Your personal timeline, a place to aggregate photos, blog posts, tweets and key events in your life.
Created by carolshergold on May 29, 2008
Last updated: 10/19/10 at 09:18 PM
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Turnitin PeerMark demo - tool that allows students to review each other's work
http://vimeo.com/8495059
ISBN lookup site
http://isbndb.com/
CETIS Distributed Learning Environments meeting web page with links to all presentations.
http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/DleMarch2010
Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia by Arshile Gorky - as seen at the Tate
http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Arshile_Gorky/Nighttime-Enigma-and-Nostalgia/
ftp and sftp client for iphone or itouch. enables file download to itouch.
http://www.ftponthego.com/index.php
around 3 mins good footage of dj at work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06AnpzLPDaA&feature=related
Mark Nichols' online primer for e-learning, focussing on online discourse. Useful resource.
http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/project/eprimer-series/resources/pages/online-discourse-eprimer-series
love will tear us apart guitar tab
http://www.guitaretab.com/j/joy-division/9501.html
a series of great uke lessons including quite a few on strumming techniques
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-X_FxbUJZM&feature=channel
TurnItIn login page
http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/carolshergold/https://submit.ac.uk/static_jisc/ac_uk_index.html
Fiona Strawbrige, UCL, on the issues and tensions with using VLE for summative e-assessment. From the UCISA e-assessment event November 2009.
http://e-assessment.wetpaint.com/page/Role+of+the+VLE+and+associated+learning+systems+in+supporting+summative+e-assessment
Striking image from collection of Russian promotional posters in Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bpx/136056560/in/set-72057594117941491/
Blue State Digital are a digital marketing company who ran the online part of Obama's presidency campaign. This is the case study.
http://www.bluestatedigital.com/casestudies/client/obama_for_america_2008/
Grosseck paper in scribd on use of delicious from Romanian perspective
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2413801/The-Role-of-Delicious-in-Education
Phil Greaney blogs about delicious and points out that its relatively constrained approach to social interaction (e.g. it doesn't offer any way to directly comment on other people's bookmarks, use of tags or comment fields, or even a way of contacting a user who you would like to communicate with) can actually be a strength for helping less confident students to engage. It's an interesting point and I think it makes a lot of sense.
http://greaneynet.com/blogs/?p=520
George Siemens, July 2009. Blog post exploring the idea that we need learners to form their own self-organised networks and groups in order that the curriculum can be properly personalised for large numbers of learners taking courses such as the Siemens and Downes Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course.
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=194
slideshare talk on managing risks for use of web 2 tools in educational context
http://www.slideshare.net/efsym/web-20-managing-the-risks
This week I've been reading a paper by John Richardson, Students' approaches to learning and teachers' approaches to teaching in higher education.The paper outlines a number of ways of categorising how students and teachers think about learning and teaching.One classic approach is that of Marton from 1976. He identified three approaches to learning:deep, where the student takes an active role and attempts to relate what they are learning to their existing knowledgesurface, where the student is unreflective and focuses on the facts and details of what they are learning without attempting to synthesise or integrate themstrategic, where the student concentrates their efforts on passing the examI wonder, in passing, whether the deep / surface distinction relates to a construct I have found helpful in understanding different thinking styles. One factor in the Myers Brigg Type Indicator Instrument is how people prefer to process information and it distinguishes between "N" people (whose standard approach is to find the big picture) and "S" people (who focus on the details). Are "N" people more likely to be deep learners?In Richardson's paper the distinction between deep and surface is normative, and it is "better" to be engaged in deep rather than surface learning. However, other commentators point out that for some higher education endeavors, the surface approach is probably the most effective. Examples here would be disciplines where there are vast amounts of facts that need to be learned before the student can move on to achieving full disciplinary mastery such as law and medicine (see Atherton's page on deep/surface learning for a summary of this http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm).I found it interesting to see how the deep/surface distinction mapped onto Sfard's distinction from 1998 between the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor in learning. The acquisition metaphor is the classic view of learning as the "getting" and "having" of knowledge. It is everywhere in our language when we try to talk about learning. The participation metaphor is harder to pin down as it is the less dominant metaphor. It relates to learning as a process, a process of becoming which crucially occurs in relation to others. It is particularly useful when trying to understand learning within communities of practice.Quadrant diagram: Sfard and MartonClick the image to load a larger versionFinally, there is a resonance in the distinction "deep" and "surface" - it calls to mind the work of Chomsky around understanding how language is structured (see brief note below). Does this connect at all?ReferencesMarton, F. (1976) 'What does it take to learn? Some implications of an alternative view of learning.' in N. Entwistle (Ed.) Strategies for research and development in higher education, 8.Richardson, J.T.E. (2005) 'Students' approaches to learning and tetachings approaches to teaching in higher education', Educational Psychology, vol.25, no.6, pp.673-680.Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one’, Educational Researcher, vol.27, no.2, pp.4–13.The deep structure of a sentence is the core semantic relations of that sentence (what it means?) whereas the surface structure relates to the particularity of what was said. E.g. the two sentencesRichardson wrote the paperThe paper was written by Richardsonwould have a similar deep structure but a different surface structure.So deep and surface are important words that are carrying with them some complex intellectual freight.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/05/approaches-to-learning-deep-and-surface.html
Analysis of discussion forums using Moore's concept of transactional distance, which characterises learning contexts in terms of structure, dialogue and autonomy. Finding is that teachers find it hard to achieve a workable balance between these. (Do they become an "iron triangle" like cost, access and quality for e-learning?). Kanuka, H. American Journal of Distance Education, Volume 16, Issue 3 2002.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15389286AJDE1603_3
Takes the view that assessment is the domain in which an educational institution is forced to "show its hand" about its underlying educational practice. Hence the hidden curriculum is often laid bare by examining assessments. Students actively construct their own understandings of the hidden curriculum by negotiating assessment requirements.
Sambell & McDowell, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 23:4,391 — 402
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0260293980230406
Academic institutions often manage access to their electronic resources by creating institution-specific URLs. For example, one particular electronic library database within the Open University generates links like this to be saved to bookmarking tools:http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=11830244&site=ehost-live&scope=siteThis link ties us into one specific (OU) library in two ways:it specifies a proxy server tied to the OU which will require authentication prior to resolving the variables within the linkthe data identifying the particular resource is an accession number relating to the OUSo if you can't authenticate with the OU, you also can't dig the article details out of the variables encoded in the URL.For social scholarly bookmarking, we ideally want to find ways of bookmarking that are meaningful for users regardless of their institution ..I've started to use the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for scholarly materials I'm bookmarking in delicious. Basically a DOI points to an underlying object rather than any of its attributes. So the current URL of an article can be viewed as an attribute as it may be subject to change, for example if the publishing house is taken over. But the DOI is permanent so it will not change. Resolver systems can take a DOI and return a current URL. This has huge benefits for managing scholarly resources.Article on use of DOIs for library services: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may06/apps/05apps.htmlOf course, delicious doesn't have a specific field for storing the doi, so at the moment I'm saving it as a tag containing the prefix "doi:" followed by the keyBookmark: academic paper on elearning spacesOriginally uploaded by carol shergoldIt should then be possible to manually plug the DOI into a tool like Google Scholar search for any individual to see where they had access. It would be feasible to write a bookmarklet that scanned delicious looking for DOIs and adding a link for objects that were available in a given individual's home instititution.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/04/scholarly-bookmarking-sharing-links.html
A very useful feature of Google Scholar is the Library Links feature. Using the "Scholar Preferences" link, you can record what institutional memberships you have, and (assuming the librarians have got it set up) Google Scholar will then produce links to scholarly materials tailored to give you access via these institutions. Here's an illustration.The first image is from Google scholar before I've told it about my institutional access:If I then use the Preferences link to tell it I'm an Open University student, and return to the search page, I now see:a new link "Find it at OU" has appeared, which gives me direct access to the article as long as I've logged in to the OU Student Home.I'm a relative new-comer to Google Scholar, but for me this "Find it at" feature is fantastic. It saves all the complexity of working out how to access resources. If you have more than one institutional affiliation, you can record them via the preferences.This is a step towards a personalised learning environment, as the materials that are available to you will be there regardless of which institution they are derived from. The institution/s are responsible for managing the resources and for running the services that provide the authentication. Google Scholar (or equivalent tool) is integrating your access across all of the institutional boundaries by aggregating your permission sets. Revolutionary stuff, in a quiet way.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/04/personalised-search-and-retrieval-in.html
