Using Video to Break Down Learning Barriers

Following on from last week's webinar, I'm very pleased to see the publication of a Blackboard/Kaltura case study on how we are using Kaltura at NUI Galway.

I'd particularly like to acknowledge Oliver Ryan (Physics) and Susan Folan (Acadamh) for their contributions to the case study.

Read the full case study to find out how Oliver and Susan have been using Kaltura to support their students' learning.

We have also been featured recently on the Blackboard blog, in a nice write up by Katie Drossos.

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Kaltura on Blackboard at NUI Galway

I am very pleased to participate in this afternoon's webinar, hosted by Blackboard, on how we are using the Kaltura building block for video at NUI Galway.

Here are the slides that I'm going to be presenting with:



To find out more about Kaltura at NUI Galway, take a look at our Blackboard blog. Our guide for instructor users describing the Kaltura building block can be found on our Blackboard support site.


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Hiding behind my avatar

I joined twitter on 20th February 2009, three and a half years ago.

At the time I was very skeptical; I had no idea of the effect twitter would have on my professional life or the wealth of contacts I would build up in my Personal Learing Network (PLN).

Being a shy individual, an introvert in fact, I felt uncomfortable about using my own photograph for my profile image, so I chose an image that represented me: a cup of coffee. I do like good coffee, and sometimes tweet about it. The image certainly said something about me, as a person. I also felt somewhat protected, lurking on twitter, hiding behind my avatar, thinking I was unnoticed, anonymous in some way.

The cup of coffee lasted for about 6 months, until I met @vonprond at a conference in Galway. In fact, Ferdinand was the first person I followed on twitter. He commented that I looked completely unlike my image: he'd been expecting a large cup of coffee. I realised that my perceived anonymity did not exist and it would not be possible to separate my real life from my twitter existence. 

 

Still being a shy individual and uncomfortable using my own photograph, I created an avatar representing myself using the Mad Men Yourself avatar generator. After a new haircut, this was further updated to my current image, which I've used for about 2 years.

I have been told that I look a little bit like my twitter image (or should that be the other way round?). I have even been recognised at conferences, twice. But it's clear that most people don't recognise me when they meet me in real life. I'm fairly comfortable with that. But, I wonder if I'm still hinding behind the avatar and is it prohibiting me from a deeper engagement with my PLN when I meet them in real life? 

In some sense, my twitter persona is an alter-ego of myself. She says things in public that I would never say in a room full of people.

In the last year, or so, I've noticed more of my PLN using photos of themselves, and I'm wondering if it's time to change?  

There's another issue. Having used this image for about 2 years, it has now become my "brand". The image, in itself, is recognisable to my followers, even if they don't associate it with the real-life me. Would I be wise to change it now?

And so, dear PLN, I put the question to you. Should I change my profile pic to a real image of myself, or not? Let me know what you think. 

Related Post: I got a big response to this article and have written a follow-up, where I explain why I decided not to change my avatar.

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Welcome to the #cel263 class of 2012

This afternoon I am meeting with our new intake of academic staff on the Learning Technologies module. It looks like we have a great group of people this year and I'm looking forward to working with them to explore their use of technologies in teaching and learning.

This afternoon we'll be introducing ourselves and I'll run through the structure of the module - 7 workshops, each addressing a different theme. Over the next few months we hope to introduce participants to some new technologies and new ways to use those technologies to support teaching.

Today we'll also take a look at some social networking. Fiona will introduce an activity based around social bookmarking, and then we're going to have some fun using twitter. We're using the hashtag #cel263, so please keep up with participants by following the tag, and join in the conversation.

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Embedded twitter timelines in Blackboard

This week, I've been preparing for the start of our Learning Technologies module - offered to academic staff as part of our Higher Diploma in Academic Practice at NUI Galway. I have blogged, in the past, about the wonderful work carried out by participants on the module, and we have done some initial investigations into the longer term impact of the module.

