Katie Piatt's Blog

iPhone 4 (vs Galaxy S) vs HTC Windows Phone 7 evaluation - two months without my iPhone

2011-12-12T21:12:00.000Z

Regular readers will know I gave up my beloved iPhone 4 for a month in October to test drive a Samsung Galaxy S. Summary: Android ok, but not switching. The next test is an HTC Windows Phone 7 for a month - the month has now been and gone, and I'm still carrying the phone...that tells you something! I reluctantly have to give it back this week, so time to put cards on the table. Here's a breakdown:

For those of you who've never seen a Windows phone, here's a useful intro from http://msdn.microsoft.com/.

Image copied from http://msdn.microsoft.com/ used under fair use

The thing I particularly like about the Windows Phone operating system is the way instead of thinking about apps (Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email etc...) I can think about People, and see everything related to a particular person centred around them. I'll let Wikipedia describe this idea of 'hubs' to you:

Windows Phone features a new user interface, based upon Microsoft's Windows Phone design system, codenamed Metro. The home screen, called the "Start screen", is made up of "Live Tiles". Tiles are links to applications, features, functions and individual items (such as contacts, web pages, applications or media items). Users can add, rearrange, or remove Tiles. Tiles are dynamic and update in real time - for example, the tile for an email account would display the number of unread messages or a Tile could display a live update of the weather.

Several features of Windows Phone are organized into "hubs", which combine local and online content via Windows Phone's integration with popular social networks such as Facebook, Windows Live, and Twitter. For example, the Pictures hub shows photos captured with the device's camera and the user's Facebook photo albums, and the People hub shows contacts aggregated from multiple sources including Windows Live, Facebook, and Gmail. From the Hub, users can directly comment and 'like' on social network updates. The other built-in hubs are Music and Video (which integrates with Zune), Games (which integrates with Xbox Live), Windows Phone Marketplace, and Microsoft Office.

Extract from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone 13/12/2011

Things I love...the ideas behind the interface. And some of the features; like the voice control and the way if you're running late for a meeting you can email the organiser straight from the diary reminder, very cute.

My big criticisms of the Android was the ability to get photos off the phone and music/videos onto the phone via my MacBook Pro - not an issue at all on Windows Phone. Using the Windows Phone 7 Connector App (free through the Apple App Store) this is simple, natively syncing with the iTunes music and iPhoto albums. Spot on.

Things I love less...well the number of applications available is hugely limited compared to the iPhone App Store. I don't think you can make screengrabs. If that's it, then that's not bad.

So. What next? I don't want to test a Blackberry for a month. Does anyone think it's worth my while? I want a Nokia Lumia Windows 7 Phone. Everything I like about the HTC but slimmer and sleeker.

Cards on the table. I really like Windows Phone. Better than iPhone? I don't know - they're different. But I'm sticking with Windows. For now, at least.

The Future of Flash - a talk by Seb Lee-Delise

2011-12-12T20:16:00.000Z

Today I attended a talk organised by the Digital Media students at the University of Brighton, presented by Seb Lee-Delise, a Flash/Javascript/Interactivity guru.

Seb Lee-Delise inspiring his audience to keep on learning

For a considered opinion on the demise of Flash and the rise of HTML5 read this post by Adam Yeats (who co-organised the talk today).

Seb was a highly engaging speaker, taking us through the highs and lows of Flash over the last 10 years. He demonstrated the demand for Flash and actionscript coders (15 times LESS than HTML and javascript programmers at the moment) with stats from real job listings. I particularly liked the way Seb used his tweet stream to engage with his audience, responding to the tweets and identifying the tweet authors in the room.

So, what is the future of Flash? Is it dead? No, according to Seb, it's not dead. Tomorrow somebody could write the next in-browser multiplayer game to replace World of Warcraft using Flash and suddenly demand could change completely. On the other hand, maybe they won't, and Flash will fade away, left only for specialist applications where video is involved and it really is the best solution. We're in flux. We just don't know what's around the corner. And that links to Seb's leaving remarks - as illustrated in the photo above. We can't stand still, Flash one day, HTML5 the next, who knows what tomorrow! Love learning and experiment and it will be an exciting ride.

What's in a kiss? Seminar - considering language online

2011-12-10T15:13:00.002Z

This Wednesday I attended a lunchtime seminar: What's in a kiss? Emoticons, initialisms and kisses in instant messaging language presented by Dr Lynn Cahill.

Lynn was presenting the work of a student comparing features of language use in Instant Messaging chat between teenagers and undergraduates. Their findings are shown in the slide below, which gives you a flavour of their research:

A new concept arising from their work is that of 'medial kisses'. Many people sign off messages and emails with an 'x' but medial kisses are those used to end sentences throughout a conversation, almost in place of a full stop.

I was intrigued by the idea that most teenagers don't capitalise the word 'i' unless it's at the beginning of a sentence. This is an irregularity in the English language anyway, so if any changes result to written English over time due to this behaviour it will be to standardise, which may not be a bad thing. In fact the typical view seen in the press, that teenagers are ruining the English language and don't know how to use it properly, was completely overturned in the qualitative analysis of this research. The participants showed that by knowing how to use English properly they were better able to subvert it for efficiency and impact (following the current trends) when typing with their friends.

I've discussed this with a few colleagues since and decided there is definitely something generational happening here. I tend not to type an 'x' on anything unless it is family, a close friend or possibly somebodies birthday. I do however use emoticons (eg smilies like ;-} ) on emails and facebook posts very regularly in order to help clearly express emotion or lighten the tone.

I'm off to check my Twitter stream...how often do I use x and ;-} and LOL in my tweets? I'm pretty sure I always capitalise my 'I's though!

Running a Conference Murder Mystery Game #ecelmurder

2011-11-13T18:43:00.000Z

As an advocate of the games-based learning approach, I was delighted when asked by my colleague Steve Kilgallon to help plan and run a game at the European Conference on eLearning this year. The conference was at our institution, the University of Brighton from 9-11 Nov 2011, and now the murder has been solved I can share the experience.

We decided to make the game not only an entertaining activity running alongside the conference, but also use examples of games-based learning within the game. We chose a Cludeo/Whodunnit scenario, as something an international audience could all identify with. With 6 clues: 3 activities that could be completed online through existing websites, released on the Monday of the conference week (Weds, Thurs, Fri) and 3 that required looking for or speaking to somebody at the conference itself.

Here is an example of an online clue:
What's the name of the swab used to collect DNA samples from cheek cells?
link: http://forensics.rice.edu/ (Rookie Training, Forensic Biology)

The answers to the clues were entered into the game website to release digits of the final code.

The website for the game: http://student.brighton.ac.uk/ecel2011/

What worked well...

Keeping it simple: The three clues at the conference were all pretty easy, which meant we didn't lose players through trying to be overly cryptic. eg The 'poster' clue required them to spot that one of the posters on display was by Professor #Brown, pretty easy as it was of four elephants, with 'elephant' being the answer they were looking for.
Which poster has the clue?
The final clue: The 6 clues gave the players 6 numbers. Once invited to the reveal they were given one final clue on a piece of paper and had to race each other to add 11, subtract 12 etc to reveal a number, then work out it was a phone number ('Ring my Bell' was being played loudly while they worked this out) add a leading zero to their number and then dial it. We spent £6.99 on a cheap mobile phone with minimal credit and gave it to one of the conference organisers (Asher Rospigliosi) who was happy to play along and act it up when his phone rang revealing him as the murderer!
The reveal location: Because we were unclear on how much take-up there would be, we left our options open regarding when to reveal the murderer; either on the Thursday night at the conference dinner, or at the lunch break the next day. In the end we decided on the Friday lunchtime to allow extra time for players to complete the clues and to allow the finale a more intimate space (where you could hear a phone ring) than in the large dinner venue (the Brighton Dome).
Data Logging: The website was a basic html form to check the responses, but everything entered was logged to a text file. This was a simple technical solution to set up, but gave us a very clear idea of how players were progressing and assess take-up throughout the day.

What worked less well...

Technology choices: Some of the online activities required Flash, which meant delegates on iPads or iPhones couldn't complete the clues without finding a computer.
Optimistic social media: I tried creating an #ecelmurder hashtag for the game, but it didn't really take off, and all the conference activity was on #ECEL2011 which I used in all tweets anyway. It's own hashtag wasn't necessary.
Take-up: With a captive audience of nearly 200 conference goers, interested in eLearning presumably(!) we were hopeful that of the order of 50 might complete the game. In fact the figures were 41 for the first online clue, then descending down to 11 who eventually completed all 6 tasks and logged their email address. About 6 of these came to the final reveal as some had already left by lunchtime on the last day.

What would we do differently....

As is often the way with these kind of pseudo-Alternate Reality Games, the clue solving/puzzle activity ends up quite remote from the story-line. Although we had created a back story for our victim, it was not important in order to solve the clues. I'd like to find a way of making it integral, perhaps with clues on a (fictitious) blog etc.

The winner, Andrea, collecting her prize (chocolates)

Computing Ethics and Modern Parenting Dilemmas

2011-11-06T22:04:00.001Z

As part of the first year New Media module I am teaching on this semester, I attended a guest lecture by Dr David Horner on Issues and Ethics in Emerging Media. This isn't an area I've looked into before and I found it fascinating - the idea that technology isn't a neutral thing; changes in technology lead to new forms of behaviour which imply new ethical issues. We find ourselves in situations that our norms and rules just don't cover.

David talked about Moor's (2008) model where because of these new 'rule-free' situations we find ourselves in, we create a conceptual muddle. This covers things like sexting...what is it, is it illegal? And software piracy...what is software, is it like physical property or is it like intellectual property?

Helping my 6 year old son learn right and wrong when the world keeps changing

To try and relate this to my life, this got me thinking about the conceptual muddles I find myself in at home with my children, which they didn't teach you about at childbirth classes...

1. Supervising YouTube
The kids know which tv channels they like and which DVDs on the shelf are 'theirs'. They know they can't watch Harry Potter 4 yet, because it's a 12. They also find endless hours of entertainment on YouTube, but things online aren't quite so clearly labelled. What looks like innocent cartoon sometimes turns out not to be. I tend to go down the line of educating rather than blocking, so they get full access to look up whatever they want - but I can't get on with something else in the same way I could if they were watching CBBC.

2. My iTunes Store Password
My 8 year old knows my iTunes store password. Because he knows he's not allowed to spend money without asking, but he is allowed to download free games that are labelled as suitable for his age, and he can update things on the iPad without needing me. But, technically he could spend an awful lot of money on Smurfberries (for example) if he wanted to.

3. Smurfberries
Since I mentioned it. I don't spend money on virtual goods in games. I think it's a complete waste of money. But to an 8 year old, spending 69p on a basket of virtual smurfberries is as good a way to spend his pocket money as a bag of sweets for himself. And it's his money, so yes, he is allowed to spend it - he pays me the cash and types in the iTunes password to buy.

These are just a few - feel free to add to the list.

iPhone 4 vs Galaxy S evaluation - a month without my iPhone

2011-11-01T21:59:00.001Z

Image from SmartPhone Envy YouTube video
The iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S

As some of you know I gave up my iPhone 4 for a month in order to give Android a real trial and see what I think of it. Well the month is now up, so time to commit to an opinion.

If you're interested, here's a great technical comparison of the two on YouTube from SmartPhone Envy:

Part 1 (above) covers the hardware and features, Part 2 covers the user interface in more detail.

I'm less concerned with the specification of the phones and more interested in evaluating how well the phones meet my needs. It's a personal thing - for me, email and photos are the killer apps. I haven't tested everything - no, I haven't even plugged in a pair of headphones to it this month. So here's what I think:

1. Old habits and prior investment
I've had an iPhone for about 3 years now. So of course I'm more familiar with it than an Android phone. About a week after I had the Galaxy S I was raving about it and in love, there were some features I really loved (notifications and Exchange integration in particular) - but that initial infatuation wore off, and by week 2 and onwards, I really wanted my iPhone back. It just seemed quicker and easier to do the tasks I wanted to do on an iPhone. I also have several years of investment (time to evaluate and money) in iPhone apps. Although I have downloaded a few on the Samsung, I couldn't face starting all over again.

2. Unpicking who to blame
iPhone and iOS go hand-in-hand, Samsung Galaxy and Android don't - the hardware and the software are not from the same companies. I hated the Samsung Kies software you use to backup and update the phone, particularly as a Mac user where most of it doesn't work. (It genuinely took me a whole morning to download it and update the firmware, it wouldn't connect, gave errors etc etc). But that isn't Android's fault, that's Samsung's fault. There are also various apps on the phone which Samsung put there and aren't Android. But as a user I don't really care who made what - I assume all Android devices will work pretty much like the Samsung phone, and Kies has tarred my experience of Android forever.

3. Doing stuff with photos
I take a lot of photos, and when I get home I download them, edit and do something with them. As I said above, Kies made connecting up to the phone simply hellish. I found saving all the photos from the phone into my Dropbox and then waiting for them to sync through to my laptop the easiest route. A bit late in the month I discovered you could override the Kies mode and get the phone to present as a USB storage device using the cable - that worked well. I found the camera frustrating - you don't seem to be able to just switch off the phone after taking a photo, you seem to need to have pressed the home button first or you get locked in a cycle where the power button doesn't work. Maybe I'm missing something? I do like the simplicity of the iPhone camera, the Samsung seemed to have an awful lot of choices and options on it. I'm sure some people like that, but wasn't for me.

4. Email (and Exchange)
Android wins here. The Exchange ActiveSync for my work email was spot on. Because it's a Google phone I can also sync up all my Google stuff natively. On my iPhone I can only have one Exchange account, so if I choose work I can't also sync my Google calendar, and I'd rather use my Google calendar so I can't use Exchange - not ideal.

Update 6th Nov: I stand corrected, you can have multiple Exchange accounts on the iPhone, and have been able to for some time - thanks @coordinated.

So what now? Well you can probably tell I haven't been converted. I have decided to try an HTC Windows phone for the next month, last time I tried a Windows phone it was a few years ago, Windows Mobile 6, and I hated it. It actually made my life a little bit worse. Can it do better now? Or will I be posting in great relief in a month's time that I'm going back to my iPhone...?

The Big Draw - running a staff drawing event

2011-10-24T21:03:00.000+01:00

Last week I was involved with planning and running a 'Big Draw' event for staff at the university one lunchtime. Along with some colleagues we planned a series of team games and activities to provide 'a new perspective on drawing'.

Games underway - everyone drawing

Inviting eight teams of 3 along to our creativity centre for an hour, they played a describing game, speed Pictionary and some doodle challenges. We also had some other non-competitive activities - the sign-in poster, drawastickman.com and a flipchart paper version of consequences.

The Creativity Centre - flexible learning space allows us to move the writeable walls
and projectors to design the playing areas as we wish

Although not convinced we actually lived up to the 'new perspectives' we promised the feedback was that people really enjoyed the session and definitely did some team bonding, as well as thinking about communication skills.

One of the big hits of the session - 'put yourself in the picture' sign-in poster

The winning doodle of 'Critical Thinking'

For those interested, there is a fuller set of photos and description of the games on Facebook.

Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Using the quiz resource

2011-10-16T20:59:00.000+01:00

See my post from last week: Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Developing a quiz resource for the background to this resource.

This week I used the ideas from the quiz in a lecture on 'Living a Digital Life'. The lecture included two cohorts of students, so I decided to select two questions from the quiz, and using PollEverywhere, present them projected side by side for each cohort. Here are the results:

Question 1: Do you have any online friends you have never met face to face? (Sort of means - Yes, but through a face to face friend, or similar)

This question is designed to get students thinking about how they value online relationships. Not a lot of difference between my cohorts here (note small sample sizes). Perhaps not surprising.

Follow up discussion: If you do not have any online friends, do you think that such friendships are possible? Are they 'real' friendships?

Question 2: Do you ever feel like you are missing out because you have been offline for a long time?

This question looks at how the students value the conversations online compared to the content they view. The 6 Digital Media students who answered 'Yes' for this one I would classify as the Digital Residents in the room.

Follow up discussion: Do you have to answer 'Yes' to be a Digital Resident? If being a resident with the option to choose when and where you connect a better model?

Finally here is a link to the original 4 question version of the 'Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor?' quiz. I've had 50 responses to this so far - although please note this has only been advertised via Twitter and Facebook so it is a highly biased and self-selecting sample, however it might give you a guide to the responses you might get among an adult room full of technology users!

Based on feedback to this four question version I am working on a longer more in-depth version - coming soon I promise!

Are you a Digital Resident or a Digital Visitor? Developing a quiz resource

2011-10-11T19:41:00.001+01:00

When looking for resources to include in a session on living digitally this week, I wanted some kind of quiz to help students identify themselves on a spectrum. Not finding anything I decided to try and create a quiz around the Digital Visitor/Digital Identity model:

Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagementby David S. White and Alison Le Cornu.First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3171/3049

So here is my sample quiz - just four questions for now, taken from the ideas introduced in the paper, to start a discussion.