On h800 at the moment, we are using blogs for collaboration and sharing of ideas - hello fellow h800-ers, if you are stopping by here.We've only just started blogging on the course, and I think the real advantages and disadvantages will start to emerge over the next few weeks.But straight up at the beginning, I have observed one quite large inconvenience/inefficiency about the process. We're all supplying our blog URLs via the course forum. But obviously in order to manage potentially 20 or so blogs in an efficient way, we need to be using some kind of blog feed reader (such as Bloglines or Google Reader). Even then though, you have to add each blog individually and possibly a separate feed for its comments too (I haven't actually got around to sorting that out yet, argh).I just did a little screen cast of the process of me adding a blog into the feed reader that I'm using (Google Reader). I did this partly because I wondered if it would be helpful for anyone, and partly to document just how long this took me. I think it's important because in terms of supporting blogging for teaching and learning, we have to find ways of making this seem simple and seamless. (This is rendered small, or here's a full size view)There isn't any explanation in the H800 literature for the week about what feed readers are and why you might need one, and this is probably an omission ..How are other people getting on with trying to make the process workable?
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogging-for-course-collaboration-and.html
I'm taking an Open University course on Technology Enhanced Learning (H800) at the moment, and some of the learning activities for this week (week 10) involve us using delicious for bookmarking journal articles. delicious has many fantastic features, but inbuilt support for scholarly material isn't one of them. In order to support the use and management of academic references, it would be great if some or all of these were added to the feature set of social bookmarking tools:standard bibliographic fields such as author, journal, volumethe ability to pull in references automatically from web pages that contain this material such as journal pages or bibliographiessupport for exporting of references in a standard format (to make it easier to create references sections)notes sections where short comments about the resources could be madethe ability to group and organise resourcesAnd then there are functions that support the location and identification of resources:manage resources in terms of their digital object identifier (DOI)This last point is particularly important. In academic publishing, the same resource can end up with different URLs. The URL is just an attribute belonging to an object; the DOI is directly represents the object itself.Potential tools with support for scholarly bookmarking are:http://www.bibsonomy.org/http://www.connotea.org/http://www.citeulike.org/and there's also an excellent firefox plugin Zotero, which differs from the others in that it resides on the client rather than being a cloud computing service.Has anyone got any suggestions about tools?
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/04/scholarly-bookmarking-looking-for-tools.html
If we want to support the design of high quality learning, and to promote the reuse of designs, then we need to find suitable ways of both representing designs and of utilising those representations.I've been reading a paper by Grainne Conole that focuses on these issues and in particular on how representations of learning designs can be used to scaffold and support the generation of new designs.The paper focuses on two central questions:How can learning designs be captured and represented?What best supports the process of designing/creating learning activities?Conole identifies the contradiction that:(a) in order to be easy to understand and apply, designs need to be simple but simple designs may fail to capture enough detail(b) rich, detailed descriptions can be 'difficult to understand and time consuming to apply' (p189)She identifies 5 types of design:narrative or case studiespatternsvocabulariesdiagrammatic or iconic representationsmodelsLearning designs differ in a number of respects:their format of presentation - text, visual, auditory, multimediatheir degree of contextualisation (from abstract to contextualised)level of granularitydegree of structure (flat vocabulary v typology)The table below maps the characteristics of designs created with three different tools:Characteristics of 3 learning design representationsClick on the image to view the full-size table.ReferencesConole, G. (2008), 'The role of mediating artefacts in learning design' in Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, pp. 187-209, Hersey PA, IGI Global.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/04/characteristics-of-3-learning-design_18.html
We're going to be heading to the University of Greenwich in July for their 2009 conference Making it personal.The focus will be on personalisation in SkillClouds and on the way that SkillClouds can be used to support and develop the work done between students and their academic advisor / personal tutor.You can read the abstract here.
