Lego Appeal!

On Tuesday, my using-lego-as-a-model-for-social-networking is being presented at the Durham Blackboard Users conference (durbbu10). Problem is, I only have enough lego to do the experiment with about 10 people, and from what I hear, I'm likely to have more like 30 or 40 people in my session. Help!

What I need is more traditional-style lego for making basic cars, like this:


(you cant really see it, but those black ones are the wheel connector blocks)

If anyone reading this in the Shoreham/Sussex area has some lego like this they could lend me for the next week or so, I'd be extremely grateful! Please email me or comment and get in touch!
Thanks

My Wordle Christmas Quiz

My Wordle book quiz has been going down well, so thought I'd write some notes for those that want more details!

Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/) is a tool to generate beautiful word frequency clouds, like this:
I've used Wordle in the apst for getting a quick overview of reports, or websites, or blogs - even giving it the top 20 google search results of yourself is quite interesting. However using it for a quiz was inspired by Tom Barrett and his "interesting ways" series, which suggests using texts as a quiz format.

The wordle's I generated all used texts from Project Gutenberg - copyright expired free electronic books. The top 100 are at:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

I chose pages where major charcters were mentioned, and then using the right click feature in Wordle, removed the most common name from each - which was usually a complete giveaway. Sometimes I had to try another page, or a coupld of pages together to give enough of what I thought the clues were - but of course these things are always easy to spot when you know the answers!

Anyway, the final 5 plus a few extras are available for your perusal. Enjoy!

You can't beat Lego

This post is to patent yesterday's genius moment, answering the question I posed to myself in October of how to physically demonstrate the differences in learning that take place in a traditional/Blackboard model vs a social/collaborative model. I hereby patent the Piatt-build-a-car-out-of-Lego-to-demonstrate-social-learning model. There.

My willing colleagues were subjected to being my first guinea pigs at lunchtime today. In fact, it was our departmental office christmas lunch, so many thanks to them all for humouring me on what was supposed to be a more alcoholic occassion!

The model goes like this.
Lego = bits of knowledge.
Building something (a car) out of lego = having learned something new

All students come to a new subject with some existing knowledge. This is represented by a small bag of lego bits given to each "student" (I used 7 students today, but could do more if you have enough lego). Some students have a bag of 3 wheels, soome have some flat bits, some have some wheel blocks. All have some relevant knowledge, but none - independently - have enough to make a car.

Part 1 - Blackboard

So we take a few (say 2) of our students to learn using Blackboard. In Blackboard, the students effectively have no voice. So no questions please. The lecturer (me) has decided in advance what materials to present through the learning environment. Both students are given a bag of bits to make the car the lecturer has designed. 4 wheels, 2 blocks and a base. They can of course bring their existing knowledge to the task, but they don't really need those bits. You can predict the outcome - both students will make the car I intended for them to make.

Predictable learning outcome. Low risk.

Part 2 - Social

The remaining 5 students are then told to work as groups to make a car. Everyone has a voice. At this point, I, as lecturer become one voice amongst many as they raid their bags and start seeing who has which wheels and *sharing* with each other. I as lecturer can choose to answer questions, provide any extra bits I feel they need as required. The cars they make are unpredictable, and rather mad - wheels aren't balanced, dubious extra bits everywhere. This (I hope) demonstrates something much richer than above. There are loads of learning opportunities here to talk about how and why things work.

It could be argued that students who've been through the basics using Blackboard are better enabled to make use of the richness that comes out of the social, having a good grounding for what they're entering into.

I'll be giving this model it's first official outing at the Durham users conference in January, so will report how well this works with a larger group then.

A personal FAQ

At a workshop today I spotted a feature on a corporate Intranet called "Questions I am often asked" which struck me as a great way to describe the sorts of personal and work areas I am active in, but also save me typing the same thing so regularly...so here's goes, here are the..
Questions I am Often Asked (with answers!)

1. How do I get wireless/email on my iPhone?
If you're at the University of Brighton, email me and I'll send you my "it-works-for-me" instructions, when something official is produced I'll post it here.

2. Can you help me/my-son/my-friend do a website?
If this is a personal/non-profit site, I strongly suggest you consider signing up to google and using a blogger blog (like this one!). It's free, ridiculously easy and makes you focus on content instead of spending ages getting tied up getting a hosting package, and setting up a bespoke site. If you get really into it, then maybe you should do all that, but to start off the google tools offer you photo galleries (picasa), blogs (blogger), pages (using public shared google docs), profiles etc. You can buy yourself a domain name and point it at your Google blog if you like.

3. How do I make an online survey?
Assuming the normal situation of low technical skill, short timescale and no budget, then I suggest Google Forms (part of the google docs tool). Very quick to make online forms with results all logged to a spreadsheet for easy analysis.

4. Are you going to...conference/workshop/seminar?
Yes, if it ticks at least two of my boxes, which are (in no particular order):
- eLearning, online learning, educational technologies
- digital games/play/leaderboards
- Google, Twitter, Facebook
- Social networking, collaboration, blogs, wikis
- Blackboard, Elgg, Sharepoint
and they've got decent catering.

5. Will you fix my computer?
Seriously, I get asked a lot. The answer is No, but if you describe the problem clearly enough I'll google it for you and there's always someone out there who's had the same problem and can suggest where you should go or what you should do to get it going again.