Using the old twitter embed code

Twitter is just one of the many tools we use as part of the module, both to support communication between participants, and for them to reflect on how they might make use of it in their own teaching practice. Since we also use Blackboard as our VLE, it's useful to bring the course twitter feed into the Blackboard course, to help link various strands together.

In the past, embedding a twitter feed was not straightforward, but was certainly possible. A quick google search would bring up instructions, and allowed us to produce some nice results (see image).

So, I was really delighted to see that just last Friday, Twitter have announced a new way to embed timelines, making it easier to embed a public twitter stream into a webpage. The old embed codes will no longer work from March 2013.




Since I was already working on my Blackboard course for the current year, I thought I'd give it a try.

Step 1: When logged into twitter.com, go to your settings page and select Widgets from the left menu bar.

Step 2: Click Create New, to create and configure a new timeline widget.

Step 3: Choose a timeline source. In my case, I want to search for course related tweets, using the #cel263 tag. I leave everything else at the defaults. The preview is looking good so far!

Step 4: List the domains where this widget will be embedded. I use the domain for this blog, and also the domain for blackboard (which is on a secure server).

Step 5: Click on Create widget. Success, my widget has been created and I just have to copy the embed code!

Step 6: Now, in my Blackboard course, I create a new item and paste the embed code into it. I'm done!

Except that this wasn't really what I was expecting...a rather disappointing "Tweets about..." link.

Clicking on the link will open a new page, but produces a Blackboard error message.

It's not particularly elegant!

When I first encountered the problem, I tweeted about it. I've had a couple of replies from other people experiencing the same issue.

Anybody else having problems with new twitter embedded timelines in Blackboard? bit.ly/OmRuEi
— Sharon Flynn (@sharonlflynn) September 6, 2012

I also posted on the Official Timeline Questions blog, but to date have seen no reply.

Has anybody figured this out? Please let me know. For the moment, I'm sticking with the old embed code.

21 September 2012: Update

Hooray! The embedded twitter widget is now working for me. The problem, it appears, was with secure sites (https) but a fix has been implemented. Now, what I see when I insert the code is much, much nicer.

31 January 2013: Update

In response to a couple of queries, I didn't implement the fix, I presume Twitter did. The one change I did make in the narrative above is in the list of domains at step 4. This now looks like:

I don't know how important the last *.blackboard.com is, but it might make all the difference!


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Translation, Technology and Autonomy in Language Teaching and Learning

Congratulations to our team member, Labhaoise Ní Dhonnchadha, and her collaborators Pilar, Laura and Dorothy, on the publication of this collection of contributions on Translation, Technology and Autonomy in Language Teaching and Learning.The collection is based on a very successful conference that took place at NUI Galway in December 2010.

From the book synopsis:

This volume brings together contributions from academics, language teachers and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to discuss questions of autonomy and technology in the area of language learning and translation. The book focuses on English, French, Italian, Irish and Spanish language acquisition, but many of the essays also develop an interlinguistic perspective from a plurilingual point of view.
The book opens with key contributions from a number of leading scholars: Dr Daniel Cassany on critical literacies, Professor Henrik Gottlieb on translation into 'minor' languages, and Professor David Little on autonomy in language learning. These are followed by explorations of translation, technology, intercultural issues, autonomous learning and the European Language Portfolio. The volume represents an important contribution to the development of new plurilingual approaches to language teaching and learning.

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Creating video for teaching

Using video in your teaching can be a great way to get a message across and to enhance student engagement. There are some great videos available on YouTube, iTunesU or TED Talks, for example, that can be used to illustrate a concept or give additional information.

In the last year, we've seen an increase in the number of academic staff who are creating their own videos for use in teaching. See, for example, the NUI Galway Microbiology channel on YouTube, Derek Molloy's (DCU) award-winning channel on Digital Electronics, or setting up the oscilloscope in a Physics lab.

Certainly, recording something on my mobile phone and uploading it to YouTube is surprisingly easy. But how easy is it to create something a little bit more professional and useful for teaching purposes?