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/04/skillclouds-making-it-personal.html
Instructiona for upgrading Flash player on Eee PC
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=6423
At Sussex University the data in Skillclouds comes from our Oracle database.We cannot really expect everyone else to have the same database, tables or data. The data we display in Skillclouds at Sussex is personal and sensitive. For this reason the Skillclouds open source version is not really a stand-alone system. It is a template for a webpage within an already existing (probably) internal and password protected web site. It's also not platform specific to a Framework, CMS or ILE like Moodle.Skillclouds does provide you with data structure diagrams, UML, interactive Javascript, PHP classes, adaptable CSS and front end XHTML web pages to add the data you want to. SkillClouds also provides you with some dummy data, so when you unzip SkillClouds it all just works out the box as if you were a logged in as student at Sussex! Alongside the the code documentation, code layout and variable naming this 'out of the box' approach got the best response from our testing with developers. The initial code we tested with some developers included PHP's PDO which allows you to connect many a database, and have a layer of abstraction. Sounds great ? Well almost.When testing the open source version of the Skillclouds code with developers and we came across some issues with this. The first problem came when a developer we were testing with had a database PDO didn't support. Just our luck we thought.The second set of problems came when we found some institutions didn't have the information Skillclouds was asking for in any database! They then had to edit more code than if the PDO layer had not been there. Another developer described how they write queries for fetching things from their institutions database every day, and so knows how to do this like the back of their hand. Skillclouds having this layer of PDO was more of an obstacle then an advantage to them. They found it quicker to plug in their own code, then plug in the PDO layer.It is a common problem for open source code that isn't platform dependent. The outcome is we left the open source Skillclouds code as open as possible for the moment. The PDO layer might come back in the next stage, but for the moment the overwhelming developer feedback was to leave it out. We can recommend the information you should provide in your own Skillclouds installation, but we are not going to tie you to it.We are interested to hear from other projects having similar issues, other developers opinions on this and we are still looking for developers to test the next stage of development with. Just press the Contact us link above and say hello.
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-no-database.html
On most of the projects I work on we spend a great deal of time looking at user experience and making the end user enjoy a site. Sometimes an equal amount of time is put into the back-end design with an enjoyable cms interface. Very rarely is the developer who has to set up the project considered in any user testing.When programming code for the open source community it is a completely different approach. Whether contributing a plugin to wordpress or a library to jquery you're putting the code out there to your fellow developers for peer review, and they become your primary stakeholders/target audience.After showing out SkillClouds code to a number of developers at the resent JISC dev8d developer happiness days we took the opportunity to extend our user centred design approach to the users who have to install, configure and implement SkillClouds in other Universities.We started off asking developers about the SkillClouds documentation/readme file - the structure, the style of writing, how much detail they like and generally how ours could be better. Lots of very obvious things came up you might not think of when your head is so far into the code - just the same as during front end user testing.At the next stage we started looking at code, and got some very nice comments from all the testers about the structure, variable names and general semantic nature of the code.There were some conflicting views on data structure, with the general view being that to integrate SkillClouds into another University's systems it would take a developer, as compared to a systems administrator. Automated database installation was not seen as a good idea, but an abstract data layer was seen as helpful. There were also conflicting views on complexity vs object oriented abstraction, and how these might increase project set-up time.Our approach of providing 'dummy data' so as SkillClouds runs straight out the box was given a thumbs up with, apart from a permissions problem, all users having a working demo almost straight after unzipping.We are now refining the SkillClouds code based on the developer feedback - a big thanks to all involved!
