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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="bye bye paper note books? flickr:SSK"][/caption]
I wrote about electronic lab books just before the summer break. Since then my husband (@richardbadge) and I have just published a short communication about his use of wikis to support undergraduate students carrying out research projects in his lab. The wikis reside within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects campus pack plug-in).
The article focussess on his use of the wikis to supervise the student's work, as this was a pilot study just carried out with his two students. We considered asking the students how they found it, but the most fundamental question we wanted to ask was how using an electronic lab book compared to a paper one, however, neither of them had used a paper lab book, so it was a moot point!
You can read the paper in full on the Bioscience Education Journal.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/using-wikis-for-project-student-lab-books/
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="twitter cake from flickr"][/caption]
Following a hastily arranged local meet up, twitterers came for a coffee, tea and some cake at David Wilson Library Cafe, Leicester University. We marvelled at Mark's shoes and only talked in 140 character sentences.
I went through my list of followers to find staff and postgrads from Leicester University and DeMonfort University that are tweeting and was surprised how many people there were. Andrew (@steepholm) asked for a list and I started typing and it got silly, there are LOADS of us :-)
To save RSI, can you please add yourself to the list using this google form?
Results will be automatically added here as a list of Twitterers
We'll organise another face to face session (with cake) again soon.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/leicester-academics-tweet-up/
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="twitter cake from flickr"][/caption]
Following a hastily arranged local meet up, XX twitterers came for a coffee, tea and some cake at David Wilson Library Cafe, Leicester University.
I went through my list of followers to find staff and postgrads from Leicester University and DeMonfort University that are tweeting and was surprised how many people there were. Andrew (@steepholm) asked for a list and I started typing and it got silly, there are LOADS of us :-)
To save RSI, can you please add yourself to the list using this google form?
Results will be automatically added here as a list of Twitterers
We'll organise another face to face session (with cake) again soon.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/leicester-academics-tweet-up/
I met a lot of people at ALT-C 2009 that I have only knew through twitter. It got me thinking that there are a few people in Leicester that I talk to on twitter that I haven't met yet, either. So, before the beginning of term makes the David wilson Library Cafe completely inaccessible, lets meet up in the flesh for some famous #cake and a nice cup of tea.
Sign up on doodle so we can pick the best day for the most number of people.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/networking/
I presented our work using iPod touches and microblogging to ALT-C 2009 on 9 September 2009. This work was funded by JISC TechDis who provided the iPod Touches through the HEAT3 scheme. The presentation went well (apart from some freaky slide changes brought on by my forgetting to turn off my rehersal timings!). I would guess that we had over 80 people there, which was really pleasing as we were scheduled against plenty of other good stuff. There were some great questions from the audience.
Thanks to Jane Challinor (@virtualleader what a star!) the whole thing was recorded and is available on youtube. I've restated the questions below, and provided some short answers to save you watching the video!
The ALTC2009 hashtag has been extensively spammed, was this a problem with the student hashtags?
No. We didn't have any spamming issues. The students were new to twitter, none of them had accounts before starting the project, twitter is now quite a different place but still wouldn't be an issue. ALTC2009 was a trending hastag, the student network didn't trend, so didn't attract attention and even now wouldn't be spammed.
What is an iPod Touch?
An Itouch is essentially an apple iPod with wifi capability, prices start at £149, no data contract involved.
In the network diagrams you appeared to have social connectors in both networks were these acilitators of collboration?
Agree that there were social connectors in each network. Friendly tone, social connection was important to them helping the network emerge.
Is there an optimum network size for this sort of work?
Difficult to say, the students that were involved volunteered and were incentivised with the potential of keeping one of the iTouches. Dunbar number is 150, optimum number of people that you can know well. We agreed that there was no minimum size for this sort of network.
The undergraduates seemed to have a level of peer support which was different from the postgraduates. Why?
The two groups of students very different - first years in throws of transition, a lot of social grooming went on with this group online. The postgraduates did have some extended peer support - they were more professional, trading links and resources to support studies. These students were perhaps more aware of public nature.
Was the 140 character limit a problem?
No, students took to it very naturally. Around 50% undergrads still twittering.
Did you ask students to limit their private communications on twitter?
No, we didn't ask them. We have no way of knowing if they made private communications with each other and we didn't ask them about this at any point.
[slideshare id=1962531&doc=twitter-090907061306-phpapp01]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PICCwm0W980]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT2g2qMMENE]
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/heat3-presentation-at-altc2009/
Hashtag spam?
What is an iPT?
Network diagrams - social connectors?
Optimum network size?
140 character limit a problem?
Private communication limited?
