The Online Student Experience

Following the tweets from the Blackboard World 09 conference taking place in Washington DC over the last few days, I came across this video. I don't think it represents the experience of the students involved in the various online and blended programmes offered at NUI Galway.

However, it does demonstrate very effectively that technology in itself will not improve the student experience.

Britain goes Open

JISC, the Higher Education Academy and England's Funding Council (HEFCE) today launched the new Open Educational Resources porgramme. The programme, which builds on earlier work and combines initiatives such as Jorum, CETIS and InfoNet, has ambitious but achievable aims.

"The programme will make the equivalent of 5,000 undergraduate modules of existing learning resources freely available online. Projects will be working towards being able to sustainably release a much larger pool of resources over a longer period.

The funded projects will run for 12 months and will end on 30 April 2010."

More info is available on JISCs website.

EdTech 2009 Conference Review

We all had a great 10th anniversary EdTech conference experience at the National College of Ireland on May 20-22. The programme was action-packed with 50 papers presented by Irish and international researchers and practitioners around the theme '2020 Vision: Changing Learning Futures Through Technology'.

Keynote speakers included Niall Sclater of the Open University; Theresa Hagan of HMH; and Richard Katz, Vice President of Educause. A really interesting feature of the conference was the use of Twitter, especially in the closing panel session where conference Tweets were visible throughout the open floor discussion.
Other highlights included the pre-conference launch of the NCI NELL usability lab by Leo Casey, and the presentation of inaugural Jennifer Burke Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning to the TCD outreach programme 'A Bridge to College'.

NUIG had a high profile presence at the conference with 5 practitioner and 1 research papers featuring in the programme. Well done Sinead Hahessey, Michael Campion, Mary Dempsey and Elaine Wallace for flying the flag for NUIG.

CELT staff were highly involved in the organisation of the conference with Michelle Tooher sitting on the ILTA Working Group, while Fiona Concannon and Paul Gormley served on the EdTech 2009 Organising Committee. I was also delighted to be voted in as the Chair of the Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA) for the forthcoming year.

...and Sharon Flynn got voted the Twit of the conference - for non-Twitterers, this is a compliment!

Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race

Just back from a fascinating lecture on "Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race' in the race village, where media crew members Anton Paz (TELFONICA BLACK), Gustav Morin (ERICCSSON 3) and Rick Deppe (PUMA) spoke of their experiences filming using high-definition television, on their respective boats. Climbing up the mast, getting hit at 30 knots by waves, and sitting on the bow crashing up and down were all in a day's work. All the while, these media crew members kept a plan or theme in mind and looked for stories and action to document on film or to blog and podcast. Then, below deck, it was time for digitising, compressing, editing and then uploading via the Inmarsat system via satellite, followed by a few snatched hours sleep before doing it all again. This all took place under conditions of keeping electricity usage low (running off disel on these weight conscious boats) and stopping cables and wires from corroding with salty water. Heroic tales!

Dr. Seán Crosson from the Huston School of Film welcomed this rare opportunity to meet these "embedded journalists", as part of the Huston School's two day symposium on Representing Sport. Each of the boats are fitted with five fixed cameras and a delay camera, which is activated by a button to record 2 minutes back and six minutes forward- useful for things that go bump unexpectedly.

One of the biggest challenges noted (aside from sailing around the world at breakneck speeds) was the condensation that builds inside the housing for the HDTV cameras. Gustav spoke of the frustration at lining up a good shot, and then having to stop and somehow open the waterproof housing to clear the condensation and then begin again. Solid state cameras might offer some longer term solutions to the problem, but are unlikely to be as reliable as the DV tapes for the adventure this time around.

You can watch some of the footage on http://www.volvooceanrace.tv/. The replacing of the PUMA rudder mid-Atlantic by Rick Deppe won a media award for the Boston-Galway leg of the race.

Marcus Hutinchson, the race communications director, spoke about the potential to develop a more pedagogic and educational approach to the race, with recognising the value in linkages for learning between stop-over cities for a younger audience. To date, however, the videos, the race viewer (my favourite!), the online game, the regular updates, the weekly TV broadcast, have all combined to give spectators an unprecedented insight into ocean racing. Congrats to all the media production people involved!

Lindsay Jordan: Blogging with Students...how and why

We came across this lovely video yesterday from Lindsay Jordan, educational developer at the University of Bath. Linday's blog is promising an accompanying paper soon.