[if you are reading this anywhere other than my blog site then the embedded form might not work - here is a direct link to the quiz]

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Once you've taken the quiz, please leave me a comment below to tell me how accurate you feel the results are? Did the questions offer responses you thought appropriate? What better questions could we use as well or instead?

I hope we can develop this into a useful resource to not only help students position themselves but also to help us all question our practices and understand the wide range of attitudes amongst our colleagues.

Making the first move. Do you follow your students on Twitter?

2011-10-05T20:46:00.000+01:00

Having recently taken on some new undergraduate teaching, I've been thinking about my online behaviour with regard to students in comparison with my normal activity. I've decided, and feel free to argue with me, that I do not need to modify my behaviour - I aim to consistently act in a professional way. Whether networking with colleagues, students or complete strangers. I would always look up people I meet, and if they tweet, I follow them.

I'm going to talk about Twitter in this post - because the conversation about Facebook is more complex (it's a reciprocal relationship). Twitter is a public forum. If you tweet, anyone can read it. If I choose to follow you on twitter, that is my way of letting you know I am reading your tweets (but I could read them anyway by looking at your twitter page without you knowing if I wanted to). It's a one way thing.

The responses to my tweet were fairly consistent, here are a sample, they were also asked about responding to non-academic tweets from students:

Rachel on behalf of the British Library for Development Studies:

"We follow back if they follow us, but wouldn't follow them first generally. (And I don't follow any with my personal account.) Would always reply to genuine questions/comments I think, have never had any really irrelevant/personal ones! We do get to know some of our small student body quite well, but personal chats just don't happen through Twitter. So far."

Derek Moore, a teacher at Wits University, South Africa:

"IMO On Twitter it's fine to follow students as it's a networked public. FB is a walled garden & the request should come from them. I'd be cautious about non-uni/course type tweets, but would not exclude replies to specific questions."

Patrick Moore, teaching support at the University of Brighton, Hastings.

"I have a few that follow me, mostly used to ask tech questions. They found me, a couple of times it's been non uni stuff, but i try to keep it just for uni questions."

In all these examples, the student initiates the follow. Does that really matter? If you have a public profile online, student or staff, you should expect to be googled, and expect people to read it. Shouldn't you?

Any students reading this, what do you think? Would you think it odd if a lecturer started following your tweets/blog etc. Or would you be flattered?

All the fun of the Fresher's Fair

2011-09-28T21:16:00.001+01:00

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

2011-09-21T20:19:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-19T20:22:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-17T18:17:00.000+01:00

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!)

2011-09-16T20:08:00.000+01:00

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

2011-09-12T21:43:00.001+01:00

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

2011-09-06T19:00:00.000+01:00

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!)

My Online Life: Exploring the Amazon

2011-07-31T15:06:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd share with you some of my recent explorations around the internet. This week, it's Amazon. The four ways I use Amazon, the last two of which were attempts to make some money, which aren't exactly going so well, but no reason you can't save yourself the bother or do something slightly more successful with my efforts!

1. Buying

The obvious one, but a few ways of using it to save you some money. Firstly, if you are a student, work at a uni or are alumni, then you probably qualify for an NUS Extra card. £10 a year and gives you a 5% discount on most stuff at Amazon.

There are also clever ways of searching Amazon for bargains, a useful list of techniques on MoneySavingExpert.

2. WishListing

"What should I buy Archie for his birthday?" I always have the answer to that, as I maintain Amazon wishlists for everyone in the family, which makes it easy to keep track of the things they want and easy to email out a (perma-)link to the family.

Here's is Archie's (age nearly 8) list.

3. Making Money 1

Mechanical Turk. I love the idea of this, but in fact my time is too valuable to commit to this.

The idea is to give you an easy way to get a real-human workforce to do tedious work for you, and pay a few cents per piece of work. This is typical:

I've dipped in and out of this over the past year, and having given a few evenings of my life to slightly better paying tasks (like writing descriptions or articles) I've managed nearly $16. The frustrating thing you'll see from my account report, is that sometimes your work is rejected.

Then after all this you have gift credit on Amazon.com, which I haven't figured out how to use yet as they don't ship internationally. D'oh.

4. Making Money 2

The other way to make money is to become an associate, and basically drive sales traffic to Amazon for them. The most common way this is done, which you'll see if you are reading this post on my blog directly, is to included context relevant ads on your own websites. At the time of writing, Amazon has decided an ad for hoover bags is the most relevant context. Hmmm.

For each sale resulting from a click through I provided, I get paid 5%. The most success I've had with this so far (ok, the ONLY success) is when I tweeted about a book I was reading, and remembered to use an associate link for the book:

I had 51 direct clicks to Amazon from the link, which converted into one sale, for which I earned 20p. Have tried doing this with a few more books, and although the clicks are going up, still not exactly a millionaire...

I have also been exploring Amazon's 'aStore' (still part of the associate scheme). By curating your own list of items for sale you can quickly and easily create and maintain your own online store. Here's my store: http://www.hard-to-shop-for.co.uk My only expense here was an evening to put this together (90% of which was spent trying to find stuff to put in the categories) and a few pounds for a domain name.

I like the idea that by maintaining lists (which as you can see from number 2 on this list I like doing anyway!) I can have a website out there that might bring in a few pounds with little effort. Ok, maybe pounds is optimistic - I'll let you know if I ever do reach a whole pound in commission!

I hope there are some ideas there for you to try doing a bit more with Amazon. I enjoyed the exploration anyway!

University of Brighton Learning & Teaching Conference 2011

2011-07-18T19:58:00.000+01:00

Our annual learning and teaching conference is one of the anchors in my work diary, a nice rounding of the academic year. This year it took place on Friday 15th July, and I've had a few days now to gather my thoughts (and my photos) for this post!

The first keynote was Sally Brown (Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Professor of Higher Education Diversity in Teaching and Learning at Leeds Metropolitan).

Visual recording of Sally's keynote

Sally gave a very topical overview of the myriad issues preventing students progressing through their course. Some powerful home truths.

One of the highlights for me was Sally's praising of the supportive approach our colleagues at Northbrook college offer - a theme of the day for me, meeting in the flesh some of my online network from Northbrook.

Next up I co-presented a session:
Becoming an Independent Learner – The Academic Study Kit for Students
Pauline Ridley: Centre for Learning and Teaching, Lucy Chilvers: Centre for Learning and Teaching, Katie Piatt: Information Services, Katie Stripe: Brighton Language Institute

Abstract: The "Academic Study Kit" website has been launched to provide tutors and students with essential resources to support the transition to becoming an independent learner. The session will provide an opportunity to demonstrate these resources and how and why they can be used within the curriculum. Student case studies will demonstrate the use of the website for developing time management skills, academic writing style, research methodology, essay writing and note taking in lectures. Other services, such as streamed television programmes (BOB), will be featured to increase awareness of the range of resources available to support successful study. Delegates are invited to visit the website in advance of the session and think about the issues they have supporting their students' independent study.

You can view the site at: http://student.brighton.ac.uk/ask

The next session I attended was a highly interactive live blog discussion:
How many bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb? (1 to do it and 100 to comment!)
Vanessa Cornford: Northbrook College

Abstract: My aim will be to introduce my experience with eBooks and blogging as the hub for cross disciplinary project communication. My session will offer opportunities to watch or contribute as I live blog the conference. My session will report on a funded project which I have undertaken at Northbrook College this year. Working with a level 4 Foundation degree year group on a realized collaborative cross disciplinary performance, my aim was to build an eBook which could act like a project book, a blog and a place where links relevant to the devising of performance material across the disciplines could be placed. It was initially intended as a portal through which the general public might be involved in our creative process; following, contributing, collaborating and ultimately, coming to see the work. Part of this idea was to create a communication tool between different disciplines by which would appeal to multiple learning styles and intelligences. I hoped an eBook could be a visual project brief, a shared project book and indeed a method of assessment. I aim to share how these ideas engaged my students. I shall offer delegates the opportunity to participate in or watch the process as I blog the conference – one of the methods which contributed to the creation of the project e book.

Participants were invited to join in live on the Transitions conference blog: http://transitionsconference.blogspot.com/
I volunteered the iPads I'd brought along for my mobile tech session later in the day which gave lots of people a chance to try out the blog and provoked very interesting discussions about the pedagogy of using blogging with students - what are we trying to achieve, does assessment work, do institutional barriers matter and how do you get your students off Facebook.

At lunch we continued a lot of this debate, moving on to a discussion about the changing nature of what it means to behave professionally in the world of social media. The observed behaviour of many young people online is to be either sexy, agressive or funny - as it being yourself isn't quite enough. More on this topic another time...

After lunch I was presenting again - a logistically difficult session. Trying to give the 70+ delegates in the room a chance to try out an iPad with limited kit and a lot of enthusiasm!
Using Mobile Devices to support Research and Teaching, or 50 reasons why you need an iPad
Katie Piatt: Information Services

Abstract: Mobile devices are becoming increasingly common and sharing and raising awareness of their strengths and limitations allows us to make the most effective use of them. There is a lot of interest and activity looking into how these devices, such as tablet computers and Smartphones can be effectively used in Higher Education to support learning, teaching and research. For this presentation I am focussing on identifying ways in which lecturers and researchers can personally benefit from using these devices, gathering my examples from social networks, journals and personal experience. Attendees will be given the chance to try some devices for themselves and discuss their own experiences, good and bad. Emerging in the field are tangible examples of where these devices have been particular effective. My own research in this area tries to cut through the hype of Apple and my self-admitted passion for shiny gadgets into identifying the advantages (and disadvantages) of these technologies for the University of Brighton. Reading and annotating papers, visual recording and providing student feedback are three of the examples I will demonstrate and invite discussion on.

My slides, which hopefully still have some meaning without a commentary - I suggest you try out the apps in question as you look through it. Especially Brushes (well worth the money).

A full and enthusiastic audience getting excited about mobile tech

Following this I went to another Northbrook session:
What's it got to do with me!
Adrienne Rosen: Northbrook College

Abstract: This will be an interactive workshop exploring aspects of adaptability in a changing environment by opening people's eyes to incorporating new ideas that transcend across subject specialist boundaries. Students on our new FdA Art and Media Programmes at Northbrook College have been shifted out of their comfort zone and into an interdisciplinary rotation. The project funded by the Learning and Teaching Fellowship award set out to discover if Journalism students' creativity was enhanced by attending lectures and workshops in other subjects. The results have been surprising. The rotation may have begun with the familiar cry of 'what's it got to do with me,' but in my subject group, it's ended in an expansion of everyone's knowledge. The aim of the session is to challenge notions of what it is to be interdisciplinary and come up with ideas of how participants might make transitions in their own practice. The project's findings will be presented using journalistic codes and conventions. There will be an interactive element to this workshop using participants' own specialist knowledge. You too may leave knowing what it has to do with you!

In the exercises I worked with an Interior Designer, and we talked about how Interior Design as a subject is already, by it's nature, incredibly cross-disciplinary.

The final keynote was given by Phil Race (Emeritus Professor Leeds Metropolitan University)

Visual recording of Phil's keynote

I enjoyed the way Phil used his slideset as a resource to make his points - jumping about in the slides and making sure we were all along for the ride as he convinced us to agree with him that traditional assessment in HE is broken, and we know what to do to fix it, so we should make the change. Utterly compelling.

Phil seems to blog all his presentations so we can get the slides (and homework!) immediately after the event. Impressive!

Following all this was Pimm's in the sunshine, a fantastic day - thank you.

Applying the Game Frame - Email Story Games for Literacy

2011-06-21T22:16:00.000+01:00

As part of the Games and Learning group I belong to, we have been reading Game Frame by Aaron Dignan.

The book provides a model to help the reader design games to solve problems - whatever they are. The rationale is that we can everyday, boring jobs more engaging and fun by adding a game layer to them. And ok, this doesn't work for everything, boring things often are, indeed, boring, but where it does work we might as well have some fun!

Having had a practice at designing a game with the group (we planned a Ninja library resource finding activity), I wanted to have a go at applying the framework to an idea I had for a game for my son.

Scenario: My 7 year old son needs lots of encouragement to read and write at home

The game I'm designing to help in this scenario, is a personalised email story game. He will get a 'chapter' a day which he needs to read and respond to in order to get the next installment the following morning.

Activity: regular reading and typing
Player Profile: my son, or other 6-8 year olds who can read, but who would rather play games than read and write
Objectives: Find out what happens next in the story
Skills: Accessing email, Reading, Understanding, Using imagination, Typing
Resistance: Only one email a day (scarcity)
Resources: access to email, My imagination
Actions: Send email to son every day building on his response to the previous days question
Feedback: next chapter builds on his response to previous days question
Black Box: My imagination to interpret his response and develop the story
Outcomes: regular, enthusiastic reading

So, assuming you won't judge my story telling ability too harshly, here is a flavour:

Chapter 1

Archie and the Plasma Planet - Chapter 1

There was once a boy called Archie who lived in Shoreham-by-Sea.

One day Archie saw a strange light in the school playground and went over to see what it was. It was a spaceship, and as he got closer a strange figure came out and spoke to him:

"Hello, I am from Plasma Planet. Would you like to come on my spaceship and visit Plasma Planet with me?"

Would you like to go? Reply to answer the question and find out what happens next!

Chapter 1 response

yes

Chapter 2

Archie and the Plasma Planet - Chapter 2

Archie said "Yes, I would love to visit Plasma Planet" and then climbed aboard the space ship.

The strange alien said, "my name is Pluto, and I am very happy to meet you."

The space ship was very comfortable, and soon they had taken off and Archie could look down on the school as it got smaller and smaller.

Pluto said "it will take a long time to reach the planet, so would you like something to eat on the trip? Our food is not like human food, can you guess what sort of food we eat?"

What do you think? Reply to answer Pluto's question about food on Plasma Planet to find out what happens next!

Chapter 2 response

rocks and moon dust

Chapter 3

Archie and the Plasma Planet - Chapter 3

Pluto said "On Plasma Planet we eat rocks and moon dust!"

Archie looked sad, he didn't want to eat rocks. "Don't worry" said Pluto, "we have human food on Plasma Planet too for visitors!"

Archie looked out of the window and could see an amazing planet. "Is that Plasma Planet?" said Archie.

"Yes" said Pluto, "I will land the ship and then we can explore. Where do you want to go first?"

What do you think? Reply to answer Pluto's question about where to go on Plasma Planet to find out what happens next!

Chapter 3 response

The purple spot

etc.

This morning the first thing he did when he got up was check his email, excitedly read out the chapter to his brother and send the reply. He wanted to know what happened next straight away - the one email a day scarcity certainly increases the anticipation. Tonight I sent Chapter 4 (where we actually start exploring the planet and I have to figure out what the purple spot is!).

I think this has mileage. It's a great exercise for me coming up with the next installment and something he is really enjoying. I imagine it will last about a fortnight before we both get a bit bored with it. I'm not sure the Game Frame helped here or if I understood it correctly, in fact it's probably clear I had the idea and then filled in the framework - but I think it does meet the requirements so maybe it was just a good design to start with.

Social Networks for Seven year olds

2011-06-19T21:38:00.000+01:00

How does my own knowledge and experience of social networking affect my attitude towards my children's online activities?

I got a mixed set of replies to this tweet - some agreed, however some thought what they knew, of Facebook in particular, would make them less likely to allow their children access to social media. 12 seems to be the average age parents allow their children on Facebook, so I've some way to go with my 6 and 7 year olds - I don't have to make that decision yet! (although they do go on my Facebook account - supervised - as Farmville is too much of a temptation).

I believe I'd rather teach the children good habits than restrict access so am particularly interested in exploring appropriate social networks with my children to help them learn their way around and judge when they are socially ready to hit the big time of Facebook.

Their favourite (semi-social) sites at the moment are Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin.

There are lots of activities and puzzles (maths, spelling etc) on Moshi Monsters (above), and the social features are the note-board where you can leave messages and the friends tree where you can add friends. The usernames are so obscure usually it's hard to tell which friends are actually people you know - very little social interaction.

Kid's social circles are a lot smaller than adults. This week, at his request, I helped Archie set up a club website for the club he plays with his friends at school (Plasma Planet). I chose Ning for this, as it is easy to set up and for him and his friends to join and use. We went for the mini option (£20/year), so basically all they can do is edit their profile, add friends and post words, pictures and videos. He is delighted. He can quite happily draw, scan and post his Plasma People and share them with his friends.

Because the site is small I hope moderating it should not be too much work for me. All memberships are approved, and I will only approve people we know. By practising networking in this small, safe way, I hope they can learn the etiquette and potential, ready to hit whatever the social network of choice is for them in a few years time.

I do think there is a gap in the market for a Ning-like product designed for kids to have their own online clubs. It doesn't need to be a dumbed-down Ning, but simpler options, built-in parental moderation settings etc would provide something ideal for purpose.

Make a Searchable Online Database -or- I Love Google Spreadsheets

2011-05-30T17:40:00.002+01:00

So you've got a spreadsheet of useful stuff that you want to be able to easily update and turn into an online searchable resource, but you don't want to have to set up a database. Well, Google have the tools for that. Google provide a lot of info, but I found this overwhelming when I got started so am hoping this offers a simple way to get you going.