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/?p=249
Even though I am offically on my summer holidays now until September (ahh the wonder of scheduled posts!) there is just time for me to mention a new Special Interest Group I'm involved in.
Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) is a UK network of education practitioners and learning technologists interested in promoting good practice with classroom technologies that can enhance face-to-face teaching.
The ESTICT banner will over arch inter-related Special Interest Groups (SIG). The first of these SIGs is "EVS and Beyond" where EVS stands for Electronic Voting Systems.
The aims of the "ESTICT: EVS and beyond" SIG are:
To promote the use of EVS in teaching and learning (through models of good practice, events, case studies, networking face to face and online)
To disseminate and promote EVS practice with respect to conducting evaluations and research
To encourage collaboration between all stakeholders within and across institutions and promote a community of practice (includes students, practitioners and learning technologists)
Join our ning community http://estict.ning.com/
Once registered on the ESTICT site you will be able to find further details of and register for our first free event to be held at the University of Leicester on Thursday 26th November 2009.
The aim of the day is to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of electronic voting systems (also known as 'clickers' audience response systems ARS, personal response systems PRS). This event is aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more. Both experts and novice users are welcome.
Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Steve Draper, Senior University Teacher, Dept of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Steve is an acknowledged expert in the field of EVS and has published widely on it's use in Higher Education. The title of his talk is: Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what software features matter for these.
Places are limited so don't delay.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/estict/
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="credit: flickr S.S.K. "][/caption]
My better half is a lecturer in bioinformatics and tries very hard to fit his bench research along all the other things he has to do as a lecturer. About a year ago, he started to use a campus learning objects wiki within our VLE, Blackboard, as an electronic version of his lab book. Much of the data that he produces comes in electronic format (DNA sequences, digital photos of gels, phosphor images for autoradiography), so it seemed daft to be printing these out to put in a paper lab book. He opened the lab wiki with the following reasoning:
He has used this system with undergraduate and postgraduate project students working in the lab, and we are writing up these experiences as a short communication for a journal. As part of the background research for this, I sent a brief email to our staff in the School of Biological Sciences to see if there was anyone else experimenting in this way. There was a range of interest from a wide variety of staff. It appears this is a topic that people are thinking about more and more and a potential research area for the future.
A couple of comments were:
'I'm looking at openwetware'
one colleague said he kept everything electronically but didn't use a specific system to link everything together. He raised the thorny issue of proof of ownership/ authorship for patent applications and storage (large images at 1 GB a time).
iDaily diary though the colleague that paid for this did point it that it did not transform his notebook practice (I guess if you aren't good a keeping notes anyway, going electronic probably won't help!)
on twitter, a colleague said they used DEVONthink (Mac only) which allows the insertion of images (include editable PDFd LaTex equations)
This is an interesting area and one which I'm sure we will come back to, not just as a project for the more effective supervision of students, but as a tool for assisting research scientists to bring their practices for recording data into line with the already innovative generation of that data.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/thinking-about-electronic-lab-books/
We were fortunate to be given some funding from TechDis from HEAT3 scheme to buy 10 iPod Touches for use with students. A summary of our findings were presented at the HEA Annual Conference in Manchester on 2 July through a poster and short slide show, copies below.
Student Microblogging And Recording Timelines (SMART)[gigya width="425" height="355" src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=heat3-090622083421-phpapp02&stripped_title=student-microblogging-and-recording-timelines-smart" quality="high" flashvars="gig_lt=1245753682894&gig_pt=1245753707864&gig_g=1&gig_n=wordpress" wmode="tranparent" ]View more OpenOffice presentations from Jo Badge.
[scribd id=16688775 key=key-40hh3oddbju5s76p1nb]
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/heat3-ipod-touch-project/
I presented our work on Personal Learning Environments at the HEA Annual conference in Manchester on 30 June 2009. This project was funded by HEA Centre for Bioscience Departmental grant and took place in 2008/09 with a cohort of 220 first year undergraduate students. The project team was led by Alan Cann with assistance from Stuart Johnson and me.
[slideshare id=1602622&doc=heaples-090618062014-phpapp01]
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/ples-at-hea-annual-conference/
For the first time, I attended a one day conference today purely because of someone I had met on twitter. Jennifer Jones is a first year PhD student in the department of media and communications at Leicester and is investigating social media. She walks the walk and talks the talk, and when met with resistance to the new forms of social connections offered by the likes of twitter in her own department, she decided to do something about it and organised a one day conference on the Social Media: Uses + Abuses (#uanda).
I think she did an amazing job, quite an achievement for a first year postgraduate student. She had the support of her twitter network behind her and quite a few of us were there to enjoy the conference.
