Reading blog

We are in the process of setting up reading groups on the Goodreads website to use with pupils in our school. The idea is to set up reading groups, share reading lists and get children to write and publish reviews.

Sample Poster

I thought it would be interesting to tie Goodreads into another school initiative - the "Currently reading" posters. All members of staff are encouraged to update a poster and display it on their door to show what they are currently reading. It's part of a campaign to create a culture of reading in the school.

I wanted to combine the posters with Goodreads. Rather than just show what I'm currently reading, I could link to Goodreads which tracks my progress, lets me publish a review when I am finished and records which books I've completed so far this year. Or at least, that was the plan...

The trick was to share links to specific sections of Goodreads. The best way I could find was to use the widgets provided by Goodreads to place the details in a blog and then share the blog posts.

The result: Mr Muir's Reading Blog. Only a few posts so far but a couple of key sections are:

• Keeping track: why I started the blog;
• Books Read in 2018: a widget that links to "read-in-2018" bookshelf and
• Currently Reading: the currently reading widget.

Put some QR codes on the poster to link to the relevant sections and job done. At least, job done assuming anybody bothers to scan the QR codes and read the blog. 

What do you think? Daft idea? Vaguely interesting? Please leave a comment below if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Back again!

A long overdue return to blogging...

First post for ages. Hopefully not the last.

SLF 2011 - Enhancing Game Design With Blogs

Brian Clark - PT Computing, Portabello High School
{Live capture of session}

Brian Clark
Enhancing Game Design With Blogs

Brian was seconded to Consolarium and involved in a games project with a primary school. He found that teachers felt they lacked the confidence to meet the game design requirements 2-09a outcomes. {See the Technologies document for more detail - DM}. First thing he did was to direct them to the Consolarium area on Glow where there are a series of tutorials and videos. {Note: to see most of the Consolarium links here you need a Glow Login. - DM}

Decided that Scratch was best tool for the children in their primary school. once this was decided they started to build up the capacity in the teachers, to get them up to speed in building games.

What is the game design process?

First stage is character design. When you designing a game, the characters are important - not just the game play. Also, opportunities to extend beyond the game into literacy, creativity, model making, marketing. (Think of the spin offs from established games, for example, comics, movies, novels, ...) Truely Interdisciplinary work, for example, see for example:

"By considering the type of text I am creating, I can select ideas and relevant information, organise these in an appropriate way for my purpose and use suitable vocabulary for my audience.
LIT 2-26a" (From the Literacy document.)

Model building and creating assets, see for example TCH 2-14a. Create music and audio effect his other outcomes e.g. EXA 3-17a, 2-18a.

Building the game. This hits Maths outcomes, e.g MNU 2-04a and scaling. At a fairly late stage, we start coding.

Games design therefore brings in a whole load of inter disciplinary tools. Many activities have to take place before you get to the game creation. Real games companies use blogs to communicate internally and as publicity. So, this project got the pupils to use Glow Blogs to log progress (The Room 11 Games Blog - Glow login required) and communicate between teams. (Again, inter-disciplinary, e.g. LIT 2-20a and 2-23a as well as TCH 2-08a) The children used the blogs very effectively to give and act on feedback. Children in the project school choose to write about their work and comment on other people's work. The pupils we getting about 6.5 comments per post! Very impressive level of engagement and useful feedback helped them improve their games.

Edonis interview

I was talking to David Noble today as part of his research for the Edonis project. I think that, at some point, the interview will appear on the edonis ipadio page. I hope I make sense!

I told him that I aimed for at least two updates to this blog a week. This week I failed.

So before I post a Fun on Friday, I thought Id cheat by posting this. Does that make me a bad person?

Glow Community Building

Attended a Glow meeting at the Stirling Management Centre today which was interesting for a number of reasons - not least of which was that it got me more enthusiastic about Glow than I have been for a while.

Normally, when at a meeting like today's, I would either capture notes live in a Word document or in a live blog. Today though I decided to use Twitter instead. I think it worked. capturing and reporting in short burst was useful. I wasn't distracted by thinking how to phrase stuff for the blog or sidetracked by pfaffing about with formatting. Also, some live interaction took place by tweet which is not easily achieved with a blog post. However, the problem is that I now have a series of disjointed Tweets instead of a coherent, archived, record of what went on.

