Does research need a capital R?

Research covers a spectrum of things. From the published journal article full of references and methodologies (thats the "proper Research"), through to a basic gathering of facts to better inform yourself about something. I'm guilty of the first (I have a PhD to prove it) but spend most of my time doing the latter. Both are valid, but the idea of a "pedagogic research conference" - a daunting title - definitely makes you think of the former - and it's a shame, because we're all researchers, we just don't spell it Research.

Today's post is a bit of a ramble through the thoughts arising from today's University of Brighton pedagogic research conference - I'll do it like a photo diary so hopefully the pics will hold your attention...


So we begin with some sightseeing, it was my first visit to the new Checkland building. A new build based around five "fingers". The photo shows the colour schemes for floors 3, 4 and 5. I love it. I don't understand why all the concrete is left exposed everywhere, but apparently that's very trendy...


This shiny new building has some shiny new lecture theatres - these chairs caught my eye - a nicely designed fold away table - as modelled below by Marion. Neat.




The day began with a keynote from Glynis Cousins about research in HE. Making it relevant. Making it interesting. And deciding for yourself what was or wasn't valid research.


We then went into parallel sessions, and I chose Sue Greener speaking about "E-modelling? Helping learners to develop sound e-learning behaviours ". Sue talked a lot of the need to challenge a lecturers conceptions of teaching, to recognise the skills they needed themselves in order to help the students become good learners. I didn't take many notes today, but from Sue's session I wrote down "Openness, Integrity and Enthusiasm". That's what makes a good teacher - not "being right".


Next up was Gaynor Sadlo speaking on "Learning through problems: some perspectives from neuroscience". I must admit, this lost me - dendrites and neurons are not really my thing. But Gaynor has a real passion for trying to understand exactly how learning takes place, in order to be able to improve learning.


More lego? Yes, next up was me and a variation on the Blackboard/Elgg talk I gave at Durham, this time entitled: "The Best of Both Worlds: studentcentral and Community; Comparing controlled and social platforms for acquiring knowledge" (the slides are here). I again got some good feedback on the logo-as-a-model-for-social-networking activity. One group of lecturers decided they would use it as an activity with their first year students as a way of introducting them to Community@Brighton, so it's nice to know that it will live on even though I think I'd better stop with it now before I get an entirely lego-based reputation around the office.

I'd taken on board some advice I read on the Speaking about Presenting blog I follow. I intentionally told my audience a slide in advance that I was going to be asking them for feedback - in order to give them time to phrase their responses in their heads. I also chopped up the 45 min session with the activity and chat right in the middle to maintain attention. I think this all worked, and is less stressful for me as a presenter as it meant I did get responses when I asked for them, and I got a break in the middle of the session as well.


The last session was Darrell Evans and Stan Stanier (my boss) with "A Question of Competitive Quizzes – What Happens Next? Using an interactive TV quiz format as a model for a formative assessment strategy". I loved Darrell's work - as an Anatomy lecturer he uses a massive range of activities, tools and techniques to impart knowledge and maintain interest and enthusiasm. He makes use of the familiarity and conventions of TV quiz shows to play interactive games with his students - leading to the online quiz Stan and Darrell presented today. This furthers the work I've mentioned earlier from the Never Ending Uni Quiz, that leaderboards and competition really work to increase motivation. Turns out medical students are massively competitive - they love their prizes and seems chocolate is the favoured reward!

Full abstracts are available on the conference website if you want to follow up on any of the above.

So overall an interesting day, some interesting conversations with colleagues and a chance to find out about other interesting things going on across the university. If only it wasn't called a "pedagogic research conference" and was called a "what interesting things have you been doing in your teaching" conference it would pull the crowds.

The difference between ages 8 and 18

West Sussex have a policy:

"...the decision has been made to give all West Sussex schools their own Moodle installation..."

Of course I have 2 boys at primary school in West Sussex, and if their school is implementing Moodle as a VLE then I want to help. So just before Christmas I volunteered myself as someone who knows about web stuff, and have been spending a fair bit of time since then talking to the school about all things web.

My first task was to revamp the school website, which I chose to do using Moodle (as I don't have control over the hosting package I was unable to install a CMS of my choice so it seemed wise to stick with a system they already had - and used - and which was being maintained and supported).

I also spent some time with the head of ICT planning Moodle roll-out across the school, and meeting with other local primary schools to see how they use Moodle. Holmbush Primary were particulary helpful, with some nice examples of creating accounts for historical figures (Henry Viii) to 'chat' to the students.

Now the thing that I find hardest to get used to is the fact that we're dealing with primary school kids - aged between 4 and 11. I'm used to an 18+ audience, who can all read, and all (supposedly!) take responsibility for their own learning. All of a sudden we're thinking about kids that can't read, and particularly in terms of online stuff which happens at home in support of the classroom work, where the parents role is significant.

Also, unlike at University, there is no top-down compulsion to use Moodle. Staff are free to use it as they wish - if at all.

