cakes:learning technology blog

Back in the olden days everyone stored bookmarks in their web browser. In Internet Explorer you’d click on Favourites or in Firefox you’d select Bookmarks.

Many people are now using Social Bookmarking tools to store bookmarks. I use Delicious.com as this allows me to:

• Search through everyone’s bookmarks on a certain topic, to see what other useful sites and articles are out there.
• Access your bookmarks from anywhere, home or work.
• Annotate your bookmarks to remind yourself why you saved them.
• Subscribe to a feed of another person’s bookmarks, if you find that you have similar interests.

To get started with Delicious

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

‘Web 2.0′ – The term still excites many, but to be honest when I hear it now I wince. It was originally a call by Tim O’Reilly for businesses to realise that the Web had changed. So for example, the real power of the web was not tapped from putting company brochures online, but the Web could be a platform supporting services that grow in value as more people use them. It was a message that pointed out to media businesses that people want to create and share their own content, not just consume yours. Looking at the way the education industry uses the web, it is still a call that we still need to hear. We keep students in small groups in VLE sections, rarely connecting with other groups of students. We supply them with content, but VLEs are not designed with user generated content in mind.

So why does it make me wince, even when the message is still valid, and it’s implications still able to open up the potential of the web for learners?

Well, Tim O’Reilly never defined what the term Web 2.0 meant. People explored the possibilities of Web as Platform and everything that came with it, and the term came to mean a lot of different things to different people. For example, my above explanation of the Web 2.0 message will be radically different from other people’s. From this mix of meanings the term becomes meaningless, and when I hear it I’m not sure what the speaker actually means.

So what do we do with ‘Web 2.0′?

My opinion now is that we should stop using the term because it is hindering communication, not helping. We should say what we mean. If we want our students to use online services like social bookmarking which are valuable because many people use them, and the reason is that we think it will help their research into a subject, it is better that we explicitly say that. Often when we use these vague terms, we are preventing ourselves from realising that we don’t really understand what we are saying in any detail, or at least preventing others from understanding what we are actually trying to communicate.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a useful ’shorthand’, and everyone understands pretty much the same thing from it. Maybe I should make peace with, and embrace the term ‘Web 2.0′?

What about you? Do you use the term? What does it mean to you?

[Image by luc legay]

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

We’ve finally finished working on the Spark08.com website [note that they've made big changes to it now] for the World Firefighters Games. The idea of the site is to connect with a younger audience (7 – 16 yrs old) encouraging them to explore fire and rescue services across the world and the World Firefighters Games via four national curriculum subjects: History, Art, Geography and PE.

This was a big thing to attempt in the very small amount of time available and while the site is far from perfect I’ve appreciated the chance to explore various ways of displaying information using various free on-line services. Using these services you can very quickly display information in more appropriate ways, and I’ve explored how we’ve used some of them below.

Google Maps: To display information geographically (example)
While you can do very useful and clever mashups using data sources and Google Maps if you have the technical know-how, anyone can use Google Maps to display their information.

Log in using your Google account and click on the My Maps tab. From here you can choose ‘Create new map’ and easily add placemarks containing the information that makes more sense displayed geographically.

Flickr: For displaying and annotating photographs (example)
We’ve used Flickr to display a series of photos as a slide show, which also displays information about the photo.

You can create slideshows in Flickr by creating a new Set from the photographs that you’ve uploaded. When you’ve done this you can click on the ‘View as slideshow’ link and link people to the URL of this page so that they can see the slideshow.

Xtimeline: For displaying historical information (example)
This allows you to upload text and related images that are best displayed by date.

Not all of these would be useful for your projects, but they provide a simple alternative method of displaying information that might be more effective than just text. As always when using external services keep a copy of the resources on a computer that you know is backup up, so you cannot loose it all.

There are many beginners guides to new web technologies, but I was especially impressed by Jeff Cobb’s concise and well illustrated ‘Learning 2.0 for Associations‘, which covers some of those that are becoming mainstream as well as the theory that is often linked with their uptake in teaching and learning.

The document won’t take long to browse through, and if you want someone to talk to about how and where you might implement any ideas that you have, contact your local Learning Technology Development Officer. At Edge Hill University your current contacts are:

-Faculty of Health: Adrian Cain, David Callaghan and Lisa Bushell
-Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Peter Beaumont and Carol Chatten
-Faculty of Education: Paul Duvall and Megan Juss

[Via]

We’ve been recently using The Form Assembly for creation of forms for end of module surveys and the like, because the WebCT survey tool was awkward to use.