My task for tomorrow is therefore to try and pull all my Tweets, supplemented with comments from others, into a coherent, blog post.

See you tomorrow... maybe!

CAL 2009: Digital Dentists

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Measures to assess students’ spatial reasoning relating to using Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)
Margaret J. Cox, Jonathan P. San Diego, T. Newton, J. Hindmarsh, P. Reynolds, S. Dunne, et al; King's College London


PHANTOM project: Design, develop and evaluation of haptic and synthetic devices applied in dentistry. (Haptic - sense of touch.) Interdisciplinary team looking at Technical, Curriculum & Context and Educational Evaluation. Gathering evidence of students' attitudes under three headings and hope to see which factors have the biggest impact. Compared "traditional" method where students practise drilling on a mannequin while being observed by tutor and then final result is also assessed.

Technology Enhanced Learning methods used spacial relations tests, measure fine motor skills (identified by clinicians as an important skill that may improve with practice), gross motor skills, etc. Also developing a PHANTOM Workstation - a virtual mannequin. Virtual mannequin will allow students to rehearse techniques over and over again. Also, the students' performance can be replayed and assessed.

The research will also capture experts using the PHANTOM tool and then students can compare their performance against the expert.

CAL 2009: Does Technology Enhance Learning?

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

The dark side of learning in digital worlds - ‘technology never enhances learning!’
Esyin Chew, N. Jones, D.A. Turner; University of Glamorgan

Technology has not had the impact on Learning and Teaching that we might have hoped for. There remains a group of unconvertables who will not use technology in their teaching. (See The University of Google.) There is a school of thought that says technology does not impact on learning in the same way that a lorry delivering vegetables has no effect on nutrition.

Research looked at a number of universities and noted that elearning had positive effects such as ease of access, any time learning etc. However, they also reported "discomforting experiences" for example academics complained about time and discipline issues whereas students complained about no synchronous feed back and misuse of online forums. Lecturers complained about lack of time and student complained lecturers are not up to date.

See the Evaluations of Learners' Experiences of e-learning (Special Interest Group) site for more information on learners experience of blended learning. Both students and lecturers complain about technical problems. Also different ways that the academics use technology. For example, Science lecturers tend to use the technology to "preach" whereas social scientists use it to discuss.

Mutual communication would be beneficial. "The value of an educational technology reflects the values of those who make it and use it." A student said, "It's not the technology that doesn't impress me. It's the lecturer that doesn't impress me." {Once again, it's not the tech, it's the teach. DM}

CAL 2009: Digital natives

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Digital natives: Who are they and what do they look like?
Rebecca Eynon*, Ellen Helsper University of Oxford (Oxford Internet Institute)

What factors may describe a digital native? Is there an age factor.

If it is true that younger people work and learn in different ways, this has implications for education. Important to see how young people are using technology in their daily lives. There is some research that shows a higher proportion of young people use the Internet but are there significant differences in the way young people use new technology?

Research based on Oxford Internet Survey - the 2007 survey is based on responses from over 2000 people. General characteristics of digital natives were described. {But I missed the chance to copy them down! Curses. - DM}. Some aspects of the survey results show that age is a factor. For example, 14-17 year olds are the highest users of the Internet and are more likely to be surrounded by technology. When asked how skilled they are at using the internet, again, 14-17 year olds are more likely to say they are skilled. First port of call for information - again, 14-17 most likely to go to the Internet for more tasks. Multi-tasking by age also shows 14-17 as highest. However, there is not the dramatic drop that Prensky might suggest after 25. Main significant drop happens after 55.

Digital nativeness - age is an indicator, but so are other factors such as previous experience.

Activities online - shopping is the most common. Middle age group more likely to shop and do e-government type activities. Formal learning, fact checking and current affairs may also be age dependent. Age is important but many other factors are important too.

Younger people do tend to have access to a greater range if ICT, more likely to go to Internet for information online and more likely to multi task. However education, experience of using the Internet and breadth of Internet use are important. There is therefore some support of the digital native concept but age is not the only factor. In other ords, parents and teachers can learn to speak to digital natives. For example, online experiences need to be contextualised and this is an area where teachers could help.