Unfortunately I couldn't stay for the whole conference, but I very much enjoyed Andy Miah's presentation. His description of twitter as a search engine was very apt and that it is replacing email is an important message for the those in the media and communications department to listen to. I hope they can rise the challenge and embrace these new connections and spaces.
I think Clay Shirky's recent TED talk about twitter sums it up nicely: this represents a a new way of communicating, the many to many conversation can now be supported.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/uanda/
Several updates are coming to Turnitin this summer. I've highlighted some of them below:
Global exclusion Bibliographic material
Default setting for all new assignments will be to exclude bibliographic and quoted material from the Similiarity Index
Currently, within an individual originality report, instructors must choose to exclude bibliographic and quoted material. When this new feature launches, instructors will be able to indicate their preferences at the assignment level. The default for all newly created assignments will be for this content to be excluded. (Originality reports generated prior to the feature’s launch will remain unaffected; whatever exclusion preference was set for each individual original report pre-launch will remain post-launch). This assignment-level preference can be changed up until the first paper has been submitted. In all instances, as currently, an instructor can view an originality report and change the individual paper’s settings to include or exclude bibliographic and quoted material.
Optional Exclusion of Small Matches in the Originality Report
Instructors may choose to indicate that the similarity index for every originality report for an assignment should exclude matches equal to or less than a certain percent (1% - 100%). The default setting is that ALL matches are shown.
The size of matches that have been excluded (if any) is clearly indicated on each originality report. Instructors can adjust the size of matches to exclude while viewing each originality report and those adjustments are immediately reflected in the originality report.
Instructors may sometimes find limited value in seeing large numbers of small percentage matches for an assignment. Now instructors have the flexibility to choose what level matches should be included in the computation of the similarity index and highlighted in the originality report. This flexibility provides instructors with an additional degree of control in evaluating student assignments.
Improved Handling of Document Submissions and Multiple File Uploads
New productivity and usability enhancements for submissions that:
• Double the size limits for individual file submissions (from 10MB to 20MB) as well as zip file (batch) uploads (from 100MB to 200MB).
• Improve user notification for submissions that exceed the maximum sizes (and guidance to help fix the issue);
• Streamline the process for uploading zipped files of multiple documents.
Currently, instructors must repetitively select and tag each document (author name, email, paper title) for upload. Now instructors will select multiple files and conveniently enter document information into a table.
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/summer-updates-to-turnitin/
Poster presented at HEA Annual Conference 30 June - 2 July 2009. This project was funded by TechDis as part of the HEAT3 scheme.
You can download a copy of the poster (A4) from scribd below. If you have come to this page via the QR code I gave out at the conference, I would be really interested to hear your thoughts on using the QR code as our use of QR codes is part of another JISC funded project.
[scribd id=16688775 key=key-40hh3oddbju5s76p1nb]
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/student-microblogging-and-recording-timelines/
Nine of us from Leicester attended the third Science and Learning Teaching Conference 2009 . Having got up far too early in the morning for my own good, we were rewarded with breakfast on arrival.
We attempted to amplify the conference as best we could, but with only two non-leicester people twittering, there were limited opportunities for outside interaction (though I think we kept Moira happy!). this was the first conference that I didn't take notes at but tweeted instead. I have come to think that there is enough online and printed material for me to just try and absorb and reflect whilst twittering rather than writing notes to not use afterwards. So what follows are edited highlights of my relfections on the conference.
Learning by Experience?
Professor Dave Barclay, Robert Gordon University, a Forensic scientist
The first keynote was fascinating and I learnt perhaps more than I wanted to know about where to look for DNA evidence at a crime scene. The learning resource for forensic science that Prof Barclay demonstrated at the very end of his presentation looked really interesting,especially the way that it was possible to revisit exercises at different levels (simple structure for first years, more detailed and open questions for third years). This system enabled a series of hyperlinked labels to be added to photographs which led to other evidence, written documents, more photos, lab reports.
Prof Dave Barclay
First-year student transitions: engaging with the 'whole' student experience
Paul Green, GENIE CETL, Leicester University
This is actually a Leicester Project, but I haven't been involved with it much since it started and I knew there was some very rich data here and was really keen to hear what Paul, a social anthropologist had brought to the project. The presentation was excellent and it was clear that the audience empathised with the students in their video diaries, perhaps having had similar experiences themselves. Paul has brought some theoretical contextualisation to the project which is really helping to struture it's direction and research questions.
In the afternoon, the session that stood out was a presentation by Nicholas Freestone on 'the perils of pedagogy'. Nicholas outlined some of the challenges faced in having the scholarship of teaching and learning recognised as a worthwhile pursuit and spoke a lot of sense.