With these questions in mind, I went along to Irene McCormick's presentation at the EdTech conference in Maynooth in May. Irene is from IT Carlow and she is responsible for this NDLR-funded video, illustrating why you might want to use a tripod when recording video.


At her presentation, Irene gave some compelling reasons why we might want to bother with video: that it supports innovative methods of teaching, learning and assessment; it's good for our own professional development; it can involve students, particularly where they are producing video; and it can be good fun!

She stressed some important points, the main one being Keep It Simple. Don't use gimmicks, stick to the storyline and aim for high levels of continuity.

Creating video involves three stages. The planning stage is the most important to get right - never go out with a camera and start filming. Consider equipment, your team, dates, locations, actors and whether there is any A/V support available. Write a script. Irene recommends using something like celtx, which I will have to investigate.

The second stage is production, where you actually get out with your video camera. Again, Irene recommends a simple approach: no need for zooming; work methodically; and use a tripod.

The final stage is post-production, where you edit your video. Again, this can be kept very simple; no complicated transitions. Irene recommends Final Cut Pro, but if you're just starting out, Windows MovieMaker does pretty much everything you need (and it's free).

If you're based at NUI Galway, you can use our Kaltura connector on Blackboard to upload your final masterpiece to Blackboard for your students' consumption. Otherwise, YouTube, BlipTV or Vimeo are all possibilities for hosting video in the cloud.

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International Turnitin User Group Meeting

The International Turnitin User Group meeting took place on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead, just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. This was a great opportunity to meet with Turnitin representatives as well as other Turnitin users, to compare experiences and find out about the product roadmap.

After a welcome from Will Murray (VP International), Christian Storm (CTO) gave an update on recent developments and current research in the Turnitin suite.

It's clear that there has been a shift in focus from plagiarism detection towards supporting assessment and feedback, with a view to improving student outcomes. Turnitin aims to be the complete solution for improving student writing and the best-in-class solution for grading. It seems that the company has really been listening to its customers, and my impression is that future directions are very positive and exciting.

Recent developments include voice based grading (which I haven't played with yet), fewer noisy matches and false positives, translated plagiarism (e.g. via google translate) and support for left to right languages (e.g. Arabic). Current research is looking at more advanced phrase exlusion, so that particular phrases (perhaps specific to the discipline, or "boilerplate" text) can be excluded from reports by assignment, or forever. Turnitin is also working on stylometrics, which can identify changes in writing style, to help address the problem of ghost writing.

On the integration side, Turnitin has been working on new APIs, meaning new integrations for Moodle and Blackboard. Different roles and views are also being considered, to facilitate double marking or read-only access. It was stressed that each institution has different workflows, which are a challenge to defining roles.

During the Q&A session there was lively discussion involving plans for globalisation of the product and adding more languages (must get Irish on the list); legal defensibility of decisions arising from originality reports; support for more varied filetypes and assessment types; PeerMark lite, allowing peer review earlier in the workflow; communication with customers about new product features (still not ideal); customer involvement in beta testing; improved workflow for anonymous marking; and bulk download of originality reports for archival purposes. And all this before coffee!

Somebody raised a question about a dashboard for policy makers - which might allow access to orginiality reports to support benchmarking for individual teachers, departments or even institutions. There was a collective intake of breath at this point. Turnitin executives hastened to reassure that this was not a likely development, and that it would require a huge a amount of data. However, there has been a focus on improved analytics, for students, staff and administrators.

The Product Roadmap
After the coffee break, Steve Golik (VP Product Management) gave us some updates on the product roadmap, repeating the vision of the company To be the world's more innovative and effective technology for improving students' written work.

One welcome development is the GradeMark interactive tutorial, which allows instructors to practice and get used to the functionality of GradeMark without worrying about live student work.

The new Instructor Dashboard is currently being rolled out, providing a more modern entry point and easier navigation. Unfortunately this is not yet available via integrations, but the interface looks clean and user-friendly.

