All the fun of the Fresher's Fair

This morning I took a trip up to Brighton racecourse for our Fresher's Fair. Apparently the largest in the country (according to one of our Students' Union Vice Presidents, Ed, on his blog about the fair). 

As always, the place was buzzing, with sweets, pens, club night freebies and more leaflets than you can imagine stuffed into your hands as you try and walk around.

This was taken before the fair officially opened - already packed

The fair is a mix of student clubs and societies, internal services and local and commercial companies. My colleagues from Student Services, for example, put on a great stall. They were giving out information and useful promotional items like their (now classic!) tea towel.

Student Services - photo by Bob Seago

I believe the fair is a great chance for first years to get a good feel of the range of activities and services available for them during their time at uni. But I think that some of that usefulness is lost with our in-house stalls sharing attention with the commercial ones. As Ed comments in his post, students are encouraged to make the most of the freebies from the commercial advertisers. And they do. The point of the day for many - myself included - becomes getting the best freebies rather than finding out about your town and uni.

An interesting perspective is offered by Reach Students, questioning industry specialists on their views on Fresher's Fairs, and whether this is actually the right time to try and engage students. I like this quote:

"The new student has so much visual noise over the first two weeks of term it is a bonus if they can work out which modules they are taking and how they get to them from their accommodation. The best time to reach them is when they have time in front of a computer and they are looking for distractions (before exams) or excited (two weeks before they arrive on campus)." John Abell, MD at Membership Solutions by Reach Students

I would agree wholeheartedly with this, but if the nightclubs still want to come and give away their freebies knowing the students are unlikely to remember the difference with any of them, then good luck to them. I admit I am not their target audience (by a good 20 years), but would say most didn't manage to stand out in any particular way. However, I will give special mention to the two campaigns that particularly appealed to me today.

1. The Haunt, a nightclub in town. Given what I just said, why did I remember their name? Well because when they gave me a free wristband, they used a metal strip and clamped it on to my wrist! The idea was for students to keep it on as long as possible - all term in fact - to get the discount.

wriststrap clamped on!

2. And a piece of rock from the Samaritans. A simple sweet giveaway, quite fitting for a seaside town, but the message through the rock seemed so apt for the Samaritans and so witty it deserves a special mention!

Samaritans rock - for When Life Sucks

An enjoyable day, and I know that the internal services will have plenty of campaigns long after Fresher's week is finished so the students who were overwhelmed today should be able to get the information they need at a less frantic pace.

Play nicely in the Blogosphere

I've seen lots of posts offering good advice on etiquette for Bloggers, but these usually relate to your own blog, not the wider world of blogging (the blogosphere). I was pondering this week how few comments most of the blogs I read get, and what a shame it is the bloggers don't get any feedback and support in terms on comments.

My tweet this week (above) seemed to get a good reaction, so I wanted to expand on what I think makes you a good member of the blogosphere and what social media really means.

1. Read more than you post. Odds are someone has written something relating to your subject matter, reference them, see what they think, explore their links, get some new ideas. Let's not re-invent the wheel by blogging in a vacuum. 

2. Comment more than you post. This is my most important rule - and one I will try to stick to myself. Blogging is hard, it is putting something of yourself out there into the world, so let's all cheer each other on a little bit. If you read a post with no comments, especially by a new blogger, then let them know you were there - say hello, ask a question. Comments are incredibly self-affirming to the recipient. If you want them to comment on your posts, you should repay the favour.

[I like this advice from Daria Black on what makes a good comment]

That's it really. Two little rules to blog by. And as to the 'social' part, we've got to remember it's not all about ourselves. Social media means engaging with others and building relationships, and it's not much of a conversation if nobody ever listens.

[If you're thinking of blogging, Steve Wheeler has some excellent reasons why you should]

It's so much easier on Facebook, but clicking 'like' is a bit too easy. If you've read this, I really do want to know what you think, so will you please tell me?