However with our upgrade to Blackboard, Form Assembly’s re-development and the fact Peter Reed tells me people like Brian in the Faculty of Health had been looking at, and are quite keen on Bristol Online Surveys, it is worth taking a proper look at how each of them compare.

We will look at the services from the perspectives of:

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people
-Completing the forms
-Data management and analysis
-Financial cost
-Potential longevity of the service

by comparing re-creating a generic end of module evaluation form.

1. Form Assembly

See the example. If you have time you could make it look much tidier.

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

Form creation is very flexible, with the possibility for more complex features like conditionally released questions. The import list feature means that it is very quick to create a series of multiple choice questions which have the same replies (e.g. Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree).

Duplication of the form is easy as you can just use an existing one as a template. You can release your form to the public to use as a template, which means if several people at Edge Hill had accounts, they could share generic forms and change whatever questions they might want.

Several people could use one account and email notifications announcing when a form has been submitted can be sent to different email addresses for each form.

-Completing the forms

Very straight forward.

-Data management and analysis

This is affected by the plan you choose. The free plan doesn’t allow you to export results in CSV format, but it does create pie charts to display the results, and these could be printed or saved as a PDF. The paid plans allow export of the data in CSV or XML format.

-Financial cost

Visit the pricing page for all the options, but basically there is a free option where users are shown Google text adverts after submission, a pay as you go (e.g. £5 per 100 responces) and monthly subscription (e.g. £5 for a month/£60 per year). The paid service provides better options for exporting the results but even the free version gives notifications of new submissions by email or RSS feeds.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

Difficult to know, but the service has been around a few years and seems to be developing.

2. Blackboard Assessments Tool

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

The process of creating the questions is pretty straight forward – you create an assessment and then the individual questions. The only slight complications occur because the tool is to be used for quizzes too, which means you get more options that you need.

I could create the questions, but not separate them into sections with a title and instructions for each section as with Form Assembly.

The survey can be exported and shared amongst several Blackboard areas.

-Completing the forms

Pretty straight forward. Can save questions individually or all at the end.

-Data management and analysis

The tool does record your results, creating bar graphs and allowing you to download as a CSV file. However it is made slightly more complex because it is designed for quizzes and so you’ll also get grades given for correct answers, which you don’t need for a survey.

-Financial cost

None as we are using Blackboard already.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

Created surveys will last as long as we stay with Blackboard. This survey tool cannot be used outside Blackboard for other uses, which limits it’s use.

3. Bristol Online Survey

See an overview.

-Form creation, duplication and management among a large number of people

The creation of forms and questions is as quick and straightforward as Form Assembly. Duplication is easy as you can use other people’s forms as templates. Also you can create accounts for as many users as you want.

-Completing the form.

As simple as the other two services.

-Data management and analysis

Not used it myself but it looks like you can export CSV files of the data, and it will display results as bar graphs for you. It doesn’t look like there are notifications of submissions, but I might be wrong.

-Financial cost

£500 plus VAT per year for the institution.

-Potential longevity of the service and any other things

As the University of Bristol who created it seem to be using it I’d think it will be a long term thing.

Conclusion

The Blackboard survey tool (now called the Assessments tool) has improved since WebCT CE 4. As it doesn’t allow surveys to be used outside of the Blackboard environment, we need to look at other options for the institution, however if you just want to run an end of module survey Blackboard is fine. If you like, download the Generic Module Evaluation that we have been using. If you have access to build your Blackboard area, go to the ‘Build’ tab, click on ‘Manage Course’, ‘Import’ and then upload the file and select it. This will import the questions and survey.

If the institution pays for Bristol Online Surveys you can create/copy something on there and link to the URL of the survey from anywhere including your Blackboard area. This is a good simple solution as long as there is someone in the institution to sort out administration of user accounts. It is academically focussed too, so seems to be developed with the use of research data in packages like SPSS in mind – although I’ve not looked at this aspect.

If you wanted more complex forms, with conditionally released sections and an RSS feed of results Form Assembly would be the best solution. This creates the best looking forms, especially if you spend a bit of time with it and can have multiple users using the same account, all receiving email updates of submissions for their own forms. It works well for simple forms too and is a very affordable solution.

Following on from the post on Converting Text to Audio, there is a fantastic service at spokentext.net.

This service allows you to upload a file (be it .txt, .pdf, .doc or .html) and it converts the file to .mp3 for you. The voices are OK, but it’s the small things that are the best part about the service. You are provided with an RSS feed, meaning that every document that you convert becomes part of a podcast. You can subscribe to this in iTunes for example, and that will sync to your iPod if you use one.