Tomorrow I'm co-running the first Moodle training session for teachers at the school. I'm nervous because
a) I am not a Moodle expert. I'm a Blackboard girl, and although i can find my way, I could easily get caught out with a "how do I..." and
b) I predict a lot of the teachers just won't be interested, and why would they? They teach 4 year olds in a classroom, does Moodle make sense to them? I hope to find some great examples of use to share with them.

If you're interested, the site is currently at:
http://learning.swissgardens.w-sussex.sch.uk/
I'll let you know how it all goes.

Email, email, email

This post is part new year's resolution and part book review!

I've just finished reading "E: A Novel" by Matt Beaumont. This is a story about a London ad company, Miller Shanks, and their trials and tribulations while pitching for "Coke" - told entirely through emails sent around the company. The world of advertising is new to me - and fascinating - but the email styles are eerily familiar!

I like the dynamics of who blind copies in who, who forwards to who etc. Takes a while to get the hang of it as you don't really get introduced to anyway, but anyway, I recommend it for a different format of novel.

Which links nicely to the topic of my own email. I've lost the plot a bit over the last term, being guilty of reading emails, failing to act on them in anyway and moving on to read the next one. So I started the year with 900 "read" messages but no idea which required actions and which were so old it was now embarassing...

I got chatting to Greg Bowie (Liverpool John Moores) at the Durham conference who told me about David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book, which helped me find this excellent free article on his website called Getting Email Under Control.

I've adapted this a little and put my new plan into action today.

1. Don't open an email unless you plan on actually doing something with it (ie work emails can wait till work) as you're only allowed to read each email once.

2. Apply the 2 minute rule.

- if you can do it in under 2 minutes, just do it
- if you can delegate it, do so
- if it requires more than 2 mins (or for me to be in the office) then put it into my new ACTION folder
- if you're never going to anything with it, file it (or better still DELETE it)

So other than some filing folders (I have 2 "Learning Tech" (effectively 'work') and "Personal") there should be only:
- an empty Inbox
- ACTION
- PENDING
- and one labelled READ (of things I might follow up on and read about one day!)

Today was the mammoth job of clearning the historical stuff, and setting up the new model. I now have an empty inbox and 28 in my ACTION folder, which feels great. (I tackle the 28 tomorrow). Will let you know in a week or so how it's working out...

Adventures in Durham - Photo Diary

On Monday 4th January, 2010, Marion Curdy, Joyce Webber and myself travelled up to Durham for the 10th annual Durham Blackboard User Group conference.


We'd booked to stay at the Victoria Inn, ideally situated about 5 minutes walk from the conference venue in one direction, and 5 minutes from Durham Castle in the other. It was a friendly place, and the rooms were comfortable, if a little overwhelming in the pink chintzness department!


The day we arrived the view from my window was suitable snowy!

On Tuesday the conference began: The Programme for the Conference


First of all we checked out the lecture theatre where I'd be presenting later that day - slightly daunting, as my practical session wasn't designed for raked seating, and the projection was so high I had to have a crash course in using the smart board in order to be able to point anything out.


Lindsay Jordan (University of the Arts, London) gave the keynote "‘Jumping over walls’: Blending institutional and external learning environments". The highlight of the talk was Lindsay demo-ing how secondary school students had responded to a task of acting out the menstrual cycle (as shown in pic), the point being that sometimes alternative teaching techniques really can be the most effective.



Next up was Jo Badge (@jobadge) from Leicester, talking about the various web technologies they'd been using with their first year students as an introduction to Web 2.0.


They used a Blackboard course site as a landing point for the students, linking off to the external services and requesting students to submit their usernames on the external sites where relevant (in some cases asking students to use specific tags was sufficient to gather their data but Google reader for example needed the shared item URL for each student).


They also ran a Blackboard discussion forum, which was pretty much empty...deja vu! Although in this case there were so many other channels for communication it wasn't surprising this one wasn't really required.

A bit of a twitter debate emerged during Jo's talk about the risks involved in asking students to authenticate on external systems. Hopefully OpenID, and other SSO solutions will solve this problem in time, but for now solutions like we've gone for at Brighton - hosting our own social tools - seems simplest. Of course then you introduce the fact that students aren't working with 'real' tools, and the benefits of the wider community and the killer issue that once they graduate they (at present) lose access to everything they've built up - problems for another day.


(I liked this shot I got later of Jo Badge sitting in a spot where she could plug in her laptop - the requirement of power making her look rather lonely!)


After lunch I went to see Alex Spiers (@alextronic) speaking about the Web 2.0 training programme for Library Staff at Liverpool John Moores University. We ran a similar programme at Brighton for library staff using Elgg (rather than Blackboard) as the environment.


Next up was me, speaking about The Best of Both Worlds (Blackboard running alongside Elgg at the University of Brighton). I was pleased with the reception this talk got 0 in particular my Lego analogy - but there are plently more posts on this blog about that so won't go into it again here. Just a few select slots of the resulting efforts of the delegates!




There was a fascinating panel session about Blackbaord 9 upgrade experiences, which Jo Badge has written up nicely (so I shan't bother...suffice to say I nodded along with most of the speakers and their rather painful experiences).