David Sands presented an interesting way of using vpython to get students to think about classical mechanical physics through visual modelling. I wish he had included a demonstration of the software at the beginning, as it illustrated his point beautifully. Students had to work with the formula and parameters in the software to get balls to bounce up and down or springs to recoil correctly.
The highlight from day two (apart from Alan's presentation of course!) was Stephen McClean's HEAT3 project using a youtube cloned site to have students share videos about their practical classes. Slides available on slideshare.
A successful conference with much networking and some good twittering (archive on friend feed).
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/sltc09-2/
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="170" caption="CC: flickr jschneid"][/caption]
I've just upgraded to OS 3.0 on the iTouch and tried the new voice memos app. It's a neat and simple recorder, you can even do simple trimming of the audio files. The interface is good and sharing by email is a doddle. This means that by a simple email to posterous I can post the file online in one easy step.
Perhaps we could give student feedback this way - quick and easy to do, posterous could allow students to comment back. Not a private conversation, but maybe we can think of a way round that?
Download now or listen on posterous
Idea.m4a (462 KB)
Posted via email from jobadge's posterous
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/itouch-voice-memos/
On 1st August 2009 Blackboard will undergo a major upgrade (from version 7 to 9).
What action do I need to take now?
Make sure that you are using Internet Explorer 7 to access Blackboard 9. If you have upgraded to Office 2007 this is part of the upgrade. If you need to access Blackboard from home or a non-cfs PC you will need to upgrade those machines. Office 2007 for home is available from ITS for £17. IE7 is available free to download from Microsoft
IE 8, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 are also supported.
What will stay the same?
Your courses will be automatically transferred to the new software
Jo Badge will still recycle them ready for the new academic year (remove the 2008/9 students and enrol the 2009/10 cohort)
You will still be able to use the TurnitinUK system for submitting work for plagiarism scanning. I strongly recommend that you create new TurnitinAssignment items for students to submit work rather than re-use previous links.
What will change?
The major change is to the way that you add and edit information on course sites. This now predominantly occurs through in-context menus (i.e. click on an item to change it). The control panel is also accessible from the main course page .
Interactive screenshots of an instructor view and edit mode in Blackboard 9
Some things will disappear: electronic blackboard, digital drop box, signup list, student homepages.
Some things will get better: the gradebook is much enhanced and requires far less clicking to operate
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="203" caption="Interactive instructor view"][/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="203" caption="Interactive instructor EDIT view"][/caption]
What support is available?
ITS are providing quick overviews of the changes on: Tuesday 23rd June: 11am - 12pm and Monday 7th September: 2pm - 3pm (Book via staffdev@le.ac.uk )
Jo Badge will be running an overview of the changes that affect academic and support staff in the School in the week beginning 14 September 2009. Location and further details will be announced soon.
A meeting with MSc convenors has already been arranged for 25 June to take account of the MSc’s earlier start in the academic year.
More information on the upgrade is available from ITS
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/changes-to-blackboard-9/
This week I will be mostly attending the third Science Learning and Teaching Conference in Edinburgh. There are six of us going up from Leicester and most of us will be trying to amplify the event for those who can't attend (yes, including you Moira!) with the tag #sltc09. The easiest way to pick up all the tagged feeds will be through FriendFeed SLTC group as this will include tagged delicious, flickr, blog posts and tweets in one place.
We are getting pretty good at this kind of amplification now, so I will be setting up futuretweets which include the tag, explain how to use it and direct followers to the webpage for the conference programme. This helps encourages others to join us and helps to explain to our followers that they won't have to put up with the extra noise for long if they don't want to listen in.
Let's hope the wifi can cope with us all!
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/sltc09/
The first day at the third Science and Learning Teaching Conference 2009 has been a pretty full one! Having got up far too early this morning for my own good, we kicked off with a keynote to get us started:
Learning by Experience?
Professor Dave Barclay, Robert Gordon University, a Forensic scientist
Prof Dave Barclay
First workshop session:
First-year student transitions: engaging with the 'whole' student experience
Paul Green, GENIE CETL, Leicester University
This is actually a Leicester Project, but I haven't been involved with it much since it started and I knew there was some very rich data here and thought I would go and see what Paul had to say.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/?p=199
The morning after the night before.
First session was one Alan Cann and I were helping out with:
So you want your students to produce digital videos - some practical guidance
Chris Willmott
Developments in Learning and Teaching – Forward Thinking
Student-produced podcasts as learning tools
Chris Cane
Dude, where's my university? PLE, PDP & LLL
Alan Cann
Can you really teach scientific inquiry online?