On the horizon are common core rubrics, which will make the sharing of rubrics easier. Also, digital receipts will be accessible within the system, by both instructors and students, improving traceability. There will be more flexible grading and marking, including support for letter grades and decimal points.

Grading on an iPad
In the last 6 months I've been working with a number of academic staff to use of GradeMark to support electronic assessment and feedback for students. One barrier to this has been that the full functionality of GradeMark doesn't work on an iPad.

Perhaps the most exciting development is the new GradeMark iPad app, due for release in January 2013. Steve gave a demo of the current version, which looks very promising. This will be an instructor focussed, grading application, giving full support for grading, voice comments, text comments, access to rubrics, on-paper marking and with originality as a layer. An instructor can grade offline; the app will synch back to the web when the iPad has a suitable connection.

I tried to get a photo of the demo as it was happening, but the screen was just too bright for my camera to focus.

More on What's New with Turnitin is available online and by following @TurnitinProduct on twitter.

That, more or less, brought the User Group meeting to a close, in time for the start of the International Plagiarism Conference, but it was not the end of discussions about Turnitin. I'll blog about the conference in the next couple of days.

Cath Ellis has already written a number of blog posts on the event:

• iParadigms Focus Group
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 1 Keynotes
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 1 Sessions and Workshops
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 2 Keynotes

(I'm beginning to suspect she is WonderWoman)


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International Plagiarism Conference

This afternoon I am UK-bound again, this time to Newcastle, for the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. Having been to two previous events, I'm looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some new ones. I will miss Jo Badge @jobadge, who has moved on to new challenges.

Although not strictly learning technologies, I will post my thoughts on the conference, and will certainly be tweeting from the event - the hashtag is #5ipc. Day 1, Monday, incorporates the Turnitin User Group meeting, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the roadmap for this product.

So, do follow me on twitter for updates. And if you are going to be at the conference, let me know so that we can meet up.

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Centre for Learning Innovation

Yesterday I attended the inaugural event of the Centre for Learning Innovation, a new organisation funded by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA, to bring together industry and research in the area of technologies for learning. The event was held at Croke Park, where the pitch was busy being prepared for the farewell Westlife concerts tonight and tomorrow. (That's not an omen - I hope.) The theme of the event was Learning for Growth, and the purpose was to launch the Centre for Learning Innovation, an organisation which has been in gestation for some years, and which only arrived at its name the previous evening. Yesterday it was announced that the government is to invest €6m in the Centre over the next 6 years.

The first keynote speaker, Donald Taylor (@DonaldHTaylor), chair of the Learning and Performance Institute, spoke about the many changes in Learning Technology in the last 13 years. He identified 3 major changes in that time, leading to new opportunities for the Centre:

1. Learning occurs in a boarderless world, but it's not just the classroom walls that have been broken down. The ubiquity of the internet means that information is available anywhere. Mobile technologies mean that we can access the internet from wherever we happen to be. Moreover, the boarders between work and social life are also breaking down, leading to a blur between formal and informal learning.
2. Information is free. There is no point writing/developing new courses that already exist and are freely available. Business models have got to change, because it will no longer be possible to sell content.
3. The expectations of learners have changed. People want immediate, focussed, social learning. Donald particularly noted the increase of video in "how-to" learning. Learner-generated content brings the notion of authority into question.

From my own experience, and within the context of Higher Education, I don't agree with everything that Donald said: I think it applies more to the context of training in industry.

Donald then looked at how the world is responding to these changes. In Learning and Development, the training model is moving from design, develop and deliver, to one of find, facilitate and filter. He gave some examples of innovative use of technology for training in industry (including Ericsson, Eskom and TTi) and mentioned briefly the Open Courseware movement.

The second speaker of the morning was Jonny Parkes, who is chair of the board for the new Centre for Learning Innovation, representing industry.  Jonny started out by differentiating between "best practice", which is what may be going on today, and "next practice", which means trying to see into the future. He spoked about 3 principles upon which the new Centre will be based.