Old Media meets New Media: Pottermore.com

I should declare, before I start, that this is not a neutral review - I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter books. When J K Rowling announced that she was releasing a website full of extra material and interactive games for her fans, called Pottermore, well I was there pressing refresh for hours on end for a chance to get early access:

an over-excited tweet when I was accepted into the beta site

I usually equate the idea of a website to accompany a book a bit like having extras at the end of a DVD, usually there's a 'making of' and some trailers but not a lot more. With new books there is often a computer game, and maybe a fansite but nothing joined-up. Pottermore, I think, breaks the mould by doing so much more than just providing a few extra details about the author, this is a new world combining audience participation, gaming and story-telling:

shopping activity unlocked when you discover Diagon Alley

• The story unfolds linearly in beautifully drawn images for each scene which you can delve into, clicking to unlock secrets.
• The extra content (written by J K Rowling) requires exploration of each scene.
• Nearly everything on Pottermore is commentable, and there are a lot of comments.
• It borrows the Facebook 'Like' model, as you explore the site you can 'like' or 'add to favourites' each character and location.
• Players unlock features as the story progresses in a game-like way, and by being sorted into houses you are immediately given a strong sense of belonging and team spirit.
• The interactions make sense and follow the story giving you realised expectations (like when you know you're about to see the Sorting Hat for the first time).
• Players can challenge each other in spell duels.
• Everything you do rewards (or penalises) you with House Points.

When asked about the site, J K said:

"It's amazing for me to be creative in this medium, which didn't exist back in 1990,"
J K Rowling in The Guardian, June 23 2011

Quill icon letting you know there is new
content to be unlocked in the accompanying image

The cynical will argue the site is just a vehicle by which to increase sales of the eBook version, unusually not available through the usual channels. However I am not a cynic and am delighted to see this sort of development. I think the site shows real potential to augment traditional media in exciting new ways and look forward to seeing what comes next. Off now to work on my potions...

Pottermore.com is free, but is currently in Beta and access is limited. It is expected to go live in October 2011.

(Mis)Adventures in Geocaching

In that space on your CV where it says 'Hobbies and Interests' I want to write Geocaching. The whole idea appeals to the alternate reality gaming side of me - an international treasure hunt thats completely invisible to most people:

"Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world." (Wikipedia)

So, taking advice from @veggieg3ek (whose tweets about finding caches make it seem easy and fun) I downloaded an app to my iPhone and starting looking for caches near me. Here is my cache finding record to date:

1. Day out in Rye the day I got the app, discovered I was a few meters from a cache and abandoned the family to their ice-creams while I wandered aimlessly in the middle of a road (my phone said I was 0 meters away, then 50 meters away, then to the left, then to the right - what!?). No joy.

There are taken in the same spot, my iPhone can't make up it's mind!

2. My app tells me there is one at Shoreham train station, so I left early one morning this week and got strange looks while wandering where my phone told me and looking in hedges. No joy.

3. Shoreham Toll Bridge. This has got to be easy, it's a wooden structure. Had the family out on this one, after 15mins of looking at the sides of the bridge we gave up and went home. No joy.

Looking for a brass id tag, not many places to hide it here surely?
Rated 5 difficulty, but not sure what that means.

4. Success! Here is the cache at the wooden Heron on the footpath up to Steyning. Only I knew this was there, we found it by accident a few weeks ago. My app doesn't know anything about it, so I can't log it and there's no code.

A film canister with a list of names and dates in it.
(I'm a novice, I forgot to bring a pencil)

The film canister has something taped to it, I have no idea what this is.

So there you go, my record of failure. Shall I stick to Foursquare and other location check in services where I only have to tell it where I am, or shall I persevere?

Make an Interactive Timeline -or- I Love Google Spreadsheets (again!)

Eagle-eyed readers will remember I've already written a post about the wonders of Google Spreadsheets, but here's something else you can do with them that I hope you'll appreciate - creating interactive timelines.