Elizabeth Johnson
YouTestTube.com - video sharing to promote reflection in year one chemistry laboratory sessions
Stephen McClean
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/?p=204
Conference season is is almost here, so I have finally cracked open the 3 mobile broadband dongle that I got (the dongle was free but the P&P was £4.95) to use with my eeepc. Having come to rely fairly heavily on twitter during conferences, to meet other twitterers at the conference and increase my network, amplify the event and discuss parallel sessions with delegates, I am starting to think about which are the best tools to use for this.
The iTouch works best for twittering (with tweetie) and I'm getting better at taking notes on it, which can be emailed to a gdoc after the sessions have finished. The only drawback is the reliance on the availability of free wifi, a good strong connection that can cope with multiply connections. So this year I thought I would try mobile broadband, so the dongle is PAYG (supposedly with a time limit on the credit to 30 days, though several friends have commented that this doesn't always seem to come into effect and it is more likely to be on bandwith and download useage).
- what twitter client shall I use on the eeepc? Liam has a way of installing twhirl, which is my client of choice, so I may try that. Alternatively, the firefox add-on, twitterfox works quite nicely, though if you are multitasking, say writing notes in open office and twittering, it will pull up the whole firefox window for each twitter update, which could get very annoying if I'm trying to write notes.
Looking forward to some interesting discussions and to broadening our online network :-)
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/?p=189
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="203" caption="Bb9.0 instructor view"][/caption]
The Blackboard version 9.0 test system can be accessed via: http://bbtest.le.ac.uk/
please note:
The new service requires the use of Internet Explorer version 7. If you have upgraded to Office 2007 on a PC, you will automatically be running IE 7 .To install version 7 on a private CFS client log on to the CFS service and select start | All Programs | Install CFS Software and then select Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 - Upgrade. Next click on Run and the installation will begin.
The new system sees the removal of: the Electric Blackboard; the Digital Drop Box and Student Home pages. We shall be communicating separately with the users of Electric Blackboard and we shall be informing students of the loss of their home pages but you may be aware of staff that are making use of the digital drop box. We shall say more about this in the communiqué to all Blackboard course instructors.
We are not linking any course assignments on the test system to the TurnitinUK plagiarism detection service. This is to avoid the accidental deletion of any live data that is being held on the TurnitinUK service.
The Sign-up List tool will not be available under Version 9.0 as it is replaced by a Blackboard built-in tool within the Group function. The contents of any existing sign-up list will be lost during the final upgrade. We have a Web site where Known Issues with Blackboard Version 9 can be found.
Finally, if you experience any problem with the test system please report then to the IT Services Help Desk (email ithelp@le.ac.uk; tel 2253) but clearly state that the problem is with the Bbtest system.
Note: this test service is subject to disruption if it is required for investigation of issues or bug fixing.
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/blackboard-9-0-available-on-test-server/
Conference season is is almost here, so I have finally cracked open the 3 mobile broadband dongle that I got (the dongle was free but the P&P was £4.95) to use with my eeepc. Having come to rely fairly heavily on twitter during conferences, to meet other twitterers at the conference and increase my network, amplify the event and discuss parallel sessions with delegates, I am starting to think about which are the best tools to use for this.
The iTouch works best for twittering (with tweetie) and I'm getting better at taking notes on it, which can be emailed to a gdoc after the sessions have finished. The only drawback is the reliance on the availability of free wifi, a good strong connection that can cope with multiply connections. So this year I thought I would try mobile broadband, so the dongle is PAYG (supposedly with a time limit on the credit to 30 days, though several friends have commented that this doesn't always seem to come into effect and it is more likely to be on bandwith and download useage).
Things to ponder:
- what twitter client shall I use on the eeepc? Liam has a way of installing twhirl, which is my client of choice, so I may try that. Alternatively, the firefox add-on, twitterfox works quite nicely, though if you are multitasking, say writing notes in open office and twittering, it will pull up the whole firefox window for each twitter update, which could get very annoying if I'm trying to write notes.
- use of tags and futuretweets. Alan and I have established a tag for the first conference we are attending, and hope that others will join us. The third science learning and teaching conference in Edinburgh on 15/16 June 2009 will be a good place to start tweeting with #sltc09. We are getting pretty good at this kind of amplification now, and setting up future tweets which include the tag, explain how to use it and direct followers to the webpage for the conference programme help encourages others to join us and helps to explain to our followers that they won't have to put up with the extra noise for long if they dont want to listen in.
Looking forward to some interesting discussions and to broadening our online network :-)
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/?p=189
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="350" caption="photo credit: flickr jeffwilcox"][/caption]
ITS are pushing us to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 - if you use IE for your web access and use Blackboard you MUST upgrade to use the new version of Blackboard coming over the summer for use in the next academic year.