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/03/skillclouds-developer-happiness.html
Members of IT Services took a poster from the SkillClouds team up to Liverpool for the UCISA 2009 conference poster session:http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/2009/conference/posters.aspxOur poster and abstract are available for view on the publications site:http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=ucisa2009
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/03/skillclouds-at-ucisa-2009.html
Repository plugin for moodle
http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute/
This post follows an earlier one reporting back from the workshop on 9th March 2009, "How can e-portfolios support 21st century learning?"As part of the event, Geoff Rebbeck talked about the way that e-portfolios have been used at Thanet College, a Further Education college in Kent.For institutions thinking of implementing an e-portfolio system, Geoff asked the question "What is it you want your learners to do?". He stressed the importance of the pedagogy driving the process of procuring an e-portfolio system.He raised some interesting questions:Purpose: what do you want? is it for records of achievement, or is it for reflection? If reflection, how do students currently reflect? How do you teach it?Ownership: who does the data belong to? Is it administrative data that can be mined by the institution to generate statistics on student achievement? Or is it owned by the individual student themselves?Access rights: linked to ownership; who has access rights to the data?Transferability: what happens when students leave? what happens when students arrive with existing portfolios?At Thanet, they took the interesting decision to implement e-portfolios first of all with staff, on the grounds that once staff really understood what an e-portfolio could mean for their development, they would be much better placed to support students' use of e-portfolios. They worked in conjunction with the Institute for Learning (IfL), the professional body for FE lecturers.A statutory part of Continuing Professional Development for IfL members is Teaching Observation, and Thanet took an institutional decision that all Teaching Observations would be reported and discussed via staff e-portfolios. Staff began to realise that the e-portfolio made appraisals easier to manage, and a couple of staff applied for jobs within Thanet by using their portfolio. A number of mentoring and critical friendships developed on the platform, and they have found that a broad group of staff have set up community areas.Here's a YouTube video Geoff made in which 20 staff at Thanet answer the question "How did you last use your portfolio":It gives a good feel for the varied use of the e-portfolio and of how it's been embedded into life at Thanet College.An early account of this project can be found here:http://excellence.qia.org.uk/page.aspx?o=157923The Thanet CPD e-portfolio initiative is featured as a case study in JISC's Effective Practices with E-portfolio report.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/03/e-portfolios-what-is-it-you-want-your.html
I attended a JISC-funded Netskills event on Monday 9th March 2009 on the topic "How can e-portfolios support 21st century learning?"Definitions of e-portfolios tend to include the following elements:A collection of digital resources that provide evidence of an individual’s progress and achievements drawn from both formal and informal learning activities that are personally managed and owned by the learner that can be used for review, reflection and personal development planning that can be selectively accessed by other interested parties e.g. teachers, peers, assessors, awarding bodies, prospective employers. (Helen Beetham, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/themes/elearning/eportfolioped.pdf)The discussion stressed that effective practice with e-portfolios isn't just about the final product - the process of arriving there is crucial.This diagram from the JISC InfoKit summarises the relationship between process and product from a slightly more systems oriented perspective:We mapped the current or planned uses of e-portfolios at our own institutions onto a useful matrix designed by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young and Gordon Joyes. I found it particularly helpful to identify how different projects and initiatives I was aware of fitted in to the matrix.view a version of this matrix, partially annotated by me in relation to local projectsThis was a helpful activity because it clarified the different kinds of purposes that e-portfolios are used for, along with the different tools that are used as part of the process of building a portfolio.The focus on purpose was maintained in a presentation by Geoff Rebbeck, which I'll make the topic for a separate post.The "Effective Practices with E-portfolios" handbook outlines 6 steps for e-portfolio based learning:define: what is the purpose of your initiative, what are the issues you are aiming to address, think about the support needs of the users and the nature of