I also attended a session about Maple TA, which has great promise as a way of integrating more mathematically advanced tests into Blackboard - will write more about this soon when I follow up on it.


One thing that caught my eye whilst I was there was the smart information plasma screens in the building. We also do this at Brighton, but the layout of the screens at Durham was very clear and has given me some ideas on how to improve our presentation.


On the Tuesday night we headed off into the snow for a tour of Durham Castle before drinks and dinner. We got a bit lost on the way (although how we can fail to find a castle baffled us a bit!). The tour was a real treat. Durham Castle is owned by the University and students live, sleep and eat there. Our guide Tasha, a postgraduate student, filled us in on the history and a few tall tales about the castle.


This is the organ in one of the chapels in the castle, originally from Durham Cathedral. Photography wasn't permitted in the other chapel, but we were particularly struck by the natural rust patterns in the stone pillars.


Canapes, drinks and dinner were then served in the Great Hall - this is the "chocolate cup" for dessert. We made an early return to the B&B around 10 or so after coffee, but judging by the activity on twitter I think some managed to stay up drinking until 3am...we're such lightweights!


The walk home over the footbridge through the gently falling snow was simply idyllic.


On the Wednesday morning we awoke to heavy snowfall, despite this, there was still a good turn out for the opening session at 9:30 - but most of the laptop screens in this shot are on travel/weather websites, as we all became a little paranoid about our journeys home.


Blackboard spoke about their structure and processes and their "bug squad" model. Following the presentation from Blackboard, we chose to leave at 11:30 (rather than 4 as we'd planned) - hoping to get an earlier flight out of Newcastle (the Newcastle airport website was unavailable and Flybe weren't answering their phones).

I was sad to leave early - so apologies to those with sessions on Wednesday which we missed. Overall I feel that the conference was a good opportunity to meet with people I've only met virtually and to renew some existing friendships. It brought up some issues I'd not really thought about before but there was little new material I hadn't previously heard about through my existing networks and info channels - which in many ways pleases me, that I'm not missing out of too much (other than networking!) by spending very little of my time on the conference circuit.


The taxi journey down the A1 (past the Angel of the North which we;d somehow missed on the journey there!) was one of the most entertaining parts of our trip. Our driver (Barry) has a story and joke for just about everything. He also informed us that we'd had dinner in the Great Hall as shown in the Harry Potter films (upon researching this fact afterwards he was wrong, only Durham Cathedral was used in the films).


We arrived at Newcastle airport and were slightly concerned about the "mountain rescue" vehicle parked outside. We were about to discover that the 10am flight to Gatwick had been cancelled, and the earlier flight we'd hoped to catch at 2:25pm was also cancelled. So we were going to end up on the 18:10 we'd originally booked on anyway.


A long period of amusing ourselves in the departure lounge - watching no aeroplane activity at all - began. We know those shops quite well now!


We watched all flights to the south of England get cancelled one at a time. Including (eventually) ours. We were then offered either a flight at 18:25 to Southampton or to transfer to another Gatwick flight in the morning. We chose Southampton (wisely as it turns out, no flights went to Gatwick till 6pm the next day).


This was the little plane that eventually arrived to take us to Southampton - we took off in a snow blizzard and it was possible one of the scariest flights I've ever been on. The three of us were clinging to each other by the time we landed, and I don't think it was all to calm me down. The promised coach to Gatwick didn't materialise, so a late train ride and icy walk later we all made it back to my house for a team sleep-over. Alls well that ends well, 24 hours after we'd started Marion and Joyce finally made it to their own homes!

Snowy Durham, here we come

The next few posts will no doubt be about the Durham Blackboard User Group conference - ignore me for a while until normal service resumes if this isn't your cup of tea!

The first session I'm presenting is entitled: The best of both worlds: the controlled meets the social. It's really about how at the University of Brighton we run Blackboard alongside Elgg to provide a traditional VLE platform and a social platform for tutors to best support and teach their students. I'll be highlighting where this works well, how we can help tutors understand the differences (this is the bit that involves a Lego demo - read the rest of my blog to find out more!) and some honest home truths about how it works in reality...
The presentation is viewable on Google Docs, feel free to have a look and hopefully it won't put you off actually attending!

My second session (as part of the show and tell on Day 2) is about The Never Ending Uni Quiz, an initiative to help teach students (and staff) about all aspects of life at University in a competitive quiz format - the leaderboard being the key feature!
This presentation is also viewable on Google Docs (but is screenshots only, so you'll have to come and listen!)

I'm also looking forward to catching up with some colleagues - many of whom I've only met on twitter, and no doubt having endless conversations about the future of the VLE - our favourite topic! I'm also interested to see how twitter in particular is used at the conference, there's already a Twub, and I was pleased to see the hashtag (#durbbu10) promoted far in advance of the conference, so I've been following chat about preparations and delegates for a while now.

This morning I've spent far too long thinking about packing (a lot of snow forcast, and only hand baggage allowed) so assuming the ice holds off long enough for the flight I look forward to being there by dinner time tonight!