You'll need a Google account and a place you can edit php webpages (or something like a blog/Blackboard you can enter code).

We're going to create a Google Spreadsheet and then set up a webpage with some special 'visualisation' html to make it searchable, sortable and openly available online! Here's how...

First, set up a new Google Spreadsheet from your Google Docs account.

Fill the spreadsheet with your resources, list or whatever. You'll note I've left the top row blank - I've had problems getting Google to recognise my column headers so tend to leave it blank and we'll label it up later.

Once you've got some data we need to 'publish' the sheet so we can talk to it from our web page.

On the publish screen, click the 'start publishing' button which will make a long web address appear, you need to copy this into notepad or somewhere handy as we'll need the 'key' from this shortly (the bit from after "key=" up until "&output-html").

You also need to change the 'Sharing Settings' to Public, otherwise users need to be logged into Google to make this work - you could use sharing settings to only allow individuals, but in this case, just make it public.

Here is the magic, you need to copy this code into your favourite webpage editor. The code is here. To complete this demo and build a page that searches columns A and B and displays all three then the only edit you need to do is to swap the key from my version to the one you made a note of in the step above. Paste it in, save it and upload it to your web server.

If you're feeling imaginative, this is the line that does the magic you might want to explore:

'SELECT A, B, C where upper(A) like upper("%%") or upper(B) like upper("%%") order by A asc label A "Type", B "Title", C "Date added"'

What this does is says:

Show me columns A, B and C...

...where the thing you searched for matches (in upper case to make sure case doesn't matter) anything in column A or column B...

...order the results by column A is ascending alphabetical order...

...and label the columns like this.

You can find out many more options of what you can do with this query on the Google pages.

The one I made now looks like this (see it for real here).

A couple of real-life examples of this.

1. Searching a spreadsheet of music details pulled out of an iTunes library (NowLookHear)

2. Virtual Research Unit Funding Opportunities (University of Brighton). This uses some extra category fields on the spreadsheet and then a new query is built depending on what the user clicked on allowing filtering as well as searching.

For those of you without 'proper' access to webpages, you'll be please to hear you can embed this in something like Blackboard. The search box bit doesn't work but you can display the spreadsheet and let the user view it and sort it.

In Blackboard you'll need to enter a simple version of the code (simple version available here - like above but without the search box stuff) into an item when the visual editor is turned off.

This is what it looks like in Blackboard.

Good luck - and if this works for you, please let me know in the comments, would love to see what you do with it!

Never Collate Emails Again -or- I Love Google Forms

2011-05-25T21:44:00.000+01:00

My presentation at the Brighton Library Teach Meet (#btnlibtm) was on how to quickly gather feedback using Google Forms. As I kind of rushed through it (there was only 5 minutes) I thought I'd blog it for anyone who'd like a reminder at a slower pace...

Log into your Google Docs account (it's free and if you've got GoogleMail then just click on the 'Documents' link at the top) and click on 'Create new' -> Form

This is what a blank form looks like - ready for you to add a title, description and your first question.

Here we go, first question 'Your name' and you'll see I've ticked the box to make it 'required' ie they have to complete it to submit the form.

Now we're going to add a multiple choice question, but note there are seven different question types to choose from. After adding question you can drag them to re-order, edit them, delete them until you're happy

Here's our form ready to launch - note at the bottom there is the URL to the 'live form' - thats the link you want to email or tweet to your audience.

This is what the live form looks like (you can see a real one here).

Now the magic happens. By creating a form, Google Docs automatically created an accompanying spreadsheet. As your audience complete the form, their responses are automatically logged under the question headings.

Here are the results from the live demo I did tonight - very impressive watching the responses appear on screen.

And once the results are in you can click on 'show summary of responses' to get an at-a-glance overview of responses.

So, if you are ever thinking of sending an email and then collating the responses into a spreadsheet - then stop! The small effort involved in setting up the form is instantly rewarded by the fact you have nothing to collate - your spreadsheet os ready for you to sort, annotate and do with as you will.

This is just the basic stuff - you can create quite complex, branched surveys using this tool. All free, and unlimited responses allowed.

A word of warning, I wouldn't recommend using this for secure or personal data - Google doesn't comply with UK Data Protection regulations at this time.

A Game for Teaching Boolean Searching

2011-05-25T20:51:00.000+01:00

At tonight's Brighton Library Teach Meet (#btnlibtm) one of my favourite sessions was Siobhan Duvigneau from the Institute of Development Studies demonstrating the way she teaches boolean using an experiential learning technique...or I would say, using a game.

Siobhan noted that students don't find boolean searching a very interesting topic and making it engaging and relevant can be hard. So she tries to make her demonstration very visual for her students by making it physical - "stand up if..." and then stating the search criteria.

Here's the first round: Stand up if...you are Female and a Librarian:

Then we were encouraged to suggest some NOT criteria. I offered: "stand up if...you are male or female and NOT from the University of Brighton". Actually this confused people, but they worked out whether they should or shouldn't be standing!

I spoke to Siobhan after to see how she extends this when she's got more time than the 5 minutes we had tonight. She says she sets the students targets to achieve, like: "come up with a query that leaves only one student standing". This, for me, really adds the game elements, a competition to quickly find a way of achieving the target she has set using the rules of the game. You could have a lot of fun getting the students to come up with their own increasingly complex targets and enjoying the challenge of finding the search criteria to give those results.

The beauty is the visual nature of the results. I don't believe you could model this online in anywhere near the same way - having individuals figure out of they should or shouldn't be standing and seeing the results is a very powerful demonstration.

Augmented Reality - having a play with Aurasma

2011-05-17T17:43:00.000+01:00

Augmented Reality: the technology of combining real word images, video, etc. with computer-generated information and/or imagerydefinition from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

I read a good post this week on Steve Boneham's blog called "Simple Augmented Reality with Aurasma". He was writing about a new (free) iPhone app called Aurasma which allows you to create your own personal image-based Augmented Reality "anywheres" - basically linking images in the world to images on your phone. I'll explain...

So, I set up Aurasma on my iPhone and showed it the University of Brighton logo:

Then I chose an image (could have been a video) on my phone which I wanted it to display any time the app saw the logo out in the world. This is known as an "Anywhere". For step by step instructions, I refer you back to Steve's post rather than repeating! This was the image I chose (a google maps screengrab with the Uni contact details, web address etc):

So now, when I use the app to look at things which happen to contain the logo, say the sponsors page of the Brighton Fringe programme for example:

Then this is what happens - it sees the logo and overlays the media I have chosen:

Now the cool bit, is that you can try this out yourself - if you have an iPhone! Get yourself back to this blog post on your iDevice and click on this link which shares my uni "Anywhere":

http://share.aurasma.com/YXVyYXNtYTovLz9jaGFubmVsaWQ9MDQ1ZGQ3ZjBjYjE3ZDkzOTk2YTU3ZmZiYzhiZDQ3N2QmYWN0aW9uPXN1YnNjcmliZQ==

It should take you to download the app if you don't have it, and if you do it automatically loads my Uni "Anywhere" onto your app. You can test it by using your phone to look at this post on another device as I handily put the logo in near the top...

So this is a "taster" app, but certainly one I'd like to see developed into a more fully featured app where there are global "Anywheres".

Note: some of you are probably thinking QR codes, which is a similar technology, but this allows you to use any image, not just a code and it overlays rather than links.

Twitter Credibility Part 2: making a research plan

2011-04-18T20:23:00.000+01:00

Credibility: qualities that someone has that make people believe or trust them
definition from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

A week or so ago I proposed repeating a recent American research experiment looking at perceived credibility based on twitter streams. I had a lot of encouragement - including 8 twitter contacts who kindly volunteered to let me use their twitter streams as part of my experiment.

Having allowed enough time to pass that these 8 have probably forgotten they offered, and hence have no mention of the project in their stream I have taken snapshots and begun to think about the next stages, and would welcome any feedback on how I take things from here.

In the original American research, participants were asked 3 questions about the (fictitious professors) twitter streams they were asked to view.

The questions were:
This professor seems caring [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]
This professor seems competent [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]
This professor seems trustworthy [strongly disagree - 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 - strongly agree]

My first research question is purely to test if I can replicate the same results - namely, that when asking the 'caring' question about tweets of a personal nature, there will be a significantly higher response that viewing tweets of a more academic nature.

The tweet streams I want to use are genuine users, but anonymised, as although I suspect discerning twitter users make assumptions based on avatars, account names, number of followers etc, that is not part of the first question. Real streams contain replies and retweets which is such a fundamental part of twitter I don't think faking it is easily achievable. Here are a five of my anonymised streams:

So having a quick look through those 5, how would you respond for each to the questions: "this person seems caring?" "this person seems competent?" "this person seems trustworthy?"

I think all five display some degree of personal and professional tweets with numbers 1 and 4 primarily social, 2 and 5 primarily professional and 3 a mix. That's getting subjective, so do you think I really ought to edit the streams more tightly to make sure I can compare personal with professional on a less murky basis? Or more interestingly; What is it about the tweets above that lead you to make judgements about the person who posted them?

[etiquette note: please be kind, these are real people who volunteered, I'm interested in the process of making judgements not in judging these individuals!]

Weekends, Holidays and Google Analytics

2011-04-12T21:47:00.000+01:00

I installed Google Analytics tracking code on our staff and student intranets (home/login pages) late last year, so here is an overview on the data I am now gathering.

studentcentral (Blackboard - our student intranet)

staffcentral (web pages plus CMS - our staff intranet and default staff homepage)

My observations:

1. I'm interested in the weekends, although on studentcentral there is a clear weekend dip it's primarily Saturday that dips, Sunday stats are considerably higher. On staffcentral, both weekend days have very low rates. Who would have guessed the ideal downtime was Saturday not Sunday?

2. The Easter holidays, which we're now a week and a bit into for the students is very clear - their graph loses all normal shape, however for staff it seems to be pretty much business as usual.

3. And look at the typical shape of a week - students peak on Monday, tire on Tuesday and Wednesday, and reinvigorated on Thursdays and then tail off on Fridays. Staff on the other hand peak on Monday and then tend to go downhill all week...

50 reasons why you need an iPad (supporting your teaching and research with a tablet)

2011-04-12T21:23:00.001+01:00

I've offered a conference session with the above title later in the year, so am gathering resources and ideas here to get some feedback before I present a more coherent version! I intentionally put iPad in the title, as that is the tablet I have most personal experience with, and the current market leader.

I know that it's impractical for all the students in a class to have a tablet with them, but that doesn't negate the value of the teacher having one - whether in class or for preparation/research outside the classroom. Here are my initial 5 categories of table computing use, and I welcome your thoughts and extra resources to help complete these!

1. Using an iPad in the classroom

47 Interesting Ways to use an iPad in the Classroom

From the excellent 'interesting ways' series from Tom Barrett.

iPad for eLearning from the eFront Learning Blog.
Comments that the iPad supports synchronous (e.g. Facetime) and asynchronous (e.g. presentation of non-flash eLearning materials) learning and provides a list of relevant links.

2. Supporting your Research

I've also got the notes from a recent similar presentation ("iPad Apps for Education") by a Portsmouth colleague, Timothy Collinson. Timothy talks about a range of uses of the iPad in HE, and his app recommendations in this category include:

GoodReader (Timothy says "best 59p ever spent!"). This also gets a top recommendation from joeyanne on twitter who says: "GoodReader - great for storing and reading documents, annotating PDFs, and syncing Dropbox"
iBooks for um, eBooks...
Blackboard Mobile (if you have it at your Institution)
Safari, for easy web browsing/searching
Referencing with Mendeley

Personally, I love reading using iBooks on my iPad, annotating, searching, highlighting, dictionary - it makes you a much more effective reader.

3. Productivity

An excellent marking example from Becka Colley: iAnnotate PDF, which Becka suggests "to show how they can mark student work with verbatim comments"

A few more ideas from Timothy's presentation:

Dragon Dictate - impressive speech to text conversion
Flipboard - a customisable news/social media feed app
and a myriad of dictionaries, thesauruses and atlases.

And of course there is always email - so much easier than typing on your phone but still mobile enough to churn through your inbox during a quiet spell on the train or in a meeting.

4. Supporting your own learning

Timothy suggests a Flashcard app for creating your own language learning sets.

"Thousands of Apps. Endless Potential" says the Apple in Education. Here is their top pics for Maths and Science apps:

5. A little Rest & Relaxation

The iPad is excellent for social networking and news. Keeping in touch has never been easier.

And never forget the iPad is perfect for a little casual gaming if you like that sort of thing, and I guarantee there's a game out there for everyone. Here's what I was doing immediately prior (and probably post) writing this:

(Bejeweled Blitz if you don't recognise it)

Right, let's see if I'm still top of the leaderboard...

Social use of Social Networks - does it really change your credibility?

2011-04-05T20:49:00.000+01:00

There’s been a lot of buzz this week about some recent American research into improved lecturer credibility by using social media for personal as well as academic use:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a935339874~db=all

In the research, students were asked to rate the credibility of three imaginary lecturers based on their twitter posts - one posting entirely social tweets, one entirely academic and one a mixture. The results found that the purely social lecturer was perceived to have a higher credibility that the purely academic by the student sample. And there is already research showing that improved lecturer credibility leads to increased learning outcomes.

My colleague Peps considers this on his blog expanding the question to researcher credibility and thinking about issues of transparency as a lecturer. I have also seen an article today extending the ideas to business and corporate tweeting.

So I am interesting in validating some of these ideas and seeing if they hold true within a UK Higher Education environment. If we broaden the student/lecturer relationship to an audience/candidate one, then the sorts of questions I want to know the answers to are:

1. Does the perceived credibility depend on how familiar the audience are with the social platform?

2. If the audience and candidate are acquainted in real life does the social presence have less of an effect?

3. If the audience and candidate are acquainted, does the length of their relationship change the credibility?

4. If the candidate gets too social can we go past the peak of credibility?

5. Does the platform matter? Do Facebook audiences measure credibility in the same ways as Twitter audiences?

6. Is the lecturer/student relationship special in any way, or do employee/boss or colleague/colleague relationships follow the same model?

7. Does a company or institution tweeting in a social way increase their credibility or does the 'facelessness' get in the way?

8. Is having a lot of tweets/followers/following an influencing credibility factor?

etc.

What do you think? Is this worth researching? I would like to run a trial (using twitter as the platform) and see if initial data looks like this might be something worth pursuing - and this is where you (dear blog reader) come in.

I would like to construct a series of candidates with twitter streams for a questionnaire, and ask respondents to rate their perceptions of the candidates on a variety of criteria. The pic of my stream in this example is what I have in mind. Rather than doing this in a fake way, I was hoping some of you would volunteer to let me use you in my questionnaire as examples. I won't hide your identity (after all, your twitter streams are public) but I won't publicly publish results about you specifically (although you can have your own results). Is anyone happy for me to try?

Sharepoint, Internal Communications and Saying "No"

2011-03-21T20:53:00.000Z

I went to an excellent workshop session today on Sharepoint presented by Sam Marshall from ClearBox Consulting so would like to share some of the ideas Sam presented and reflect on what I gained from the day.

Analogies first - is your staff intranet a market, a plush shopping mall or a superstore? Do you want highly structured order, or a vibrant range of tools and options? Sam presented his work on The Digital Workplace Maturity Model and made us think through where we already are on the model and where we wanted to be. Of course we all think we want to excel on all four of his dimensions:

Communication and information
Community and collaboration
Services
Structure

...but we don't have the resource to do this, so by working through plotting all the features we want on an Ease-of-implementation vs Value-to-users matrix we can start to identify what is achievable quickly and easily and what requires significantly more investment. We are talking about replacing our aged, current staff intranet, staffcentral, with Sharepoint. So things like prioritising and presenting news are relatively easy, things like blogs from the senior management team are much harder to achieve because of culture change issues.

Sam also played us this short 'Sharepoint in Plain English' YouTube clip, commissioned by Microsoft. It's simplistic (and cringey!) but probably a good start for people who have no idea what you're on about and can't see what's wrong with your current website solution...

For me, as an IT development person, one of the hardest things I find is to say "no" to the staff and students we offer a service to. In technology, subject to resource, the answer is usually "yes - we can build it". But when planning an Intranet and thinking through communications, sometimes the answer has to be no, in order to have a consistent and efficient communication strategy:

Yes, I could build you a shiny site in the content management system of your choice with 57 different social networking options - but No, I'm not going to, because then your content will be on an island separate to everything else we do, nobody will find it and you won't be eligible for central support or have your news propagated to the rest of the University.

Working with our colleagues in Marketing and Communications we should be able to achieve the right balance of providing and supporting the right tools, distributing the right quantity and balance of news and events. Watch this space.

What your iPhone Home Screen says about you - not a lot!