the learning environmentunderstand: how will this impact on other pedagogic practices in the institution, what kind of learning outcomes do we require, will this impact on practitioners, admin staff, technical staff?prepare: e-portfolios raise issues around ownership of data. There are questions of accessibility, copyright, IPR that need to be addressed in advance. Risks and benefits can be identifiedengage: what is your strategy for engaging and sustaining commitment of learners, staff and everyone who is involved in supporting the initiative?implement: identify factors such as timing, involvement of champions etc that might influence the outcomesreview: use a range of methodologies to explore how people feel about the serviceUseful resources:Effective practices with e-portfolios publication : "investigates current good practice in the use of e-portfolios as a support to learning and as an aid to progression to the next stage of education or to employment" - gives a good overview and a series of case studiesE-Portfolio InfoKit : recently launched from JISC, with background, policy drivers, purposes, case studies and support for selecting and implementing an e-portfolio systemhttp://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/e-portfolios : a useful page with links to all audio resources etc from the InfoKitEvaluating the learner experience : resources from JISC
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/03/effective-practice-with-e-portfolios.html
A key indicator of the success of JISC projects (from JISC’s perspective) seems to be the extent to which the outputs are adopted, by both the home institution and external organisations. In terms of the former, we can claim some success, as Sussex - and specifically, its Teaching and Learning Committee - has taken the view that SkillClouds can help support some of the University’s strategic priorities.The University is particularly interested in using SkillClouds to support student personal development and the role academic advising (personal tutoring). For the remainder of the academic year we will be meeting all departments at Sussex to explore how they can use to tool in their differing contexts. We have secured additional funding to carry out further development and integration of the SkillClouds.In terms of the possibility of SkillClouds forming over other parts of the country, we have had some interest from other universities and are currently liaising with them. Stuart (the project’s technical developer) has created the first version of an open source version of SkillCloud pages. People can add their in-house style sheet and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.Feedback on this version has so far been positive and has been described by one member of the Emerge team as ‘beautiful code’. Now, as a non-developer, I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I imagine there can be no higher praise from one of your peers.Finally we are in discussion people working at a university in Australia who think SkillClouds could be useful to their institution.You can read more about the open source version at the SkillClouds blog http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-open-source-its-alive.html
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/03/skillclouds-forming-over-sussex-and.html
this is named "uncertainty" by the photographer, it's someone with her hands over her eyes. it might work as an image for self-awareness or something like that?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambiodefractal/3322233325/
Today we finally made public the first edition of our Open Source version of the SkillClouds pages. Previously the development has been within the Sussex University MLE - Sussex Direct - but the latest versions are all non-platform specific. We first took the open source demo to the Jisc emerge U&I strand meeting in York as our 'project artefact' and showed it to other members of our Jisc strand, from which we got some very nice feedback. While creating the artefact we thought it was important the developers could just unzip the file, add their 'in house' style sheet, and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution. During the recent Jisc Dev8d event we were able to show the front end, and code, to some other Jisc developers and get feedback on how they would like to see it develop from a coder's perspective. It's just as important to do your usability testing with the developers who have to implement a system, as the front end users. With this in mind, over the next few weeks we will be user testing our open source code with a few other developers in the Jisc community. If you're interested in taking part email us at skillclouds@sussex.ac.uk !Want to take a look ? http://wwwnew.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/Bonus fun stuff :Click on the link - Special - Change the style sheet, and you can add your own style sheet!Liverpool University worked so well, we added it to the defaults in the drop down menu. If you find any interesting ones, email us or leave a comment and we will add them to the default list.