The best example of this is a project I've been working on that went live today, the University of Brighton Student Experience Timeline.

view the live timeline at http://staffcentral.brighton.ac.uk/studentservices/timeline.html

There is a good introduction to the rationale behind the timeline on the university Student Services website. It's overall aim is to provide a tool to help staff understand the student lifecycle in order to best plan their own activities, and to direct them to relevant resources at key pressure points. The events can be filtered or searched and each item on the timeline can be clicked for more details, links and an image.

The recipe for producing this timeline is a Google spreadsheet, a bit of html, and links to some magic scripts (from MIT's Simile Project). I learned how to do all this from Brian Croxall's excellent 'Build Your Own Interactive Timeline' tutorial. If you want to do this, I suggest you start by watching Brian's video which gives you a good overview of what we are building here!

This timeline won't work embedded in Blogger or in a Blackboard item because of the way it calls in links. Sorry. You need to create a proper web page for this one. Also it doesn't like Win7/IE8 and I don't know why, but I've put a javascript browser check on the webpage which suggests the user switches to Firefox.

I'm very impressed with the results - an impressive interactive tool, that can be easily updated and added to by non-technical users by just adding rows to a spreadsheet.

Improving the Student Experience - a unified Student Calendar

The new University of Brighton Student Calendar went live today, and I wanted to stop and highlight what I think is a great achievement both technically and politically.

The calendar presents as a small box (portal module) on the studentcentral (Blackboard) homepage when you log in:

(the calendar is that blue stripy one in the middle)

On it's own, it looks like this:

What this is showing, in a colour-coded way, is all the student facing upcoming events from across the university. And when I say "all" I really do mean it. This calendar incorporates the academic calendar, study support, health, Sport, Students' Union, Alumni, Volunteering, Wellbeing, Careers, IT workshops etc. By getting everyone on board (for which I can in no way take the credit) it means that it becomes definitive for students and immensely useful. Every department wants to be included, because all the other departments are...simple!

The technology behind this I did have a hand in suggesting, and if you've been following this blog for a while I suspect you've guessed - it's Google Calendar. This gives us an easy way to set up multiple, publicly viewable calendars, devolve access to only those responsible for each set of data and then overlay them in various ways to present the results.

Below is part of the screen in Google where you can set the presentation options. You can see here which calendars I am overlaying (remembering not to include my own diary of course!). This is 'agenda' view, but you can choose to present it in a more usual weekly or monthly grid view.

Students can click each item to get fuller details, or subscribe to the calendar(s) by clicking the Google button at the bottom.

You can take a closer look and explore the calendar yourself on the Student Services web pages.

Note: In an ideal world we would find a technical solution that integrated with our existing student email and calendars (Live@Edu) but hope to achieve this in the future. Once everyone has good habits of keeping their calendars updated then the platform can change over time.

Technology with Purpose - A Google Latte Special

The Learning and Teaching Technologies Exchange (LATTE) is an interest group, based in the School of Education at the University of Brighton, who meet fortnightly to discuss the use of technology in supporting teaching and learning. I led the most recent meet of LATTE with the enticing topic: "Google. Google Forms, Google databases and Google plus for education. It's all good with Google!". This post offers a summary of the topics we discussed:

1. Google Docs

+ Keeping all your documents in the 'cloud' for access on and off campus, never email files to yourself again

+ Sharings control for colleagues to view, edit or share publically

+ Collaborative working on documents

+ Creating Google Forms (see post on how to do this)

+ Capturing student data to use in class

+ Using spreadsheets as a database (see post on how to do this)

2. Google Calendar

+ Sharing your calendar with people outside the university or publicly

+ Embedding calendars in studentcentral

3. Google Plus

+ Using circles to limit sharing to audiences

+ Not needing to be 'friends' with your students (as in the Facebook model)

+ Setting up module groups (once there are more people using it!)