2011-03-13T22:23:00.000Z

Today the family was around for lunch, which resulted in three iPhones in the house - mine, my husbands and my brother-in-laws. Which got me pondering if someone would be able to tell whose was who's by looking at the home screens:

What do you think? Which one is me? I'm the third one, but I'm not sure you could tell unless you knew I liked word games and travelled by train regularly. I wondered if at a basic level you could spot gender or connectedness just from home screen app selections.

I put out a call on Twitter and Facebook and gathered a dozen more examples (full set embedded in the slideshow below if you are interested). I'm not sure I can deduce anything about gender/interests etc from this small set, but here are some observations:

Most people have phone and email on the bottom (shared) row
Most people have the settings app on their home page
Several people wanted to share their second screen as they felt that was where their personality came through - the home screen is just the 'boring apps' they use most often
Nobody has 'messages' (SMS/MMS) on the bottom row unless it was in a folder along with phone, Email seems a much preferred messaging platform for my sample
Everybody has iPod (or Music for iPod users) on their home screen. Apart from me.
We all love our connected services - Twitter and/or Facebook highly prominent for everyone. Although given my method of capturing these images this is not at all surprising!

A special mention goes to this home screen as the most categorised of them all. One page, all folders apart from a camera app:

So, in summary, I'm not sure you can tell much about people from their iPhone home screens - or rather, we all use the same basic set of apps. Would love to see some screens from non-twitter/Facebook users - but suspect there wouldn't be much difference. If you find some out there in the wild, please send them in and I'll add them to the collection and see if there is any secret psychology out there!

Doing a Google on studentcentral

2011-03-01T19:54:00.000Z

One of the aspects of my job that makes me smile is by recognising special events by changing our student learning environment (studentcentral) login page graphics - 'doing a google'.

I've started collecting these customisations together as a slideshow, and here it is:

Next week is 'Green Week' and I have a suitable theme planned!

"This Game Sucks" - Article Review and thoughts on a Games-Based Learning Environment

2011-02-23T18:22:00.000Z

Educause Review Jan/Feb 2011

I was recently recommended to read an article in the Educause Review by Sarah 'Intellagirl' Smith-Robbins entitled "This Game Sucks": How to Improve the Gamification of Education. Here I present a summary of the article and my thoughts on it...

--- --- ---

Sarah opens by comparing the points and level aspects of 'gamification' to assessment grades and graduation in education. She shows how the common criticism in games that this is just 'pointsification' is the same mistake made in education:

"Perhaps education could be improved by ditching the points and adding the game; technology can help."

She goes on to talk about the three characteristics of games: A Goal, Obstacles and Collaboration (or Competition). These three characteristics in FourSquare become: Acquiring badges, the logistics of travel and collecting badges or stealing mayorships.

In higher education the goal should be completing a degree course, but students often think the goal is to do with a well-paid job post-graduation. If education is likened to a game, then a mismatch of the goal means students don't understand the way the game works - ie that it's about learning not just passing. This reflects onto perceived obstacles - staff think it is about mastering content, but students without the learning goal in mind would rather cheat, "grade grub" or complain about harsh marking. The final characteristic of competition becomes animosity and demands on the institution rather than classmates working as a team towards intellectual growth.

Given we do need grades and degrees in HE, the solution to this problem is proposed as improving the game and making learning fun: "To me, a quality education and an entertaining experience are one and the same."

Sarah offers three ideas for small steps we can make to achieve this:
1. Ensuring students align on clear goals e.g. including a 'How can you use this in the future' section on assessment descriptions.
2. Making progress transparent and that grades are not the only measure of progress e.g. online checklists, contributor credits or peer voting.
3. Reflection on your own and your students game play e.g. ask students how they learned to play games and which games they like.

Sarah concludes with a reminder about motivation and engagement: "Focusing on the ways that entertainment technology engages us can result in methods that we can transfer to any learning situation"
all above quotes by Sarah Smith-Robbins - Educause Review Jan/Feb 2011 - I've summarised hugely so please read the article for her fully expanded ideas.

--- --- ---

Well I agree that we can learn from games, but I think we might be able to help lecturing staff along a bit by building some game based approaches into the everyday tools we use to support teaching. I'm not going as far as proposing a Games-Based Learning Environment - but after reading this article I started thinking about what games-based features you could add to something like the Blackboard Learning Environment giving Instructors more choice about the approaches they take.

Blackboard has a feature called 'adaptive release' allowing content to be hidden until some rule (e.g. 75% on a test) is reached. This could be extended and linked to a series of appropriately named levels to visibly show progress and reward each level with new challenges*. Depending on the discipline you could have fun letting the students construct the names of the levels, what roles do you take on your way to being a mathematician for example?

* note to self: never use this as a way of making core content harder to access than it needs to be. Obscuring for no reason is not my aim, unlocking progressively more challenging self-tests however could be highly motivational.

Blackboard offers a 'my grades' tool, which I would extend to provide a customisable leaderboard, yes, I mean seeing some of each other's grades to provide competitive motovation. The Instructor can control which grades are displayed, and if only the top 5 scores are shown.

I like Sarah's idea of peer-voting and contribution credits. These could be built into discussion boards or blogs and presented via a module on the course homepage and reinforced by a tutor mentioning top contributors in class sessions.

That's what I've got so far - do you think there's mileage in any of that? As a teacher would you welcome the ability to easily integrate these kind of features, or are you a lecturer and NOT a games designer and would you rather we stopped trying to distract the students from getting on with studying?

The Power of the Community and Critical Mass

2011-02-15T21:15:00.000Z

I'm not a business person, but I'm fascinated by watching the appearance of new, commercial community-engagement models. Firstly, a couple of examples of recent sightings of community power in action commercially to illustrate what I mean by the title of this post:

1. Giff-Gaff (http://giffgaff.com)

Giff-Gaff is a mobile phone network where members support each other, and are rewarded in credit for doing so. They have strong ethics and develop their service based on member feedback. On their website they state:

We believe in the power of the community. When the community succeeds, we succeed - and vice versa.

Community aspects:

member to member support forums
reward for contributions (forums feature unanswered questions and voting)
reliance on members to resolve your issue
evidence of change due to member input

2. Whipcar (http://www.whipcar.com)

Whipcar is a car rental company where you can offer your own car up for rental or rent other cars from neighbours in your area.

Community aspects:

allows you to rent your own car to local people
allows you to rent cars from your neighbours (and you are rewarded for encouraging them to sign up)
relies on a critical mass of people in your neighbourhood using it in order to work - there are two cars in my town, neither very close to my house...

[if you are interested in WhipCar then please sign up using this affiliate link - we both get £5 credit, the non-affiliate link is at the top of this paragraph]

So what?

If you take it as truth that by working together we can achieve things more quickly and more cheaply, then how does this apply to life at a university? I'm not talking about shared knowledge and social learning - which I wholeheartedly endorse, but ways we can improve the non-academic part of university life by borrowing from these commercial models. [oh yes, and putting to one side the desire of these companies to get my money from me!]

Here are some starter ideas of how I think we can take the community aspects above and re-use them at an institution like a university:

1. Encourage students and staff to support each other through online forums.

We are already exploring this for technical support to set up the multitude of mobile devices that exist on the university network as there are too many to provide individual documentation for centrally - however why not extend this to other areas of university life? I've used this model successfully in the past for students to self-support each other through an induction game.

Our in-house social network Community@Brighton can support this kind of open forum, but perhaps should be encouarged much more obviously and although a financial reward system is probably not viable, perhaps a voting recognition reward system might be enough. Something to explore when we build out new staff intranet platform perhaps?

2. Rent stuff from people within your Community

Ok, not cars. But how about electrical kit - scanners, digital cameras etc. The university offer a loan service, but can't always meet demand and sometimes it would be good to just borrow a scanner for the weekend to complete your project - if you can't afford to buy one, then a low price (or better still credit system) to borrow one from someone who lives in the same halls of residence as you would be ideal.

Likewise there are long periods in the summer where students are at home and probably have lots of spare stuff that could be made use of by someone else. Facilitating this requires some kind of brokering service to be set up - which again could be community run.

Critical Mass

All of the above - the commercial stuff and my extrapolations - rely on sufficient take up by the community to be successful. I'll be interested to watch WhipCar and see if they can achieve that. Both of my examples reward existing members (financially) in order to encourage new members to join. I hope to come up with a credit/reward model that doesn't involve money but yet is engaging enough to work within an institution, I'm not convinced recognition will be enough on it's own.

I welcome your thoughts and other examples - we are part of a captive membership at a university, how can we effectively use that huge community to benefit each other more effectively?

University of Brighton Pedagogic Research Conference 2011

2011-02-04T19:12:00.003Z

Today I attended our annual research into teaching conference, a relaxed event, and a chance to see what colleagues around the university have been doing in the past year. The format of the conference is a keynote, four parallel sessions (with a buffet lunch after the third) and then closing plenary at 3 - a perfect model for a cold day in February as we all get to attend everything and still go home early!

Below I present my visual recordings of the sessions I attended for you to view the ones that interest you - fuller details of the speakers and their talks are linked to on the conference webpage.

1. Professor Sally Fincher gave the keynote, speaking about the characteristics of disciplinary-specific pedagogic research and some challenges for its dissemination. I has interested in Sally's comments about the way we increasingly reward research output for lecturers but fail to reward teaching - as if the researching counts more than the doing. It's important to get your priorities right!

2. Barbara Newland describing the eRes project with case studies and a group exercise to design an e-tivity. The group activity reminded me that in order to make effective use of technology, you need to know what is actually possible - as always it boils down to good communication more than fancy kit.

3. PhD student Jody Boehnert speaking about the the difference between what you believe and what you do, and how transformative learning can close this gap.

4. Bob Hughes showing the results from analysing student submission and grade data across an online module. He looks at the implications, the difficulties and the ethics of using this kind of data. I wonder if I can help produce even more data from inside the Blackboard database and how we can produce value for the student experience from this.

5. Jennie Jones & Stephanie Fleischer introduce their findings on the reasons for International students having higher rates of leaving university courses than UK students. Many of the factors that come through are common to all students, and English language issues seem to be the additional factor that makes the rate so much higher in this group. However, what comes across is how highly motivated for study International students are, they want to excel not just get by.

--
For more on the techniques I used to make the videos above, please read this post on Visual Recording on the iPad.

Videos not loading? View this post in it's original location, or watch them on YouTube.

Visual Recording on the iPad

2011-02-01T10:51:00.005Z

What is Visual Recording? Well, it's like making a mind-map of a talk/event. Best explained by an example, here is my visual recording of a BBC documentary last night called 'Do We Need the Moon?':

I made this drawing in real-time whilst watching the documentary.

I discovered the techniques for Visual Recording on the iPad last year, when I read this blog post by Rachel Smith (aka Ninmah).

Rachel Smith explaining Visual Recording on the iPad

At the time I had a few attempts, but was unable to produce the kinds of results you see done so beautifully by the RSA and forgot about it...

Animated RSA talk by Ken Robinson

...until I listened to Jake Spicer recently at TEDxBrighton, who reminded us about the importance of visual literacy, and that I need to practice my drawings. So with that fresh in my mind I have decided to pursue this technique and practice, practice, practice.

For me, the value of the technique is the animation - I hope that the animation makes the result more understandable and engaging to a viewer. I also find it a really good focussing exercise for me, as you have to stay fully engaged with the content you are watching in order not to miss key points in your drawing.

I am keen to improve my skills at this, so have a few questions about the Moon video at the top.

If you did watch the documentary, do you think this is a good reminder about the key points presented? If you didn't, does it give you a sense of the programme or is it just confusing?
Would it benefit from an audio commentary?
Can you follow it at all? Is it too fast/slow for reading?
Other than a nice curiosity, do you think this has value as an information resource?
Honestly, did you even know it was supposed to be a werewolf?

I like doing these live, but no doubt they would be better laid out and structured if I watched it first and then drew it on a second viewing with a plan in mind.

If you fancy trying this yourself, they I recommend the software Brushes on the iPad. It's £4.99, but is really simple to use and provides a free desktop tool which allows you to email yourself a final jpg and your brushes file from the iPad, view it animated on your computer and easily convert it to a Quicktime file for upload to YouTube etc. (my Moon film is exported at 15fps).

Finally, if anyone reading this would like to practice with me, then I'm very open to sharing results, constructive criticism and technique sharing. I will attempt to record the keynote talks this way at the University of Brighton Pedagogic Research Conference this friday, so sit next to me if you are there and want to see me try and keep up - and I will share the results with anyone who expresses an interest.

[videos not loading? view post on original site]

TEDxBrighton - Joining the Dots

2011-01-23T19:38:00.008Z

On Friday I attended TEDxBrighton, a local version of the popular TED talks (you probably know them through that famous Ken Robinson talk on creativity in schools?). It was one of the best conferences I have ever attended - featuring talks on topics ranging from art to anatomy to education to utopia.
Lots of others have provided a good background, a full write up on the talks and on the classic TEDx films that were shown - so I'll offer up what I call joining-the-dots, what my brain did with all the amazing, inspirational inputs and the common themes and ideas I got from the day. And most importantly, what I'm actually going to do or change as a result.

1. I can do anything
Darrell Evans showed us how our anatomy can change and adapt to do what we need it to. I probably haven't found the right sport yet, but my body could change itself to perform better. And, considering the information on mirror neurons presented in the classic TED film by VS Ramachandran, one was I can improve my ability is simply by watching others doing the activity while my brain copies the movements. Jake Spicer convinced us that we can all draw, and that by practicing drawing we can change the way we see the world. And while I'm busy expressing my creative side, Sue Bradley showed us how by balancing business and creativity we can achieve amazing things.

What I will do: I will try and draw more. I barely even have handwriting any more, so I will hold a pencil and look at the world. I was quite surprised that my life drawing was ok. I should practice and look at the world with a pencil instead of a digital camera sometimes.

2. We can help kids do anything
Judith Good demonstrated some of her work developing games to help autistic children relate to their world, and the ways we can use technology to help all kids learn and engage with their learning. And Angie Hart reminded us that we can all help kids become stronger with only small 'resilient moves'.

What I will do: To start with I'll find out more about the resilient moves in order to help my own kids. I'm also working with out Widening Participation team and will take the game ideas and possible technical adaptations of the resilient moves to see if it leads to some powerful resources in this area.

3. Work Happy
Will McInnes made us think about happiness in the workplace, and why employers should really think about the happiness of their employees. Complemented nicely by George MacKerron and the results from his Mappiness iPhone app, teasing us with the potential of the changes we could make in the way we live if we could really define what makes us happy. Anthony Mayfield talked about the skills we need to help us work well in the social web, which for me all comes down to building a trusted network. I am connected with like-minded individuals, I trust and am trusted by them and I am happy.

What I will do: Talk to my boss about what we can do in our workplace to foster happiness and trust. We're not co-located, so we might need a digital analogy for Will's measuring happiness by 'balls-in-buckets' ideas.

4. Hope is not an action plan
Sally Kettle reminded us that hoping something good will come along or that things will improve is useless. Make a change or live with it. David Bramwell had hopes for improving social cohesion in Brighton & Hove, and to achieve this we need to actually do something. Like organise a Zocalo - as @emtaff promises to do. And as one of the classic talks on organising a movement taught us, we don't always have to be the one to start it all off, but we can be the first follower. Find a "lone nutter" with a good idea and give them your support to make something real happen. And the sentiments Sally Kettle finished her talk with, see what you can inspire in others.

What I will do: I am too nervous of results to organise a Zocalo, but next time I see an opportunity to attend some socially connected event I will make a point of going. And I will do my utmost at work to either accept what I don't like or to make a change.

Conferences for Kids (big and small) - Learning without Frontiers and BETT 2011

2011-01-18T17:09:00.008Z

In the past week I've attended Learning without Frontiers and BETT, and it got me thinking about the similarities and differences between these events - and the effect they had on me.

Learning without Frontiers was great. It was the first 'work' event that I've taken my kids to. The special 'Let us Play' day on a Sunday (for free!) was a fantastic way of showcasing some brilliant technologies and exciting both me and the kids. The highlight for us all was Jason Bradbury's Dot Robot show:

Jason Bradbury showing us the coolest hovering
robot (4 blades) controlled from an iPhone app.

(If you're interested in this event, I've a full annotated photo album on Facebook)

After the show we got hands on the latest Microsoft Kinect and Surface as well as playing on some new iPad apps and highly engaging story software.

The Microsoft surface - like a huge coffee table computer.
Archie is playing a spelling game, dragging letters around
and making, in this case, the word 'ant'. I played a multiplayer
Chemistry lesson making molecules - it can cope with loads
of simultaneous users.

BETT on the other hand I found simply overwhelming. BETT is the UK trade show for educational technology and resources. Just look at it - it's huge beyond belief, filling Olympia - and very hot.

Looking down on the ground floor of BETT 2011

I think because it was so busy and huge that the conversations with the stands became overly pressured. In face at one point a freelancer on a software stand aimed at primary schools told me:

"you don't get a demo unless there's a sales opportunity, we're not interested in University people just looking for ideas"

Ouch. He had me pegged, but if there's no room for 'looking for ideas' at BETT then that's a real shame. Learning without Frontiers was the polar opposite - we were all there 100% for the ideas and the chat (although I did buy copies of Jaons Bradbury's books!).