CAL 2009: Mobile Learning

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Context sensitive mobile learning: Adding relevant information on the move to objects and activities to augment understanding Carl Smith*, John Cook, C. Bradley; London Metropolitan University

CONSENS project. Vocational, context based mobile learning. Attaching information to space - "The world itself becomes the interface". Knowledge formation in the clickable world. There is an increase in scanning and capturing real world. You can then look at overlaying multiple views of real world objects to reveal more information. The hope is that the data can be interrogated rather than just passively viewed. Learner control of the objects - linking 2D, 3D representations of objects with real world.

Reflection in context. For example, accessing data about a street while you stand in the street and record thoughts on phone as a sound file or by creating video podcasts. Reflection in situ - no written notes. Used Mscapes to overlay digital information based on GPS positioning material. Also looked at QR codes and pattern recognition as well as technology such as Photosynth.

Researcher described how they investigated the technology - described how students first went on an "analogue tour", that is a lecturer walked round a city with them and told them about what they were seeing.

Question was also asked about what was meant by "context" - more than just location or even location + time. Do you tell the system you are an architect or does it work it out?

For more detals, see the M-Learning pages at CETL Reusable Learning Objects site or go to the researcher's web page.

CAL 2009: Capturing semantics

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Capturing semantics in enterprise systems education S. Polovina*, I. Launders, S. Andrews; Sheffield Hallam University

Only 15% of business critical information is stored in a structured form. The problem is of course that computers like structured information. Humans like concepts - the 85% that sits outside the information system and that is hard to compute. Businesses are not happy for their strategies to be constrained by their IT structure. Further complication because businesses want to conduct their business over the web.

This research tries to capture concepts in a diagram - Conceptual Graph. This has the advantage of being visual for humans, captures the context and is computable. However, computers can't process it, question the model and students can't add unconscious knowledge. Desire is to harmonise creativity of humans with the productivity of computers.

"All models are wrong... but some are useful" {I like that! - DM}

CAL 2009: Paperless Assessment

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Using tablet technologies in marking paperless assessment
Hilary A. Cunningham-Atkins, Wendy A. Fisher The Open University

Practised what she preached - first thing she did was pass round a tablet for people to sign in and give their email. :-)

Biggest part of lecturers' job is marking! Researcher's university moved to paperless assessment in 1999. Meant that lecturers were constrained in where they could mark - had to be at desktop PC. Previously they could mark papers with pen anywhere. Also, how do you annotate a diagram. Example was given of an essay with tutor annotation compared with pro-forma feedback on electronic assessment. By going paperless, there was an impact on the quality and quantity of feedback. Filling in a pro-forma removes the location of the comments from the assignment being commented.

Researcher wanted to see if tablet allowed paperless assessment but with at least some of the advantages of hand-written annotation. Used software that comes with the tablet to annotate document (.doc, .html, .pdf, ...). Tutors can write in document' existing white space, can highlight sections and (if necessary) can create extra whitespace. Annotations and document saved together as a pdf. Used in conjunction with pro-forma but gives richer feedback to students.

The technology now costs around £600. They tried using a £20 graphic tablet but, although you can do most of the same things it is significantly harder!

Students liked the personalised feel of the feedback. They felt the handwritten notes were much more personal. Tutors gave significantly better feedback - perhaps even better than written feedback.

Use of technology by lecturers is individual and dependent on their pedagogical views as much as their technological skills.

Extension project is looking at recording audio or video annotations and embedding in the document.. {Record facility in Word? - DM}

CAL 2009: Using tag clouds

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Getting our heads out of the clouds: Using tag clouds to reflect on the emphasis of materials presented in powerpoint slides Damian T. Gordon*, Deirdre M. Lawless Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland

Started with a description/definition of a tag clouds and produced a tag cloud of the CAL website. Learning was the dominant word. Moved onto talk about knowledge management. Three aspects identified:

1. Process
2. Technology
3. People

Most of the effort has to go into the People part. Researcher suggested that most students only read lecture notes the night before the exam, so we have to make sure our notes are good! Tag clouds may be a tool to help focus lecturers minds. Showed tag clouds of a set of his notes/powerpoint slides on research methods. Showed for example how "Research" featured strongly in first three lectures but hardly at all in his lecture on statistics. This shows some of the (perhaps unintended) messages given in the lecture. Also showed how you can see the major word, say "research", and then take it out of the cloud to see what other words come to the fore.