1. Learn from the past. Jonny gave a very nice overview of learning technology since the 1980s, starting with CBT (interact), through multimedia in the 1990s (engage) and eLearning in the 2000s (connect). None of these were perfect solutions, but we can learn from each of them. What then is the next practice?
2. Be brave, but be open to change. The themes of the Centre will be social learning (search, interoperability, personalised); mobile learning (intelligent content delivery, location based, hands-on learning); immersive learning (agents, games & virtual worlds, augmented reality); metrics and assessments (is it working? are we improving learning?).
3. The need for smart people, including academic partnerships and industry-led collaboration. (Apparently the smart people are all in the heart of Dublin, but I'll let that go)

After the coffee break, Vinny Wade (TCD) gave more detail about the mission of the Centre for Learning Innovation, which will be based at Trinity College Dublin: it is to support breakthrough research for learning innovation, through collaboration with industry. It will not be another learning technology centre, but aims to be a hub for industry and research, with a focus on application and transfer to achieve real results. Vinny identified 5 factors crucial for success

1. Research excellence, achieved through partnerships with research groups in TCD, UCD, NUIG and WIT.
2. A deep understanding of learning and the learning sector.
3. Proven transfer success
4. Industry direction and partnerships
5. Need to lower the risk in technology adoption

Vinny spoke about ensuring that key challenges are defined by industry, while there is a need for use cases and authentic evaluations. The Centre will welcome further industry partners to participate with membership, collaboration and trials.

To date, the percolate project, a precursor of the Centre, has been working in the area of social discovery for learning. The final speakers of the day, Paul Mac Cartney and Lynda Donovan gave a good overview of the work so far in three areas: corporate, schools and higher education.

Focus on Technology
I'm still trying to get together my thoughts on yesterday's event. I can see a role for the Centre for Learning Innovation as a hub to bring together industry and research in technologies for learning. But I do think that the expertise in Teaching and Learning is missing. The "academic" partners of this initiative are research centres and, just because they are based within a higher education institution, doesn't mean that they have expertise in pedagogy or pedagogic research.

The canvas for online learning is certainly changing and moving fast. I found it strange that none of the presenters mentioned any of the recent developments in MOOCs; see this quick snapshot of advances in online education by Catherine Cronin.

Much of the talk yesterday focussed on technology, and there seemed to be a basic view that learning is a matter of finding the best content. But learning is much more than content, and teaching is more than delivery.

There was very little talk yesterday of the learner and no consideration of how people (children, students, employees) learn. This was particularly evident in the final presentation on the homework help system for children. From the evaluation of the system, it appears that it was of more use to "fast" learners than to "struggling" learners. It was suggested that this might be because children of high ability are more proficient at searching. For me, this immediately raises issues of digital literacies, of which there was no mention during the presentation.

So, I think it's worthwhile keeping a watch on this Centre for Learning Innovation. It will be interesting to see how it develops. But I am concerned to see such a focus on the technology and so little on the pedagogy.

All of yesterday's sessions were recorded and will be available on the Centre's website. For the moment, that website is www.percolate.ie.

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Learning about Digital Literacies at EdTech 2012

The last couple of weeks have been busy, between the EdTech 2012 conference organised by ILTA, our own CELT conference, and then a presentation to the WRSLAI event last week. I haven't had time to think!

So, before my memories fade completely, I'll write a couple of blog posts about all these events. I'm starting with the keynote speakers at EdTech 2012, compiled from my notes and tweets, using storify.




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Top Tweeters at #celt12

Using Martin Hawksey's twitter archiving google spreadsheet, we can now reveal the top tweeters at the 10th Galway Symposium: The Written Word - writing, publishing and communication in higher education.

The conversation is still continuing, using the #celt12 hashtag . So far, we have archived more than 1000 tweets from the event.


To see a visual representation of the archive, you can visit the Interactive Archive of #celt12 tweets (static image below). Click on any name to get a list of that person's tweets and interactions.

A full archive of tweets, though it's not particularly pretty, is also available.

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