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-open-source-its-alive.html
It's official - SkillClouds are presenting at the Hertfordshire University Blended Learning Conference 2009.For this presentation, we are going to be looking at the 'hidden curriculum' of skill outcomes and the way that this could potentially perpetuate inequalities.We have found that some students are concerned about appearing to be 'arrogant' or 'boastful' when they are put into a position where they need to talk about the skills they have developed and practiced at University.We'll explore how the use of SkillClouds can help students to feel more confident about articulating their skills.For more details, see the SkillClouds web site:http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=blu2009
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-are-blu.html
Uganda has a population of 29.9 million people (World Bank 2006), with literacy levels of 62% and a ratio of Gross National Product per person of just $320 (World Bank 2002).In 1998, 55% of primary school teachers had attained the required qualification level (UNESCO EFA year 2000 assessment). Just 2% of the populated are educated to tertiary level (http://www.iucea.org/?jc=papers-01).The introduction of Universal Primary Education in Uganda in 1997 had the effect of almost trebling student numbers; annual spending on education increased by only 9%. The introduction of Millennium Development Goals for 2015 has pushed many African countries including Uganda into introducing Universal Secondary Education too, again with a massive impact on conditions in the education sector. Class sizes of 70 are common and many schools face huge shortages of furniture, basic equipment and books (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/katineblog/2008/may/23/ugandawillachieveitsmillen).Distance learning in UgandaUganda has a long history of distance education, which was first used in the colonial period as a way of training civil servants for administrative duties (Binns 2006). From Independence onwards, a key use for distance learning has been for the training of teachers. Since the 1980s there have been a number of programmes that have used distance education as a way of providing in-service training for primary school teachers. The main mode of distance education has been the use of printed texts, with radio and cassettes used to a lesser extent due to scarcity of required resources. Television and video are rarely used (fewer than 5% of households have a television according to http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ug-uganda/med-media).Pedagogy Distance learning requires access to resources such as a reliable distribution network (which could be postal, based on internet technology, based on mobile phone network etc) and to resources to be distributed to students. It can be argued that it also requires an educational system in which it is generally agreed that learning can take place without a teacher at the centre of a classroom (Rennie 2007). For example, in Nepal a style of distance learning that appears more acceptable than the distribution of printed resources is the use of video conferencing, which can replicate the dominant model of the expert teacher giving an oral presentation (Rennie 2007)There is clearly a relationship between the dominant pedagogy used in an education system and the access to resources in that system. If 70 children are being taught by a single teacher with few books or other materials, then inevitably the pedagogic method will rely on the teacher's presence and his or her ability to impart information to pupils.Reports show that even where Sub-Saharan African school curricula encourages investigational or activity methods, the majority of lessons rely on traditional rote-learning (Mereku, 2003; Mirembe, 2002).Building an effective ‘Open Education Resource’ (OER) Environment for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: The TESSA Experience (http://www.wikieducator.org/images/6/6a/PID_402.pdf)However, even if the teacher is the major "resource" available to pupils, that does not necessarily imply that the pedagogic approach has to be teacher-centred and that all learning has to be rote learning. O'Sullivan (2006) surveyed a number of classrooms in which teachers were teaching large groups of students. Successful strategies were identified by analysis of video recordings and interviews with students. The author's findings were that successful teachers:praised childrenlooked around the classroom frequently to keep scanning all children, and used a lot of eye contact with studentsused some repetition but did not resort to long periods of itprovided group tasks for students to work on and had established with students how group work was to be carried out so that it was efficient and effectivedid not rely solely on rote learning and copying from the blackboard(see http://www.id21.org/id21ext/e3mo3g1.html where O'Sullivan's findings are discussed in detail).Binns (2006) describes efforts to ensure that distance learning for teaching training was student-centred. The Northern Integrated Teacher Education Project (NITEP) trained 3000 student teachers using distance learning. They evolved methods they described as a 'culture of care' which aimed to support students with their learning in very practical ways. This places students at the centre of their learning through their needs and difficulties being taken extremely seriously.References Binns, B. and Otto A. (2006). Quality assurance in Open Distance Education - towards a culture of quality: a case study from the Kyambogo University, Uganda. In Perspectives on Distance Education: Towards a Culture of Quality. (eds) Badri N. Koul and Asha Kanwar, Commonwealth of Learning 2006. Accessed ashttp://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/PS-QA_chapter2.pdfRennie, F. and Mason, R. (2007). The Development of Distributed Learning Techniques in Bhutan and Nepal. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Volume 8, Number 1, 2007.O'Sullivan, M. (2006). Teaching Large Classes: The International Evidence and a Discussion of Some Good Practice in Ugandan Primary Schools. International Journal of Educational Development, no 26, pp 24-37, 2006.
http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2009/02/pedagogy-and-distance-learning-in.html
This is an edited collection of studies on Quality Assurance in Open and Distance Learning programmes around the world. Although the focus of the chapters is on quality assurance the chapters contain useful summaries of the history and context of open and distance learning programmes in the relevant countries.
http://www.col.org/resources/publications/monographs/perspectives/Pages/2006-cultureQuality.aspx
An interesting sounding series of short free seminars hosted in WebEx, around the use of VLEs. I've signed up for one.
http://www.compendle.com/webinars.aspx
maybe something to look at in attempt to sort out streaming media?