So perhaps it's not fair of my to compare a platform designed for improvements in Learning (LWF) with a trade show (BETT), but the former inspired me to be excited by what future technologies could do for education, and the latter made me want to run back to Brighton and avoid the inevitable sales calls for the next month...

In defence of BETT: The LEGO stand was fab, I just love their new 'WeDo' software for letting primary school kids build and program moving lego models.

UPDATE: Just read this excellent write-up of BETT from Danny Nicholson, someone who clearly got a lot from the day. Maybe I just need tips from Danny on how to make the most out of something like BETT!

Books for Christmas? The iPad, the Kindle and the Samsung Galaxy Tab

2010-12-14T17:17:00.007Z

When you buy someone a book for Christmas, you expect it to cost you about £5.99. This year though, you need to buy the recipient an eBook reader to read their book on, before you actually worry about the content.

Three eBook readers have passed through my house this week, sadly not all for me to keep - but I took the opportunity of comparing the size and features of each for your enjoyment before they went under the appropriate Christmas trees.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab

As a committed Apple fan, I was really quite impressed with this tablet. I can certainly see the appeal - my biggest issue with my iPad is the difficulty of carrying it. Don't get me wrong, I love the size, but it requires a big bag and most often I just carry it in my hand. The Galaxy is definitely handbag size. Plus it has a camera and phone functions which the iPad don't.

comparing the BBC website on an iPhone and the Galaxy Tab

Comparing the screen size of an iPhone, Galaxy Tab and iPad

I found the navigation confusing - there was a widget style navigation interface as well as the applications screens (like Apple devices). I kept finding myself back on the home screen when I didn't expect to. Like when using the Kindle app, clicking a word to get a definition and then being sent to my web browser, I couldn't seem to get back to the book and had to re-navigate back to the Kindle app.

The Galaxy Tab has wi-fi and 3G. The 3G works out as 30p/day for each day that you use it (you can put it in airplane mode which means it won't use the 3G if you're happy with wi-fi).

The Amazon Kindle

Speaking of the Kindle, another impressive device, this time for the E Ink screen technology. When you take it out the box you think it's got a sticker on it, then you realise that is actually the screen. Because it's E Ink it shows an image even when it's off.

After playing with the iPad and Galaxy Tab, you want to start touching the screen on the Kindle as well - but no, it's not touch screen, you have to use the rather unintuitive buttons at the bottom. The primary purpose of the Kindle is reading, so I suppose you don't spend a lot of time navigating the menus, but even so, the interface is poor in comparison with other devices.

You link your Kindle to an Amazon account, and I found it much easier browsing the Kindle store (and looking for free books) using my laptop and a web browser. Then, when you turn the Kindle on you can get it to sync and it downloads all your books.

I was using the Wi-fi and 3G model. For £40 more than the Wi-fi version you get unlimited 3G downloads forever more. You can only download books from the Kindle store, but it does mean the recipient of this Kindle doesn't have to worry about lack of wi-fi or loading books before they go on holiday.

comparing the size of the Kindle with the iPad

In terms of using these as an eBook reader, I've only actually read books on my iPad, and I am easily impressed by the lovely page turning animations you get with iBooks on the iPad, but I'm sure all three devices work perfectly for reading.

For me, the feature missing from eBook readers is the ability to lend books to your friends after you've finished with them. So there is still a stack of paperbacks by the side of my bed and I suspect I will continue to do so for a few years to come.

The Virtual Green Map - Foursquare and Sustainability

2010-11-16T20:26:00.007Z

For the past few weeks I've been working with our Sustainability in Action team, looking at developing a communications strategy that makes the most of social technologies without overwhelming them with too many channels to maintain - especially when the people in question are more at home working on the wormery than on the computer. It's been particularly interesting finding common ground in these conversations.

A lot of the work is still to be completed, but my favourite part of the project is working towards a green map using geo-tagging technologies, in particular Foursquare.

One of the aims of the communications strategy is to let the University community know about the various sustainability/green efforts already in place. Various signs are being put up around the campus, but this can only go so far, and doesn't (for example) make it easy to find out about the green roof above your head.

So, by creating a foursquare account and "checking in" at each of the University buildings the team can leave "Did you know..." tips, so anyone else checking in at that building gets a little nugget of information. A virtual green map layer, if you like. The pictures in this post show the first couple of entries we have left.

We can then hook up Foursquare with Twitter and with some Google Maps magic on their website start to present a live Green Map - this bit is theoretical, but I'm sure it can be done, right?

Gamification, Pointsification and Embarrassment

2010-11-08T20:10:00.005Z

For those not up to date on lingo in the games developer world, 'gamification' is the new buzzword to describe the process of adding game-like elements to (especially) web activities to encourage engagement. See wikipedia definition.

Around this time last year I described a plan of mine to encourage uptake of staff completion of a compulsory fire safety eLearning package by publishing a leaderboard of the results. Well that project is now underway, so I wanted to reflect on how it was going, and in what ways this might be described as gamification.

Sandwiched somewhere in the middle of our staff intranet (staffcentral) homepage is the leaderboard.
This is updated (manually - by me) weekly. Staff can also click through to see the full leaderboard for all depts in the university (as well as the blurb explaining this is indeed a legal requirement).

So does it work?

Well yes. The package launched in April/May via email notifications, and around 50 people in targeted departments completed it, and then a few weeks later, activity stopped. In September we launched the leaderboard with no promotion at all - no emails - and 6 weeks on we're seeing around 175 completed, from across all departments, and rising.

Turns out there were some technical issues with the package, and before the leaderboard, people who had tried and got stuck, gave up. Now that their performance is slightly more public they are prepared to make slightly more effort. From a support perspective this is a headache, but they are all coming out of the woodwork. They want to know that their score has definitely been recorded. I'm even getting complaints that the weekly update is not often enough.

And is this gamification?

Well no, other than adding a scoreboard, this isn't a game and doesn't try to be. But that doesn't make it less valuable. A better description is pointsification (as coined on the Hide and Seek blog) - a simple way of measuring and assigning scores.

I like this term, because it's also the driving force behind my Never Ending Uni Quiz project and seems equally effective there. It's also a really simple way for anyone to add an additional motivating factor to anything with a measurable 'score'.

And what about the Embarrassment?

A moment of doubt. If they're only completing it because they are embarrassed their department has such a low score, can I really talk about games and playfulness? I'm not adding fun, I'm adding guilt, and that wasn't my intention.

My Kind of Mobile Learning

2010-11-04T08:24:00.007Z

i.e. when I am mobile and the things I learn on the train. I've been commuting for a month or so now, and feel it's time to reflect on what I have learned from my time on British Rail.

1. How to balance standing up on a moving train
2. That my hips (just) fit into the luggage rack when there is nowhere else to sit.
3. How to be a South-East British train traveller by ignoring everyone around me. (I'm assured this isn't the case in other parts of the country, but it seems on the trains I take you are not allowed to look or speak).
4. That the views you get from the train are fascinating. You get a view of Brighton in particular that you just can't get from anywhere else.
5. How to just be still and think, when there is nowhere to sit and no room to swing a cat (or your book or your iPhone).
6. Patience and to let go of control, if there's a delay, there is nothing you can do but wait for it.
7. A new kind of commuting friendship (apparently you can make new commuter friends as soon as there is a serious enough delay you can talk to all those people you've been ignoring).
8. That the only people who do freely talk are school kids, and that listening to them is utterly fascinating. I'm not sure they live in the same world that I do.
9. That everyone has an iPhone. Ok, not everyone, but they all fish out their phones the minute they sit down. And I would say messaging is more popular than music. I don't see many with headphones, they're all just tapping away (like me).
10. That vicariously living other people's lives can be great fun. One of the people I've never spoken to who catches the same train as me every day (I call him Ben) has a new girlfriend this week. They hold hands on the platform and kiss a lot. I'm very happy for him.

And a few thoughts on the future of train travel:

1. Trains should enforce a PG certificate. The language and unfortunately the violence I have seen and heard on the train this week is unacceptable. I don't know how to influence this.
2. A smile goes a long way. I will endeavour to smile at the people I sit next to and opposite from now on. I won't speak of course, that would really freak them out ;-}

(the photo was taken today at Brighton station about 4pm - the large queue of people in the pen are trying to get to Lewes for the fireworks)

The Power of Play in the Workplace

2010-10-14T20:08:00.005+01:00

I'd like to recommend that all managers read "The Power of Play: Fostering Creativity and Innovation in Libraries" by Kurt, Kurt and Medaille. Not just library managers, but anyone who wants to bring out the best in their staff.

The paper argues that although we try to recognise and encourage children, students (and library users in this case) to be creative through play and innovations, we rarely apply these same techniques in the workplace. To hold onto good, creative staff we need to provide a culture that motivates them, and providing room to play is one way of achieving this.

The paper profiles four companies with a strong play ethos: Google, 37Signals, IDEO and Pixar. (and who wouldn't want to work for Google or Pixar?). My favourite quote in the paper is from Kelley, the founder of IDEO (an innovation and design firm), who says:

"When people feel special, they'll perform beyond your wildest dreams."
(Kelley, 2001)

As much as I enjoyed the paper I wished it had provided more real-world examples of how to actually include play in everyday activities where resource and time are tight. I've taken and adapted a few from throughout the paper - and as you'd expect (!) I've taken the liberty of adding some of my own, hopefully applicable in a wide variety of settings:

Get your team to role-play as the customer/user to put themselves in their shoes. Or if possible, do some 'mystery shopping' exercises trying the service out as an unknown user.
Allow your staff to spend 20% of their time learning about and working on projects that interest them - anything goes as long as they feed their knowledge and experiences back into the team.
Go with wacky ideas if they make people happy and still allow you to achieve your aims - an excellent suggestion I saw this week (from @chriskeene) to apply targets and FourSquare style language to your email inbox, to beat yesterdays 'replied to' figure and aim to become 'Mayor of your Email' (please can someone build this as an Exchange add-on?)
When fire-fighting a technical problem - take a step back and go into Sherlock Holmes mode to re-evaluate the evidence with a fresh pair of eyes, and co-erce a colleague to play Watson to force yourself to express things clearly and verbally.
Set yourself targets throughout the day. A chocolate break when you've crossed two more things off your to-do list.
If working on a service desk, make Bingo-style cards for the team, and see who can collect five common surnames from users first, of a row of books with certain words in the titles etc.

What else? What do you do? And how do we overcome preconceptions that this is a waste of time and gather the evidence that shows playful adults are happier and more productive in the workplace.

The Ultimate Conference badge...um, T-shirt

2010-10-10T20:04:00.004+01:00

At a recent conference (#fote10) there was quite a backchannel discussion about how in the future, with the use of augmented reality goggles, we could see people's twitter account details floating over their heads helping us to spot people we knew virtually, but didn't recognise physically.

This got me pondering a rather short-term, more realistic solution to the genuine problem of not recognising people who you already know online, and not having to get close enough to read their little conference badge before you know if you have found the right person.

So, I have designed a prototype Ultimate Conference T-shirt. Works as an ice-breaker as well as a rather detailed business card. I don't think I would actually create this and wear it, but I hope you see where I'm going with this...

(click to enlarge)

Meetings are boring. So let's fix them.

2010-09-23T08:53:00.009+01:00

Embedding games-based learning practice into teaching has been an interest of mine for some time, but why restrict it to teaching?

Inspired by Nic Whitton's post on Making Learning Engaging and Alex Moseley's post on embedding games methodologies into a conference session, I wanted to see how far you could push the idea of making 'work' more engaging by learning from games. To save you any background reading on the topic, we have previously identified six key elements to motivation in games-based learning:

Community - Competition - Completion - Creativity - Puzzle Solving - Narrative

Applying these elements to a few days in the office, this is the list of ideas I have so far, a mixed bag, I would love to build on this and come up with a real set of tools that could easily be used. I don't want this to be a gimmick that is only implemented by games fans, I want tools that help people cooperate to reach desirable conclusions in an efficient, enjoyable way. Is that too much to ask?

Level 1 - Easy
Ideas that can be implemented without special equipment or too much convincing

You don't get free run of the refreshments on arrival in the meeting room. Tea & biccies become available as a reward for completing the first 3 agenda items complete - it's important this isn't a time limit, it's reaching a goal.
A points based reward system for contributions (newbie - bronze - silver - gold stars as seen on most discussion forums) but applicable easily to most electronic channels (and less easily to face-to-face channels)
Or provide physical rewards for activity. A little badge for being on a particular project team, or even smarties to represent each online contribution presented when the group meets face to face.
A 'swear jar' in the office for committing whatever crimes are considered punishable. Like accidentally forwarding emails to people who weren't supposed to read that, or double booking yourself and wasting people's time.
Halfway through a meeting or conference, everyone stand up and change the dynamics by changing seats.

Level 2 - Medium
Requires colleagues to want to try new ways of working, a little effort!

Anthropomorphisation. In our case, we name our servers after Terry Pratchett characters, which mean we can talk about with personalities and genders, and amuse ourselves associating characters with server functions. "Cheery seems to have had a rough night, she couldn't get up this morning, but Carrot is ok..."
In an email/twitter/comment exchange members must include an agreed category (e.g. animal names) into each of their responses. This removes the tendancy to yak and forces more consideration than usual into both writing and the reading.
When working in smaller groups reporting back to the main group, make it competitive. Prizes not required, just the honour of being best, and promoting the recognition of good work.
Use games as analogies to demonstrate concepts rather than powerpoint. I'm a fan of using Lego to demonstrate social networking.
Apply a Reading-ease/Fog-Index measure to all reports. Anyone circulating work of unnecessary fogginess is given press-ups according to how verbose it was! (the press ups aren't enforced but serve as a reminder that you're not speeding things up).
A light hearted recognition of topical dress according to the days work/meeting topic. e.g. a tie with numbers on it for budget meetings.
Use anonymous personal reposnse system (PRS) or other voting devices to take impromptu votes of agreements or gather unplanned feedback from the table. We do it with students, why not with each other?

Level 3 - Hard
Requires kit and software that may or may not exist and big changes

Have the conversation take place in turns played alongside a game (electronic or physical). We are currently finding Carcassonne on the iPhone a good way of holding a conversation and you make your turn and type your message.
You don't have to be you. In some cases, maybe you feel strong enough to be a Warrior, or in others you want to be a diplomat. Easier online, but could work in meetings too, take roles, develop avatars and then it's ok to not do exactly what they expect.
In an online environment where you can see who is logged on, build an extra feature that allows you to virtually 'shoot' other logged on members. Suspect this might encourage people to log in regularly to join in - and they might well read and participate while they are there.
Add a puzzle-lock on each new email/post. You can't read it until you complete it - adding a challenge so the content is the reward.
Some kind of monitor for who has 'possession' of a meeting, ie who has had the most voice-time. If that ever gets to over 75% for one person, then the is not a productive meeting.

Social Media for Learning, Social Media for Marketing - what can we learn about control?

2010-09-21T20:59:00.006+01:00

On the Social Media Marketing course I attended this week, I was struck by the rewards and challenges for marketing that paralleled the same issues in Education.

I'll start with an example (thanks to @reachstudents for this). Do a Google search for "student experience Nottingham" and you get something completely outside the marketing departments careful control of search engine optimisation:

The top hit there is this (unofficial) student produced YouTube video with 52,000+ views:

Now as it happens, although not the message the university would have chosen to put out, it's positive about the university - and indeed (by criticising Nottingham Trent) is says things the marketing department could never have done!

One of the key things for social media marketeers to understand is the need to give up control. The whole point of social media is that your customers will comment and respond in any way they like, and your best response is to accept this - the worst response is to attempt to control it. (Google 'nestle remove greenpeace video' for evidence of this backfiring!)

And when we talk about using social media in learning, indeed the changing of nature of education more generally, we always end up talking about the lecturer giving up control. I've struggled with understanding how the role of the lecturer is changing as we move to this model, but I find that considering the three social media marketing elements I discussed in my previous post allows us to draw parallels putting the lecturer in the role of the marketeer:

Aims: In marketing you are usually trying to increase and encourage customer engagement with your produce/service, whereas in education you are doing the same - but for the subject area you are teaching.

Value: As the marketeer using social media you are offering customers knowledge, new content and customer support - this maps easily to the role of the lecturer.

Audience: In marketing you tend to go to where you know your customer is, or do your best to drag them where you want them (usually your site). In education you have more freedom to use the platform of your choice, as your learners should(?) do what you tell them if they want to complete the course - but it would be wise to understand what social media your learners use already to maximise effectiveness.

What do you think? Can we learn from marketing to move education forward? Is there some aspect of social learning we can use to provide clever marketing opportunities? I'll let you know...

Social Media Marketing - tips for success, and what not to do!

2010-09-21T17:06:00.007+01:00

I attended a one-day course yesterday, presented by Luke Mitchell from @reachstudents on Social Media Marketing. With Luke's permission here is my summary of the day (part 1!).

