on serving Web applications to users. Other improved functionality of Web 2.0 includes open communication with an emphasis on Web-based communities of users, and more open sharing of information. Over time Web 2.0 has been used more as a marketing term than a computer-science-based term. Blogs, wikis, and Web services are all seen as components of Web 2.0."

The Learning Lab has an overview of some of the Web 2.0 tools

So if that's what it is, what can we do with it? How does Web 2.0 relate to university life? For a start you are using Web 2.0 technology now by reading this blog. The resources section of this website contains a wiki and an area within it, 'the Playground', where you can, well, have a play. For librarians what about Library Thing? Here people can connect though the books they read. Does this have implications and applications for university libraries? Then there is the concept of tagging. Democratisation of cataloguing?

In working life group activity is commonplace but group work in universities can often be a problem. How can you tell who did what? How can you ensure that the work is truly a collaborative effort rather than a collection of individual pieces of work. Wikis in particular lend themselves well to group work as Futurelab point out. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are also useful in the area collaborative working and can also be used for reflective learning. You can find more information about collaborative and reflective learning the Uses for e-learning section of this site.

This post has barely scratched the surface of what Web 2.0 might be and it's implications. In the past 'Content was king' and whilst content is still important Web 2.0 allows users to have power. Users no longer only have the option of reading or watching what has been created for them but can now create, edit, delete, connect, discuss.......... In the university context if we substitute 'users' for 'learners' in the previous sentence, the implications are great - in both senses of the word.

A tale for our time....

Dr. Ebenezer dragged himself to bed. What a day! It was now 2am and at 9am tomorrow it would all start again. Teaching lectures with so many students that some had to sit on the floor with no way of getting to know the students or the students being able to work together, constant phone calls interrupting his work, exams to mark, students he knew were cheating but couldn’t prove it, students who didn’t really understand what they were doing or even why they were doing it. The list was endless and on top of it all some idiot had sent him a circular telling him how he had to ‘embrace the concept of e-learning’ to ‘enable students to fully engage in the learning process’. He’d fully engage them if he had a chance! As if he didn’t have enough to do.

“Why can’t I just teach and do my research” he thought. “I wish no one had ever invented e-learning!” His head was thumping and the pain in his neck was coming back again but, after what seemed like hours of tossing and turning, he eventually managed to fall into a fitful sleep.

He woke with a start. It was still dark outside and as he rolled over to turn on the light he felt something against his feet. There was an object at the end of the bed. He switched on the light and there, shining brightly, was a genie’s lamp, straight from Aladdin. Well, everyone knows what to do with a genie’s lamp. Maybe he could wish for an extra day every week, smaller classes and wish away all that e-learning nonsense. So he rubbed the lamp and out came, not a genie but a man in a sharp suit with laptop under his arm and winning smile across his face.

“Great” said the man in the suit “I’ve been waiting to touch base with you so that I can run some ideas up the flagpole that you might want to pick up and run with.”

“What?” said Dr. Ebenezer.

“You need to keep in the loop so that you can fully buy into the technological paradigm shift that Web 2.0 facilitates.”

“What?” said Dr. Ebenezer.

“Listen. Third generation e-learning can transform the learning experience, save you so much time you can do twice as much research, improve you students grades and why” said the man in the suit as he leant towards Dr. Ebenezer with a slightly disturbing glint in his eye “it will even improve your sex life.”

That was it. Dr. Ebenezer had heard some rubbish in his time but this was….. Suddenly all the stress of the previous week began to explode. He grabbed the creepy salesman by the throat and violently shoved him back into the bottle and threw it out of the window.

“Touch base with that!” shouted Dr Ebenezer as the bottle disappeared into the darkness below. Dr Ebenezer slowly returned to bed and attempted to get back to his much needed sleep. But not for long….

“Ehe ehe” came a coughing sound from the end of the bed.

“Ehe ehe”

“Not again!” thought Dr Ebenezer as he sat up and turned on the light.

But this time standing at the end of the bed was not the creepy salesman but someone who looked strangely familiar.

“I’m sorry to bother you” said the person at the end of the bed “but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation.”

“What?” said Dr. Ebenezer.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I’ve got a few things you might find interesting.”

This was all starting to get too weird. Maybe the stress was getting to him or it was the cheese he’d eaten before going to bed.

“OK” said Dr. Ebenezer as he lay back down with a weary resignation.

“Er, right, yes. Erm, would it be useful to be able get students to check their work signs of plagiarism so that they can get a better understanding of what plagiarism is rather than searching through it yourself? It requires a bit of setting up but works pretty well”

“Well, that would be quite useful” thought Dr. Ebenezer.