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
From the home page: "IndividUrls lets you build your own custom news aggregator with content from the sites that you are interested in."
http://individurls.com/login.php
This is the main login page for the OU's deployment of their inhouse development MyStuff. You need a valid OU username/pwd to log in. MyStuff is an e-portfolio/PDP system.
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/portfolio/
An online community for Harringay N4
http://www.harringayonline.com/
Set up iTouch with mobile me service
http://www.apple.com/mobileme/setup/iphone/mac.html
As we work on our final report on the SkillClouds project, we have been reflecting on the way that the direction of the project has changed as we have responded to the new understandings that have emerged from our research.The change in direction has been most marked around a key part of our original for the project, which foregrounded the use of the social bookmarking service delicious as a way of collecting institutional metadata on skills. Our was that we could view a course/module as an object which could be tagged with the skills that it would help students to acquire. We were particularly interested in exploring the potential clashes between an institutional taxonomy and a user generated folksonomy, and in seeing whether using a tool like delicious made the collection of skill data more acceptable to staff.Initially, the staff we spoke to about this seemed keen (see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/user_engagement.php for a summary of activities carried out prior to bidding). However, as we progressed further with the project, this approach began to seem less useful. First of all, we had technical issues with the use of delicious. The delicious tagging model does not permit spaces in tags, whereas our stakeholders wanted skills to be expressed as naturally as possible ("data analysis and interpretation" rather than "data-analysis-and-interpretation"). We also had problems using the API for search as it was doing greedy matching - see http://stuartlamour.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/delicious-bug for a fuller description of these issues.Even more significant were our findings about students' requirements. As our research progressed we gained a much deeper understanding of their information needs (for a description of this research, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/pilot_stage.php and our presentation at ALTC2008 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=altc2008). In our original plan of SkillClouds we had paid relatively little attention to the resources that would be made available to students who clicked on a skill-tag within our proposed tag cloud. We had described this in our original bid as: The individual skill tags could then link the student into pages from the institutional student intranet, for example showing all the courses taken in which this skill was and enabling the student to drill down to view their course performance pages. Alternatively, skills tags could link to pages provided by careers specialists to support students in the development of their CVs. However, by the end of our research phase, we had amassed rich data about where students really were in terms of understanding skills. We found that their information needs were much more basic than we had suspected and that they found the language of skills very alien. We therefore realised that a key to the project was going to be the provision of high quality data on each skill to empower students to use the language of skills themselves. Whilst social bookmarking tools such as delicious would enable staff to tag university modules with relevant skills, they provide little support for the authoring and management of information that would help students to understand what was meant by a given skill and to see how they might be able to demonstrate this skill to employers. A further reason for the reduced emphasis on the use of delicious for data collection was that of the work-flow for staff around the development of new modules/courses. Staff are expected to fill in a document using Microsoft Word, and even if they were using a tool such as delicious to collect the skills meta-data, the rest of the process for defining a new course would require them to use another system in addition to delicious. It was not feasible to build it into a work flow for general use. We also discovered much more about the difficulties that academic staff face when they try to define the skills that their courses may help students to develop. When we tried to stimulate their interest in using SkillClouds to help them define skills for their courses, they told us that "What we like about SkillClouds is that you are doing it for us, so we don't have to!". There was little enthusiasm evident in the staff members that we spoke to in using SkillClouds tools to define skills. Staff were almost always excited by the possibilities of SkillClouds and how they could use it to work with their students, but not interested in being part of the data capture process. Staff who tried out the use of delicious to tag courses found it acceptable, but we realised that it was unlikely to be something we could roll out across the institution.
http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/01/reflecting-on-changes-in-project-aims.html
Unix/windows file synchronisation utility - neat features - definitely worth a look at some point
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases/stable/unison-manual.html
podcast plus great transcipt - interesting in terms of good practice around accessibility as well as for the semantic web content
http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/02/sir_tim_bernerslee_talks_about_1.php
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