The day worked around consideration of a triangle of Aims, Value and Audience.

Aims: We first considered what we were trying to achieve (ranging in our case from contacting old alumni to promoting events and new schemes).
Value: We then thought about what we had to offer (knowledge, new content, customer support etc). If you have no value to offer you are probably wasting your time.
Audience: And finally considering who we were marketing to, and where they might be. The consensus is that most undergraduate students are on Facebook, with pockets using other sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

The secret to social media marketing is to find a method of marketing that matches all three of these; you have to have something to offer to someone and know what you want out of it. Once you know this you can match the most appropriate social media. This is best illustrated by a pair of case studies where companies got this very right (and very wrong!).

1. Habitat - how to make Twitter uses hate you by getting the etiquette all wrong

Habitat decided to use Twitter to raise awareness of special offers. They employed an agency to help increase visibility of their tweets, and the agency decided to use trending topics to boost views. Only they happened to use hashtags which had nothing to do with habitat. Like hashtags relating to the Iran election (#MOUSAV) for example.

image reproduced from: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/103334

The Twitter community reacted very badly to this, accusing Habitat of spamming them. Habitat tried to make the problem go away by removing all the tweets, but the internet doesn't forget that quickly. For more on this case study read socialmediatoday. Clearly Habitat did not understand the codes of behaviour of their chosen medium and by trying to 'Black Hat' they were trying to cheat the medium.

2. IKEA - How to get users to drag their friends to your Facebook profile

IKEA knew their audience were on Facebook, and wanted to get them enagaged with their new store. Their store manager created a Facebook profile, and posted photos from the catalogue - then they opened a competition. Whoever first tagged themselves or one of their friends in the photo (ie tagging yourself as a chair) won the item.

image reproduced from: http://www.opedefeijao.com.br/2010/08/24/sensacional-as-20-melhores-campanhas-de-midia-social/

The photos then started appearing in users streams on updates, encouraging more and more friends to visit the page. Users were effectively promoting Ikea personally, and signing themselves up to a mailing list.

Ikea had something to offer - prizes, and knew exactly how to engage their audience. The best way to learn more about this case study is to watch Ikea's video about it.
--

We discussed many more examples on the course but these two I think illustrate the risks and rewards of social media marketing nicely.

Both cases stemmed from a marketing agency having a novel idea of how to use the existing technology, and doing a copycat is never as effective as being the first, so I don't suggest you copy what Ikea did. I don't believe you can teach people how to have novel ideas, so I'm off to think of something cool to do on Twitter that no one has tried before...hmmm...

Society, Play and Education

2010-09-11T15:23:00.012+01:00

[my summary of the photos below]
Boys play with soldiers and guns because they need to fight for their country. Girls play with dolls houses because how better to train them for the future role as wives and mothers? At least that was the norm until the late 18th century when there was a realisation toys and games could be educational as well as just miniature versions of their parents daily lives. Since then things have moved on, and with the input of child psychologists, toys of today can train our children to be moral, educated members of society. Is that asking a lot from lego?

The photos below are from a visit to Scaplen's Court Museum in Poole this summer. The Museum is usually only used for local school's education programmes, but is open to the public at certain times in the summer to explore their education and play collections:

There is a great traditional classroom with wooden desks, inkwells and slates and sand trays for the kids to practice writing.

After the school room, you move into the two main 'play rooms' - as the sign puts it:

"explore the way in which play has been developed and exploited according to the social thinking of the time"

Toys through the ages - nothing electronic in sight.

Here are the posters around the room taking you though the centuries, and the history of play:

Managing my Digital Identity

2010-08-19T20:56:00.000+01:00

One of the current hot topics in learning technology circles is digital students/digital identity. There are concerns that students don't understand the lasting implications of their digital identities (ie future employers seeing those drunken night out photos in five years time) but I think before we can advise students we need to have a clear grasp on our own presence online. Here's my top 3 things I think we all need to consider - and my take on each.

1. How many online lives?

I have a number of colleagues who maintain two Facebook accounts; one for students to contact them and one for personal relationships. There is a lot to be said for this - it's a way of having quite a public persona but still keeping your private life limited to a small group.

Personally, I've taken the decision to have one joined-up online presence, and am happy to have this quite publically open. I don't teach students directly so all my connections have a roughly equal status - ie none are relying on me to pass or fail their degree.

I also like to tweet as myself - I can reply to work stuff as me, not a faceless support service or brand. I think that's important, the personal voice with a real face and name attached.

2. How much is Public?

If you could be bothered to check out all my online information and join me up with my husband and check through his information you could find out my full address and home phone number. You may or may not think that is a good idea, but the important point is that I am completely aware of it, and the day the last piece of the puzzle went public online (that was our flat number) it was a conscious choice.

3. Is there a weak link?

I found this article on Google or You? Who Would You Rather Control Your Digital Identity? thought provoking. It's all very well having a super professional LinkedIn profile, but if a Google search on you has some 10 year old inappropriate blog comment you wrote as the top hit it ruins your efforts.

There is room for personal opinion and non-professional stuff if you go for my joined-up approach, but that's the stuff that stays 'friends only' on Facebook. I have an internal 'what if my Dad sees this?' rule in my head (as it happens he is a friend on Facebook, so he probably will read this). Because if it isn't suitable for my Dad [insert web-using older relative of your choice] then it probably shouldn't be online anywhere.

Upgrading Blackboard 9 to 9.1

2010-08-17T20:15:00.004+01:00

Just over two weeks ago we upgraded Blackboard from 9.0 to 9.1 - and not wanting to tempt fate I've delayed writing this post, but now feel in a fairly confident position to say it was the best thing we could possibly have done.

We upgraded from 7.3 to 9.0 last summer, just a few weeks before the start of term. We spent most of that term plagued by stability issues (JVM crashes) and then the rest of the year identifying bugs and applying custom patches and fixes meaning we were no longer on a standard install path and unable to install the generally released service packs.

Pleasingly, 9.1 fixes nearly all the outstanding issues from 9, and so far the only new issues we have found are relatively minor and relate to new improved functionality. The major bugs that affect us now resolved from 9.0 are:

Announcements sent as emails will now be delivered correctly
Feedback attached to submissions (including via TurnItIn) can now be accessed by the student
Ability to get full list of students on your modules
Ability to view access statistics for your areas

9.1 has also introduced some helpful new features:

"save and next" efficiency feature in the Grade Centre
New Learning Module tool
New course file management library
New Lesson Plan tool
Improved appearance

The course file management library really is a big change for us as we don't have the content system (it's basically a cut down version of the content system). If you're interested in more detail (with screenshots!) please read this excellent handout produced by our Learning Technologies Advisors: studentcentral - all change 2010!

I know a lot of institutions on Blackboard 8 are delaying the upgrade to 9.1 for another academic year because of the bad press that 9 received, and I can't say that they definitely should - but for anyone still struggling with 9 I recommend you move to 9.1 as quickly as you can and spend the year supporting interesting new learning tools rather than bug reporting!

Etienne Wenger: Knowledgeability

2010-07-27T20:32:00.004+01:00

Today I attended a workshop on Knowledgeability in Landscapes of Practice presented by Etienne Wenger and Bev Trayner. This post is a write-up of the session.

"The seminar will explore the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. The basic idea is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act. This simple observation has profound implications for the way we think of and attempt to support learning." (extract from advert for the event)

Etienne introduced us to the idea of "Knowledgeability". Knowledge is the "stuff" we know, but knowledgeability is the state we become by negotiating in a complex landscape of different practices. An example that came up later I think helps explain this, is the idea of a doctor making a decision about whether a patient gets a certain medical test or not. As the doctor you have accountabilities to the patient, to the other doctors to the hospital administration even to your own family and friends, and all of these come into play ('reconcile the landscape') as you make that choice. You need to find the balance across communities that do not see eye to eye.

The key idea seemed to be to recognise your own learning is influenced by all these accountabilities in the landscape of your own practices. And these accountabilities shape what you need to learn and where you should invest your time.

We completed an exercise in groups, thinking about our own accountabilities - and explored the tension between the places we are accountable, particularly where we are paid and where we aren't paid. We contemplated the differences between responsibility which is not the same as accountability. If you are accountable to colleagues, it means you can give an account to your colleagues to show you are a knowledgeable practitioner.

Another example - there might be only 10 people in the world understand some aspect of particle physics - and it's ok for us to not understand them, as we are not accountable to them. However if they aren't accountable outside that small group, then they will feel no need to help others understand.

We then self-formed groups around our own perceived 'primary accountabilities' (recognising, of course, that we are always juggling multiple accountabilities). The groups we came up with were:

My children
Community development
Social adjustors
(Unmet) health needs
Enforced framework (audit culture)
The Oppressed and marginalised
Spirituality
Student learning and development

Within the groups we were asked to come up with one practice that embodied that sense of accountability. My group (Primary accountability: My children) came up with "organise day to day around our children's need." We had a discussion about guilt - if you have to cancel a lecture, you feel bad and inconvenience 100 students, but if you have to miss your child's school concert you feel terrible about it forever more.

The point of this exercise was to then hear the practices from the other groups and identify boundaries where the practices touched. Sometimes a tension, sometimes a complement.

The risk is that within a community of practice you can becomes too inwardly focused, and it's on the boundaries where ideas can be pushed and moved forward. The community is both a resource and a danger. Etienne argues that social reflection is just not possible within a community, you need to travel and cross boundaries. As a 'learning citizen' we all need to try and step out of our groups and look for places to make conversations on the boundaries - for the future of the planet, he suggested.

The advertising for the seminar suggested that:

"Practically, these ideas are helping people who face all sorts of challenges, such as:
• design more effective knowledge-oriented organizations
• create learning systems across organizations
• improve education and lifelong learning
• rethink the role of professional associations
• design a world in which people can reach their full potential"

It looks like Etienne and Bev gave a similar session at the OU recently, this video gives you an idea and a chance to see them in action:

I can see that in Higher Education it is too easy to teach students within the student learning community of practice, but rarely provide opportunities for them to explore overlaps with other communities, to form their own communities or to recognise their existing communities.

[Etienne was also in Brighton to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Brighton]

University Induction "Collect the Set" - using mobile location check-in

2010-07-21T20:34:00.004+01:00

I've been inspired this week but a two posts about Foursquare:

Brent Schlenker talking about whether there is learning potential in rewarding location based check-ins, and Andrew Careaga about including check-ins as part of their campus social media strategy.

Background: Foursquare is a location based social network where users check-in at a location to earn badges, get tips or find out who else they know is (or has been) there recently. There are other competing location based networks like Gowalla, Google Latitude and Britekite. See wikipedia for more.

The idea brewing in my head is to make use of the increasing popularity of these kind of services on mobile devices for first year induction - a way of encouraging new students to explore their university sites and services.

Foursquare offers badges for completing certain (secret) targets, but I don't believe users are able to set their own badges. What I'd like to do is reward students who manage to check-in at all buildings in a particular set (say all buildings on their campus). In the case of the University of Brighton we have 5 campuses, and six libraries scattered from Falmer to Hastings. It's unlikely that any student would ever visit all 5, but they could find new friends on Community@Brighton (our social networking site - Elgg) and complete a set between them.

I need to investigate the privacy issues of check-in statuses, but I believe unless you are somewhere at the same time as another user you can't see their history easily. You can claim locations as the manager, which may be what we need to do in order to track who has checked in.

I think the idea of making friends to complete a set with some kind of (nominal) reward might just strike the right note in those scary early weeks. Would welcome comments, and any University of Brighton colleagues reading this, who's up for helping me try this out!

If I'm tapping away on my phone can it really be work?

2010-07-09T19:06:00.004+01:00

Today was our annual Learning and Teaching conference, where I presented a world cafe session on "Building a Personal Research Network with Twitter" (see my handout - a getting started guide)

One of the things I wanted to demonstrate was the twitter stream for the conference hashtag #uoblt10, so during the sessions I made sure to tweet regularly and encouraged my twitter colleagues in attendance to do the same. And the thing I noticed from non-tweeters was their assumption when they saw me tapping away on the iPad that I was "not paying attention" or was "being rude to the presenter" (both direct quotes from colleagues).

I'd like to argue why this is not the case! My use of twitter during the sessions actually involved a great deal of engagement with the topic. Live tweeting requires the ability to pay attention, summarise interesting points of the discussion into a concise and focused 160 characters suitable for sharing with the wider world.

Anyone scribbling on a notepad or tapping on a laptop is assumed to be taking notes, which is considered fine. But taking notes on mobile devices or tweeting has different perceptions. Particularly when you translate this to students in a classroom or lecture setting - who should make the judgement about whether twitter enhances or distracts a student from the content of the lecture; the student or the lecturer?

I imagine this perception will change over time as we become more used to seeing the backchannel presented at conferences and in lectures, so being part of the conversation is more valued.

Incidentally, once I showed colleagues the conference stream they were highly impressed with the quality and content of the discussion they were missing.

The Future of the Managed Learning Environment - diagrams

2010-07-06T20:28:00.000+01:00

This week we begin an eLearning review at the University of Brighton. I wanted to come up with a model to help the members of the review group understand the jigsaw pieces involved in providing what we call a 'managed learning environment' so we could look at the various options and how they relate to each other, so here I offer what I've come up with and invite your comments:

1. My model for the main elements of a Managed Learning Environment

2. Based on the model, this represents where we are today, the main systems we currently use.

3. Based on the model, where I think we should be going next, with examples of the tools that could offer this.

I know the general model here might offend those who believe passionately in a Personal Learning Environment, but as Emma Duke-Williams argues (see the comments of this Cloud Learning Environment post), a PLE can't be provided. My model is about what the institution can provide. The user can choose to use whatever they like and you can imagine a lot of arrows coming out of my future diagram to allow them this choice.

My future model is based loosely on the Hub and Spoke design from Washington State. I hope it demonstrates using the institutional data as a hub from which all kinds of spokes can be connected with varying degrees of integration.

One of the possible hubs I suggest above is Schoology, an (external) online enterprise learning management system and social network. I'm interested in seeing cloud solutions appear in this area, competing with the big players like Blackboard.

3 steps to successful discussion boards (without assessment)

2010-07-01T21:33:00.003+01:00

This is another gem from Catherine Owen's presentation on the REAP project. Catherine talked about a very successful first year psychology course redesign getting students in groups of 7 to use discussion boards to collaboratively write short reports, peer review each other and practice writing at University level ready for the assessment. [prior to the redesign the first written piece of the work the students undertook was the final assessment - and they really needed feedback before then but with 560 students this was a challenge]

In my experience the only time discussion boards work well is where there is a clear need for the users (usually no face to face option) or it is assessed, however in this case study neither of these were the case. Here are Catherine's three tips to really get the students sharing:

1. Normalise

The discussion board was introduced in week one of the first year as the normal method of communication on the course with each other and the academic staff. The students knew no different and accepted it as 'the norm'.

2. Structure

The monday lecture each week gave very clear guidance on exactly what the students were expected to post on the boards - this consisted of responses to a core set of questions or a collaborative group task.

3. Motivation

In the lectures the academic consistently referred back to discussions on the boards, praising posts and responding to common issues. Students felt they needed to be part of the discussion in order to be part of the course community.

Of course there were students who just didn't do it, but tracking was used so students who had not joined in could be contacted and supported or encouraged as required.

The results of this were staggeringly impressive:

"The Department of Psychology at SU re-engineered the first year Basic Psychology class to improve reflective and sustainable learning with 50% of the lectures being replaced by online tasks which involve peer discussions around progressively more complex formative assessments. This peer scaffolded design where monitored peer feedback supports large student numbers resulted in a 6% rise in average exam marks and reduction in the course failure rate from 12.1% to 2.8% without any workload increases. "
Case study on REAP website: http://www.reap.ac.uk/assessment/pilotsSUPsy.html

Can't argue with evidence like that!

Effective course redesign - 2 factors for success

2010-06-30T19:51:00.007+01:00

This afternoon I went to an excellent session on REAP presented by Catherine Owen from Strathclyde who showed a range of case studies where the change of learning design (primarily introduction of assessment technologies) had provided evidence of hugely increased retention rates, increased overall scores and improved motivation in students .
In this post I want to reflect on a conversation I had with Catherine after the talk about how she and her team were able to make such radical changes to the course design across such a range of disciplines and academic staff. Catherine proposed two fundamental factors:

1. Influential Friends

As a learning technologist I have experience and knowledge of course redesign, but suggesting to a lecturer that they reduce their lecture time by two thirds is always going to be met with alarm. What I need is credibility for the change - and Catherine thinks having an influential friend (the Head of Learning and Teaching, a Dean or the VC for example) makes all the difference. Permission and support from this influential friend will give the academic reassurance that enables you to run a pilot, and from the pilot you can build an evidence-base that the suggested changes make a demonstrable difference. After that (assuming you do get good evidence of improved grades/retention etc) no-one will object.