“Would you like students to be able to work in groups outside lectures and seminars? Where they can work through problems by research and discussion and you can keep an eye on what they are doing?

“Hmm…, I’d need to think about it but that could be quite useful as well” thought Dr. Ebenezer.

“Would you like students to be able to work through some of the areas of the module at their own pace, be able to check on their progress as they go and then go back to any parts they didn’t quite understand? It takes a bit of work to set up but if you can use a word processor, you should find it relatively straight forward.”

“Hmm…, that’s sounds interesting” thought Dr. Ebenezer.

“Well, if you’re interested and want to find out a bit more get in touch we can go through the ideas in more detail”.

“Erm, thank you” said a rather bemused Dr Ebenezer

Then the strangely familiar person turned to leave.

“Before you go” said Dr Ebenezer. “I realise that this is supposed to be some kind of fable, so shouldn’t there be a moral?”

“Ah yes, nearly forgot. The moral of the story is -

E-learning won’t fulfil all the outlandish claims of the salesman but it can provide some real benefits to learning and teaching. There are some new skills to learn and some investment in time is required but it’s not rocket science. Unless of course you were talking about ionizing Argon by exposure to electrons provided by a cathode filament, then that would be rocket science”

“Anything else?” asked Dr. Ebenezer hopefully.

“No, sorry it can’t do that” she smiled as she left the room.

Little LAMY

I am currently exploring the use of LAMS in higher education. It's an open source tool for creating online, interactive lessons. I can see some really powerful uses for this particularly with collaborative, problem based learning in areas such medical education and teacher training.

I've set up a test server and am beginning to have a play. We'll see what happens.

Long time, no write

It's now December, cold outside and Christmas is coming. It's a year since I started this blog and my MEd is finished, I graduate this week, and I've started a new job in E-learning support at a British university. Not much happening at the moment, it's the end of term, but we'll see how it goes.

Make Poverty History

Every single day, 30,000 children are dying as a result of extreme poverty. This year, 2005, we finally have the resources, knowledge and opportunity to end this shameful situation.

Join the band of people who are taking action to make poverty history. It only needs to take you a matter of minutes every month, but it will help us to literally change the world.

http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/

Procrastinate? I'll do that tomorrow....

Dissertation again. Quite a few of the others on my course have already handed out questionnaires and are getting on with their research but I haven't even started yet!!! One of my colleagues puts the problem down to my procrastination. Harsh, but probably fair.
The ECDL thing doesn't appear to be working as I can't get access to the data. I've tried contacting various organizations but to no avail. The plan in itself is good but with no data it's going to be pretty pointless. I can either try again to get access to the data directly from training organizations or think up a new area of research entirely. There is a learning centre near me which teachers English and IT and uses IT to teach English. They are also an ECDL test centre. It could be ideal. I could either persue the ECDL plan with them or look at student experiences of learning English using IT. I've actually just applied for a part-time job there, which is either a good or a bad thing. I'm not sure. it could be good if I get the job and then have access to the data and co-operation from the centre. However, there could be problems or being an 'insider researcher'. It could also be a problem if I don't get the job. Should I wait to see if I get the job? Or will that be another example of my procrastination? Hmm....

Help! I've gone completely IELTS.

Now, for my Databases and CALL module I've decided to design an 'activity bank' of exercises for the reading section of the IELTS test. This is partly due to the fact that I can't think of anything else to do. Not because I'm a lazy git, but because, whilst databases have many uses, I'm very skeptical of their usefulness in the language learning environment. Dictionaries are obviously one area as are massive databases of authentic language - corpora. However, apart from the three uses mentioned, I can't think of much else that is useful. I have seen many uses of databases design for language learning but they all have one thing in common - they're a bit crap. They mainly seem to be behaviourist drill and practice exercises, which help people to the learn the answer to the question but not a lot else. For example, why it's the answer! Luckily I have the opportunity to vent my spleen in a critique once I've finished the database.

I go IELTS!

Back to the web site project. My latest plan is to base the site around the writing skills required for IELTS writing. If I want to follow a broadly constructivist approach, I don't want it to be just a list of exam tips. I envisage it being a series of example exam style questions accompanied by the questions that candidates may wish to ask themselves as they plan their answers. I aim to use Flash animation, partucularly for writing about prcesses in order to make the process to be derscibed 'come alive'. I feel it's perhaps best to start with section 1 - proccess writing and describing charts and tables. If I have time, I may move on to the various essay types required for section 2. I'm unsure about including actual writing exercises but maybe there could be some checking of model answers to questions the site uses in the 'thinking about planning' section. I plan to a aim the site at intermediate, and possibly upper-intermediate, students.