Went on to show a comparison of tag cloud for lecture notes with tag cloud of learning outcomes. Or compare with assessment. For a more student centred approach, a student could compare a tag cloud of an assignment with a tag cloud of their submission. Could help them reflect on their response and perhaps help them with a redraft.

Tag clouds could be used as an introduction to a topic or as a revision of a previous topic. Tag clouds give semantic and syntactic view but present it in a visually stimulating way. Presenting the information in multiple ways can help the learner.

Two useful tools are Convert Powerpoint {can't find this... maybe I wrote it down wrong. - DM} and Wordle.

CAL 2009: Institutional policy

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

A study of the relationship between institutional policy, organisational culture and eLearning use in four South African universities
Cheryl Brown, Laura Czerniewicz, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Is there a relationship between institutional policy and use? (Note, there is no national policy or funding drivers in South Africa.) The researcher identifies two elearning policy types: structured and unstructured. They also identified four cultural types of university: Corporate, Collegian, Bureaucratic, and Enterprise.

Policy existed in the two structured type universities. They were both embedded within broader teaching and learning policies. The biggest difference in impact is in availability of good teaching facilities. The two Corporate cultural types did much better. There was however an acknowledgement that some universities were "historically disadvantaged". In general, the Bureaucratic, unstructured university fared poorly, for example in frequency of use, variation of use, encouragement to use, availability and accessibility, ...

There is a crucial relationship between policy and use. Staff use is higher in unstructured collegian type universities. Policies are needed but they should be supportive, flexible and non-restrictive policies. These are the most use for for supporting innovation.

CAL 2009: Interactive Whiteboards

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Using interactive whiteboards to orchestrate classroom dialogue Sarah Hennessy, N. Mercer, Paul, Warwick; University of Cambridge

The Interactive Whiteboard can be a tool for supporting dialogue in whole class teaching. In particular, conceptualising dialogue for aspects such as developing reasoning. An Interactive Whiteboards could be a great tool but whether it is or not depends on the pedagogical approach of the teacher. {Again, it's not the tech, it's the teach! - DM}

Therefore this project worked with teachers that they knew were already using dialogic teaching approaches. They were not looking for "whizzy" uses of IWB but rather uses that supported the purposes of the lesson. Examples given included annotating a piece of text and adding their own explanation of the vocabulary. Using storyboarding based on a poem and then showed YouTube video for "Paths of Glory". Children put things on IWB (annotations, spotlight areas, underlining, sketches...) for class to see but then had to justify and explain to class.

The researchers found the IWB could support rich dialogue. The teacher relinquishing control of the IWB developed a sense of co-enquiry. Important though for teacher to acknowledge pupil's contributions and for pupils to build on the work of others. The IWB can open up more space for new forms of dialogue, for example, non-verbal dialogue or multi-modal dialogue.

How as educators can we exploit this rich opportunity for rich dialogue? Can we use the layering of different modes?

Finished with and advert for the Research Into Teaching with Whole class Interactive Technologies (RITWIT) conference.

In questioning it was pointed out that most of the examples shown could have been achieved with an OHP. Is this a method of teaching that was lost by the introduction of IWB technology that is now being re-discovered? Response was that the research took a pragmatic approach - IWB is the technology that is in the classroom, so how can it be used more effectively. Also, part of value of IWB is the ease of collecting, storing and retrieving different annotations on the same source material.

CAL 2009: Using an e-portfolio

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

‘There was a lot of learning going on.’ Using an e-portfolio to support learning activities in a professional course for new HE lecturers
Sarah Chesney and C. Marcangelo, University of Cumbria, UK

Using e-portfolios with staff doing post-graduate certificate. The university uses PebblePad but realised what they were doing was creating a Personal Learning System rather than a simple ePortfolio.

Used a "patchwork text" technique where a number of short pieces are written over time and then sewn together using reflexive commentary at the end. {Fairly sure she said "reflexive" rather than "reflective". Is that right? - DM} Important that the drafts of their short texts were shared at regular intervals for comment from peers and tutors.