2. Make it Easy

This is a harder one for me to apply in practice. Catherine argues that you should basically do the work for the academics for the first run of the redesigned course. In one of her examples where 560 psychology students are split into 85 groups of 7, it was the learning technologist who managed the groups. In another example using a PRS system (clickers) in lectures, the learning technologist went to ALL the lectures to set up and help operate the kit. After the first run, the learning technologist then did all the evaluations to get the evidence needed to support the changes. After all that, the academic is on their own - but with the confidence of knowing how it all works. I have concerns about the resource and sustainability of this model, but can't argue that it doesn't make a lot of sense.

NOT - eLearning Champions

It's important that eLearning Champions are most definitely not one of the factors for success. Catherine even goes as far as to suggest they are a hindrance. Everyone knows who the champions are - and that they will try whatever the new things are. But everyone else is a bit tired of them and slightly resentful...they also probably aren't the ones who most need your help for the online redesign.

So my job now is to figure out how this model can work given the resources, experiences and courses at Brighton. And if you're 'influential', watch out, I'll be knocking on your door!

Top 10 Web 2.0 Relationship Issues

2010-06-29T17:00:00.006+01:00

1. Ebay - do you check your partners feedback? You'll see what they've been buying recently, and it might have been for you...

2. iTunes - do you share an account? Do you share a music library? (many more thoughts on this one!)

3. Passwords - does your partner know your passwords?

4. Calendars - presumably you already have read access to each other's diaries, but do you have write access? And how do you handle entries for events you are both attending - it gets messy quickly.

5. Facebook/Twitter - it's very rude not to have read your partner's status updates, but socially inappropriate to comment one each other's stuff too much. (and it goes without mention that you're updates should never contradict your partner's especially if one of you has made an excuse about not going somewhere!)

6. iPhoto - if you're sharing a photo library, do you agree about face and place tagging and how you split events? Chances are one of you cares more than the other about these things...(and whose is the default Flickr/Facebook account linked to the library for uploading?)

7. LoveFilm.com - if you've managed to agree which DVDs you want to have posted to you, you still have to decide which order they should come in. Easiest to not set a priority unless you're both desperate to see it.

8. Games - is it ever ok to play a game using the other person's account when they've already unlocked loads of levels?

Ok, looks like this is just a Top 8 - any offers for any more?

eLearning Worst Practice Top 10

2010-06-25T20:47:00.000+01:00

Inspired by Scott Wilson who suggested an education equivalent of websites that should never have been built, I present my top 10 eLearning Worst Practice examples...think about your learning environment module areas and (hopefully!) feel smug.

1. Forcing students to download a Word document or Powerpoint file when there's only one paragraph or one picture which could have been read much more easily on the website.

2. Creating an empty discussion board within your course and expecting students to use it without any input or guidance.

3. Not checking through your links regularly and expecting students to figure out where you meant the URL to go.

4. Leaving old content live and expecting the students to know which stuff relates to them.

5. Hiding things - structuring your online content in a way that suits you but doesn't reflect the way the content is taught face-to-face.

6. Poor grammar and spelling.

7. Failing to communicate - not using announcement mechanisms to let students know what new content is available, or replying to their messages.

8. Not telling the students your expectations - e.g. they should check messages twice a week, post on forums at least twice.

9. And giving them false expectations of how often you will reply to posts - if you only check weekly, they need to know that.

10. Overload! There are a lot of tools out there, but selecting the appropriate ones and turning off everything else removes confusion and focuses attention.

Tech-up your lectures

2010-06-23T13:20:00.012+01:00

Yesterday I had my first opportunity to explore our new Huxley Building. I'm always excited by new University buildings, because they'll be full to the brim with new technology for me to explore. This building met my expectations - not only with it's solar panels and green roof, but also in it's teaching facilities.

The Huxley Building

This is the main 300 seater lecture theatre. Two projectors, a rack of kit and a ceiling mounted camera.

The 300 seater lecture theatre

The technology is all controlled from the lecturer's position at the front from a single touchscreen control interface. I've seen a few of these in my time, and this was very intuitive and focussed on making common set ups as easy as possible. For example, you can easily plug in your own laptop, project it onto the left hand screen, then use the visualiser to project an object onto the right hand screen, then reduce the lighting in the theatre to your favourite levels, point the webcam at yourself and record the whole thing down to DVD to carry home with you afterwards.

The audio, lighting and video controls

For those of you who like a bit of infinity, you'll feel the need to do what I did and point the web cam (direction also controlled by the panel above) at the screen and then project it onto the screen. [note: the webcam output is labelled 'DVD' as it is directed via the DVD recorder in case you want to record it.]

Webcam Infinity

And you'll also want to project your giant hand - the visualiser is most impressive.

The Visualiser

Finally, here's a quick look at the other teaching spaces. There are four teaching rooms, arranged in two pairs. Between each pair is a sliding wall, so you can open it up into a double size space and use the projector controls to duplicate the output onto both displays.

The teaching rooms

All of this relates to my previous post on creative learning spaces - true these spaces don't have smell-o-vision and beanbags, but they do have flexibility and modern kit, so I hope lecturers at least find out what their options are. I look forward to an opportunity to present something before too long in Huxley and try it all in anger.

Making Space for Creativity

2010-06-18T21:56:00.004+01:00

Today marked the end of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) focusing in creativity project at the end of the University of Brighton.

The Creativity Centre undertakes research into aspects of creativity and its effective practice and application.

This is acheived through the delivery of creativity related events, sponsorship of creative projects, operation of a creativity fellowship scheme and through the administration of a dedicated creativity centre at the University of Brighton.

For just over three years we've had use of this "Creativity Centre", and it's been an important place for me because every event I've been involved in there has had me attempting to push the boundaries of what the space can do just a little bit further. From enticing conference delegates with peppermint scents through the smell system, to tinting the whole room green for a fictional society, to peering through gaps in walls for a drawing activity, I like to think I've come up with some innovative uses, and produced more memorable experiences as a result. And I am always inspired again when I see how everyone else uses it too, the room actually makes you feel guilty for not pushing it's limits.

To celebrate the work an e-book(pdf) and video have been produced, it's a great film, worth a watch, to remind us that creativity isn't just for artists painting pictures.

Making Space for Creativity HD720p from Docs & Pieces on Vimeo.

I find it interesting to think about what features in the room were most effective - that we could all use to add that magic element to slightly lower budget spaces where we live and work. For me, the ability to write on the walls - ALL the walls - opens up great possibilities. And everyone loves the beanbags - such a different dynamic to sitting in chairs. I'm minded to label our meeting room as a "creative space" and make people feel guilty for just standing up giving powerpoints. We should use the creative label as an excuse to try things out, make it different and play just a little bit more.

Thanks to Steve, Richard, Paul & Angela from the Centre for a great celebration today and for putting up with all my boundary pushing!

Do you use Facebook the way Facebook think you should?

2010-06-10T20:41:00.003+01:00

The answer to that is 'yes' according to Associate Professor Rebekah Russell-Bennet from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Facebook's market positioning matches user's perceived values of the service. If that sounds like marketing speak, it is, I've been to a seminar at our Business School entitled:

“The relationship between strategic positioning and perceived value of social networking sites”

Rebekah was presenting some recent survey results looking at users of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube to see how they used and perceived each of the services and how this matched with the social networking sites own perceived positions.

I found the methodology very interesting - trying to make sure she had a truly randomised sample of the population - and not just a convenient sample meant that from over 1000 targeted consumers she ended up with less than 400 responses, most of which were Facebook and YouTube users.

The general findings were that Facebook and YouTube are more popular with users and users are clear what the services are for. MySpace users are less clear on it's position (and is on the way out) and Twitter users likewise have no clear idea of the values of the service but this might be because it's relatively new.

As an 'advanced' (can I say that?) Twitter user I was not surprised with the results, but am saddened as I know the value that Twitter has, but find it very hard to help others make the most of it. Either they aren't prepared to put the time into building up their network, or are unable to find like minded people to follow/follow them so end up getting bored knowing nobody sees their tweets.

I'd be interested in doing some more detailed research on Twitter looking at only users who regularly use the service (to rule out the majority of registered users who signed up a year ago and have tweeted once and didn't get it). I'd like to see how wide their network is, whether they successfully mix work and personal and whether there are strong pockets of subject specialisms on Twitter that aren't related to tech/information/communication.

Stop, Look & Listen - the Modality Principle for verbal and visual information

2010-05-26T21:09:00.006+01:00

A few weeks ago, I agreed to be interviewed for an MSc project (on 'playfulness in adults'). The researcher conducted the interviews using Google Talk, part of the Google Mail tool.

It was an interesting experience for me, as I'd never taken part in an interview using instant messaging in this way. On the positive side, the nature of the tool meant that I had plenty of time to consider, spell and construct my responses. And of course there was a complete transcript available for the researcher at the end of it (screengrab above). But on the negative side it was a truly strange experience, because I got no visual feedback at all from the interviewer. She intentionally asked very open questions, and then left me to type...whenever I asked her if I was answering the way she expected she said I could answer however I liked, and with no encouraging nods or smiles I have no idea whether I was on the right track at all! I found myself looking at her little icon on the chat screen as that was all I had to go on. In fact the interview took 2 hours rather than the 45 mins she had anticipated.

I spoke to my colleagues about this, and when I mentioned the lack of feedback Adam told me about The Modality Principle. It basically says that:

"items presented both visually and verbally are better remembered"

I think this holds true even for an interview. I needed those visual clues to help the verbal stuff flow. We've seen the same thing with academic podcasts - when converted to video with a talking head it makes the material so much more engaging than pure audio.

Of course you may have valid reasons for wanting your interviewee to feel uncomfortable and have no guidance...in which case stick with the IM!

Learning through Stories - pick and mix!

2010-05-11T18:44:00.004+01:00

I spent this afternoon at a "Learning through Stories" workshop, organised by our Centre for Learning and Teaching. The idea was that anyone across the university could share their experience in using stories - in whatever context. As a result, we got a really interesting mix of 6 different sessions (mini write-ups below). The audience was mixed too (academics from the Business School, Education, Media and Nursing and staff involved in staff development, student support etc).

The afternoon was successful - for those of you at Brighton you can continue the conversation on the community. There is likely to be another event where we can see more examples, and also follow up on some of the below by co-coaching each other to share our experiences.
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Gina Wisker (Centre for Learning and Teaching) – Encouraging reflective professional practice through storytelling
Gina talked about storytelling as a technique to help students reflect, to engage and to anticipate problems. This works in teaching as well as for professional development. By talking through what has happened as a story you can retell it with different endings - 'what if?' to try and find a resolution.

Gilly Smith (Journalism/Broadcast Media) - The constraints of professional language on business and academia.
Gilly talked about the importance of "I" in journalism, and how the constraints of academic writing mean however passionate you are about your work you remove yourself from it in the write-up. She observed that academics are untrained in telling stories and to recognise who they themselves are within a story.

She talked about the power of encapsulating an idea (e.g. an abstract) in 60 words - a good exercise to do to show you really know what the work is about. She reminded us to use: Who, what, where, when, why, how and so what? as questions to ask in our writing.

We digressed onto twitter and the skill of encapsulating what you want to say in 160 characters, but also recognised the importance of the richness of detail in some contexts.

Angela Rogers (Creativity Researcher) - Methods that use imagery to generate stories and elicit personal narratives
Angela gave us three image based strategies to trigger, support and generate stories. The first was to look at challenging images (like this):

..and try and find a who, what, where, when and why. (It turns out this is a tradition in Spain for the jumping 'devil' to protect these children from hernias...).

The second example involved ordering a series of photos into a storyline, where there was no correct answer. We all tried to make vaguely real and sensible stories, but Angela reminded us we can fill in the gap between one photo and the next with whatever we wanted - murder, aliens etc.

The last technique was a minimal pre-prepared storyboard. Her example was for students about to go on their first teaching placement. The students got to annotate and detail the storyboard to work through their feelings of what they were to embark on the next day.

Katie Piatt (Academic Computing) - Games based learning, and using stories to increase engagement.
Yes, this was me talking about Alternate Reality Games - regular readers have already read plenty about that topic ;-}

Laetitia Zeeman (Nursing) - Examples (from practice) of how to use stories in a healing context i.e. narrative therapy.
Laetitia gave us a series of questions that can be used in one to one therapy conversations to help people build up a rich affirmative story of events in their lives. The therapist can help co-construct an alternative account by following different conversational paths.

David Simpson (Education) - Discussion on connections between drama and writing in all genres
David got us doing some role exercises, using a teacher-in-role technique to get students comfortably talking about complex topics. By taking centre stage in the role play himself it put the students (us!) more at ease. The effort is on the part of the lecturer to prepare the situation and the roles in order to not simplify a discussion to 'for and against' but to allow the conversation to include a full spectrum of shades, then when the students come to writing they have much more to draw on.

The Secret of eAnything

2010-05-04T19:27:00.004+01:00

This was going to be called the Secret of eLearning, but upon reflection (and replies from my lovely crowd of twitter followers) I realise it applies to all tech stuff, hence eAnything.

And yes, it's sort of stating the obvious, but it's such a key bit of obvious I wanted to talk about it.

"in every service we build online, good communication & engagement is so much more important than the tech"
twitter

I'm coming round to believe that the choice of platform (be it eLearning, Intranet, Social web or whatever) although important (in terms of the choice of tools you have open to you), the really important factors in terms of success of a service, are:

1. how well you communicate with users about what the service is for and how they can use it

and

2. how easy and rewarding you make it for them to engage with the service

I think the clearest examples are thinking about the reasons why people love facebook and hate their corporate intranet. It explains why despite everything you do students always complain about not being able to find things and disliking your learning environment. To start to fix it, we need to improve our communication (both ways of course, listening is under-rated!) so they know how it works and why we're doing what we're doing the way that we're doing it.

Of course it's better if you think about 1 and 2 before you release the service rather than after. If you want some ideas on how to achieve number 2, then I'll point you at my Fun Engineer post.

Fun Engineers and the Engagement Economy

2010-04-22T21:53:00.014+01:00

This post is a summary of the Engagement Economy ("the future of massively scaled collaboration and participation") research by Jane McGonigal. The 21-page paper dates from September 2008, but I feel the research is very timely for anyone introducing new systems. As Jane says:

Organisations...may benefit greatly from looking to the online "fun engineers" for lessons in how to drive meaningful, passionate engagement with... increasingly crowd-dependent projects

The paper begins with an example of a major collaborative site (Cambrian House - commercial crowd sourced business development) which failed as users were happy to look and rate but did not participate, leaving the "work" to the site founders. The site had attention but not engagement.

Increasingly companies hope to reap the rewards of collaborative working (internal wikis, social networks for employees) - aiming to create a large scale community, collectively producing data, ideas or content. The value of the output is entirely dependent on the quality and quantity of the contributions.

The main obstacle is whether this is a sustainable model - if people belong to multiple networks where do they contribute most? and recognise that people are not an infinite resources. Not all collaborative projects can thrive, so we need to "optimise participation bandwidth".

They identify three key elements to be successful in this "Engagement Economy":

1. Create Emotional Incentives

Financial incentives don't work, you want a passionate crowd - positive emotions are the reward. You should design 'feel good' tasks that can be accomplished quickly and easily (training is all well and good, but making it simpler is a better first step).

You should aim to:

make them feel smart
- exercise some unused mental capacities
let them 'make a mark'
- the pleasure of changing something in the world
have a 'desire to do a good thing'
- create a love of the project "if we all work together we can achieve this goal"

2. Understand Diverse Rewards and Design for the Pyramid of Participation

In any communitiy there is no typical user - consider what the participant wants, and how much they are willing to contribute.

There are usually a few wildly active participants (top) and a large group, barely active (bottom). You should capitalise on this - give ambitious tasks to top users and one-off or micro-tasks to the bottom. This is your pyramid, the base of the pyramid supports the top.

"Triggers" (such as an email) can explicitly prompt a bottom participant to do something - this is likely the only way to get those users to engage.

3. Build in Fun Mechanics and Create Meaningful Work to Extend the Life cycle of Participation

By 'fun' we mean self-imposed work. Engagement like this requires "flow" (a positive emotional state) which you achieve with immediate feedback, a clear sense of objectives and failure states, and a challenge level that is not too easy or too hard. Typically "levelling" (reward users with new status or powers) maintains this kind of engagement. Anyone who puts in enough effort can rise to the top of the pyramid, breaking the authority view of top jobs having the top status.

There must always be work available to allow leveling (avoid nothing-to-do syndrome), as soon as a project is boring the users will probably go and participate in something else. Leveling is now a tool in use well outside the gaming arena.

What does an organisation need to do?

Hire: Researchers and Interactive designers with backgrounds in online gaming and playful social network design. The strategic input of an engagement engineer ("fun engineer") either permanantly or as a consultant to ensure resources are being invested in projects with a high likelihood of engagement.

Management: Set reasonable internal expectations for participation levels. Be aware that their members are probably already involved in external communities which probably provide better emotional payoffs than their job. Find out what they get from these communities to provide lessons on introducing fun flows into the organisation's primary business practices.