From ITS:
7 reasons to change to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) - upgrade now
It’s easy to upgrade from IE6 - find out about the new features in IE7 and how to install it
To find out which version you are using, open Internet Explorer and press F1 to open the help dialogue box. If the logo on the right displays an ‘e’ in a square box and doesn’t state the version number, then you are still using IE6.
There are plenty of reasons to change to Internet Explorer 7 and it’s easy to install:
1. Tabbed browsing
If you want to keep your current page open and browse for something else, just start a new tab. This means there’s only one copy of IE7 open (which uses less PC resources) and you can easily jump from one page to the next. You can open multiple tabs then close them individually or all in one go.
Even better than tabbed browsing - if you have a lot of pages open in tabs already you can view thumbnail previews of them to help you navigate to the correct one more quickly
2. Supports Blackboard 9
Blackboard 9 is being introduced in August 2009. Certain functions will not work with IE6, so why not upgrade now so that you’re ready for the changeover. IE6 will not be supported after October 2009.
3. Page zoom
You can quickly zoom in on a web page to make it easier to read. The whole layout including the navigation, pictures and text can now be magnified.
4. Improved printing
IE7 will automatically scale the page to fit when printing whereas if the page if it is too wide to fit the print area in IE6 then text will be lost.
5. Instant search box
The Google search box appears on the toolbar so you don’t need to navigate to your search engine first - just start a new tab, type in your search & go.
6. Newer and improved security
Improved security is available in IE7. Malicious coders look to exploit vulnerabilities in older browsers - you are more at risk from viruses, malware and hacking if you don’t have the latest supported version.
7. End of support
Support for IE6 will be phased out from the beginning of the new academic year 2009/10
What's new in IE7
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/upgrading-to-ie-7/
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="lts2009"][/caption]
In a change to previous years, the learning and teaching in the sciences annual conference was organised as an unconference this year. It was an experiment and Stuart Johnson took his reputation in his hands to organise it. He needn't have worried, we all managed to talk for two hours and eat the sandwiches, even though it was set up with only 10 days notice. We used a tag (#uollts) and several people from our various twitter networks joined in the discussion. We had twitterfall on the dataprojector and this did add to the discussion as well as providing a useful archive following the meeting (which I'm sure Alan or Stu will add to their blogs).
I thought we had a good discussion to say there were only around 20 people in the room and the very loose theme of 'assessment' to go at. I gave an impromptu demonstration of grademark (from Turnitin). I would have liked to hear more about the project in Geology experimenting with 'keyboard' examinations, so I am hoping that someone will capture a link for that and share it later.
This was my first experience of an unconference, and I rather liked it. When's the next one Stuart?!
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/unconference-was-unboring/
Yesterday, at our Pedagogic Research Group meeting, we were delighted to welcome Janette Ryan as our guest speaker. She spoke to us about international students and changing learning contexts which was thought provoking and kept us talking for nearly two hours. One part of the discussion was around the myth that international students plagiarise at a higher rate than home students. This is perhaps now being borne out by a rise in complaints by international students to the OIA.
There is still a need for education of students and academics alike in the use and abuse of electronic detection and I am delighted to say that Jon Scott and I have been awarded some funding from the HEA for a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. We will use citeulike to support the project by tagging the references we use in the synthesis (example using tag 'plagiarism'). The feed from this tag will be public and I am hoping that the plagiarism research community will join us and suggest and tag resources and papers too. The synthesis will become part of the HEA's evidencenet.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/yet-more-plagairism/
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I do love my little eeepc (asus e701) and I've had it for almost a year now. I use it mostly in conference season, and as that is fast approaching I thought the eeepc deserved a little love and attention, so I have installed easy peasy 1.0 (ubuntu 8.01). Whilst it sits and upgrades to ubuntu 9.04 (anything from 3 hours 48 mins to 1 hr 52 mins remaining, your guess is as good as my wifi connection!) I have a few first impressions.
the system makes lovely use of the limited screen real estate on little eeepc without looking teeny tiny. The layout is clear and (dare I say it) easy to navigate.
joining our home wireless network took one click and a password.
I am hoping to get a dongle for mobile internet browsing to work with the eeepc so I am hoping I can it working with easy peasy (with a little help from Liam no doubt!).
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/easy-peasy-eeepc/
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As twitter becomes mainstream in terms of recognition by the great masses, it has inevitably become a target for marketeers and spammers alike. When I first started using twitter, one of the most impressive things about it was the real time responses you could receive to support your use of web 2 technologies. Tweet 'why is adobe buzzword making all my fonts look wierd' and within minutes you would get an @reply from adobe offering help. This intelligent use of searches on keywords by companies for support is a great use of twitter. It felt personal.