Feedback was gathered through online survey (anonymous) and focus groups over two different cohorts. Themes investigated included Formative Feedback and Use of the ePortfolio.

One danger of formative feedback raised was a concern that it would be plagiarism to use peer feedback to improve work. Also concern that formative feedback didn't match the summative criteria.

Use of ePortfolio - participants tended to critique the software rather than discuss the concept of learning portfolio. Also, some were concerned that concentration was on presentation rather than content.

Conclusions

Do we need to recognise process outcomes as well as final outcomes. From a course point of view, how do we deal with tools that will be in perpetual beta?

CAL 2009: Quality in the writing process: exploring blog micro-content from discipline specific perspectives

Live capture from #cal09

Blogs by Primary Student Teachers

Just a quick post to give you a list of blogs started by a group of BEd 3 students. As usual they are a mixed bag with some getting the hang of blogging faster than others. If you feel you can offer encouragement or advice I am sure they would appreciate a comment.

BEd3 2008-2009 blogs

Student learning blogs

I encourage students to use a blog to reflect on their development through their year at Jordanhill. A few have had a go and I have been given permission by two students (so far) to share their blogs with people who read my blog. They are almost at the end of their first teaching placement but I am sure they would still value any advice or comments:

• Niloc Reflects
• Of Computing, and being a Student Teacher
  

At least leave a comment to let them know that someone other than me (and their mum) is reading. :-)

ECER 2008 - Social software for reflective dialogue

Live blog from a session at ECER 2008.

Presentation from Carina Granberg, Umea University, Sweden

The full title of the presentation is Social software for reflective dialogue – is there any trace of reflection and dialogue in the students’ blogs?

Student assessment included the requirement to make at least two entries. The presenter is interested in internal and external dialogue. She sees reflection as essential for learning but requires a deeper level of reflection - not just on content but on the process and even the premise. The students tended to agree that reflection involves internal reflection but see the value of external dialogue - to talk through what they are thinking with fellow students. Two thirds prefered face to face dialogue seeing it as more social and faster. However a third valued the thinking time written responses allowed.

[Running out of power - may add more later. :-) - DM Update: More added!]

Two groups were studied. One saw reflection purely in terms of completing the assignment. They did bare minimum and discussion was very linear. Other group saw reflection in a much broader sense - to do with learning rather than just for the assessment. Their discussion was much more complex and they appreciated blogging as a tool that helped encourage reflection. Both groups were equally unfamiliar with blogs and similar ICT skills.

[Trick of course to encourage group B behaviour in group A students! - DM]

In a subsequent blogging exercise, the tutor took part in the discussion and challenged students to reflect further. Also didn't set quantity of responses but asked for quality instead. The researcher therefore confirmed the importance of an active eTutor/eMentor in creating a positive, educationally valuable, blogging experience for students.

ECER 2008 - Podcasting and Blogging – the way to learn

Live blog from a session at ECER 2008.

Report on study from Mid Sweeden University by Maria Rasmusson, Susanne Sahlin and Marcus Sundgren

Student attitudes to podcasts and blogs. Report on an ICT And New Media As Support for Learning course for student teachers.

Podcasts were recorded lectures and were about 30 minutes long but students were expected to use their own blog and were assigned to write posts and comment on each others work. Students were “proficient to average computer users”.

Students reacted positively to the podcasts and comments included “Listening is better than reading” and saw them as an alternative or complement to lectures. Negative comments made were mostly around technical issues but some did say it was a “limited experience compared to traditional lecture”.

Blogs were very positively rated (85.7% thought it supported their learning). They appreciated the sense of writing for an audience. The blogs were public so writing for an audience beyond their tutors and peers. Some saw the potential as a tool in their own teaching practice. There were no real technical problems with the blog but a few expressed concern that the objectives of the blogging exercise were unclear.

The students valued the podcast and blogs as tools for their own learning.

My comments: In the question and answer session the presentrs talked about the entusiasm the students had for using blogs and wikis (but not really podcasts) in their classrooms. Perhaps the recorded lecture format did not show the real potential of podcasting. However, where the students benefited from the tools (blogs and wikis) they saw the potential. If I want my student teachers to be blogging teachers I need to encourage them to be blogging students. Better telt than felt!