Moocs, Music Festivals and Cricket Matches

In July I spent the weekend at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk.  It was the first time I had been to a music festival as opposed to concerts and also the first time I had been camping in a long time.

I blogged about the weekend http://bit.ly/1fuC8tl and very much enjoyed it.

We arrived on the Thursday night and so started to explore on the Friday.  We set off from our small campsite, through a bigger campsite, through the 'village' of shops and facilities and headed towards the arenas.

Then I was struck by the thought 'wow, this is a much bigger place than I expected' and 'I have no idea what to expect or where to find anything' and then realised that I had had this feeling before, in fact very recently.

It was the same sort of feeling as starting a MOOC……

My next thought was ok, what sort of filtering system do I have to put in place in order to make sense of this? 
This has been my immediate response to participating in MOOCs and I thought that although it wasn't exactly the same situation,  there might be some common strategies that could be used?

The similarities were that:

I was in an environment that was massive, there were thousands of people and I didn't know anyone (apart from the person I was with). Thousands of participants and no way of knowing how many or who they were.

I was in an environment that I had signed up to, entered (either physically or virtually) but didn't know what it consisted of – I didn't know the lie of the land.  I could see that the people were in the environment and interacting but didn't have an overview of the whole place.

I could see that the people involved had a purpose, they were individuals or groups and they were there to see/ hear someone or something.  There was an itinerary – i.e. it was possible to find a list of performers (lectures) and there was a list of tents / arenas (rooms) in which you could enter to see the performance.

Most importantly, there was a lot  happening, too many events for one individual to see or participate in them all – it was necessary to dip in and dip out of events and 'go with the flow'.

So that is what we did at the music festival – we picked a couple of performances each day that we wanted to see and then just wandered around and stopped to see or listen to whatever was happening – sometimes we followed the crowd to the popular arenas, sometimes we chose a less busy place in order to interact more and sometimes we went back to the campsite to get away from it all.

Obviously there were differences, one is mainly a physical environment and was entertainment (the music festival) – there were no learning outcomes that I was trying to achieve. 

I could actually see (hear and touch) the other participants, I knew they existed and we were all in the same place. It was real but I was surprised by the similarities in the experience.

Last weekend we went to the Twenty20 cricket match at Chester le Street, Durham.  It was a great day – England v Australia and England won – women's match in the morning and men's in the afternoon.

Again there were a large number of people participating in an event but this time it didn't have any of those moocish overwhelming feelings nor music festival feelings.

I think this is because everyone had a seat – there was a defined space where each individual was placed – there was no choice and no decision to make about where you would place yourself.

There was only one performance at a time, one match, everyone was watching and listening to the same thing at the same time.  There was a start and finish time and it was a performance with rules that those playing and those watching knew about and adhered to.   You could interact with other participants but only the other members of the audience not the players although I suppose by cheering (especially the barmy army) you could influence the performance.  

I don't know whether to feel 'moocish' is good or bad – I don't think it matters as long as you recognise it when it overwhelms you.

Getting to the Repository of the Future. RepositoryFringe2013

Yesterday I attended the first day of Repository Fringe 2013 and an afternoon workshop entitled Getting to the Repository of the Future. It was held at the University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum.
I haven't taken part in this event before and although not a repository expert, I am keen to find out more about the current situation regarding repositories and gain an informed general overview.
The room was laid out with 6 tables of approx 6 people ( there was another workshop session being held at the same time so this was a subset of the total attendees).
The session was introduced by Chris Awre who gave an overview of the context, background and aims of the day. He mentioned that repositories need to be used for a variety of purposes to include Research Data, OER, Digital assets, MOOCs etc. He raised some questions to be considered during the workshop:
There are many repositories in place but how do we support them?
There are lots of repositories and lots of services but where do we go now?
Institutions need to be responsive
If you work with a repository, are they still the right system for managing the institutions assets?
Staffing and skills requirements?
What tools will be used in the future?
There needs to be a collaborative approach and sector wide perspective.
Then Balviar Notay from Jisc talked about the current picture with an overview of the development of digital repositories by key strategic area. This included considering what the value is of a repository to an institution. In order to help address the question 'So what can we do now?' She gave some examples of pioneering ideas including:
Uni of Hull (Hydra)
Uni of Creative Arts - creative arts repositories (ePrints). Practioner based researchers work.
Middlesex MIRAGE 2D repository of MRI scans could be turned into 3D visualisations with embedded visualisation toolkit

In a sharing economy power is moving to the edges - are repositories at the edge?