More recently this seems to have been superseded by a network response, for example I just tweeted about posting something to the wrong blog in wordpress and I got two @replies from people in my network followed by a retweet from the wordpress hash account (#wp). I wondered if companies have found this model unsustainable since the twitter user base has grown so rapidly in the last couple of months.
At the beginning of this academic year, we tried supporting undergraduate students on twitter. There was a handful of students who used twitter and joined in our conversation. It was manageable and I would like think we provided personal, meaningful responses. I wonder what will happen when the new academic year comes around? Will we be able to replicate this support system if every student is twittering? Would we want to? Just as I hate being followed by random people just because I used a particular keyword, will students resent being followed by university staff?
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/customer-service-via-twitter/
You will have seen that ITS have announced a major upgrade for Blackboard for the new academic year. Within the School of Biological Sciences I will be reviewing the impact of this upgrade on our practices. If you have any questions or concerns that you would like to raise, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Internal support and information pages for version 9 upgrade.
Link to register for ITS briefing session 27 may 2009 on the upgrade
credit: Garrettc flickr
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The Blackboard virtual learning environment will be upgrade during the summer vacation (2009).
The planned upgrade date is MONDAY 3rd AUGUST and IT Services will be upgrading Blackboard to the latest version of the software – version 9.0.
Why: For technical reasons the Blackboard service was not upgrade for this academic year (2008-2009) and our current version (version 7.3) will become unsupported in October 2009. Blackboard Version 8 saw an upgrade to the grade book which now supports multitude of ways to customize the display of the Grade Centre, however, this version remains problematic so IT Services has decided to upgrade to Blackboard Version 9.
What does it Offer: Blackboard Version 9 is the latest release and features an expanded” Web 2.0” and “social learning” tools, such as blogs and journals and the new Blackboard Sync facility allows certain Blackboard content to be available to users of Facebook and the Apple iPhone.
What are the Changes: The major change for Blackboard users is the redesigned and customizable user interface. Although the student view basically remains the same as previous versions there are some significant changes in the user interface for course instructors – although the basic Blackboard functionality remains the same.
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/upgrading-to-blackboard-9/
I signed up for citeulike some time ago, dumped my refworks library into it and didn't do much more with it. I struggled to find similar users and was just starting out with delicious at the time and felt it more appropriate to bookmark articles that way than in a separate citation manager.
However, I came back to it recently when I was looking for a solution to a problem of how a group of us could keep a collected set of citations of our own work for re-use on grant applications, reports and so on. I remembered citeulike and set up a tag for us to use. I'm not sure how successful that will be as I'm not sure anyone else in the group is joining in (!) but it reminded me that you could subscribed to RSS generated by tags, and so I randomly decided to pull a feed from 'plagiarism' and have been delighted with the results.
There is a fair bit of duplication (not sure why) but over the last week I've found a rich mine of previously undisovered papers in journals I would never have looked in. I've always found searching for articles in pedagogic research problematic. Coming from a science background I get very frustrated when a nicely constructed pubmed search won't find everything I need. Papers on education research seem to be spread far and wide and indexed in a highly distributed way (any advice on other's search strategies gratefully received!). Looking at what other people in citeulike have tagged has been really eye-opening.
The other big advantage of using an RSS feed from citeulike has been the ease of transferring citations to refworks. Every bibliographic database seems to use a different system for providing citations and I can never remember which ones work and which ones just fall over. From google reader, one click to citeulike, click to copy reference into my library, then download the RIS file and upload to refworks, off to pick up the paper, print off and bob's your uncle (as long as I actually get round to reading it!).
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/im-liking-citeulike/
Testing blog app for wordpress from itouch. Photo added from library on the itouch.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/testing-testing/
I've joined a group of staff from institutions around the country interested in the use of voting and other technologies that promote interaction with students in lectures and other teaching situations. We are hoping to set up a Special Interest Group (SIG) around this topic and have just had an online meeting about getting started.
Having wrangled a name for the group: ESTICT : Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (yes, I know it's a mouthful, but we didn't want to limit it to just PRS/EVS voting technology) and next we want to promote it and hold our first event before the end of this calendar year. We will be looking to promote the use of any technologies used in HE to encourage interaction and engagement with an audience, including electronic voting systems. The focus will be practitioner-based and we aim to share and promote best practice.
We are looking for places to find funding for our events, so if anyone has an suggestions, please get in touch!
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/electronic-voting-special-interest-group/
The TurnitinUK plagiarism detection service has now released an anonymous marking option.
When you add a new Turnitin Assignment there is now a new screen with the usual options of setting the assignment's title and start date etc. but at the bottom of the screen there is a “more options” link. Within “more options” is a new feature: “Enable anonymous marking?”. If this option is switched on then course instructors will not see any student names in the TurnitinUK system until after the post-date (which is set when the assignment is set-up).