--

I think the reason this paper struck such a chord with me is that "engagement engineering" is something I've been drawn towards for a while but hadn't had the theory or vocabulary to talk about. Although not always applicable to more mundane projects I think it provides an alternate perspective to consider when planning internal services, which can only be for the better.

"Social Networks Were Created by Geeks to Attract Girls"

2010-04-21T20:03:00.006+01:00

My favourite topic at the moment is how the nature of communication is changing, particularly with regard to social networks. And despite not wanting to make this all about gender, the studies I see seem to continually emphasise the differences in male and female behaviour.

For the record, I completely disagree with the title of this post - but I love the quote. It's taken from the comments of a 2008 study finding that Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks. The article looks at the major social networks and confirms that women outnumber men in all age categories on all of the networks - except Linkedin.

I don't have the answers as to why this is (women's desire to share/communicate/socialise?) but surely something is changing in society if increasingly communications are happening via social networks, and it's the women that are dominating this area.

Another social media survey, from website's magazine called "Let's Hear it for the Ladies" found that increasingly 'online women' refer to blogs and message boards when making purchasing decisions. Women like the peer-to-peer reviews, and the notion of trust seems key to me. It doesn't state how men make their purchasing decisions. Personally, I'm quite happy to trust the reviews of strangers on amazon for my new toaster - but if a friend on facebook told me not to buy it, then that probably would change my mind. That's assuming of course I'd already shared the fact I was thinking of buying a toaster in order for them to respond...

Actually, I do need a new toaster, any recommendations?

My Vicarious Life

2010-04-20T20:11:00.001+01:00

Last Sunday was the first Brighton marathon, and I enjoyed every 26 and a bit miles of it. Well vicariously I did...! I didn't run it, but Brighton is full of twitterers, the hashtag #brightonmarathon was in use well in advance, so when the day dawned the stream was already very active, full of well wishers, nervous runners and toilet queue updates.

The local paper also did a live stream pulling tweets along with posted messages from readers and their journalists - here's one from later in the day where my stormtrooper photo was retweeted by the official twitter account (little did I know that EVERYONE had posted photos of the stormtrooper).
So despite having personally witnessed only a tiny piece of the event, I really felt quite involved with it.

I've also been following various conferences recently via twitter - there was a Games Based Learning conference in London a few weeks ago I would have loved to have attended, but luckily several people I follow were there and posted all the best bits including video links.

This got me thinking about the power of vicariously living through events as a learning tool. We already know about the power of twitter to connect people and to harness the knowledge of the network, but this is about sharing the experiences of the network.

At the extreme end of this, imagine an operation (please go with me on this) - and consider the twitter stream from the patient, the surgeon, the family members and the observing student as the operation happens. I suggest that following everybodies perspective - live - is even better than actually being there from a learning point of view.

(I think this could also make a great teaching exercise with students taking the roles and posting their own messages into a stream for the other students to discuss)

I am starting to consider if a recording/archive of tweets of an event has the same value as watching them come in live. My instinct is that it doesn't. I'm sure if I was trying to fake a tweet stream experience I would end up over-editing the displayed posts and no doubt lose some of the richness. The fact that it's really happening, now, is the key.

And finally, thank you to all the tweeters out there who let me follow their marathon runs, their conference sessions and moments of their lives so that this is possible. Somebody actually has to have the experiences after all!

Managing your IT services the ITIL way (my Cheat's guide to ITIL)

2010-04-07T20:59:00.007+01:00

ITIL is big news at work lately, but nobody seems to be able to give me a decent summary of what it is, how it works and what new buzzwords I need to drop into committee meetings. So I've decided to write my own. I've never read the books either, but I've assimilated a whole lot of other people's work into this summary post.

ITIL - Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Ok, it's all about managing IT services, and the library is a set of books full of checklists, best practices and processes to help you do this effectively. Like a "how-to" guide for your IT infrastructure.

By using these best practice processes you can plan, deliver and support your IT services without fumbling your way through it or reinventing the wheel each time, and with resulting improved quality and speed.

Process is the key idea. Think about services in terms of the overall goal for the organisation - like a quality eLearning platform - and the processes needed to achieve that. But don't think about your IT sections doing their own thing, the network guys do this, the training guys do that. The individual teams need to really trust the process so they can achieve their bit of it - this can be a hard change of mindset for some (implementing ITIL is a culture change as well as a process change).

An example of ITIL recommendations for a service desk would be to have a single point of contact for users and a systematic way of managing their request:
Log -> Classify -> Investigate -> Diagnose -> Resolution

Change management is another biggy - making sure you assess the impact of any change and that all changes are authorised, tracked and communicated.

The ITIL wikipedia page has a list of the 5 volumes that make up ITIL v3 (the latest version). The books and courses to become ITIL accredited are expensive. Luckily, JISC Infonet has provided a set of infokits on process review and other aspects to provide best practice advice to UK educational institutions like universities. These resources are freely available.

Sound like you know what you're talking about:
"the complete service management life cycle."
"align IT throughout the entire business enterprise"
"Automating the Service Life Cycle"
"promoting Continual Service Improvement"
"capacity planning"
"impact analysis"

Want more?

This Beginner's Guide to ITIL (powerpoint presentation) from Dennis Adams has some great diagrams and more examples than I've included here. Worth a look.

There is also an interesting set of 13 case studies of Universities that are implementing ITIL - interesting to see how far they are and how they are handling different aspects.

Why Outlook will not rule my life.

2010-04-07T20:47:00.001+01:00

There has been some discussion recently about a communication strategy for the university, which has got me thinking about how I would write a future communication strategy for a large institution. And surprise, surprise, my strategy involves a LOT less email in my life!

A couple of posts have shaped my current thinking on this topic, Ben Werdmuller's post on How Social Networks can Replace Email, and a post I picked up on twitter by @grahamperrin called Microblogging inside the Firewall.

Now before I start on what I want, I thought I would give a passing consideration to what other people might like, so I tweeted: What are my ideal communication channels? If you could choose, would you have less via email and more via discussion boards/RSS feeds etc?

And here are the replies:

In theory yes but email is just too convenient - the inbox is always in my face but RSS feeds are more in the background
depends on what I'm communicating, and the expected & needed speed & detail of response
I suspect RSS is still relatively niche as compared to email
I'd like it better if outlook messages were threaded
Outlook message are threaded in the latest version, but would still prefer an email alternative.
anything with a bayesian filter that lets me prioritise messages based on content.
A decent search capability.
Direct person-to-person messaging shouldn't be for automatic updates: those via RSS. But then, I'm not a typical use case.

I've talked to colleagues about this too, and as much as people seem to want to have twitter-style and feed-style news, they then want email alerts about all of it. And they all want to resort back to email as soon as something is considered "important". I'm all in favour of choice, so if people want to receive email alerts of all the systems we implement then that's fine by me, as long as I can choose not to.

Speaking of email, as Ben points out, the analysis firm Gartner released their predictions for social software, and the first is this:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

Just 20%? Please don't let it be so - or let me be in the 20%. In my vision, I do not spend my life glued to my inbox. So, in no particular order, and subject to change, here is how I think (in an ideal world) a large institution should handle it's internal communications:

1. Everyone will use their calendar. Properly. Never again will someone email me a load of dates and ask me about my availability.

2. Any message to a formal grouping (such as a dept or campus etc) will be posted on the central communication site (e.g. Sharepoint, even though we don't have this yet) and will not be emailed to everyone in the group. And yes, they can subscribe to groups and get email notifications if they want. A well designed portal homepage will be key to everyones daily activity to see these messages. The only things sent direct to my email are messages targeted directly at me.

2a. I'll say that again to reinforce it, I'm going to be viewing my inbox differently. Only messages targeted directly at me are in there.

3. And because of this, email attachments only exist for messages sent between individuals, externally or to small informal groupings. All those minutes etc will be properly stored in appropriate team areas.

4. Serendipitous communication, and the ability for every individual to have an easy way to send a message viewable by every other individual is encouraged. I would like to see an internal twitter style solution for this - which is not for really important stuff that shouldn't be missed, but is also not viewed as "fun" and sharing your status, what you're working on etc is encouraged and not frowned upon.

This is a work in progress, and I should restate it is just what I want. But if you work with me, I may well try and talk you round...

Play Games - Save the World

2010-03-25T09:02:00.008Z

I've just watched an awe-inspiring TED video by Jane McGonigal called Saving the world through game dynamics.

Please watch it. Do you think she's really onto something? I'll try and explain why I do. And how we can get everyone on board for this - in the real world.

I'm already signed up to Urgent Evoke, the latest game Jane talks about in the video, but have revisited it this morning to start on my first mission. It's straight into some serious stuff - Secrets of Social Innovation. My mission is to pick one that speaks to me, so I have chosen:

Listen to the right people. Okay, so you probably don’t know what it’s like to carry fifty pounds of firewood on your head. Well, don’t pretend that you do. Talk to someone who has done it. I believe that the key to innovation in international development is truly understanding the problem, and using your imagination is not good enough.

It reminds me of the BBC program I watched a few weeks ago challenging the attitude that "every one could get a job if they actually wanted one and stopped being lazy". It just isn't true, but I kind of thought that it was, because I didn't know the facts. I've never been there. I don't know the solution, but I am at least better informed about the problem.

Yesterday I blogged about Lucy Bradshaw who produces Simulation games at Electronic Arts. Simulation games are another great way of understanding the world and thinking through problems. Making hard choices - education or roads, environment or expensive waste removal..?

So now I'm armed with the skills to explore the issues in a game, I know I need to learn about the real problems by connecting with real people who understand them, and I will try my best to believe that anything is possible. And I have another trick - which I hope is the key to getting more people on board with this, Leaderboards.

The possibilities thrill me. My early explorations of this - using games and leaderboards to educate show potential, but I'm sure this can be taken so much further. I'm sure the likes of Jane and her team will be able to create better and smarter games, but I think the real art will be in recognising and harvesting the ideas that come out of the games and figuring out how to apply them in the real world. Would be a shame if a kid posted the solution to poverty but nobody picked up on it.

My Favourite Game (Ada Lovelace Day 2010)

2010-03-24T07:28:00.000Z

Last year for Ada lovelace day, I wrote about Marissa Meyer, Google's Vice President, Search Products and User Experience. This year I thought I'd fine another woman high up in a company I love - Apple. But I was to be disappointed, there are no female executives at Apple. There is one on the Board of Directors - Andrea Jung, but her role seems more Business than Tech (so sorry Andrea, you don't count for Ada Lovelace). So what are my other loves ? Let's talk games...

For me, the best kind of games are simulations. Sim City in it's various versions has consumed months of my life. I have worried about whether my citizens would have enough water, and whether they'd mind if I sacrificed their beloved roads in favour of a decent education for their children. In fact, despite not having played it for years I would still classify it as "my favourite game" because it was so influential on me.

I was delighted to discover that the producer behind the latest versions of Sim City, and the Sims and SPORE (a entire life modeller) is a woman. So this year for Ada Lovelace Day I have chosen Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer at Electronic Arts.

Here's her summary biog (2008) from 50 Top Women in Technology

"When people say “Get a life” these days, they may be talking about a virtual version—most notably the video games that enable you to simulate your own societies and your own virtual persons to populate them. Charged with developing a sequel to the most popular digital dollhouse for adults, Bradshaw knocked the pixelated ball out of the park: The Sims 2, on which she was executive producer, was one of the top-selling PC games of 2005 and 2006. She has also watched over the releases of SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The series continues to be among the industry’s most lucrative franchises, with the Sim titles alone accounting for more than $1 billion in sales. Bradshaw worked for Activision and LucasArts before joining Maxis after it was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997. These days she’s teamed up with Sims creator Will Wright on Spore, an epic game modeled on the evolution of life. —BAP"

An interview with EA Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw on the making of Spore

In honour of Lucy, and Ada Lovelace, I downloaded SPORE for my iPhone last night and spent a while helping my little blog evolve in the primordial ooze.

Well done Lucy, not only for the great games that you help produce, but for being a glamourous women high up in your male-dominated profession.

Tell me a story

2010-03-22T18:21:00.004Z

I've signed up for a University of Brighton workshop in May called "Learning Through Stories" which is going to:

"explore the idea of enhancing learning through stories, story development by educators and or fellow learners, the construction of stories to convey a set of learning objectives, the conversion of planned, emergent or experiential learning into stories to help others learn and, the translation of learning from stories from one domain to another, and more."

I've offered a session on game-based-learning and how narrative can be used in games to increase engagement. I want to feature some local examples as well as some I'm aware of from colleagues externally.

I thought I'd post mini-summaries here of what I've got in mind for my bit and would appreciate any additions you may have to this list - comment below or email me if you prefer - thanks!

Introduction to ARGs in Education (Alternate Reality Games)
"a format which blurs the line between reality and fiction, game and real life, online and offline, creating an immersive experience for its participants."

diagram from Nicola Whitton, Argosi

more information: ARGOSI introduction, Viewfinder article by Alex Moseley (pdf)

ARGOSI
Manchester Metropolitan University
ARGOSI was an alternate reality game with an "ongoing story that runs throughout the game provided coherence and context to the challenges, and the game community provided a forum for students to share information, provide hints for each other and work together. As well as the universal induction aims of encouraging students to make new friends and get to know the city, in this pilot the focus was on a single area of the induction curriculum: introductory library and information skills."

more information: ARGOSI website

Who is Herring Hale? (Alternate Reality Game)
University of Brighton - 2006
A pilot project to investigate the use of game formats to introduce support information and services, primarily to first years:
• An online and offline treasure-hunt game
• Fun, intriguing and engaging
• Optional for all students
• Develops key IT and social skills
• Encourages awareness of support services
• 1 (30 minute) clue per week over the term

more information: Overview blog post

What is GG? (Alternate Reality Game)
University of Brighton - 2007
The next implementation of ARG building on lessons learned from "Who is Herring Hale?"

The Great History Conundrum
University of Leicester - 2008
"Responding to a need within a first-year undergraduate History module to improve take-up and engagement by students of the critical analysis and filtering of internet-based historical resources, the innovative Great History Conundrum project used paradigms from online social networks and immersive online alternative reality games to create a four-week long activity based in problem solving, collaboration and competitive play. Through the solution of a number of puzzles of varying difficulty, high level searching, filtering and criticism skills were taught. Collaboration and reflection were encouraged through the use of discussion forums and the construction of a collective wiki (a resource the students will be able to use throughout the rest of their degree) , and carefully constructed assessment criteria encouraged and assessed engagement with the activity and concepts. The activity additionally served to develop a community of practice early in the undergraduate course, hence improving engagement and performance in the wider academic context."

more information: ALT-C abstract, Overview blog post

World of Warcraft Grading
Indiana University 2009
"Last year, Sheldon replaced the traditional grading system in two of his game design classes with a system that is based on experience points (XP), which were typically used to track progress in role-playing games. Students commenced the program as avatars at level one, which corresponded to zero XP and a grade of ‘F’. They gained XP by completing ‘quests’, ‘fighting monsters’ and ‘crafting’– in other words, giving presentations, sitting quizzes and exams, and handing in projects."

more information: Overview blog post

Twitter - is it really only for the web geeks?

2010-03-17T09:51:00.006Z

* note, in this post I'm only interested in Twitter as a communication tool, I know lots of people like Twitter for following celebs, which is fine, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I had a placement student to amuse for a few hours yesterday, so I set him the tasks of doing some analysis of way the University of Brighton uses Twitter. Interesting results.

I had already identified 60 twitter accounts belonging to University of Brighton staff or services - and I think this is a relatively complete list. There are of course no doubt many more accounts belonging to our students and possibly our staff, but for this analysis I'm sticking to the ones that use real names and admit to the affiliation(!)

So, of the 60 accounts:

10 are functional (related to services like the SU newspaper) and 50 are personal
26 belong to Information Services, 13 to the Students' Union, 11 to the academic schools
14 have tweeted within 24 hours, 24 haven't tweeted for over a month and 3 have never tweeted.

What do I make of this? Well I suppose it isn't surprising that a lot of individuals who work in Information Services have personal twitter accounts - but what I'm interested in is how many of them have continued as active users of the service. ie for whom, and where does Twitter work well?

So of the 26 Information Services accounts, 17 have tweeted within the last month. That's pretty high I think.

I'm giving a session at our Summer Learning & Teaching conference entitled "Twitter - Build your Personal Research Network" and the point I want to make there is the importance of building a network, otherwise, like all social networks, it's all a bit silent and pointless.

I believe that only if you invest the time in building and maintaining your network (the usual advice, be interesting, join in, share, reply, retweet) that you can reap the benefits of tools like Twitter.

Information Services professionals are probably well placed to understand and make use of Twitter. But I'd like to help those without such high exposure to the tools to take advantage of them too - where it's appropriate. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is just full of technophiles/learning technologists and web geeks...and maybe if you're into molecular biology building a useful network isn't possible. I don't know. Are there any molecular biologists out there looking for company?

If any of you have any great examples of subject specific Twitter usage (and no IT/Education or related subjects allowed) then I'd love to hear them.