Chris Awre then added the following questions to consider
How do repositories pay their keep?
Directly through exploitation? Indirectly through lowering of costs elsewhere?
What are the current trends that influence repositories?
Social - open learning, RDM, academic shifts in need/innovation
Technological - content centric development, system integration, usability, analytical
Legal issues - licensing
Environmental - relational to other systems VLE, shared library management systems, public engagement, preservation
We then had breakout sessions which consisted of discussions on our tables to look at 2yr, 5yr, 10yr predictions for repositories - Short, medium and long term. What is the future of the repository?
There was a good mix of people on our table with different levels of expertise and experience which made for a good discussion. We looked at the functionality of repositories - what should you be able to do with a repository?
(We did have a discussion about the actual word Repository and whether it is appropriate or relevant but in the absence of any other word........)
The main points we made were:
Other systems need to be able to pull information out of a repository easily - it should be an 'invisible repository' in a good way - transparent.
There should be an automated way of getting stuff into the repository - no need to input.
Enhanced discovery - easily searchable. Different ways of visualising - clever interfaces.
Publishers? Do we still want them in 10 years? Need to have more engagement. A better relationship with publishers should be part of the infrastructure providing more ingest.
Which institutions repository should a piece of work be stored in when co-authors?
More interaction with open access repositories? What are the incentives? There needs to be a change in culture.
Is it possible to get all the repositories or silos to talk to each other and then bring data together to send out into an interface that is usable?
There was then a feedback session when the groups fed back to the whole room. The main points raised were:
Functionality of repositories revolve round three main aspects - preservation, access and diversity.
Repositories should do less but better.
Automation of management.
Should the delivery of the content be offloaded to a delivery platform rather than being a function of the repository itself.
Who decides access and how?
Interoperability - add service layers.
Diversity of content - images, videos etc
Access to ephemeral content such as blogs
Organisationally there needs to be more integration with other systems and multiple systems. Fully integrated into people's workflow.
Governance and transparency - how much does the organisation want to invest?
Two good quotes of the day were
"If everything could be automated, then that would be great"
"The future is here, but not evenly distributed".

The summary of the day was that:
Repositories are good to draw stuff together and manage it - breadth of content will grow.
Who is driving? conflict between ownerships of content and repository and those who run the institution and the requirements
A lot of what we want to do is already known about but an uncertainty how to do it. So what are the barriers? Policy? Skills? If we could identify the barriers would this help?

ALT-S SIG Glasgow Caledonian University - 20th June 2013

A belated blog about the ALT-S SIG Glasgow Caledonian University on 20th June 2013.

This is the first meeting, apart from at ALT-C that I have attended and the first time that I've been to GCU.  It was very interesting and useful and I met and talked to quite a few people that I've not met before.  The attendees were mostly Learning Technologists.

There was a mixture of presentations and talks and then group discussions with feedback.

The presentations were the following which were all very interesting and useful.

Dr Christine Sinclair, University of Edinburgh: The Coursera Experience

http://prezi.com/duzydes5ipst/the-coursera-experience/

Grainne Hamilton, Jisc RSC Scotland: Open Badges

http://prezi.com/abpca_dnt5et/open-badges-open-scotland/

Martin Hawksey, Cetis: ALT’s ocTEL MOOC experience: Designing the platform

http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/06/presentation-alt-scotland-sig-alts-octel-mooc-experience/

As well as tweeting from the event, I did take some brief notes......

Why tweet from a conference or event?

When I attend a conference or event I try to tweet as much as possible for the following reasons:
1. As a record of what is happening for myself. I really don't want to be spending time writing or typing copious notes. This might be laziness but I want to concentrate on watching and listening to what's going on. However I need a summary of important points so use tweets for that then I can refer back to them later or storify them for a record.
2. As a record of what is happening for others. I like following other events via tweets with hashtags so hope that my tweets will be useful and interesting for people who can't attend.
3. To publicise the event and raise awareness of it. That's good for the event organisers and hopefully they will do the same for you. Also as a reminder that it is happening.
4. To find out who else is attending the conference - a quick way of checking out other delegates is to see who's tweeting - anyone you know or the people who are active tweeters.
5. To interact with others at the conference - retweet and reply. Sometimes it's a good ice breaker to meeting someone at a conference if you say that you've seen their tweets and thought you'd like to talk to them.
6. To share views and add that extra dimension or channel to the main event. It's interesting, and sometimes funny, to add comments and be able to be slightly less formal.
7. To ask questions or use a polling feature. At some events you can tweet a question to the organiser or moderators and then the presenter will answer that question.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

PUBLISHING: EVOLUTION, DISRUPTION & THE FUTURE #pubconf

I managed to watch / listen to one of the sessions via the live webcast of the Edinburgh Publishing Conference.
PUBLISHING: EVOLUTION, DISRUPTION & THE FUTURE #pubconf

http://www.edinpubconf.net/index.html

The session was: Can Blogs, Apps and Newspapers Co-exist in Harmony?

The first talk was by Bill Jamieson of Scot-buzz & The Scotsman and was entitled Media: Digital or Death?
It was interesting to hear about the drop in circulation and readership of print newspapers.  The readership has dropped dramatically in the last 5 years and the number of journalists employed by newspapers has decreased.  Bill Jamieson called the cycle that means that some businesses survive in recession, Creative Destruction.  This is part of the process of recreating the newspaper industry.   But news continues to reign supreme - the demand for news has increased and the 'Have you heard?' question will never disappear.