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/anonymous-marking-in-turnitin/
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Wimba Create is an add-in to Microsoft Word which allows such documents to be easily converted into a Web friendly format for inclusion in the Blackboard VLE. Converted documents are a series of Web pages with their own self-contained navigation structure.
The University has a site licence for Wimba Create and it is fully functional in both Word 2003 and Word 2007.
How to install and run Wimba Create on your local PC.
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/wimba-create/
The HEA Centre for Biosciences ran a session on pedagogic research at University of Leicester on 24 March 2009. Our twittering fraternity were out in force (@cjrw, @ajcann, @cwells1, @jon_scott) were all there and I am sure there will be other blog entries from some of them on the meeting. Unfortunately you will only get half the story here, as I had to leave just as it was getting interesting to collect the kids.
We had presentations on a wide range of topics, from the mysteries of social science research methodologies by Bonnie Green, with surely some made up terms in there (bemtology anyone?!) to case studies of practitioners looking at their own work in pedr in the biosciences. We tagged the meeting (#cfbres on delicious and twitter) and Alan invited the other participants to join our community of practice online.
As with most face to face events, the main benefit was in the networking and talking with people at the meeting. One of the feelings I was left with, was how can we harness this community of practice to greater effect? And what effect do we want to have? Is it solely to improve the teaching and learning for our students, or is part of it to improve the status of teaching and learning for ourselves?
There were two other home truths that beginning to dawn on me. Firstly, we need to stop moaning about educational research being impenetrable and just get on and get to grips with it (Paul Orsmond thought that we could do it if his second year undergraduates could!) and secondly, we need to write some grants and get in some money. Unfortunately end-of-term-itis has hit and I need to make a calendar note to come back and read this post and put these into action when vim and vigor return!
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/hea-bioscience-pedr-event/
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We had our first online meeting with the other partners involved in the JISC LTIG QR code project today. It was good to put some names and faces together with institutions (even if the faces were only there for while until we had turn the video off!).
We mainly reported that following up on the substantial number of projects that we thought we could do had been a little dispiriting in that we had met with a number of barriers to adoption. it was good to know that other people were sharing some of our problems and that Andy Ramsden was keen for us to document barriers as much as the successes (phew!). We will definitely write these experiences up as one of our three case studies.
The session gave us some good contacts to follow up and some ideas to inspire us. We will talk to Graham at Sheffield about our tentative ideas for using QR codes in museums. We liked the idea of an audio induction linked to a floor plan and are thinking about if we could do this within our School of Biological Sciences for first year students arriving in October. A treasure-hunt style tour could direct them to the main places of the three buildings that the School works within, showing them the locations of the main teaching labs, departmental offices for handing in work and the open access computing facilities.
Another idea resulting from the session was for us to think about working with a social media postgraduate student we know to promote the use of QR codes via a charity event she is involved in.
Alan and I suggested that we start to use a tag (on blogs/twitter/delicious) for the project, to bring the various discussions together, so #jiscqr (twitter RSS, delicious RSS, blog rss) was born and is now in use.
We are now looking forward to kicking off some new projects and meeting everyone face to face in June.
http://drbadgr.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/qr-codes-starting-to-make-sense/
HEA Centre for Bioscience event at Leicester
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Woodhouse Room, Charles Wilson Building, University of Leicester
The day will explore different methodologies and provide you with the opportunity to meet like-minded colleagues and promote pedagogy in the biosciences. This event is targeted at bioscientists with some experience of pedagogic evaluation and research. Registration form.
Programme
10.00 Registration and refreshments
10.20 Welcome and Introduction to the day Steve Maw, Centre for Bioscience
10.30 Social Science Research Methodologies: Bonnie Green, University of Leicester
11.15 Practitioner Perspectives: three scientists give the benefit of their experience in moving into education research with a "warts 'n' all" deconstruction of a piece of their own work.
Teaching about bioethics through authoring of websites: Chris Willmott, University of Leicester
Exploring peer and self assessment of oral presentations: opportunistically using residential field courses for Action Research: Mark Langan and Rod Cullen, Manchester Metropolitan University
A farewell to controls? The problems with experiments in education: Mark Huxham, Napier University
Followed by general discussion
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Afternoon Session: Facilitated by Paul Orsmond
Attendees will have the opportunity to join discussions on
Evaluating Pedagogical Research led by Jon Scott,
Feedback led by Paul Orsmond.
15.30 Feedback: Facilitated by Paul Orsmond
16.00 Reflections and Close
http://uolsbs.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/pedagogic-research-hea/
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