Also there is a Firefox extension for it. Install the extension and you get a tool bar.

Select text in the web page that you are viewing, click the ‘Record Selected Text’ link, and it will add an audio version of the text to your podcast feed.

Using the Firefox extension and the RSS feed make this a very easy way of keeping consuming textual materials on your portable media player while you are on the move. It is free at the moment, but if you’d like to help the development of the service they are asking for donations to help pay for better voices.

Been having a look at the ‘Corporate Learning’ conference that is going on at Complexitive.com.

This is a free online conference that is being run using Elluminate Live! and while some of the sessions are very focussed on business, I think that there is a lot that Higher Education can learn from the group of people involved.

Have a look at the conference wiki to see a list of past recordings and future presentations that you might want to attend (add 6 hours to the time if you are in the UK).

This got me wondering; how is what corporate educators are doing, different to Higher Education’s focus? Elliott Masie points out at the SCIL Conference, 2003, there are a lot of similarities in at least how on-line content and experiences are (or should be) developed.

I certainly hope that, in the future, developments that we do will be part of projects, with plans and service level agreements – more like what I’ve seen in the business world. . Most developments I see in HE run much more informally. I think when SOLSTICE pushes the idea of New Academic Teams this project based approach will be an important part of making it work. The plans would also have to take into account invisible costs like levels of student support, and maintenance which tend to be ignored.

Been reading an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Northwestern University closing their own email system. Instead students get their email hosted by Google Apps Education Edition.

This article gets me thinking because often in Learning Technology Development we use similar freely available or relatively low cost services to create learning resources and experiences, or as easier to use tools than the ones available in an all-in-one VLE solution.

The things that we have to consider are:

Extra administration – Students might need accounts setting up (will the process put any of them off from doing this?). Can we support any problems the students have when using the service (the institutional VLE takes a massive amount of time to support just by itself)?

Here today… – How long with the services be around for? Can we back up what is created (for reuse, migration to another system, in case it needs to be shown in the future during an audit). If you created things in a more closed environment (e.g. Second Life) you might not be able to back them up as such. Materials in an environment like this won’t have the lifespan of those 10 year old OHP slides that were still in use when I was a student. Is that seen as acceptable by the academic staff who use them, and those in management positions who will be allowing people time to keep creating resources?

This extra work can put people off using technologies, and that’s not bad if it means the benefit of using the technology isn’t worth the effort. I think some of the best and most innovative use of technologies in Teaching and Learning is done by people who are passionate about what they think can be done, and therefore put a lot of time, effort and focus into integrating it into their teaching. The worst uses of technology are probably by people who are told they have to use something, don’t want to or know how to use it, and therefore don’t integrate it’s use into a larger strategy. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to use 10 year old OHP slides over a Second Life meeting area, if they fit in with what you want to achieve.

With the new release of Google Earth (4.2) , it might be worth taking a quick look at how we might use it in teaching and learning. George Siemens argues that this is the sort of inspirational resource that educators and educational institutions should be focussing our resources on developing, rather than focusing on Learning Management Systems.

The easy place to start is looking at what people are already doing with Google Earth, whether in formal education or not.

Brian Romans started a Where on (Google)Earth? Quiz on his blog. This developed into a community effort. People try to work out where the screenshots taken in Google Earth are from. For example here is an example of a question and an answer.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, USA is an example of an institution who have created a KMZ file which if you open will turn the campus in Google Earth into quite a complete campus map with 3D buildings, photos and annotations. You can learn about creating 3D buildings on the Google Sketchup site if that is of interest to you. Also you can add photos at panoramio.com; see the post on my experiences if you want to know more.

While there might be no reason for creating a campus map from a teaching and learning point of view, you might want to create annotations or use existing resources to bring an issue that you are covering in an academic programme to life. Google Earth Outreach has helped non-profit organisations work on this, for example those raising awareness of deforestation in the Amazon.

For more ideas, have a look at Google Earth Community discussion boards specifically the Educators discussion board.

Frank Taylors ‘Google Earth Blog‘ is a great place to go to keep track of developments and uses for the software in the future. Subscribe to it’s RSS Feed with your feed reader. If you don’t have one and want to start subscribing to blogs, it is worth getting a Bloglines account.

More technical information can be found at Stefan Geens‘ Blog ‘Ogle Earth‘ and at ‘Google Earth Hacks‘.