The second talk was by Alex Porter, Scottish Times Digital News: Trust and Profit. Opportunities & challenges for digital news outlets in a time of collapsing trust & revenues in traditional media

The basic question that was posed was how is it possible to make money from digital publishing? 

They created surveys to ask their 'readership' – I'm not sure whether there was a theme to the questions as they seemed random but presumably it was to generate a story.  They then sell the results of the reader surveys to companies.  Create joint ventures. Looking for collaboration. 

#ocTEL Effective Learning Resources - Global Citizenship

 ocTEL week 4     Effective learning resources

How can we take advantage of technological developments in order to create and source relevant learning resources for our students?

I wasn't sure what I wanted to search for but I’d just come out of a meeting about Visiting Students and Studying Abroad and how we can improve the student experience for these students.  Two of the many areas we discussed were ‘Global Citizenship’ and ‘Employability’ and how the information and support can be delivered to enhance these aspects.
So I decided to search for useful resources in one of these areas to ‘identify appropriate digital resources, including text-based, multimedia and interactive, for particular learning contexts’ although I’m looking at it from a general  HE perspective rather than a particular learning context.

Jorum

Search term ‘Global Citizenship’
The top result was a resource from the University of Southampton which was relevant and part of a course Teaching Citizenship in HE.  There was lots of good resources although mainly text and images.
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/citizened/activities/global_citizenship/index.html

The second resource was a recording of a lecture from the Royal Veterinary College.  The content looked very interesting and the lecture itself would have been interactive using a voting system but the playback using Echo360 was very slow. 
http://www.rvc.ac.uk/Review/GlobalCitizens.cfm

Open University – Open Learn

Search term ‘Global Citizenship’               
The top result was a link to a module entitled Enacting European Citizenship (ENACT).
It is part of a Money & Management course and wasn’t a learning resource.
All of the other results on the first page were part of the same module. 
So I searched on the sidebar under education and the results showed a module Teaching citizenship: Work and the economy.  Presumably to access the learning resources you have to enrol onto the module.
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/teaching-citizenship-work-and-the-economy/content-section-1

YouTube
Search term ‘Global Citizenship’               
This search produced lots of results although not millions.  I filtered the search to include only those in the last year.  I watched two or three and they were very interesting.  There were quite a few TEDx ones.  

So the questions:
How easy was it to find a relevant resource?  It was easy to find the resources and I think that they were relevant because I managed to find course specific, sector specific resources as well as general ones. 

How could you incorporate this resource into your professional practice? For the purposes of finding a resource that could be used for Student information Points and Enhancing the Student Experience then they were suitable as a starting point and to create a general learning resource.

Which source did you find more useful (and why) – the ‘official’ resource bank or the open search?  Both the official and the open search were useful.  The official ones were very text / image based and straightforward but the Jorum ones were easy to find and relevant. The YouTube videos were more engaging but if may not match specific learning outcomes. 
Are there any limitations to the use of your preferred resource for your learners (e.g. copyright licence; login requirements)?  The Open Learn resource required a login which you would do if you knew that you definitely needed that resource and had been directed to it but when browsing it’s probably a barrier.

Would your own students agree that the resource you prefer is accessible? I think that most students would agree that the videos were accessible and the websites easy to navigate.

Catching Up #ocTEL

Catching up with ocTEL by doing the following

1. Filling in expectations questionnaire
2. Looking at the results so far from the expectations questionnaire - it's very interesting to know what other participants are hoping to achieve from the course.
It's interesting but not surprising that many of the participants are those who already have experience using TEL and in fact probably work in education with technology.
I'm not sure how this will change in the future because unless it spreads to a wider audience then is it always going to be people who are 'known knowns' who are taking part and do they want to take part in order to learn for themselves or to learn in order to then encourage others to take part.

The themes of the 'big questions' is also interesting - I'm interested in quick wins, engagement and good practice examples which are common themes but also how to share information which is probably all of it.

3. Filled in some of the questionnaires from last week.
Penn State University: Online Readiness Assessment
I immediately was put off this questionnaire by the following questions - what does that mean? Pretty easily?? Learn best??

I learn pretty easily.
I have to read something to learn it best

But I did think that these were OK and the other lot would be OK if i knew how to measure pretty or comfortable :)

My computer runs reliably on Windows NT/ Vista or on Mac OS 10.4 or higher.
I have a printer.
I am connected to the Internet with a fairly fast, reliable connection such as DSL or cable modem.
I have virus protection software running on my computer.
I have headphones or speakers and a microphone to use if a class has a videoconference.
My browser will play several common multimedia (video and audio) formats. I am pretty good at using the computer. I am comfortable surfing the Internet. I am comfortable with things like doing searches, setting bookmarks, and downloading files. I am comfortable with things like installing software and changing configuration settings on my computer. I know someone who can help me if I have computer problems.

• Illinois Online Network: Self Evaluation for Potential Online Students

I liked this one it was great especially the clip art picture.  The questions were fine and although I just filled in yes to them all, they were much easier to understand and answer - yes /no is fine.  It made it clear that you would need a computer, that you would have to dedicate time and effort and would have to be engaged with the course - what else do you need to know?