Learning Technologies Projects

I spent a very pleasant evening yesterday listening to the presentations being given by our students on the Learning Technologies module of our Postgraduate Diploma in Academic Practice. The students are all academic staff members, with busy teaching and administrative workloads, and we have spent the last number of months looking at the use of various technologies in teaching and learning. The project was to consider the use of a technology in their own context. Since each student started the module with a different level of competence in using technologies, the aim of the project was to push each individual beyond their comfort zone.

So, yesterday evening we had a wonderful range of technology use. Projects included:

• Social Networks: using Ning to support Irish language learning; using grou.ps in project work in Botany to promote and support peer-learning; using Blackboard tools to support a research group in Microbiology.
• Video: a Microbiology lecturer has created some short videos to demonstrate skills in the laboratory; a lecturer in Occupational Therapy recorded in a nursing home, in association with the HSE, to create self-instructional videos showing the correct use of wheelchairs.
• Second Life: we were given a fantastic overview of Second Life and shown plans for how students of Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship will have projects based in the virtual world in the next academic year.
• Reflective Logs: students of Speech and Language Therapy will, in future, submit their reflective logs using blogging tools on Blackboard instead of the current practice where they have to travel to the campus to submit paper based versions.
• Blended Learning: although she couldn't be there, one lecturer from Nursing recorded her presentation on lessons learned from moving to a blended learning environment, using a participatory group narrative.

It is great to see how each of these students has moved on and really embedded the use of their chosen technology in their teaching practice. I'm looking forward to the project reports, which are due to be submitted at the end of next week.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

Today's THE article Internet is fostering a 'want it now' culture among students reports on the findings of the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience. This committee has been investigating the impact of Web 2.0 tools on teaching and learning in higher education. The final report is to be published next week.

The findings, as reported in the THE, are not particularly surprising.

• The use of Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning is very patchy, and mainly driven by enthusiastic individuals. However, they can be used very effectively to support collaboration and reflection in students groups.
• The lack of information literacy skills, and critical assessment of resources in particular, is a problem.
• There is a divide between those staff who like to experiment with Web 2.0 tools, and those who are reluctant to engage at all with them.
• Students like traditional, face-to-face interaction.

My own opinion is: it's not the tools that are the problem, or the solution. When used well, they can be very effective. Poor use can promote shallow learning. The lack of information literacy skills is a problem, whether you use Web 2.0 tools or not.

I'll look forward to reading the report of the committee, which will be published on 12th May.

re-Kindle-ing the flame of learning

Amazon's new version of its e-book reader, the Kindle DX was launched officially today. With a larger screen size, the device is also being aimed at the student market with deals being done to provide popular textbooks in electronic format and a number of pilot programmes running in various US universities. With a price of just under $500 however, it might be a little costly for most students.

In previous pilot studies of ebooks in university contexts, one of the key aspects of feedback from student users was the need to provide some means of annotating and commenting on readings, something students often do with their texts or papers that they are reading. No sign that the Kindle has addressed that issue however, but perhaps gradually we're moving towards the device that we really want.

The Future Internet: Web 3.0

The future of the web?

Read more...

Novelist Pens First Book on Smart Phone

This is an amazing story about author Peter V. Brett who has published his first fantasy novel which was written almost entirely on his HP iPaq phone, typing with his thumbs! He reckons about 60% of the novel was written using the smartphone, sometimes on the train to work, in the queue for the bank, or sometimes just sitting in the park. He doesn't like using a laptop!

If Mr Brett did indeed scribe 100,000 words of his novel using his smartphone, does this mean that students can be expected to write essays, reports etc using similar technologies while commuting home at the weekends?

Thanks to @TechCrunch on Twitter for the pointer to the story.

Any book, whenever you want it, freshly printed.

Last year we blogged about the Espresso Book Machine that was unleashed in the US, finding its way into college (and other) bookstores. Now the first has arrived in the UK and is printing on demand in Blackwell's as reported in the Guardian. Purchasers simply select the book of their choice and wait a few minutes for it to be printed and bound.  One on our campus might help perk up the local bookstore - how about it? It only costs £175,000 after all.

Flickr data tracks tourism

Retweeted from New Scientist magazine (@newscientist) : David Crandall at Cornell and colleagues have exploited the increasing use of geotags on (35 million) images submitted to Flickr to map out the 'tourism hotspots' of the world in an example of the sorts of large scale data analysis that can now be performed using social networking and 'web 2.0' tools. The original paper is available here.